EPILOGUE

Miyakojima

I only accompanied Akira on one of his family visits, for which he typically decided to show up unannounced, with an embarrassed, foreign friend in tow, no less. Unabashed, he had rung the bell of a three-story countryside mansion, and when he was asked inside by his cousin, he insisted to me—a “friend” waiting in the car—that it was all right to come in. In this way, while Akira and his cousin reminisced, I wound up sipping iced tea under a fan in the airy living room of a rural house, flanked through open windows by the blistering heat of farmlands. Nothing seemed amiss, save for a passing reference to that time, decades earlier, when Akira’s cousins had seen him at a funeral in Yokohama, fearing that he might die because he had been so bandaged up. When I asked him about it afterward, he did not want to explain.

Akira’s anxiety became increasingly evident as we drove our rental car along the sweeping vistas of Miyakojima’s shorelines, past rows upon rows of sugarcane fields, and spent our evenings in restaurants catering to tourists with local food and Okinawan music shows. Saying that he was feeling “neurotic” and did not want to risk becoming a burden to his brother by being hospitalized, Akira refrained from drinking much in the evenings. One day, I had left him with the family of an old friend, only to return to find him scouring the countryside streets for me, panic-stricken and lost. More than anything, the prospect of visiting his mother’s tomb prompted Akira’s anxiety, and it was only when his older brother told him that it was not necessary to visit the tomb a second time that Akira seemed to calm down.

It was during one of the evening performances of Okinawan music that I noticed how Akira had grown sensitive to the gaze of others. As it happens during such tourist shows, halfway through our meal the lead singer decided it was time for everyone in the audience to introduce themselves, and thus, perched on a center-stage stool, he proceeded to address each of our tables, asking where customers were from, what had brought them to Miyakojima, and so forth, only to finish off each table with a comment for comic effect. There were no locals in the audience, which was composed almost exclusively of younger tourists and businessmen from the mainland, out for an evening of Indigenous music after snorkeling or work. But the clincher was delivered not when we had to account for our motley appearance in the midst of this uniform crowd—Akira was unmistakably dressed in a short-sleeve collared shirt with a floral Hawaiian design of fluorescent proportions—but when the lead singer neglected to address us, effectively skipping us by moving on to the next table. I was relieved, thinking that by some fortuitous fluke, we had been spared from public speaking. But for Akira, the purposeful neglect functioned as a confirmation of suspicions he had already been harboring. When I remarked how fortunate it was that we had not been called on, he merely muttered that it was because the man could not make sense of the oddball combination of “an old yakuza and foreigner.” It was not simply that the bandleader could not place us that vexed Akira but that this had led him deliberately to omit any reference to our presence in the room, as if we might upset a certain equilibrium among his customers. Indeed, the bandleader and manager eyed us intently as we left the restaurant. And as if to confirm such apprehensions, Akira and I were to undergo a similar experience on the flight back to Tokyo (figure E.1), when the many questions from a garrulous neighboring passenger reached the point beyond which we no longer felt comfortable answering. Perhaps we really did have something to hide. Was it not kind of Akira to have taken me with him to Okinawa? How had we met?

Within San’ya or at the construction site, it would never even have been necessary to parry such questions, which could be answered with carefree honesty or bluntly saying: “It’s none of your business.” But the social context had shifted, causing Akira to forfeit the fortitude he possessed in San’ya and at its interface with society. Much as Akira continued to sport a smile and flirt with the receptionists at our hotel in Miyakojima, there was a vulnerability about him in the evenings, when he would recount things he had learned during the day, such as how his mother had passed strapped to a bed with dementia or how the one friend he had hoped to see had committed suicide by disemboweling himself. Repeating how his siblings considered him a persona non grata on account of his former outlaw status, Akira fell to brooding and appeared to want nothing so much as to return safely to San’ya.

On the morning of our departure, Akira’s phone rang nonstop with last-minute gift requests from the guys, and later that day, everyone gathered for the homecoming in San’ya. But the cheerful mood quickly turned sour when Shōkawa insisted on haranguing Akira regarding how little he knew Miyakojima and how stupid he had been not to show me this or that. Akira eventually took it personally and, in a rare emotional outburst, told Shōkawa to “shut up” before he left for Mutō’s place, where he could reminisce in peace.

It had, no doubt, occurred to Akira that he might not be returning to Miyakojima. His health had been rapidly deteriorating, and thus, what was to have been a celebratory homecoming brought a painful finality to bear on the trip. The return to San’ya called for a moment of reckoning that had otherwise been long deferred.

Even decades after the guys had left home to find work, there was a distinct sense in which family wounds retained a primacy that was difficult to overcome. For Akira, there was the disgrace and publicity of his manslaughter conviction. For Saruma, Kentarō, Matsuda, Suzuki, and Hayashi, there was the opprobrium of failed marriages and long-lost children, which redounded in the judgmental echo chamber of their next of kin, dead or alive. Parents lived on in the imagination, although a noticeable number of fathers had been absent during childhood. Shōkawa’s father, for instance, had committed suicide by disembowelment.

It would be a mistake, however, to say that it was failure in the eyes of family that caused the conduct of an otoko, as if the trope was simply reactionary. There was a quite conscious and deliberate manner in which the conduct of an otoko was deployed to manage or contain inexpiable wounds or, rather, to make it clear that certain things ought to remain unspoken. Kentarō’s mother was an old “hag” (babā), and up until his trip to Miyakojima, Akira had “left Okinawa behind for good.” Moreover, when such comments were let slip, everyone recognized that it had better stay that way. There was not much that could be done, in any case, and drawing attention to impotence was to invite rage. Either there was no money to fly back, or the family members in question had died or gone missing. Like Akira, Rikiishi did return to Okinawa for a brief visit—his first ever—but otherwise, everyone could only wait for the ineluctable. Then, when news of someone passing reached San’ya, or when the guys were faced with the prospect of their own death, the full brunt of the San’ya man’s low self-estimation was brought forth once again.

Faced with the finality of death, almost everything seemed to confirm the worthlessness of someone who had wound up in San’ya. As if by some fatalistic logic, a constellation of factors fell suddenly into place, reflecting just how much they had disappointed not only their loved ones, but themselves. From their welfare status to self-incurred ill health, the social stigmata piled one upon the other, and it was all somehow capped and condensed in the (often secret) fact of their living in San’ya. It was thus with the passing of Shōkawa’s mother, and as we shall see, it was thus when Akira attempted suicide. Only the presence of comradeship could hold shame and destructive self-incrimination at bay.

What the pervasively negative judgment of San’ya shows, however, is that family wounds were determined by an institution anterior to the idiosyncrasies of personal relations, and this was the state. It was the normative power of state recognition that stigmatized failure as failure and, in so doing, prompted family members to dissociate themselves from potentially unruly, disreputable, and contagious elements.

But only a historical perspective can disclose how the state has been strategically invested in producing an expendable labor force. The nearly defunct system that provided out-of-work aid had been put into effect for precisely this purpose. More significant, however, is the immediate postwar era in which the destruction of rural economies not only facilitated their dispossession and subsumption by capitalism but availed capital of individuals with no choice but to submit to grievous conditions of labor. And while it might be objected that the Japanese state did not intend to lose World War II, it could likewise be pointed out that it did not plan the Fukushima nuclear catastrophes but that the destruction wrought by the 3/11 tsunami has nevertheless provided capital with the opportunity to penetrate less accessible economies. It is not a coincidence that “Fukushima” has joined the ranks of “Okinawa” as a locality that has been systematically exploited and sacrificed by the state. Nor is it a coincidence that, among other rural locations, there was a prevalence of men from Okinawa in San’ya. If only from the number of students attending Akira’s old school in Miyakojima, the postwar years entailed a mass exodus either to the Okinawan “main island” (hontō), where jobs revolve around tourism and the US military industry, or to the Japanese mainland (naichi). When Akira grew up, in the 1960s, there had been hundreds of students in attendance. In 2015, there were fewer than twenty. So too, the blue lagoon where Akira swam as a child had been transformed into a tourist spot for snorkeling, flanked by rental stores and, behind them, dilapidated concrete homes for local residents. Magnificent hotels stood farther down the shoreline, towering above the ocean, sealed off from their surroundings. It was obvious that the profits made in these self-contained compounds were funneled off the island and that it was locals who provided the service industry with cut-rate labor. Any one of these high-rise compounds could have enclosed the downtown area of Miyakojima City, which was pretty much deserted. Hence, Kentarō said to me upon our return: “You get it, right? There’s nothing!” The dearth of jobs in Okinawa had forced almost every one of the guys to relocate to mainland Japan, but this story of primitive accumulation followed by pauperism would not end there.¹ Only a few years after our return from Miyakojima, an utterly devastated and depressed Rikiishi would say the same of San’ya, in a broken voice: “There’s nothing”—no future, no hope, nothing. From start to finish, destitution, depredation, and social and economic failure had conditioned the lives of the guys, leaving them no choice but to sell their labor on the black market, as part of Japan’s postwar labor force.²

For this reason, the originary wounds of the subaltern day laborer and otoko were eminently more conscious than those of the upstanding son, husband, or father. These wounds were dissimulated because that is precisely what the oppositional character of the otoko was meant to achieve, and its sociality could assume a blinding and violent force. Yet, even behind statements like Kentarō’s—it’s “finished” once you have kids—there was lurking an acute awareness of loss and insufficiency. The truth was that Kentarō really did want to meet his two sons, although he rarely mentioned this. Moreover, meetings with welfare officers and everyday labor conditions not only operated as repetitive reminders of the day laborer’s worth in general society but instilled an awareness of his relation to statist propriety. As with members of other marginalized social groups, the San’ya man was therefore conscious of that which “general society” (ippan shakai) was not, for while general society embodied the normative gaze of the state, its members were not privy to the doubling of perspective that social exclusion can afford. Everyone knew that docile interactions with welfare officials were an act, if not an outright farce. When Kentarō was asked to don a safety badge at the construction site, he did so with a glee and gusto that bordered on parody.³ Then again, if obeisance to workplace discipline was an act, so too was masculinity in San’ya: only one Japanese character differentiates the yakuza (mobster) from the yakusha (actor). Be it inside or outside of San’ya, its residents were predisposed to give the lie to the myth of Japanese social conformity—a disclosure in which the very self-evidence of the ideological was at stake.⁴

Nothing, after all, facilitates critical reflection on convictions so much as their undoing in failure. A double reading is called for, because not only does the death knell of places like San’ya announce the failure and repressed truth of Japanese society today, but the self-evidence of the upstanding otoko must be interpreted where it, too, breaks down: be it in the face of gender differences that do not conform to the heteronormative patriarchy of San’ya (which it shared with Japanese society at large), in the hospital, at the welfare office, or at an eatery outside of San’ya, where a giggling group of customers might have remarked upon the non-Japanese appearance of the guys, asking, “Where are you from?” Such comments would either prompt a sharp rebuke or a confrontation, if the offenders were men. But they would also lead Kentarō to remark with spiteful humor in private, “I am not Japanese.”⁵

I turn, therefore, to the journal entries of two incidents that occurred during my time in San’ya. While the second of these concerns Akira’s suicide attempt and what was said in the hospital after, the first focuses on a blind outburst of transphobic violence.⁶ This latter event was occasioned by the furtive appearances of a transgender person in the Iroha arcade, where they caught the eye of Yamamori. Treating his environs as his personal domain, Yamamori, who was supposedly on meth that evening, hailed the transgender person to sit beside him on the blue tarpaulin that had been pulled out by the arcade entryway. With all the swagger of a former mobster, Yamamori proceeded to

rip the top off the transgender person, displaying their upper body for everybody to see. It was an uncomfortable moment for me. Nobody intervened. What was almost weirder was that the person didn’t seem to mind … being deprived of clothing in this way. Being displayed.

Later, inside Sakura, the transgender person happened to be sitting just across from me. Next to me was Suzuki, Akira, and Yamamori, who continuously acted brash and pushy. From across the table, Suzuki looked intently at the transgender person, and asked if they would give a blowjob: “Will you suck me?” Yamamori was meanwhile getting more and more rowdy. Going around the table to sit next to the transgender person, he again tore their top down. Threateningly asked if the breasts were real. Moving back and forth vigorously between his chair and the transgender person, standing and sitting, he proceeded to lift the transgender person’s skirt, tearing their underwear off. Asked: “Do you have a dick?” Then he said something to the extent of: “If you’re gonna work in this area, you gotta pay up to the Kanamachi-ikka, because that’s the kind of place this is.” Only Akira turned to the transgender person and said to just come back some day when this guy—Yamamori—wasn’t there.

Since I had work the next day, I went home of everyone’s urging around nine. Before that, though, there was an awkward moment when Yamamori was trying to give me ¥1,000. At first, I handed the money back, but he was insistent. Pushy. Inflated. I didn’t want to accept money from this guy who had done such terrible things to the person across from me. So I put the money back on the table. But Yamamori kept insisting. My eyes moved back and forth between Akira and Suzuki to see what to do. Waving their hands indifferently, they said something to the effect of: “Yeah, sure, just take the money.” So I took it, bowing out whilst saying “thank you,” and that I would eat something good with it.

In my apartment, later that evening with Akira, Kentarō, and Shōkawa, Akira noted that he felt sorry for the transgender person. Yet no one really seemed to think the incident serious. If anything, it was laughable, and the conversation moved on.⁷

For obvious reasons, I never encountered the transgender person afterward, and this was the only incident in which phobia toward gender difference was expressed with such despicable, physical, and humiliating violence. But it would be wrong to relegate this assault to the category of an exception that would not have taken place if Yamamori had not been there, which Akira proceeded to do (it was just Yamamori going off the wire, he said) because that is precisely how patriarchy dismisses violence endemic to its social order.⁸ Indeed, it should be noted that, in this instance, not only has the oppositional difference between Yamamori (as the vulgar hoodlum) and the Okinawa-gang collapsed, since nobody stepped in to “protect the weak.” In the absence of restraints on outright physical violence, Yamamori’s assault has become one with the “bullying” (ijime) that transgender people in Japan experience, be it in school or society at large, and his rabid insistence upon identifying the sex of the transgender person (as if this would somehow settle the matter) replicates a medical discourse in which the genitalia of an individual constitutes the final marker of their sexual identity as an “otoko” (man) or “onna” (woman).⁹ Because I was not able to speak to the transgender person who was assaulted or to other transgender people in San’ya (I did not become close enough to any), I cannot write of their experiences in San’ya, but a Human Rights Watch report of 2016 spells out the sheer discrimination and social violence that the LGBTQ community in Japan lives with from the moment one begins to work out one’s gender: “Hateful anti-LGBT rhetoric is nearly ubiquitous in Japanese schools, driving LGBT students into silence, self-loathing, and in some cases, self-harm.”¹⁰ If Takeda-san, Nē-san, or Rikiishi had been present, perhaps Yamamori would have been made to restrain himself, but the fact of the matter remains that it was no longer the San’ya man who was caught in a no-man’s-land of abjection but the transgender person who was violated, violently banished and reduced to their sex and yet again made to occupy a no-place that Susan Stryker describes at once as abject and harboring potential for transformation.¹¹ So too, the violence that Yamamori deploys is no longer that of a man taking out his ire on another man (when there is dignity even in taking a beating) but of a macho order that is revolted because the conventional markers of gender have become muddled, threatening and troubling what Yamamori himself is in relation to the transgender person. Short of killing the transgender person, Yamomori would reestablish the conventional markers of masculinity and femininity by banishing anything in-between. For, as Stryker says, to “encounter the transsexual body, to apprehend a transgendered consciousness articulating itself, is to risk a revelation of the constructedness of the natural order.” It was precisely in being threatened in his masculinity that Yamamori carried out the assault and “cultural rape” of the transgender person, and no one at the table intervened, as if everyone had a vested interest in Yamamori’s actions.¹² In all its vulgar crudity, the proper order of things had to be reasserted. Yet Yamamori’s use of excessive violence, not to mention his use of money to buy allegiance and seniority where it was otherwise uncertain, undercut his assertions. Even the troupe commented on the pitiful air of Yamamori’s remonstrations, insofar as he “cannot make it in this town” without handing out money like that. Where there was to have been subordination, there was desperate exhibitionism, and where there was to have been singular masculinity, there was reference to the money form. It was only poetic justice that Yamamori was ousted from San’ya by the Kanamachi-ikka when he made the mistake of telling them that he had had previous dealings with the Sumiyoshi-kai, an adversary of the Yamaguchi-gumi, to which the Kanamachi-ikka was subordinate. Afterward, it was said that Yamamori had gone to work at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, but this news, too, was intercepted as boasting.¹³

The fact of the matter was that it was impossible to secure the figuration of a thoroughgoing masculine masculinity, and it was precisely this impossibility that triggered repetition and, in this instance, sexual assault. As if no one was entirely convinced of themselves, there was always something left to be desired, another assertion of masculinity to be made. The certainty of identity was necessarily interrupted by differences that were as exterior as they were intimately interior to those who negated them. God forbid that Yamamori should have felt inclined to cross-dress or, for that matter, that I should have felt compelled to inflict violence as Yamamori did, because the fact of the matter was that I could have intervened but that I chose to remain inconspicuous. If I had not had a stake in establishing relations with the troupe, perhaps that evening would have transpired differently, but I knew that the troupe respected my decision to keep my place—it was not for me, an outsider, to criticize—and so I kept my silence. Everyone had a reputation to uphold, to which certain actions were at least thought to be anathema.

As horrific and violent as Yamamori’s actions were, however, it should be stated that they were not as straightforward as they might seem. It was not unusual to encounter people who cross-dressed in San’ya, and before Yamamori’s assault, the transgender person above had been giving blowjobs to regulars in Sakura’s toilet and in the back alleys adjacent to the dive. Resonating with stories from the past, when old-timers had witnessed everything from oral sex to outright intercourse on the streets, intimacy among men was intrinsic to San’ya. In fact, Yamamori’s constant consort and gambling buddy was a so-called “o—” (f—), who cut an intimidating figure while he sported a handbag over a muscular forearm. The two were virtually inseparable in the Iroha arcade, where they could be seen gambling or sauntering along: Yamamori in a billowing jacket, and his counterpart in a tightly knit blouse that accentuated his robust chest. It was not just any gender difference that caused Yamomori to assault the transgender person but rather that, in this instance, he could not recognize this person as an otoko dressing as a woman.¹⁴ It was one thing to pay for sex in the red-light district of Yoshiwara or for men to have intercourse with one another in San’ya—the conventional markers of gender and patriarchy were upheld. It was quite another matter when an individual could not be recognized either as a man or woman.

Indeed, while there was a modicum of hospitality toward gender differences in the troupe, the guys distanced themselves from such departures. Akira had worked for more than a decade in Tokyo’s gay district, Shinjuku Ni-chōme, and the others never frowned when someone thought to be a “f—” (o—) joined us at Sakura or Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall. Conversations then continued as usual, but when the person had gone home or to the bathroom, it would be asked whether they were not “this,” followed by the gesture of raising one hand to the opposite cheek, palm outward. Sometimes these questions were posed simply, as a matter of fact. At others, they were accompanied by a smile that was disconcerting in its implications but that functioned to reiterate a line of distinction where it might have been obfuscated. Identity, thus, could only be established across differences that were constitutive precisely insofar as they were interruptive of masculinity. In this sense, Yamamori’s partner was his perfect counterpart. For while they shared the menacing comportment of street gangsters, each accentuated the features of the other, throwing them into relief. The threatening property of gender difference resided in its capacity to undo the artifice of self-presentation.

But while differently gendered people could be avoided or expelled from San’ya, the reality of everyone’s deteriorating physical condition could not be escaped. Above all, it was death that instigated assertions of masculinity and death that caused the hardened gambler to fold his hand in a final admission of defeat. Time was up. After a lifetime of repetitive detours, there could be a return to origins and the instauration of a masculinity imbued with humility. Miyazaki Manabu writes:

I didn’t only gamble in Kyoto, but in Osaka, too. It was there that I was once admonished by a veteran gambler belonging to a long-established gambling syndicate, the Sakaume-gumi. He was about seventy and had known my grandfather.

That day, I kept losing and was starting to behave rashly. Young guy that I was, I just kept on betting, determined not to quit until I won. Then someone patted me on the shoulder.

“Why not just die? Come on, walk away!”

I turned around to see the old gambler from the Sakaume-gumi.

Strangely enough, his words were all it took to calm me. The harder you gamble, the harder it is to get out of trouble if it’s not your lucky day. What’s important in gambling is to “die”—admit that you have lost. This is what the old man taught me. Afterward, he took me to a separate room.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “It’s only when you lose that you prove yourself as a man. It’s easy to be a winner. How you behave as a loser says everything.”¹⁵

Walking Away

One night, I accompanied Akira in an ambulance after he had been carried out of his bunkhouse on a stretcher, altogether unable to move. But when we arrived at the hospital, we were told first by the nurse and then by the doctor that he was to return home because his pain was being caused by alcohol. In retrospect, I interpret this dismissal as a moral judgment deeming Akira ineligible for care. They knew where he had come from and were used to others like him, from San’ya: Akira was a good-for-nothing drunk on welfare. Social judgment had taken the place of medical diagnosis, not to mention care. What struck me in the moment was the absurdity of sending home someone who could hardly move, let alone speak, and as it turned out, Akira had fractured a disk in his spinal column. No doubt partly motivated by financial considerations, partly by the disrepute that individuals like Akira could bring upon the institution, the medical establishment had taken it upon itself to push responsibility and guilt onto the welfare recipient who could not cover his own costs, and this was an adjudication that structured just about every interaction between the San’ya man and representatives of the state, be it welfare officers or the police. Such treatment called for a glass of shochu upon returning to San’ya: a drink to patch up the injury of enforced servility.

Self-possession was recovered with more difficulty, however, when Akira attempted suicide by disembowelment and Suzuki suffered from delirium tremens. There was an excess to these hospitalizations that stoked guilt and ambivalence by reopening old wounds, casting doubt over a lifetime lived in adherence to a transgressive masculinity. To add, both Suzuki and Akira were ashamed before the troupe. While Suzuki had to go on welfare, Akira asked me not to tell them what had happened. Naturally, everyone was supportive when they were discharged, which is to say that the guys truly did have buddies in their stigmatized penury—a luxury of which the salaryman or part-time worker today has largely been stripped. But whereas Suzuki was not on welfare at the time of his hospitalization and therefore received one solid week of care, Akira, who had stabbed himself in the gut with a kitchen knife, was discharged thirty-six hours after he had arrived.

During those thirty-six hours, I visited Akira in the emergency ward:

The guards by the entry gate gave me a bit of a hard time because I was visiting outside of hours. I think they were even more weirded out because I was just a “friend” whom the patient himself had called. Neither a family member, nor someone the doctors had called. And Akira is not supposed to be able to call from inside the emergency ward. But he had. So they let me in outside of hours. They told me to wear a mask inside, but when the nurse came to collect me at the boundary point, it seemed like it wasn’t necessary. (I have to admit, given the bureaucracy I was coming up against at the entrance, I was scared they wouldn’t let me see Akira at all.) I walked in. Akira was in the far room of the hallway, in a bed in the closer, far side towards the hallway. (To be honest, I had been nervous about seeing him, not knowing how to approach such a situation, almost wanting to run away from it.) The first thing he said was probably sorry and thank you. What I remember is him talking in this weak voice, describing what he had done to himself and gesturing with his hands to enact. Stretching his forefingers some twenty centimeters apart, he said that it had looked like a fine knife. Then making as if to hold the knife by the hilt, pointing at the side of his stomach, he made a stabbing motion inward. Opening his mouth slowly and painfully and jabbing slowly—up and down—he had remembered that the knife wouldn’t cut. He must have tried to cut himself a bunch of times. At some point, he said something like: “If that thing had been a real knife, I’d have flayed the stomach open in one stroke.” Moving his arms vigorously across his stomach. But the knife had not cut. After a while, it had begun to hurt, to become painful. Bleeding, he had thought that maybe if he just took some sleeping pills like this, he’d “pass away.” He didn’t actually say “pass away”; silence there. Earlier that day, he said, he’d “been left all alone” by Bonobe and Yamori, both of whom want to get rid of Akira (so Akira said). So he’d gone drinking. As always, he talked about Wakako’s slippers no longer being beside his own, perhaps even on a different shelf. He spoke of Izumo massaging Wakako and one not knowing where that might go. How he had even gotten down on his knees to apologize (dogeza) to Wakako when she had rebuffed him—saying that one doesn’t do that kind of thing—by stating that everyone, even Orin, is getting massaged. Akira himself could give massages, Akira said, but “it’s a clinic” so you don’t do that kind of thing. He’d spoken of how tired the guys get, walking in the heat to do food handouts—spoke real passionately here—and how neither Bonobe nor Izumo get this. Meanwhile, Bonobe is actually sending Izumo upstairs to massage Wakako and Orin.

At some point, after he had done the deed of cutting his stomach, Akira had thought “what a ridiculous thing to throw one’s life away over.” Meaning the disagreement with Sanyukai staff. I guess that’s when he got around to calling an ambulance. His eyes teared when I explained to him that I didn’t know what had happened until after I’d spoken to his mama-san. (Why? As if it confirmed that … he had been alone throughout the experience.) He didn’t remember that he had called me twice the night before. His eyes teared again, looking away, saying that there were “other things” bothering him than the staff at Sanyukai. The Saturday before, he had been told by the doctor upstairs that there had developed a blood-vessel swelling right next to the tumor. He pointed to his head, again explaining that the tumor is in a place where they don’t want to operate, deep and in the center. Same as the blood-vessel swelling. He’d asked the doctor what to do if the clot swelled even more, and the doctor had said to come to the hospital. Asking how he would know whether the clot had swelled or not, the doctor had responded that he would experience “incredible pain.” Akira’s response to this was like: “What the hell, there’s nothing to do.” Or rather, “What kind of response was that from the doctor?” If it swells, Akira effectively dies. And speaking of its location, drawing a line down the center of his body, Akira noted that this was something like his “lifeline.” I interpret: his lifeline threatened. He also said that when he thinks of his illness … he can see the road ahead.

He also spoke of having been in the mob, again emphasizing that a lot of the guys in the mob are better than regular folk. (I realize, hypothesize, that he may have been fighting this bad image of the mob … internally … and that, perhaps, volunteering at Sanyukai has been a sort of compensation for the past.) Laughing a little to himself—because he looks thus—he explained how all of them on the corner had asked him what sort of yakuza he had been. He’d told Kentarō that he had relations with the yakuza, but not that he had been in it. He repeated the distinction he had made. And he’d told the guys to come to Sanyukai to see for themselves if they didn’t believe (that he wasn’t former mob). In the mob, Akira said straight-out, he had specialized in extortion. I.e., to collect the money that one civilian owed to another. He’s described this to me before, saying that no one is as “dirty” as “regular folk.” That and gambling he had done. Because—raising his thumb—his boss only engaged in those things. I.e., he didn’t do drugs or women. He wasn’t the latter kind of yakuza. (I wonder now why he was so straight-out about what he’d done in the mob, at that moment, lying in bed.) The nurse came by to ask him how he was doing and he responded that it hurts. The evening before, they’d used anesthetic, but he said it had hurt when they operated on him.¹⁶

In light of the references that Akira himself makes to his criminal past, it is possible to interpret this failed suicide attempt as a condensation of the social forces active throughout Akira’s life. As an institution that exploits his labor, that will not understand the hardship that this labor involves, and that humiliates him before women, Sanyukai emerges as a stand-in for general society. Rather than speak to him about their concerns, moreover, the representatives of this respectable institution give him the cold shoulder, making it clear they want him gone. The act of suicide itself emerges as an internalization of worthlessness and of the violent social prescription that the worthless should be eliminated. But it also attempts to reverse this judgment through the reiteration of a transgressive masculinity that shifts guilt back on the institution. In the pure style of an otoko, slicing the stomach would have achieved recognition through revenge: the institution would have had to acknowledge Akira on his own terms. In this instance, however, the act of suicide is ambivalent and fails to meet the standards of an otoko. A real otoko would have completed the act with a single, fatal stroke.

It is the silences and ellipses in Akira’s narrative that indicate constitutive wounds, metaphorized by Akira’s “tumor.” The physical threat that the tumor poses is clearly very real. Yet Akira himself interprets his affliction when he draws a finger down the center of his body, saying that the unextractable tumor threatens his “lifeline” (seimeisen). Like death, the bursting of the adjacent blood vessel is perhaps imminent and certainly inescapable. But it is the specter of “pain” that aligns this bursting with the resurgence of the “other things”—silenced—that he himself references and silences. Having had a close call with death, the thirty-six hours in the emergency ward take the form of an analog to that which Akira anticipates down the road.

Set into motion by the contingency of the displaced slippers, everything appears to take on the form of a repetition without difference. If Akira’s brush with death anticipates the future, it also revisits his life trajectory from succeeding as an upstanding construction manager—Sanyukai was his opportunity to go legit—only to be convicted of manslaughter, be rejected by his family, and then to embrace life as an outlaw: mobsters are often better people than members of the general public. So too, there had been a sense of honor to his work in the mob: no prostitution or drugs. No one is as “dirty” (kitanai) as “ordinary folk” (ippan no hito).¹⁷ Indeed, Akira already had scars on his wrist, where he had cut himself previously, and violent suicide was a fantasy that he continued to entertain afterward, remarking that, if it were not for fear, he would have sliced his throat open or thrown himself into traffic. Yet, despite Akira’s insistence that he would have flayed his stomach open if the knife had been sharp, there is a difference in this instance from his convictions at other times. He walks away from the deadlock between the institution and his avowed values as an otoko. As Akira recalls, there is a moment when, in the very midst of the violence, he awakens to himself and realizes that showing up the institution is not worth killing this self for. What he wants resides neither in the recognition of what the upstanding institution deems as appropriate behavior nor in recognition as an otoko.

Beyond San’ya

Twelve years after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophes, it has become abundantly clear how swiftly anti-state sentiments can explode into a mass movement, only to lose their momentum and recede from public visibility. By short-circuiting memories of war, fascism, and sacrifices incurred to nuclear radiation, it was the force of coincidence that galvanized mass sentiments into the antinuclear movement. But what has happened to the tens of thousands of protesters who took to the streets in 2011? If the embers of a movement are still glowing, the flame has gone out.

While I cannot examine here the techniques deployed to shut down anti-state sentiment, it must be underscored that their logics are similar to those that have consigned San’ya to death and that they are anchored in the power of state recognition to set the limits of propriety, visibility, and sayability. Ultimately, such techniques of recognition concern the power of the state to achieve an ideological penetration, making it self-evident that individuals fend for themselves within an overpowering market. Conditions that have been discussed under the name of “neoliberalism” (shinjiyūshugi), be it in leftist circles or in the academy, have thus existed in San’ya for decades.

Places like San’ya disclose the class-oriented character not only of much anti-state rhetoric in Japan but of discourses that have popularized themselves through their focus on “Fukushima.” It is curious how quickly activists and academics gravitated around “Fukushima” when segments of the Japanese population had long been laboring under deadly social conditions, as egregious as any in northeastern Japan today. Of course, the sheer scale of the nuclear disasters warranted this attention. Yet, twelve years after the nuclear meltdowns, it should be asked why the discourse of “Fukushima” was so self-contained and why it did not link radiation exposure to other forms of sordid labor, be it prostitution, leather tanning, or that of homeless people. After all, the same word is used in Japanese to describe how each of such topics remain unspoken: tabū (taboo).

In fact, during the two years I gathered materials for this book (2011–2013), the very same phrase was used to account for the predicament of San’ya and Fukushima: “nothing to do about it” (shikatanai). Meaning both that it was best not to agitate emotions by complaining and that there was, indeed, nothing to be done, such words blocked criticism and violence from being directed at the state and deflected them onto neighbors. Presaging the future, San’ya illustrates what happens when individuals are made to buck up, and violence is made to circulate within society itself rather than being rearticulated and returned to its source. Buttressed by the inescapable conditions of the labor market, the power of state recognition forecloses the potential for backtalk. Already alienated and disconnected by the economy, state recognition consigns potentially disruptive populations or individuals to an anonymous, early death, and such alienation has intensified with the dispersal of postwar labor pools like the yoseba, which has been replaced by the cell phone. In this way, places like San’ya have been thrust beneath the threshold of visibility, stricken from consciousness, and sanitized within history.

What the death of San’ya leaves us with, however, is also precisely that which the lackluster, uniform appearance of an increasingly alienated labor force of Japanese society has lost: the immemorable beauty of an obscene cast of characters, ever enacting the justice they would never have. Everybody in the troupe wore a mask—masks that could not be escaped, certainly, yet masks that could also be worn with an irony that opened a distance between themselves and their social personas. There was Rikiishi, the unstoppable and indomitably constant “gorilla”; Kentarō, the procurer of work and no-nonsense “silverback”; Akira, the former mobster, emperorist, and protector of the weak, also known as the “devil’s man”; Takeda-san, the ineffably elegant, humble, and self-effacing source of authority and hospitality in San’ya, a “legendary man”; Matsuda, the crafty, burlesque, and driven subcontractor of many questionable connections; Saruma, the salaryman-gone-bankrupt cousin whom everyone relied on in times of need; Suzuki, the braggart of a younger brother, as given to fighting as to kindness; and Nē-san, the quick-witted, solicitous, yet equally truculent “older sister” to the entire gang; and the list of singular characters goes on and on. In San’ya, their singularities were amplified, and insofar as the sociality of the troupe prevailed, they were rewarded with mutual recognition.

It was as if everyone was waiting for something that would not arrive. The Olympics, they would say—we just want to make it to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. After all, everyone in the troupe had been teenagers for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics—the crowning achievement of Japan’s postwar recovery from World War II. Perhaps it was fitting that what had begun with the Olympics would end upon the occasion of another Olympics, whose stadiums had been constructed by able-bodied younger men. Still, when it had become late night and everyone had become especially nostalgic, it was throwbacks from childhood and adolescence they wanted to hear, like Okabayashi’s “San’ya Blues,” Tsuruta Kōji’s “Otoko,” or Narciso Yepes’s wistful guitar theme from René Clément’s 1952 World War II film, Forbidden Games. History was closing its pages on San’ya and its experience of Japan’s postwar, but as long as the guys were alive, as some of them were in 2023, there would be time for another song and gamble.

Kentarō passed away on July 4, 2023. In his later years, he had become fortunate enough to find a partner in life, Chizuko, a.k.a. “razor blade Chizu” (kamisori no Chizu). Born and raised in Asakusa and formerly married to a member of the yakuza, Chizuko is a true native of Tokyo’s shitamachi (low-city). She was by Kentarō’s side when he died.