3 GAMBLING

The Artistry of Gambling as Motor Connectivity to Fate

It was common to compliment victorious gamblers, because gambling was not regarded as a mere game of chance but, rather, as one that required a certain skill and knowledge. But this aptitude was differentiated from skills at the construction site. For as an occupation that was freely entered into, gambling was not labor but appeared as expenditure in the absence of production, as the squander of time, money, and an embodied acumen.¹² Whether it was on horses, boats, bicycles, the lottery, an array of flower card games, or, on rare occasions, dice games, the winner always received congratulations and applause. When Norihisa won ¥100,000 ($1,000) several times in a row on horses, Akira looked at his numbers only to remark: “And to think that he wins with this.” Someone might say to a winner, “All the credit to you,” and on the floors of WINS, gamblers would commend one another, while the winner stood tall. Yet the skill and knowledge of the gambler was of a very specific type and seemed to involve “instinct” (kan) far more than rational forethought or calculation. This instinct could lead the gambler to seek out the tipsters as much as it could lead the lottery gambler to purchase a computer-generated ticket or to fill out their own divinations. Walter Benjamin thus observed that the trick for the gambler was for the nerves of the body or inspiration to remain in touch with “fate.”¹³ But to exercise this faculty, it did not suffice that the gambler divine an outcome. He also had to place an actual bet, meaning that he had to render himself vulnerable to the fateful passage of time, activating his nerves in anticipation of the results.¹⁴ And it was for this reason that horse gamblers stood rooted to their spot during the initial stage of a race, silently reining in their energies, only to release them in an unruly flood of excitement, jubilation, or dejection, as losers turned their backs and winners raised their hands in victory. Simply predicting an outcome, as every gambler knew, did not have the slightest significance if a bet was not placed. It was one thing to predict and quite another to gamble. The artistry of gambling was only disclosed through the practice of risk, in an embodied battle with fate: of staking one’s money. This also gave the lie to the tipster, for the failure of the tipster to bet only indicated that contact between the nervous instincts and fate or coincidence had been severed.¹⁵

Hence, the key to gambling, Akira would say, was “not to think about it too much.” Although on a monotonous day of gambling, Akira showed me how to place bets early on in our acquaintanceship:

Headed into WINS, bought the newspaper, and up to the 3rd floor. Had the strangest feeling I would see Akira and lo and behold, as I turned to the screen, there he was. We stayed and gambled for around two hours. There were fewer people in the hall today, it being Saturday, Akira said. Nothing much actually happened on the gambling side of things. Akira seemingly hasn’t had much luck this month. Nor today. He said he’d gotten into a fight with the staff at Sanyukai—Guy-san, Bonobe, etc.—and that he felt like he’d been cast down from the Skytree. To feel better, he’d been gambling every day at Kōrakuen, while he wasn’t at Sanyukai. Every day. Spent quite a bit of money, he said. I noticed that he doesn’t write in the papers. He said he tries not to think about it too much. Nor write. He just uses the green WINS pen to circle on the paper every once in a while. But he can look at the papers in an instant and read, evaluate the horses. Whereas for me, it’s like I can only read the basics. He merely glances. And he places the bet only a few minutes before each race begins.¹⁶

The guys would laugh at the bets I placed, sometimes even passing my numbers around, slanting their heads with a wry grin, as if there was little chance the horses would come in as I had bet on them. Even if they did, it would not make any money, since I had simply mixed up the highest-ranked horses and thrown in a wild card. But every gambler knew that the horses rarely came in as the predictions in the paper had forecast. Only an amateur would have bet as I did. Admittedly, when I won three consecutive races, each garnering me ¥100 for the ¥100 I had staked, it elicited the laughter of the guys once again. Yet when I placed bets on horses that seemed highly unlikely but not guaranteed not to win, the guys would laugh, only to retract by saying: “I don’t know, it might come with that.” For they were all believers in “beginner’s luck,” as if gambling necessitated a faculty in short supply for the seasoned gambler. In thinking or knowing too much, the connectivity of nervous instincts to the futurity of numbers was sacrificed.

There did, however, exist a corpus of knowledge requisite to success at gambling without which the gambler would have been ill-equipped to embark on “battle” (shōbu). For horses, boats, and bicycles, the gambler had to know how to read the statistics in the newspaper and the rules, and the same went for the various flower card games. This was enough: the gambler needed to know no more. Naturally, long experience brought knowledge of a profusion of further facts and honed techniques. The guys, for instance, were able to read the statistics of the newspaper with but a glance, as if the surfeit of miniscule numbers registered with them in a photographic instant. They also knew the names and career profiles of famous horses and jockeys and even their breed and offspring, though horses were without exception referred to by number. In horse racing, it was said, “The horse is 70 percent, the jockey is 30 percent,” but such knowledge shifted with boat and bicycle races, although the guys were as acquainted with the names of strong racers in both. In boat racing, the boat on the inside lane—#1—had a decided advantage, so much so that it was not unusual for #1 to place first for an entire day, and in boat races, the female racers were said to be strong. Bicycle races constituted a whole other ballgame, in which racers, who competed in teams, would pair up and strategize to take the lead. Gamblers on bicycle races were said to be particularly fanatic, as the race did not involve animals or machines but humans who did not hesitate to knock shoulders against one another or even to bump another racer down. There was one such individual living in Akira’s bunkhouse, who went to bicycle races every day and traveled around Japan, chasing his favorite racer. And then, there was flower cards, which functioned as numbered cards for the game Oicho-Kabu, which Gīn sponsored illegally by the entry to Iroha, and as sets in Koi-Koi, which workers played most frequently in the changing rooms. The latter especially required knowledge of the deck and lucid memory, because the gambler had to keep track of the other player’s cards. There was also Don-Don—a bluffing game—that the guys would play in Takeda-san’s apartment after hours and hours of eating, because Nē-san liked it. And at Hasegawa’s apartment, located on the second floor above Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall, the guys would get together once every week to play mahjong, of which Riku explained that it was about “sticking it out” or “holding one’s ground” (tsupparu) with the suits you had chosen, adding that “people are the same way” and that it was “finished” otherwise, if you dilly-dallied or failed to stick to your guns. Finally, there were dice games, like Chinchirorin, which a Kanamachi-ikka man sponsored every morning one alley down from Sanyukai, until he was jailed for murder, and that especially had to do with speed, instantaneity, and lack of hesitation.¹⁷

In addition to knowing this multifarious array of games, there was also a less rational factor to knowledge of gambling. Kentarō, for instance, observed that after decades of playing flower cards, “for some unknown reason,” cards from the pine suit tended to appear toward the bottom of the deck. But there were as many pine cards in the deck as cards in the other suits, and there was no reason why cards of the pine suit should stick to the bottom of the shuffled deck. Similarly, Kentarō noted that sometimes in gambling, the same number kept repeating for some inexplicable reason. In horse races, in which the starting lanes of horses had nothing to do with their likelihood of winning, such repetition occurred when the same numbers kept winning, regardless of the race.¹⁸ When this happened, someone might note: “Oh, it’s number seven again.” Or, fed up with missing the mark, someone might shout: “What, it’s number seven again!” Such patterns were “strange” (okashī), since they defied rational expectation and made it seem as if the numbers led a life of their own, intimating other forces at work.¹⁹ To induce an embodied accord with the numbers, there was a distinct sense in which “thinking,” “studying,” and predicting number configurations yielded nothing—yet had to be done to be set aside and forgotten.²⁰

Once a gambler started winning, it might happen that he went on a veritable winning streak, winning one race after the other until their fortune could no longer be dismissed as a mere “fluke” (magure). Their aptitude, rather, demonstrated an escalating audacity that was grounded neither in rational knowledge nor intelligent prediction, but in the dangerous certainty of an abiding motor connectivity with fate.²¹ When saying that it was best in gambling “not to think about it too much,” Akira therefore mimicked the gesture of quickly sketching in a card, as if responding instantaneously to a spur-of-the-moment instinct and “feeling,” because keeping in touch with the numbers necessitated a blind gesture of the body, “beginner’s luck,” that responded automatically to infinitesimal shifts in the nervous instincts.²² Writing the numbers with a heavy hand would have involved too much consciousness. The trick in gambling, rather, was for the nerves of the body to remain in touch with “fate.”²³

The first bout of any winning streak therefore arrived unexpectedly, before the confidence and certainty of repetition hit in. Akira would recall how, just as he was about to leave WINS one day, he decided to place one last bet, for the hell of it. Hardly looking at the newspaper statistics, skimming and sketching what felt right, he placed a ¥100 ($1) bet on a trifecta: the hardest configuration to win, meaning that three horses have to finish precisely in first, second, and third place. And just as he was about to leave, he moved his eyes back and forth from his ticket to the screen, squinting to see whether the last numbers on the screen matched his own, still in disbelief when he withdrew ¥150,000 from the machine! This very same Akira would go through slumps in gambling, so much so that he would quit, cursing: “There is never enough money.” But when he won, he won repeatedly, as he did one day in San’ya. First at boats at Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall, then at bicycles at the open-air sushi stall. Akira walked back and forth between the two vendors, placing bets, collecting money, scanning the statistics as if seeing through them, and commenting on races as if he had seen them before. The crowd of marveling regulars turned to him, basking in the summer sun, and called him “sensei.”²⁴

Everyone knew of an incident in which someone had won several million yen at Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall. Not knowing quite what to do, Mutō had gone to his guarantor, the local yakuza organization, the Kanamachi-ikka, to collect the money. Otherwise, the guys said, “no one will gamble there.” The next day, this same person gambled at the open-air sushi bar next to Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall, also backed by the Kanamachi-ikka, and won the same amount again. Once again, the Kanamachi-ikka backed the loss, only this time, the person was told never to return, as if his victories bespoke a sustainable acumen. Everyone could recount the incident, as if they shared in these victories. It is this motor connectivity with contingency that inscribes itself on consciousness as a memory, folding the past into the present in a narrative form as evident in the stories of victory told by day laborers as in the preeminent story of gambling: Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler.”

The consummate gambler thus wins by betting on unexpected number combinations. To a certain extent, the decision to bet on unlikely combinations formed part of the repertoire of skills the gambler employed to make more money. The gambler had to know both which races had a large stake (the main ones) and which races the horses, boats, or bicyclists were most likely to come in contrary to the official predictions. The horse races held during the week at Kōrakuen, for instance, were unlikely to yield large returns, both because the stakes were small and the horses tended to arrive according to expectation. These races were unexciting. The trick was to bet against the odds and to win big. In short, the horse gambler was on the lookout for a breakout that went against the odds, without being altogether unthinkable. With boat racing, in which the inside boat had the decided advantage, it was thus common to include #1 in bets but to pair it (since betting on #1 and #2 would yield no returns) with a less likely number, like #6. Nothing felt as good as winning at boat races on #6, the boat in the outer lane. It was also common for Kentarō to place boat bets with others. Because only six boats competed in boat races, there were fewer possible boat combinations than horses in keiba—30 for “two in a row,” 120 for “three in a row”—and he would try to cover all the likely bases. Pulling ¥500 from people left and right (the minimum bet at Sakura and Mutō’s was ¥500), with the promise of sharing the winnings, Kentarō placed bets on a variety of combinations, but this, too, was usually to no avail. At the instant of the first turn, something unaccounted for invariably happened, only to be confirmed at the second turn, by which point the result of the race was as good as done. Kentarō would then sigh, shake his head, leave the immediacy of the TV screen, and sit back down with his shochu. In such instances, there was a sense in which the gambler felt duped by the game, which, at WINS, might elicit comments like not “to push it” or “make a fool of” the gambler.

Knowing from experience that winning occurred when it was least expected, the guys would try to replicate the circumstances preceding the original bet that was won. Everyone could recount the story of having won big and, more significantly, could clearly remember the details leading up to the event. Like Akira’s experience of winning ¥150,000, the circumstances preceding the event were inscribed on consciousness like the lucid afterimage of shock. It might be that the person had stood in a particular spot at WINS, had eaten ramen noodles beforehand, or had bet on a particular horse or jockey or on a specific lucky number. In pachinko, there were likewise lucky machines and especially prosperous times of the month and not so prosperous ones, when Kawaii, the chronic pachinko gambler at Sanyukai, would bitterly mutter that the machines were “bullying” him. Pachinko gamblers would thus queue in the early morning to secure their lucky seat, before someone else took it, and would try to keep their winning streak by maintaining the patterns that had surrounded it from the beginning. The singular, winning quality of the pachinko machine gamblers chose was, in effect, besmirched when someone else sat at them. Not only this, but the cash the machine “put out” was no longer theirs. By the same token, the guys never shared their horse numbers with one another, unless they were placing bets to cover bases, until the final moment of purchasing their ticket. Leading up to this, comments exchanged remained within the sphere of noting that a certain horse was “likely to win.” Gambling and winning with “someone else’s numbers” was not considered a legitimate means of winning, for the work invested in the numbers had to be one’s own, and the quality of the ticket was compromised in being identical to another. Singular winnings required singular, personalized combinations. Clearly this was not sufficient to secure a win. Yet, these practices disclosed a recognition of the less rational, embodied facet of gambling.

Alas, motor connectivity to the winning numbers could only be confirmed in the final instant of danger when the winning numbers were revealed. It was also this concentration of risk in a suspended, revelatory moment of time out of time that entailed a transformation of the abstract time of the working day into an experience of contingency and that caused the gambler to repeat the act. Akira placed that bet of ¥150,000 barely a minute before it was too late.²⁵ Likewise, with quick dice games, it was the very moment and gesture of throwing the dice that decided the outcome. So too, when teaching me games in which the aim was to pull an identical pair of flower cards, Rikiishi would half jokingly, half seriously insist that I hold the pair of cards together “real tight, real tight,” before slowly sliding the one card down to reveal the other, as if holding them tight and leaning one’s body into them could make the cards bleed into each other. In other card games, in which it helped to pull identical flower cards from the deck, it was common practice to throw the cards down fervently, with “spirit” (kiai). In fact, a soft mat had been placed on the table for this purpose. Kentarō would comment at how “unskilled” (heta) I was at pulling lottery cards and half seriously, half jokingly showed me how to pull a winning card out the box. In dice games, as in most flower card games, the moment of motor connectivity to the winning numbers almost coincided with their materialization. Different games had different rhythms and various displacements of the intoxicating instant of truth. Dice was instantaneous. With most flower card games, the moment arrived when all cards were finally revealed. With horses, boats, and bicycles, the last possible moment to place one’s bet was separated from the race by a period of five minutes.²⁶ Yet as gambling races proper, they demonstrated the qualities of precipitation and jeopardy—of missing the mark—that Benjamin discerns in gambling.²⁷ With boats, this moment came at the beginning of the race, because the order of winning boats was usually established on the first turn (if not, on the second), when the leading boat put distance between itself and others. With horses and bicycles, however, this moment did not arrive until the end of the race, when the horses and bicycles accelerated into a sprint, and at WINS, the final seconds of a race were therefore accompanied by shouting and exultation. Sometimes, a computer image was needed to determine the order of horses, so narrow was the margin. In those moments, time was condensed into an immediate experience of contingency, mediated by the instantaneity of the TV screen.

As much as the pleasure of winning, just missing the mark propelled the gambler to repeat the act. Everyone would talk of coming close to winning. Maybe the same two horses on whose victory they had bet would win but in the opposite order from their bets! Watching the last fifteen seconds of any horse race left one enthralled with horses sprinting toward the finish line and with the possibility that anything could happen. Another way to achieve the singularity of an incommensurable win, however, came in the sheer negativity of loss—a propensity toward self-destruction that proved most compatible with the group’s liquor intake. But it was first and foremost the form of the transformation of time that proved addictive. Regardless of the outcome, every single race (especially high-profile ones with vast sums at stake) exposed gamblers to the possibility of overturning the objective conditions of their lives, a possibility proffered to them in the form of compressed time. For as Anatole France once wrote, gambling is “the art of producing in a second the changes that Destiny ordinarily effects only in the course of many hours or even many years.”²⁸ Contrary to the seemingly endless time of the working day, in which time was emptied out in anticipation for it to have been done, and the nerves of the body exhausted in an unrelenting necessity of registering, blocking, and protecting against contingency, time in gambling deceptively suggested the possibility of making infinite gains in an instant. In appearance, too, gambling seemed to reverse the conditions of surplus production, insofar as, in the moment of gambling that preceded victory or loss, the gambler was now owner of the ticket, the horse, the stocks, or the commodity (of time) from which surplus was extracted, in no time at all! In reality, the gambler had become the avid consumer of a commodity with no use value, except for the intrinsic thrill of the experience, and whose obsolescence was as instantaneous and cruel as the day laborer drained of labor power.

After a week of labor, liquor thus loosened the nerves, and gambling seemed to redeem time. The experience of having once won haunted the gambler so that he sought to repeat it, and the gambler was “hooked” (hamatteru) by that lucid first experience of winning, as if the contingency of the event had pierced his consciousness. Contrary to the construction site, where consciousness had to register and buffer all sorts of dangers, gambling therefore involved a desire to repeat the original coincidence of winning. Yet, like losing, winning too was never sufficient. In their conversion into money, winning combinations invariably produced a remainder of the real—just as losers witnessed how close they had come—for it was always possible to have bet more. Thus, winners would take their winnings and either augment their next bet or strategize by spreading out their next bets. It was one thing to win, say, ¥10,000 from a bet of ¥100. But the art of gambling resided in taking that ¥10,000 and, like the mythic individual who had won ¥3 billion, transforming it to a hundred times or a thousand times that figure—that is, until the winning-streak waned and the unpleasurable side of enjoyment emerged to the fore.

The compulsive gambler desired the experience of shock and coincidence that replicated the first encounter. Erected so relentlessly at the construction site, it was the “shield against stimuli” that the worker sought to penetrate, and to enable this penetration, the statistics in the newspaper took the place of consciousness at the workplace.²⁹ Where consciousness otherwise would have exhausted itself in outlining and weighing an endless list of details, the newspaper provided this information ready-made (figure 3.2). By doing the work of intellect for the gambler, the statistics facilitated the experience of gambling by liberating it from the drudgery of distilling the endless minutiae of prerequisite information.³⁰ The newspapers thereby functioned as a mere means of holding a surfeit of information in check, without acting on it. This allowed the gambler to apprehend upcoming races in broad strokes, releasing the instincts to do the work of scanning, sketching, and reacting to the minutest shifts in patterns to divine a winning code.³¹ The sheer excess of statistics, already abstracted into a readily digestible form, made evident that the gambler could not aggregate their entirety. Instead, the gambler wrote on top of the statistics with a marker, circling here and there, and in their own shoddy handwriting numbered the horses. Likewise, the specialty pamphlets for ¥500 aided gamblers. The point was not to “study” but to shut out information.

Fingers crossed, the ticket bought on the back of this surfeit of numbered signifiers is the winning combination. For the surfeit of statistics foregrounded the absence of the only three significant numbers—the first three horses—that the gambler, like a soothsayer, had to provide. Gamblers knew all too well that their chances of winning were slim and that any winning streak would end. Nevertheless, they persisted in betting and, at times, to the point of ruin. Purchased at the last moment in an impatient queue, the ticket took on the value of a material fetish, which, like Kentarō’s lottery card, had to be renewed with the wish for success. The express purpose of the ticket was not to protect against but to stand in for, to be exchanged for a singular sum of money.

The sheer abstraction of the gambling ticket and the statistics in the papers recall Marx’s elaboration of the dual character of the commodity form.³² When gamblers spoke of horses, it was purely in numbers, as if the material qualities of the horse or jockey simply did not exist. Sure, there were famous jockeys and horses, such as Yutaka Take, who rode Deep Impact, or Secretariat in the United States, whose tickets at the famous 1973 Belmont race many gamblers kept rather than exchange for money.³³ Yet when it came to filling in the betting card, horses were indicated in numbers, and rows on rows of odds determined the final wins. Like financial stocks, the horse numbers took on a life of their own to be finally exchanged into a monetary figure. With the exception of the names of the horse and jockey, and a particular characteristic of the horse—maybe it was strong toward the end of the race or good at “breaking out” (nukedasu)—every other piece of information was written in numbers. But while the language of gambling was thoroughly abstracted into numbers, in its secrecy, the gambling ticket bore the signature of the gambler from the moment of its inscription.³⁴ Ticket numbers had to be kept secret so that they could not stand apart from the person who had written it, preempting an awkward situation in which one’s numbers were the same as “someone else’s.”

Of baseball, on which everyone also bet, Riku spoke of the Hiroshima Toyo Carp as a team owned by Mazda, a car company that was not in the same league as major manufacturers, such as Honda or Toyota, and of its players who were also underdogs. But they played with their “might and main!” Nor did they use many foreigners. In fact, the one foreigner on the team was underpaid, and he was “doing his best!” In short, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp relied on their strength, without purchasing outside help, and “everyone knows of them.” Alongside his observation that mahjong, like “humans,” is about “sticking it out,” Riku disclosed his life philosophy in the bets he placed on underdogs.³⁵ So too, Akira would speak of being an otoko and of the importance of “sticking to one’s principles” (suji o tōsu). Oftentimes, their ticket numbers reflected their favorites, as well, and it was this quality that personalized the ticket, set it on its way to a singular value, and that rendered its final monetary value their very own.

In this way, the necessity of making a claim to one’s gambles in the name of masculinity sprung from the abstracted form of money and the commodity itself. The act of gambling must be considered over against the wage of the working day. For it was the wage that determined the value and the abstract form of time through which value was conferred on San’ya’s day laborers, whose bodies were emptied out until, finally, they were deemed altogether unusable.

Working from Freud’s writings on repetition and trauma, Benjamin recognized a formal congruence between the automatic motions of the gambler and the factory worker. By describing a similitude of form in the repetition of bodily motions, he proposed that, at least on the surface of things, the drudgery of menial factory work constitutes an analog to the repeated act of throwing dice at craps or placing a bet at roulette.³⁶ At the end of my first day working in ditches, with an excavator circling above, Kentarō said: “You see, there’s nothing much to it. Work is merely the repetition of this.” And, indeed, in repeatedly anticipating the contingency of shock or accidents and screening out their possibility (at work), the drudgery of the construction worker forms a counterpart to that of the gambler on a losing streak, who, on the other hand, seeks out the shock of the accidental but fails repeatedly to experience it. With the notable exceptions of victories, near coincidences, or gamblers deliberately bent on self-destruction, in both gambling and manual labor, consciousness winds up operating as a “screen against stimuli,” consigning the possibility of experience—of contacting stimuli such that they affect and inform the entirety of one’s life—to a mere “hour in one’s life.”³⁷

Yet social conditions in San’ya caused gambling to emerge as part of a counterdiscourse to the propriety of economic productivity, not merely as an analog to the repetition of labor. Everyone shared the necessity of elaborating alternate forms of sociality, for they had failed in the eyes of their families and general society. And while their arrival in San’ya marked the end point of a trajectory of failed masculinity, its space of face-to-face relations offered the possibility to reverse the abject conditions of labor to which they had been reduced. Everyone knew that workers from San’ya were mostly called on to complete dirty, dangerous, and demeaning labor, and unlike gambling, such labor conditions rarely received comment and certainly not with glee. Working days consisted in lifting heavy rocks while wearing steel-reinforced boots, if you had them; shoveling in a ditch, next to a thirty-ton excavator; or hammering away at walls to ensure that cement, which burned through bare skin, flowed into them properly. Yet the deadening effects of this draining monotony were overturned when an accident occurred, that is, when a body was pierced or wounded. Then, after work, firsthand witnesses would relate in detail how the floorboards had been loose, how so-and-so had plunged to the floor below, and how the white bones had protruded through the wound. When accidents occurred, the instinctual nerves of the body were activated to their utmost, and through narration, the event was transformed into a story, replete with suspicions that so-and-so had faked the fall to get insurance, as well as work-related safety lessons. Otherwise, the shield of consciousness or intellect sacrificed the content of sensory impressions by intercepting and registering stimuli at disconnected moments in time. The intellect thereby foreclosed experience by bracketing off and containing the event within the past of linear time, as yet another moment within a homogeneous succession of occurrences.³⁸

But clearly a difference remains between the necessary repetition of labor, which the worker would not do without remuneration, and gambling, which the gambler engages in even if he incurs debt. As with any narcotic, in gambling there is the initiating thrill, followed usually by diminishing returns of excitement and the occasional “near miss,” until gambling finally reverts to the drudgery of labor. Much as they strategized about how to begin with one hundred yen, spread their bets, and augment their stakes, gamblers in San’ya sought, above all, to draw out the high of near misses as they calibrated their gambles and punctuated their day with races of their choosing. Moreover, when it came to horses, bicycles, or boats, the order of the races was structured to reverse the law of diminishing returns, because the main races were scheduled at the end of the day and at the end of the week, on Sundays. The order of the races predisposed day laborers in San’ya to prolong the initiating thrill of victories, near misses, and self-destructive conduct, and when they stopped—which they did, saying, “I quit!”—it was when the excitement had turned to drudgery, when they had reached a thoroughly excessive financial limit, or, quite simply, when the last race had finished. Gambling in San’ya therefore assumed the form of concentrated sessions of inebriated social activity, which lasted half a day at most, since these sessions were quite possibly as extractive of energy and as self-destructive as manual labor itself, and for most individuals, they concluded naturally when the exhilaration calmed down. These concentrated sessions constituted a form of gambling, moreover, whose temporality was composed of punctuated bursts of intensity in an intensely social scene.³⁹ But for the San’ya day laborer to establish his recognition as an otoko, the energies of his depleted body operated as a vehicle that transformed the instrumental regimentation of time into an event of excessive expenditure that allowed for the past to be folded into the present. Through gambling, the lost time of manual labor remained to be actualized as a durative and curative experience, because construction work commits time to seriality without hope. Only “experience,” Benjamin wrote, “rids man’s soul of obsession with time.”⁴⁰

This obsession with time recalls its compartmentalization and the day laborer’s obsession with the workday to have been done. While the material content of the workday was emptied out in attention to the contingencies of accidents—dust, soil, mud, heat, humidity, cold, rain, snow, chemical fumes, and danger of that steel bar bouncing back, with machinic force, in the face of the excavating laborer—the time of this working day had been abstracted in the assignation of a monetary value to the labor of the construction worker. In commodification, the commensurable form of the subsistence wage was thereby constitutive of work as a passage of empty time and of the day laborer from San’ya as an object of capital. Contrary to the salaryman, it was the distinction of construction work that the content of work resided in the fending off of material stimuli, resulting in physical fatigue, and the predisposition of the construction worker to gamble consisted in the combination of these two characteristics: the crystallization of the laborer in empty time and the etiolation of material stimuli.⁴¹ At the end of a day at the construction site, the day laborer stood emptied out on the train platform, numbed in the body and wondering where the day had gone. Robbed of experience, this fatigued body was reinvigorated through the act of gambling, in which the form of money was proffered to the day laborer with the possibility of winning an incommensurable value. The very form that robbed work of content was transformed into the promise or wish of attaining singular value.

The seduction of gambling thus resides elsewhere than in the prospect of victory. Indeed, the gambler seeks the catastrophic and, hence, the risk of gambling and the excess of expenditure it requires in repeated losses or wins. Except for the rare occasions of winning streaks, in San’ya, it was the near coincidences that were excitedly announced over drinks, propelling the gamblers. How close the horses had come to arriving in the correct order! Only a hair’s breadth separated gamblers from coincidence, and losers repeatedly complained how many times their horses had arrived in inverted order. Inevitable shortcomings triggered repetition unto exhaustion. In the absence of a victory (which often went unannounced so that winners could dispense of their money discreetly), the reality of gambling oneself into debt constituted the social fact of the scene. Nonetheless, these were eminently boisterous, effervescent gatherings, at seedy dives, in which liquor and snacks were accompanied by arm wrestling or the occasional knife fight and in which San’ya’s gamblers repeatedly lived for the intoxicating moment of seeing their horses turn the corner. At the peak of their conviviality, everyone in the group was in debt by a few thousand dollars. This was a considerable amount, given the precarious availability of work and daily earnings of only ¥12,500 ($125). But they imbibed and gambled away their wages, holding one another accountable for their debts, because it was the reputation of the entire group that allowed its members to borrow from bars and eateries. After gambling, it was the condition of one’s losses and indebtedness that was commented on and enacted through regular repayments, as a burden born with dignity. And it was in this way that, while each race promised incommensurable wins in the form of time, compressed into a “narcotic,” there existed a reversibility to this promise: the narcotic could be experienced in loss, and the incommensurable could be achieved with certainty in the negativity of debt.⁴² It was when Akira got into a verbal fight at Sanyukai that he decided to blow ¥200,000 ($2,000) in one fell swoop. By squandering such large sums of money, he created as memorable an event as victory. And although such moments of expenditure were rarely as decisively wasteful as Akira’s, the day laborers made it common practice to dial up the stakes of their gambles, constantly placing their reputation on the line, keeping the thrill of gambling with them. In this way, in gambling as in life, a losing streak was never simply a losing streak. It was one that the day laborer had taken charge of and exacerbated in transgression of conventional propriety, to claim his worth in the negative excesses of liquor, gambling, and his accountability in debt.

It was not just victory that would actualize the value of time, transform the contingent into experience, and inscribe the circumstances of the gamble on memory. Rather, the repeated exposure to self-destructive loss allowed day laborers to carry these losses into the present to constitute a socially recognized self. On Monday mornings, on the train to work, the previous day had not simply been consigned to the dustbin of history: as if the embers were still aglow, the group conversed about the near misses, and if someone had declared a big win, news had traveled across town. Perhaps not everyone told the story of their losses, but they did not have to, since everyone shared in this indebtedness, and each of their bodies had been reactivated in an exhaustive exposure to the self-incurred shock of losses. Consigned to seriality without hope, the day-laborer-turned-gambler emerges as a poet of modernity and shock. As Benjamin wrote of Baudelaire: “Baudelaire battled the crowd—with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind. This is the nature of something lived through (Erlebnis) to which Baudelaire has given the weight of an experience (Erhfarung). He indicated the price for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock.”⁴³ In a “rage” of powerlessness, of having been robbed of experience, Baudelaire sought to raise the shock sensation of modernity to the level of experience. Yet, precisely when this experience would have been attained, the “price” of the experience of shock is disclosed in the evacuation of “aura,” that is, of singularity.⁴⁴ So too, in the victory of coincidence, the gambler’s aim is sacrificed, thereby producing the ground for repetition. For the commensurable form of money can never give enough, and it was the conversion of the ticket into money that effaced the dream of an incommensurable win.⁴⁵ Conversely, losing precipitated an enduring negativity of debt that tested and testified to the character of an otoko, because unlike a solitary victory, debts forced him into relations with others in which he had to uphold his obligations.

Masculinity, Credit, and Recognition in Indebtedness

It was not simply money but their social reputations and accountability as men that the guys risked in gambling, for incurred debts raised the question of whether a person was good for their word/money. Everyone in the group was in debt to an eatery or bar, which they would also frequent on credit, and some would even lend them money on request. Just inside the Iroha arcade, Sakura hosted illegal boat betting, like Mutō, and would lend people money on request. The small-statured, aging mama-san of Sakura sometimes sat tired out at the counter and recounted with her deep Kansai accent that, over the decades Sakura had been in business, she could not count the number of men who had run off without paying their debts. Still, if they knew you, Sakura would “dish out ¥200,000 [$2,000] without hesitation.” Akira was in debt for this amount, and so were Kentarō and Shōkawa. The guys would jokingly refer to Sakura as the “Sakura bank,” since everyone, at some point or other, availed themselves of its services. If not, the thought that they could do so afforded security, and not everyone ran off with Sakura’s money. Akira seemed to bear the burden of his debt gracefully, complaining that he was “deep in debt” but typically turning a negative into a positive by noting that not everyone can borrow money: it required a good reputation. Yet debts and black-market interest rates did, indeed, prove burdensome. Kentarō even remarked that he was “up to his neck” (kubi ga mawaranai) in debt. But this burden also served as an indicator of a man’s social prowess, even when he wound up returning double the original debt.

At the beginning of every month, Akira, Kentarō, and the others would make trips to pay their monthly installments, which never seemed to diminish—it took Akira two years to reduce his debt of ¥200,000 ($2,000) to a more manageable figure of ¥60,000. But Akira did not pull money from others and only borrowed from Sakura. Moreover, he was fastidious in his monthly installments, transforming the negative displeasure of his endless debt into a positive sign of his accountability, word, and reputation as an otoko. Of course, for Akira, it helped that he was not just on welfare but received more than other welfare recipients on account of his medical status.⁴⁶ Everyone seemed to know about this and his generosity, which often left him with only a few hundred yen in his bank account and more than a few days left in the month. The guys in the Okinawa-gang all knew where to go toward the end of the month, be it to Akira or a dive bar where they could put it on a tab, when the money ran out. Yet, in one respect, borrowing from Sakura involved a risk that was greater than borrowing from other members, because by borrowing from Sakura, the borrower put the reputation of the entire group at stake and, with it, the future possibility of taking money out from “Sakura bank.” When Tetsu, another member of the Okinawa-gang, accrued a debt of several hundred thousand yen to Sakura and not only failed to make consistent payments but ceased to show at the dive, the burden of his debt redounded on the other members of the group. This was not simply a matter of the mama-san at Sakura putting pressure on the others to make Tetsu pay, asking them where he was or whether they had seen him. More importantly, Tetsu emerged as a source of consternation because he threatened the financial viability of everyone. In fact, Tetsu had a prior history of “running away” from debts—of disappearing—that earned him the reputation of someone not to be trusted. Kentarō had told Suzuki “not to use” him for work, and when Tetsu had an accident at work, he was suspected of having simulated the fall. It was finally decided that Suzuki would “talk” to Tetsu, yet this was also a risky strategy. When, more than one year later, Suzuki informed Sakura of Shōkawa’s and Akira’s phone numbers (as they were both still in debt), Suzuki received such a verbal thrashing from Akira that they had a prolonged falling-out. Pulling Suzuki aside in front of Mutō’s—“Suzuki, come here a sec!”—Akira confronted Suzuki, who replied, “OK, sorry, I understand.” But it was “too late to apologize,” Akira said. “What’s done is done!”

By incurring excessive debts, the stakes and significance of gambling became amplified, for by gambling beyond their means, men staked their very social existence. Staking one’s self was also what an otoko did: in gambling, as in fights, an otoko was good for his word.⁴⁷ Hence, Riku said of mahjong: “Once you give in, it’s finished” (magetara owari). With credit giving testimony to a man’s accountability, the question was how much negative value or debt an otoko could accrue without letting others down. And while such debts were incurred in specific relations with others, they were made known to everyone through passing remarks, so that indebtedness constituted a condition of being an otoko, one that countered a statist discourse of productivity, much as illegal gambling did.⁴⁸ In this way, the experience of gambling gave rise to an economy of gifting, in which the credibility of an otoko was established across a temporality of deferral, in accordance with the timeliness with which he returned debts, loaned to others, or paid for a meal or drinks. Unless someone had won big, it was always through a state of indebtedness that an otoko established his reputation. Life itself was at stake in this gamble.

More than anyone, Matsuda represented someone who was “finished,” as Akira or Riku phrased it, or “out,” as Kentarō said. While Matsuda might not have gambled away at games the ¥30,000,000 (about $300,000) borrowed from the yakuza, he did invest it in unsuccessful business ventures and shamelessly mixed business with pleasure as he traveled around Japan. Gradually, the photos of Matsuda disappeared from around San’ya. Rumor had it that the Kanamachi-ikka, a branch of the Yamaguchi-gumi, would kill him when they found him, that he would be “buried somewhere,” if he did not wind up in jail first. But no one embodied the vulgarized form of the precept that an otoko was “finished” when he “broke” as much as Yamamori, who gambled daily on flower cards with Gīn, in plain sight of passing police cars. Yamamori was loath to let winners leave the gambling table, and when his social position permitted him, he would pull them back by the sleeve for them to stay at the table. Then, he would up the stakes and keep going until the tide turned, if it did. When he had had a drop too much to drink, moreover, he was as fervent for a bout of cards as an addict for his fix.

Kentarō thus remarked that, if there were one or two people like Yamamori gambling, things could easily get out of hand. It was one thing to gamble on horses, boats, or bicycles and quite another to gamble among buddies. In fact, when the guys gambled on flower cards, it was for low stakes. When they did so at Takeda-san’s apartment after eating, because Nē-san liked it, Takeda-san himself never participated but sat off to the side by the TV, drinking beer, chatting, or sleeping, and the winnings themselves had a roundabout way of making their way into Nē-san’s hands as the guys left, one by one giving their profits to her at the doorway. Indeed, Kentarō would say of gambling among acquaintances that one “should really not do it” because it sowed resentment. Gambling among friends threatened the sociality of the group and its discourse of the otoko. On the few occasions that the Okinawa-gang itself broke this precept, Akira would say that it was really common practice, when gambling among buddies, to return 80 percent of the winnings once the session was over. He was against “taking money among buddies” (nakama aida no kane tori). But there was always a small amount of cash involved when the guys played mahjong or flower cards, the excess of which never remained long with the winner, because word spread rapidly of who had won, and a modicum of generosity was expected from them. When someone had won big at horses, announcing their victory to the world and taking an advance from Sakura (before returning to WINS for their winnings), even Yamamori could be seen slinking along the Sakura counter to collect his share.

There was a shamelessness to such actions, albeit one that was constrained by the trope of the otoko and the importance of buddies. In the absence of a reciprocating gaze, there was neither shame nor honor in front of the TV screen, and on the surface of things, the form of value sought in gambling—money—rendered all things commensurable.⁴⁹ Even a man’s dignity had a price, as Akira experienced when his assailants demanded money in return for backing down from a fight. But it was exactly this commensurability of all things, epitomized by the individualizing labor market, that precipitated repetition of the otoko trope, which, in its excesses, required reference to a social third—Takeda-san—for its discourse to maintain integrity. In front of the TV screen, gamblers experienced no shaming gaze of propriety, and to a limited degree, this shamelessness was brazenly carried into the streets of San’ya. Every day, Gīn, Yamamori, and others gambled illegally in the open and, on occasion, were joined by members of the Okinawa-gang, like Rikiishi or Akira. Everyone knew from experience that the regular police would not conduct arrests on account of gambling, because a special department of the police dealt with such cases. Yet everyone anticipated the arrest of Gīn, who conducted his flower card operations in the open but was circumspect about selling meth. Insofar as danger was suspected, Gīn and the others restrained from exhibiting the illegal elements of their conduct, which functioned as a marker of their territory, as a sign of irreverence for the legal, proper conformity of general society. Precisely on account of the negative excesses of their actions, signification had to remain in place: San’ya was “our town,” in which one gambled on the sidewalks.⁵⁰

Gīn contemptuously reminded me of this constitutive difference between himself and me, when he learned I was teaching Akira “the computer” (pasakon). Left to ourselves in Sakura for an awkward moment, Gīn hardly even looked at me when he said: “Well, good luck with the computer. But just remember our world is illegal.” The necessity was for this sign of difference and counterdiscourse—of Yama as a “lawless zone”—to stay in force without being arrested or fleeing like Matsuda. Everyone thus knew what Gīn did, that is, aside from running an illegal gambling business, but those other transactions were conducted behind closed doors. It was general social knowledge. Moreover, illegal bakuchi (gambling) had long been the domain of the yakuza of old in Japan. Its practice signified “another world” that, as Takeda-san put it, even “normal Japanese would not set foot in.⁵¹

Akira, who had risen to the rank of lieutenant (kashira) while working ten years as a yakuza, would say that he “still thinks like an outlaw.” Sometimes, he would tack back to his days in the mob, when he had worked in extortion, and say, as if he was quoting a phrase, that “nothing is as dirty as general society.” Nearly all his customers in Shinjuku had been members of general society who had lent money to another member of general society, who refused to return the funds. Consequently, the former sought help from the yakuza, where it had been Akira’s job to find the latter’s weakness and “threaten” (kyōkatsu) them into returning the money, a percentage of which was pocketed by his yakuza organization, the Nibikikai. Noting similarly how “general society” was structured so that it was those at the bottom who did all the work while those on top took the profits, Akira would observe: “The more respectable you become, the dirtier you become. That is why the yakuza is better.” Notably, such views were difficult to reconcile with the avowed right-wing stance of most of the Okinawa-gang, except Saruma, who voted for the Japanese Communist Party (Nihon Kyōsantō), but they functioned as markers of difference that empowered the guys vis-à-vis society. Boasting was not necessary to prove that the guys did not care a wink about the police, for their conduct already demonstrated this. Kentarō’s occasional comment that so-and-so was “stupid” for ending up back in jail meant nothing more: the notion they had done something ethically reprehensible was absent from such statements. On the contrary, the bravado of being an otoko more often entailed transgression despite or because of police presence.

Yet no one in the group wanted to be arrested or jailed. After a ten-day stint in detention for aiding Shōkawa in a fight, Akira grumbled he was too old for that sort of thing. It had been OK while he had been in the mob. But at the age of fifty-six, with physical illnesses, being jailed in a cell that hardly fit his body was not worth it. As for Shōkawa, he bawled his eyes out when Nē-san came to see him in detention.

Everyone knew that San’ya and many of their usual haunts were under surveillance by the police. It was said that the local police at the Mammoth police box had a good “grasp” of who hung out in front of Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall. In fact, one day when Riku instigated a fight, the police from the Mammoth appeared in Sakura with a photo of his face, asking if anyone had seen “this man.” Kentarō assumed that a camera had been placed high on the apartment building facing down on Mutō’s, where no one could see it. Henceforth, they would have to be careful, he said, and do it in the back alleyway if they were going to fight. Members of the Matsuda-group, too, were thought to be followed around by undercover cops, as they had been arrested previously for possession of meth. Kon-chan had been arrested thus a second time and was awaiting a two-year jail sentence. Yamamori, too, would disappear from the entryway to Iroha for extended periods, ostensibly because he knew it was best to lie low awhile: “because he knows it’s risky.” And while the gambling at Mutō’s and inside Sakura continued in brazen fashion, there were moments of paranoia when members of the Okinawa-gang talked suspiciously of new faces at Mutō’s, wondering if they might be undercover police. When Suzuki’s girlfriend received an anonymous call one evening from a man asking if “the tehaishi, Suzuki,” was there, he became convinced that the “cops” (satsu)—indicated by the silent gesture of raising a fist to the forehead—were tracking his movements. How else would they know her phone number?

As it turned out, some of these fears were well-grounded, because one day the undercover police stormed Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall en masse. Suzuki made his getaway in the nick of time, as he witnessed the police descend just as he was walking toward Mutō’s from the end of the alley. From the second-floor window, Hasegawa looked down, horror-stricken, as events unfolded, at the arrests, the no-entry yellow tape, and the TV crews gathering with cameras. News of the event spread like wildfire in the Okinawa-gang, for it had been poor Shōkawa—whom, everyone knew, had started betting seriously on boats only a few weeks earlier, when his mother passed away—who was caught red-handed in the act of placing a bet. An undercover cop had been standing by his side and just as Shōkawa told Mutō (writing in his ledger) his numbers and was handing over the ¥500, the undercover police shouted: “Hold it!” With this, the remaining police charged from the wings, detaining Shōkawa, Mutō, and two of the other drunkards lounging about on the rickety stools, no doubt too drunk to stand.

To Akira’s embarrassment, news of the arrest made it onto the NHK news the following day at noon, when everyone at Sanyukai happened to be eating lunch with the TV on. Since the cops had invited the media along for the scoop, the incident was also reported in newspapers, and as was the wont of mass media at the time, the reportage focused less on the illegality of unlicensed gambling and more on the self-evident scandal of welfare recipients seeping state-acquired funds away into the Yamaguchi-gumi. The Sankei News reported as follows:

Boat Gambling with Welfare? Yamaguchi-gumi Members Arrested under Suspicion of Illegal Bookmaking, Tokyo, San’ya

On account of illegal bookmaking on motorboat races with welfare recipients in the San’ya district of Tokyo, the Metropolitan Police Department Office of Security has arrested Uga Kaho (42), a leader in the designated organized crime syndicate Yamaguchi-gumi in Tokyo, Arakawa-ku, Minami-Senjū, and Mutō Isami (73), manager of an eatery in Sumida-ku, Zutsumi-dōri, as well as three bookkeepers and three customers, on suspicion of breaking the motorboat racing law (illegal bookmaking). According to the police, the suspect, Uga Kaho, is keeping silent.

The arrest took place on the 20th around 3:00 p.m., at the yakitori eatery managed by the suspect, Mutō, with a TV streaming motorboat races, where he paid back winners made to bet on an estimate of ¥10,500 per ¥100.

According to the police, Ugo Kaho and suspects have profited upwards of ¥100 million since 2008, half of which is thought to have become funds for the organized crime syndicate. Half the customers were welfare recipients, and the upper limit of bets was set at ¥10,000 per person.⁵²

While this article in the Sankei News pays some degree of homage to San’ya, localizing the events in San’ya, another article in the NHK news does not even mention San’ya, stating merely that the arrests took place in the Taitō Ward of Tokyo.⁵³ But it is the missing term in both articles that gives them the normative force of self-evidence, namely, the “state” (kuni) or “nation” (kuni), two terms between which there is slippage in Japanese, for it is only in relation to the state that the central terms in the articles fall into place: “welfare recipients,” “illegal bookmaking,” and the “designated organized crime syndicate Yamaguchi-gumi.”⁵⁴ Not only was Mutō running an unlicensed boat racing operation at his hole-in-the-wall, but the odds of the bets themselves were being calibrated illegally, such that gamblers did not win as much as the official odds would have given them. The guys were aware of this, expressing surprise, if anything, at how much the police actually knew about the intricacies of Mutō’s operation, because in addition to Mutō, the cops had also arrested Uga Kaho, an unknown organizer behind the scenes, as well as a lower-level member of the Kanamachi-ikka, who used to bicycle past Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall to pick up the profits and hand them on to the Kanamachi-ikka. Moreover, the police also appeared to know everything about the profits that this Uga figure had reaped over the years and the guys surmised that the cops had been staking the place out for a long time; in fact, when Shōkawa was held in detention, he seemed to notice familiar faces among the police. After his release a few days later, Shōkawa recounted what the police had asked him and how he had concocted some cock-and-bull story about never having gambled there before. For a brief period, it even seemed that the Kanamachi-ikka wanted to speak with Shōkawa in person, to debrief him. Ultimately, the police did not indict Mutō, although he remained in detention for close to a month, and when he restarted business, the little TV screen had disappeared from its place on the wall across from the bamboo kumade (rake) from Ōtori Shrine, hung to bring good fortune in business. For good reason, the staff at Sakura grew wary after this incident. The group, too, began to circulate rumors that unknown individuals had been seen outside Sakura, taking photos of the entrance. A police siege was imminent, Saruma said, but still, Akira and others kept going undeterred. Naturally, all this changed when Sakura decided to acquire a license for boat racing, thereby legalizing the gambling, but the mama-san still grumbled when guys would pull out a bowl with dice, handing over a couple thousand yen as a token of gratitude for letting them play.

Wariness and avoidance of arrest differed from “ratting” (chinkoro) on buddies. An otoko would have dishonored himself by informing on friends or enemies, and therein resided his code of conduct. In effect, the occasion of arrest for what the mass media depicted as the most shameless of acts—flushing away welfare into the black market of a mob organization—emerged as a pretext to affirm dignity as an otoko. Whereas the state would have affixed insufficiency and shame in the punishment of confinement, reference to the counterdiscourse of the otoko and buddies counteracted and nullified this shame. It was in solidarity that dignity was upheld by protecting the social entity of the group. Anticipating Shōkawa’s release, the guys shared knowledge of police procedures to predict when he would be released and how the arrest itself had taken place. Norihisa expressed concern that Shōkawa (formerly in the Japan Self-Defense Forces) had an air gun stowed away in his room and for what might happen if the cops searched his bunkhouse. When his phone finally connected at five o’clock in the afternoon, someone called Shōkawa, told him to forget the train, and to take a taxi that everyone would chip in for. Akira noted it was “normal” (futsū) to do as much, and thirty minutes later, Shōkawa pulled in at the Iroha entry in a taxi, where some fifteen people were waiting for him on a blue sheet spread on the ground, partly because they had been called and partly by chance, as Matsuda was doing his tehai, ambling about with the wad of ¥10,000 bills in his hand. High on meth, Yamamori declared that he had been the one to think of paying for the taxi and kept insisting that an itchō (single) block of tofu be passed around the group, starting and ending with Shōkawa, who had to finish the tofu but did not, a ceremony that most of the guys clearly found tiresome but went through with anyway.⁵⁵ Kentarō laughed at the sober-faced Shōkawa, who recounted tales from detention once the alcohol started coursing through him. Less than a year later, Shōkawa was back in detention for fighting with an opponent who refused to drop charges.

Kentarō described such compulsively repetitive and transgressive conduct as characteristic of San’ya. Referring to the well-known 1986 novel by the former mobster Abe Jōji—Incarcerated and Incorrigible—Kentarō identified San’ya as a space of incarceration and likened the transgressive conduct one witnesses in San’ya to that in a jail.⁵⁶ No one ever learns. Yet, within the confinement of San’ya, it was only by repeatedly transgressing the social norms of upstanding society that the trope of masculinity was materialized in its mode of conduct and enjoyment, as a solicitation for recognition. Insofar as the enactment of masculinity in San’ya organized enjoyment through an array of practices that could never be entirely one’s own and that was therefore always threatened, performing the values of an otoko constituted an obsessive object of identification. The claim to masculinity could never be consummated, and for this reason, it mandated repetition.⁵⁷

Notably, there were other modes of enjoyment than those of transgression through fighting or gambling, one of which was ubiquitous in San’ya’s dive bars: karaoke. Shōkawa’s favorite song, which he sang every Sunday, was the hugely popular song by the Okinawan band, BEGIN, “The Treasure of Islanders.” Saturated with nostalgia, its lyrics give life to the vanishing natural beauties of Okinawa by asking how well the singer knows its evanescent corrals, skies, and dialects that cannot be captured on TV, radio, or in textbooks. “Surely,” the lyrics resound, “there is something precious here,” as if this “something” does not consist in Okinawa’s stars or local traditions, but is somehow disclosed through them.⁵⁸ When Shōkawa sang the lyrics—“surely, there is something precious here”—they emerged as a reference to the people present at the table on each occasion he sang the song. This was indicated by Shōkawa pointing at the table in rhythm to the lyrics, while everyone else joined in for the refrain, depending on each their state of inebriation. Displaced into the lyrics of the song, the sociality of the group did not consist in the vanishing stars, skies, ocean, festivals, or dialects of Okinawa, as if the essence of this sociality did not entirely belong to them. Rather, it was revealed through these fugitive entities, and in karaoke, it was created through the practice of singing of the song. Of course, karaoke occurred alongside gambling, and the spirit of collective effervescence easily spilled into violence. As an obsessive object of identification, this masculine sociality gave itself to be recognized as excessive to general society, the gaze of which it both required and was threatened by and the propriety of which it threatened, in turn, in its excesses. The only alternative would have been to be fixed in shame without end or reprieve, aspiring to normativity and productivity. But the otoko of San’ya had his “dignity” (iji). Takeda-san and others would compare dyed-in-the-wool workers from San’ya with laborers from elsewhere, noting that San’ya’s workers were “skilled” and “exceptional” at their trade. Laughing, Shōkawa added: “For the rest, they’re just drinking.” Defiant, the thoroughbred worker of San’ya knew their work better than anyone but threw propriety to the wind. If, like Kentarō, they did not feel like going to work, they “opened a hole, on purpose.”

The ultimate price of decades of excessive working and drinking could be seen in the feeble fifty-year-old Iwasawa, who had “become increasingly incoherent” and of whom it was said that he only had a few years left. Akira was not much different, in and out of hospitals, and Kentarō himself would react indifferently whenever someone told him to drink less or to use a condom in the neighboring red-light district, Yoshiwara. In the imminent specter of the end, it was better to gamble now than to wait until it was too late. “When you die, you die,” Kentarō said. Disregard for health, for the productive life, the biopolitical, and for death itself emerged as the negativity of life as an otoko: a trope that opposed the generalized social propriety propagated by the state and, in so doing, recovered a modicum of dignity for the otoko. Naturally, the guys were much less sanguine about death when it really faced them, but nevertheless, they persisted in their lifestyles undeterred, back to sipping shochu with ice and water at Mutō’s hours after they had been let out of hospital, having just been ordered by doctors to lay off liquor. Kentarō worried about his blood pressure because it rose above 170 whenever he checked it, but he still drank shochu at all times of the day; nor did he ever consult a doctor, knowing full well that he should, preferring to say: “There’s nothing wrong with me.” Taking all sorts of medication, including painkillers and sleeping pills that did not mix well with alcohol, Akira would claim that doctors had not told him not to combine—although they clearly had!—and though he occasionally went sober for a few days, he would drink days on end, vomiting up the food he had eaten during the day. Shōkawa, too, would spend days drinking nonstop, starting when he woke up. Kentarō observed that everyone’s liver hurt but that they continued drinking, hoping that “somehow it would turn out all right.” Likewise, some of the guys might go on a fighting spree, repeatedly getting themselves into altercations and ending up in the local Mammoth. Be it with the cops or the doctors, the activities of the guys earned them a reputation so that Rikiishi was known with the police, and doctors knew that Akira was not, in any case, intent on getting any better. In fact, being recognized by the police was something that some of them fantasized and bragged about. Thus, when it came time for the yearly Obon festival held in Tamahime Park, Makoto and Akira would both comment on how the public order police (kōan keisatsu) eyed them as they entered the park, looking at their callused hands.⁵⁹ Akira would say that, given his record, the police “kept an eye on” him.

The day laborer, welfare recipient, and sometimes convicted criminal, if not active member of the yakuza, only validated himself as an otoko by doing what he did despite the disciplinary, punitive gaze of the state. It would have been “embarrassing” (hazukashī) if authorities kept someone from acting as he desired. Thus, Akira would say that he had “no shame” (haji wa nai).⁶⁰ He was not simply reacting but was quite conscious of the obvious: that the conduct of an otoko required that “weakness not be shown.” Likewise, Kentarō asserted that “there is no way” he would spend the money of others, which he had been put in charge of keeping. There existed an explicit code of conduct that an otoko would have been ashamed to fall short of, and in Shōkawa’s case, this involved not informing on one’s buddies. By positing their own articulation of shame, the reference to buddies enabled the shaming gaze of the state to be repulsed. Yet, as with gambling, this solicitation for recognition was driven by a constitutive insufficiency that threatened to spiral out of control.

On the few occasions the guys won at gambling, it was never sufficient. Even when the returns were considerable, the form of money never conferred satisfaction. Rather, as the stand-in for an impossible presence, money assumed the force of a fetish that was repeatedly gambled or expended but never saved or used toward everyday expenses or the payment of debts. Returns from gambling were inevitably spent on activities as excessive as gambling itself, such as prostitutes in Yoshiwara, hostess clubs, or restaurants. Both gambling and the multifarious activities that followed a victory would have achieved mastery, but the aim of gambling was impossible to begin with: to restore the individual to plenitude.⁶¹ Thus, the object cause of desire appeared retroactively, when it occurred to the gambler just how close they had come to victory. Most guys let up on gambling only when they had gotten so sick of losing that gambling, albeit temporarily, did not prick them.

For others, gambling assumed a self-destructive character that collapsed into a negativity without limit, especially when gambling was exacerbated by other external failures. Hence, Akira explained that he turned to gambling after getting into a verbal fight at Sanyukai. Feeling hurt, he decided to blow a couple hundred thousand yen at Kōrakuen, transforming the commensurable form of money into a singular negativity that was hard for him to return. Yet Akira did stop gambling when he lost several hundred thousand yen. His original conduct had thrown caution to the wind, but Akira was reckless in a manner that enabled him to assert his self-possession and to successfully impose himself on his fellows in San’ya, who recognized his character. By setting a limit, albeit a thoroughly excessive limit, to their gambling debts, not to mention their drinking and fighting habits, the group harnessed negativity in their favor.⁶² Yet, slowly but surely, the excesses of their activities accelerated the demise of the guys, unraveling the social fabric that bound them together and undermining the sociality that shielded them against the normative gaze of “general society.” Within the group, it was the disappearance of the meth-driven Matsuda that exemplified the sheer plunge into negativity, not to mention the obliteration of accountability and social existence.⁶³ It was only by referencing the group that expenditure was constrained.

By a strange inversion, therefore, singular debts incurred through gambling coincided with incommensurable winnings, and it was by sticking it out in this negativity that the day laborers and gamblers of San’ya laid claim to a life otherwise consigned to that of the anonymous manual laborer, worked to death. As a solicitation for recognition from other men in the area, gambling sought to master the abjection of San’ya by countering the death-inducing form of the subsistence wage and by transforming the modern passage of empty time into an experience of contingency that created debt and sociality. This was a negativity achieved through the repetitive and embodied exposure to the contingencies of gambling, the risks of which were often compounded by the unlicensed, illegal character of the local gambling venues at which men staked their reputations. But it was also precisely this transgressive aspect of gambling that allowed men in San’ya to repulse the normative gaze of upstanding society and that allowed them to comport themselves with a dignity recognized by their fellows, insofar as they made good on their debts. Credit, thus, emerged as the foremost sign of their accountability and of their singular value as an otoko. Like boxers on the ropes, however, the men had a limit to the amount of damage they could endure without collapsing, and the excessive lifestyles of individuals in San’ya foreshadowed their death, if not that of the day-laborer district itself. Ultimately, as it was said of construction work, gambling, fights, and liquor: “The bill catches up with you” (tsuke ga mawatte kuru).

Gamblers thereby sacrificed and paid for their failures with their social reputation as men, if not with their lives, and for this reason, gambling emerged as a metaphor for life in San’ya. Only a few, like Kentarō or Rikiishi, possessed the physique necessary to survive the excessive lifestyle predicated in Yama, but even these two were ticking time bombs, waiting to collapse. Akira would say of Kentarō’s “type” that their bodies crashed suddenly, and he was right. Of himself, Akira would say that his failing health was a direct consequence of the excessive lifestyle he had led.

At Sanyukai, one did not speak of gambling: an activity that was obviously regarded as an “addiction” (izonshō).⁶⁴ Although everyone did gamble, such talk undermined Sanyukai as a space grounded on the denegation of unproductive forms of life, because at Sanyukai, even the long-lost alcoholic father with a gambling addiction and criminal record could be redeemed to take part in forms of sociality that did not revolve around excess. He could be trained both into docility and to shamelessly accept charity that sought to rescue him from himself and his environment, for he was, in their eyes, “pitiable” (kawaisō).⁶⁵ Individuals who came from outside San’ya and volunteered at Sanyukai spoke thus of the homeless people who lived in tents along the river, to whom the institution handed out food parcels once per week. The rest of San’ya, however, such as the entryway to the Iroha arcade, where the drunks gathered, or even Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall, remained strangely beside the grid of Sanyukai’s activities: at once immediately adjacent to Sanyukai yet nonexistent. Nor did staff or volunteers from outside San’ya ever make a stop at San’ya’s dive bars on their way home from work, preferring to make a beeline for Minami-Senjū Station. Likewise, Sanyukai never reserved venues within San’ya for events like the end-of-the-year party, opting instead for Asakusa.

In a disquieting display of obsequiousness, one charity organization in San’ya even required that recipients of food sing Christian hymns before receiving their weekly ration. On every Sunday, a strangely pliable, straggly crowd of men could be seen lining up in a long row along Tamahime Park, holding white sheets of music, facing the opposite side of the street, where loudspeakers had been positioned and staff members faced them in turn. Like the divide between the inside and outside of the Sanyukai entryway, an imaginary line had been drawn that established charity givers vis-à-vis the Other, on whose recognition the institution was dependent.⁶⁶

Institutions like Sanyukai could not enforce sociality among its members without expelling the excessive elements that threatened the institution at its core. Indeed, it was founded on negating the negativity of these excesses. By ousting disobedient men from its territory, however, Sanyukai repeated the originary gesture that had landed individuals in San’ya in the first place, confined and cut off from family and society. But it was not only institutions, families, and general society that could not tolerate and survive the excessive, repetitive lifestyle of the guys. Money and alcohol spelled the eventual dissolution of the Okinawa-gang itself.

The self-destruction of social reputations oftentimes began from borrowing meager sums of money. Especially at the end of the month, the group would have spent their out-of-work aid or welfare allowance and turned to one another for small sums of cash, lest they retreat to their rooms. It was equally common, however, for the guys to lose track of how much they had borrowed and lent, and from or to whom. This was no surprise, given that the guys were most often inebriated when they pulled money from one another, that is, when they asked for the bill. Akira would grumble at the end of every month that Shōkawa had demanded that he return ¥10,000 ($100) when he had not borrowed anything to begin with. To avoid a confrontation, Akira would dish the money out and disappear into his room for the last week of the month, living off instant noodles and water since he only had a couple hundred yen (a couple dollars) left in his account. Others, however, would get themselves into fights on account of paltry sums, having raised the anger of the lender either by failing, repeatedly, to return the debt or by feigning forgetfulness. What pricked lenders most was when they found borrowers spending cash on liquor or gambling which clearly indicated that they were in possession of money they chose not to return. Ironically, lenders thereby replicated the very infuriation expressed by upstanding members of general society who paid their taxes and did not forgive welfare recipients who wasted tax money. After Suzuki’s fall from grace as tehaishi, Akira would therefore caution him “not to borrow from anyone!” Because instead of returning money or, even worse, failing to give individuals their wages and promising to do so the next day, Suzuki set money aside to drink, raising the ire of Matsuda, whose underlings he had decided not to pay, muttering under his breath: “How come only I can’t drink?” Matsuda, in turn, would make a fuss with other members of the Okinawa-gang, insisting that Kentarō do something about his brother or that Akira talk to him. It was to no avail, however, as even Kentarō acted as if Suzuki’s doings had nothing to do with himself, thereby seeming to give others the freedom to act as they wished. But everyone assumed that Kentarō would retaliate if Suzuki was harmed. Thus, it was said, Suzuki was safe and protected by the presence of his older brother.

Holding his forefinger and thumb millimeters apart, Akira explained that over only one hundred yen, the personal slight experienced by a lender could prompt them to kill. It was not the money itself but the affront to the person and reputation of the individual that caused them to assert themselves as men. Thus, the trope of the otoko could spill into irrecoverable excess, for which the individual had to take responsibility, or it could shore up this negativity by placing limits on excess. In this sense, Akira, who received more welfare than others and was also more generous with his money, had made a rule of not asking people to return money when the amount was less than three thousand yen (thirty dollars). Any other conduct would have been unbecoming. But when it came to fights, Akira asserted that nothing could hold him back, neither the police nor the danger of physical injury, and that he had no problem wielding a broken bottle. When it came down to it, he said, the other party backed down.

In San’ya, “no one but me,” Akira would boast, can take things “to the limit” thus. But it was usually someone else who committed the deed, like the slightly crazed, very short-tempered Izami, who had previously been jailed for murder and this time had stabbed an “old man” in his seventies. News of such murders spread like wildfire, as if everyone knew that, at some point or other, it was bound to happen again.