Music: Stone Temple Pilots... Big bang baby
One of the craziest things I ever seen when I was in Japan, was a few months after I had arrived and I was living in the Flower mansion in Goi.
I have called the place we were living in as a dorm, but it was really a bunch of 2LDK (2 bedrooms, a living room, dinette and a kitchen) manshons. (I spell it in the Japanese way, just to emphasize that a manshon is a larger apartment, and not a millionaire’s estate). Anyways, NOVA had a deal with this particular Manshon and bought a lot of rooms which they stuffed 3 people in. This meant that there were neighbors who were just regular Japanese people. They really did not interact with us at all and as a general rule, and we knew very little about the majority of people that lived there. There were only two apartments that we really took note of. One room on the bottom floor occupied by a high class “working girl” and one room that housed a Yakuza and his wife. How did we know he was Yakuza? Well, we didn’t exactly… What we did know was that he operated the Mah-Jong and roulette parlor next door and that he beat the shit out of his wife from time to time. The girls that lived next to him tried to talk to the police, but from what I understand, they just took the report and never really followed up on it. How did we know he ran the gambling den next door? They left the windows open and they were maybe 20 feet away from my window.
On Sunday nights, a huge group of us regularly went out for karaoke. It was about 500 yen an hour, and there was free alcohol, so it was an awesome deal, but that night my sinuses were really bothering me. All the cigarette smoke after being in there for 2+ hours would have killed me, so I stayed home and read while the rest of the gaijin population emptied out. After a few hours, I heard about 2 loud pops, and froze. I could have sworn that was gunfire… Was it gunfire? Really? In Japan? No way… I guess some of my neighbors were still in the building shooting fireworks in the hallways. It’s the kind of crazy post-college shit that is famous with English instructors in Japan. I then heard 5 more pops in rapid succession… There was no doubt in my mind now. Someone was shooting. So I did one of the dumbest things I have ever done. I ran to the balcony and hung my chest off of it. I was sure it was from the snack bar 100 meters down the road to my right, but when I looked, I saw nothing. I looked to the left and I saw 2 chinpira get into a black Mercedes… Living in Goi, which was overflowing with chinpira, you get to know what the Yakuza look like. They stuffed their pistols back into their jackets, got in the back of the car, and peeled off. And there in front of the parlor, was a robed man on the ground, crawling on his stomach. I watched him for a second and thought maybe he was just a drunkard they were screwing with, but I doubted it… I started to see blood start saturating his robe from 3 floors up.
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| chimpira are young punks that look between these yakuza... |
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| ... and these bozu-zoku... Basically thugs trying to get into organized crime. |
I started banging on the door of a new roommate’s door; A 6’4” Canadian guy who had just arrived in Japan a couple weeks prior. We had another really loud and annoying British roomie that wasn’t there, so the Canadian took to wearing earplugs. “Wake up man! Someone outside got shot! Lets see if we can help!” He jumped out of bed and followed me downstairs with his new cell phone (He was very proud of that little phone). Once we arrived, I recognized him as the Yakuza guy from upstairs. His wife was there too, weeping and trying to stop the bleeding with towels, looking at us with a pleading look as her husband started to turn grey; as most of his blood was on the pavement or in the towels. A crowd had gathered silently to watch this guy’s life slip away. He was dead, and there was nothing I could do to bring him back. He was too far gone and I really didn’t want my fingerprints on a crime scene. My room mate was holding his cell phone in front of some old woman who just stared at him in slack jawed, wonder as he said loudly “Call the PO-LICE… you know… woooo wooo wooo!” I count that moment, of a giant Canadian making police siren noises to an old woman, while standing over a dead body, one of the weirdest experiences of my life.
About 15 minutes later (the police station was a 5 minute walk by the way), the police showed up and roped the area off. I called up one of my Japanese friends, and asked if she could translate for me to the police office. She had to sneak away from a party to translate for me, and when I apologized about it, she told me not to worry about it. It was really interesting and became a talking point for her at the party. I then called one of the others at the karaoke bar and told them to stay there for a while. It wouldn’t be a good idea for a bunch of drunk foreigners to come tripping over a crime scene.
That night, I watched the crime scene investigation from my kitchen window. I think they did everything to corrupt the crime scene. They touched bullet casings with their bare hands, and let it rain on the scene for a good 15 minutes before covering it up. Later the paper would read that the owner of a restaurant was found shot to death outside his restaurant. I think I saw someone eating a sandwich while gambling once…
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