of the club. A week later, the head of the gang, Hisayuki Machii, also known as the Crime Boss of Tokyo, came around to apologize for the fuss, bringing with him the offending subaltern, who was now missing the tip of the pinky on his left hand, having been ordered to slice it off in what was the standard act of contrition in the Japanese underworld for embarrassing the gang. (I confirmed this story with Shattuck years later when I met him for the first time.)
Happy Valley
By the end of my first year, I had developed a special liking for Shibuya, a major hub on the Yamate railway line that circled the city. It was a town of young people closer to my age group—lots of students from nearby Aoyama Gakuin University and working-class types. It had a more common, quotidian feel than the Ginza playground of the rich and was also not top heavy with gaijin the way Roppongi was. It felt more like the “real Japan.” Shibuya was an interesting mix of modern department stores, cheap cabarets and bars, street vendors, and dilapidated sake houses with corrugated tin roofs. Another feature of the town was “Love Letter Alley,” a collection of makeshift stalls where Japanese young women could go to have language experts write letters in English to their boyfriends overseas—former GIs who were not likely coming back.
Shibuya was also home to the famous statue of Hachiko, the legendary canine who epitomized the loyalty so central to the traditional Japanese value system. After his owner died of a sudden stroke and failed to appear at the station where Hachiko had always waited for him, the dog stayed there, cared for by sympathetic commuters, until his own death ten years later. Today, his statue is perhaps the most popular meeting place in all of Tokyo. I was partial to the Happy Valley Dance Hall, a popular 1940s-style establishment that was packed to the rafters every Saturday night. Regulars included beauticians, secretaries, waitresses, and college coeds—nice ordinary girls whose presence helped me overcome my native shyness. A surprising number were snaggletoothed, which was a particularly endearing quality. This feature, as a popular (if unconfirmed) belief had it, was the result of an Occupation-era policy to put more calcium in the Japanese diet, causing teeth to outgrow the mouth.
The Happy Valley consisted of a large dance floor underneath a glittering rotating mirror ball suspended from the ceiling that cast multicolored reflections around the interior and a stage where rotating orchestras played half-hour sets. A swing band like Nobuko Hara’s Sharps and Flats would play Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey hits from the 1940s—“In The Mood,” “Little Brown Jug,” and others; they would be followed by a rock and roll band offering up contemporary fare such as “Rock Around the Clock” and “The Twist”; these in turn would give way to Japanese pop singers like husky teenager Mieko Hirota, Japan’s “Queen of Pops,” belting out their own latest hits. Connie Francis even put in a brief appearance there one evening to sing “Pretty Little Baby” in Japanese, a version that topped the Tokyo pop charts.
When the music sufficed to put you and your partner “In the Mood,” a possible destination was a “love hotel,” a unique Japanese invention that came about because of the lack of privacy in most Japanese houses and apartments, with their cramped spaces and paper-thin walls. Shibuya was filled with them. You could get a three-hour “rest” or a room for the night. You “checked in” by handing over the entrance fee through a narrow slot in a wall in the lobby and were then given a key with the room number on it. When you left, you returned the key through the slot. No face-to-face contact. No uncomfortable stares. No embarrassment.
Japanese society supposedly frowned on premarital sex but that didn’t seem to bother the girls I met at the Happy Valley. Not that they were sexually experienced, but then again neither was I, my lone such episode back in Eureka, an encounter with a girl named Sandy in the back of my 1955 Ford that lasted approximately ten seconds. My first visit across the street to Love Hotel Hill was with a slender nineteen-year-old junior college student named Keiko with a cute face, silky smooth skin, and braces. She spoke a smattering of English and kept saying, “Please take care.” I had no idea what she meant. When I woke up in the morning, she was gone, but she had folded my clothes in a neat pile on the tatami and left a note on top with her phone number and the words “Thank you berry much.” I called her once but the older man, presumably her father, who answered the phone could not understand what I was saying using the few words of Japanese I knew, and I certainly could not understand him. So that was the end of that.
I went to the Happy Valley so often I became friends with the bartender, a tall, gaunt, morose young man with slicked-back hair and a scraggly mustache, named Jun. Jun spoke a little English and liked the chance to practice it with me when I went in. I would bring him gifts from the base. Johnny Walker Black was a big favorite. So were Napoleon Brandy, American cigarettes, Levis, and leather belts. Such items were subject to huge tariffs on the Japanese market but were dirt cheap at the Base Exchange. Jun would drink the Johnny Walker himself and then pour domestic Japanese whisky—Suntory Single Malt or Suntory Whisky Royal—in the empty bottles, and the Happy Valley would charge a fortune for it, an arrangement that ingratiated him no end with his bosses. It was a testament to the early quality of Suntory Whisky, made with pure Kyoto river-valley water, that most customers couldn’t notice the difference. I found myself enjoying it as well, particularly as my consumption of it there rarely made its way onto the bar bill.
Jun did me the honor of inviting me to his home on New Year’s Day 1963—his home consisting of a tiny two-room apartment where he lived with his wife and baby son. One room was a six-mat size (with a total space of 108 square feet), while the second room afforded the space of a large closet and was completely filled by a huge chest of drawers and several rolled up futons.
Communicating with a mixture of Japanese and English words and hand signals, we sat there at a low table on frayed zabuton (cushions), drank Japanese sake, and ate ozoni (soup with rice cakes) and other traditional Japanese New Year’s foods. Later, after the alcohol had taken hold, he confessed that he was not a pureblooded Japanese but rather the son of a Korean father and a Japanese mother. It was something he said he kept a secret from all but a few people, because there was so much discrimination against people of Korean origin in Japan.
Japan had colonized the Korean Peninsula in the early part of the 20th century, forcing its inhabitants to learn and speak Japanese. Two million Koreans wound up in Japan, many as forced laborers. Jun’s father had been one of them, working in the coal mines in Kyushu. He wound up marrying the teenage daughter of an impoverished farming family but returned to the Korean Peninsula shortly after the end of the war and was never heard from again. Jun suspected he was in the north, where his father’s parents were from. There were more than a half a million Koreans—zainichi chosenjin as they were called—still left in Japan. They had decided not to return home because living conditions on the Korean Peninsula were even more miserable than they were for them in postwar Japan. But since they were viewed in Japan as a lesser class of people, it was hard for Koreans to get into good schools or get jobs at good companies, or marry into respectable Japanese families. As a result, many Koreans took Japanese names and hid their identities.
Jun said that he and his wife, who was Japanese—a beauty parlor attendant whom he had met at the Happy Valley—did not want their son to suffer that kind of discrimination, so they kept his origins a secret. He said he would hide the truth from the boy for the rest of his life.
“I can tell you,” Jun said, “because you’re not from this country. But I can’t tell others. Here my son will have a better chance in life.”
Hachiko the Dog. The most popular meeting spot in Tokyo, in front of Shibuya Station.
The Happy Valley Dance Hall was a purlieu for the Shibuya-based Ando gang, the five-hundred-member underworld organization that controlled the area. Just around the corner, the Ando-gumi ran a low rent cho-han game, a traditional form of gambling in which patrons bet on whether a pair of dice thrown from a cup would produce either an even or an odd number. One night after the dance hall had closed Jun invited me to take part. We went down a side-street stairwell into a large tatami room behind a big steel door.
On