Foreigners behaving badly goes down well with audiences in Japan. Stories of Yankee misfits, British conmen and Korean upstarts are guaranteed to find eager readers.
Throw in shady espionage rings, guys who started out by sleeping on park benches, plus stories of massive transfers of dollars bills in brown paper bags, and you have all the required ingredients for best sellerdom.
Robert Whiting's huge collection of character sketches aims to capture how his men -- few women are included -- made their bids for fame and fortune. It also underlines the varying responses of a succession of Japanese governments, leading corporations and the judiciary to these Western and Asian outsiders.
It is a saga without seeming end. Starting out with the arrival of General Douglas MacArthur's New Deal reformers and some less than perfectly honest GIs in the autumn of 1945, it takes us right up to the 2020s and the assassination and funeral of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The underlying theme from the military occupation of post-surrender Imperial Japan to the present is the uncomfortable mismatch between the powerful in Japan and the saints and sinners who have landed unasked on their shores.
Yet roundly attributing blame to one side or the other is ultimately of less interest than learning a lot more of the extraordinary antics on both sides of the divide.
Whiting is not really writing a morality tale -- there is simply too much chicanery, deception and outright corruption by a host of individuals and institutions for any crude division into our sheep and their goats.
Take two key actors at the beginning and the end of the work. First, "Chuck" Kades, the deputy head of the occupation's important Government Section, whose well publicized love life rightly gets Whiting's attention. Thanks to the efforts of a rival U.S. general obsessed with anti-communism, stories on Kades's dalliance with a Japanese aristocrat's wife certainly contributed to his exit from Tokyo. Yet by then Colonel Kades had already done a vital service to those aiming for a new Japan. He was the man who organized and masterminded the speedy writing and enactment of the highly liberal postwar Japanese Constitution.
Kades surely deserves to be remembered as the high priest of political reform, who got unfairly shafted by his own side. Equally, those who rightly slam Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi and his extensive political dynasty, including the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, risk ignoring factors wider than the role of secret CIA funding behind the conservatives and their anti-communist tentacles
Kishi and his more than dubious associates, including the millionaire rightists Yoshio Kodama, Ryochi Sasakawa and the Reverend Moon of global Unification Church fame, doubtless relied on suspect cash to oil their political machinery but large chunks of the electorate didn’t seem to mind much. It was hardly a secret that Kishi had been minister to Japan-controlled Manchuria and after war’s end had been locked up in Sugamo prison before being released rather fortunately without trial.
Robert Whiting’s “Gamblers, Fraudsters, Dreamers and Spies” is a well-researched and well-paced eye-opener. Those, for example, looking for commentary on the case of Nissan’s brutal ouster of Carlos Ghosn, defined by the author as “by far the most successful foreign executive in Japanese history,”,are given a near impartial account of his arrest and subsequent questioning by prosecutors. Ghosn’s extraordinary escape from Osaka international airport after jumping bail and being hidden in an overlarge musical box plus the final court decisions against his surely innocent American colleague read more like the world of improbable crime fiction rather than pure cold documented fact.
The book has everything on what happened to an earlier generation of overseas baseball managers and sluggers, to allegations of North Korean criminal behavior, fierce taxi wars and present day foreign bitcoin scammers. Nor does Whiting ignore the infinitely sadder and still unchanging saga of how trafficked Asian women caught within Japan’s vast unchecked and unquantifiable sex industry continue to be maltreated.
Its concentration on the fat underbelly of Tokyo during the “bubble” era evokes both the party animals and the tangled international corruption behind the then glamorous club scene. Permitted nostalgia for Akasaka’s Byblos and Mugen along with Roppongi’s Danny’s Inn and Maggie’s Revenge as the successors to the earlier reign of the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana goes hand in hand with not forgotten drug dealings, nasty exploitation and mobster pay-offs.
While riding Japan’s post-1945 growth economy, insiders and outsiders alike have long sensed golden opportunities and made determined bids to grab their share of all available prizes. Some attempts and responses were perfectly legal, some dubious, while lots and lots look pretty shady. Their mixed results are with us still.
Whiting’s highly recommended paperback, which goes on sale April 29, is the ideal read for your next long-haul flight or on a quiet weekend down by the coast.
"Gamblers, Fraudsters, Dreamers & Spies: The outsiders who shaped modern Japan"
Tuttle Publishing, Tokyo, paperback, 2,300 yen
Gamblers, Fraudsters, Dreamers & Spies: The outsiders who shaped modern Japan
22
11
27.04.2024
Foreigners behaving badly goes down well with audiences in Japan. Stories of Yankee misfits, British conmen and Korean upstarts are guaranteed to find eager readers.
Throw in shady espionage rings, guys who started out by sleeping on park benches, plus stories of massive transfers of dollars bills in brown paper bags, and you have all the required ingredients for best sellerdom.
Robert Whiting's huge collection of character sketches aims to capture how his men -- few women are included -- made their bids for fame and fortune. It also underlines the varying responses of a succession of Japanese governments, leading corporations and the judiciary to these Western and Asian outsiders.
It is a saga without seeming end. Starting out with the arrival of General Douglas MacArthur's New Deal reformers and some less than perfectly honest GIs in the autumn of 1945, it takes us right up to the 2020s and the assassination and funeral of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The underlying theme from the military occupation of post-surrender Imperial Japan to the present is the uncomfortable mismatch between the powerful in Japan and the saints and sinners who have landed unasked on their shores.
Yet roundly attributing blame to one side or the other is ultimately of less interest than learning a lot more of the........
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