Stepping Out Of Line In A Far Away Land...

I was reminded of an incident that happened to me in Japan by this bit of news--

ANOTHER SHOOTING TIED TO JAPAN'S MOB
April 22, 2007
BY MARI YAMAGUCHI
TOKYO -- "Police stormed an apartment Saturday and seized a suspected gangster who had barricaded himself inside after a deadly shooting in the streets of a Tokyo suburb in violence that officials said may signal infighting in the Japanese underworld.
The violence came days after the mayor of Nagasaki was gunned down by a reputed mobster in an unrelated killing. Crime syndicates are overwhelmingly responsible for Japan's rare gun attacks.

The events began Friday when the suspected gangster fatally shot another mobster from the same group, local police official Yukio Tonose said.

The shooter, identified as 36-year-old Yuji Takeshita, then barricaded himself inside his own apartment, firing shots at surrounding officers, said a Tokyo Metro- politan Police spokesman who spoke on condition of anonymity, under police protocol.

After police stormed the apartment, public broadcaster NHK showed paramedics carrying the suspect on a stretcher out of his apartment. Police said he is thought to have shot himself in the head and was taken to a nearby hospital. Kyodo News agency said he was seriously wounded.

Investigators later found two handguns in his apartment and arrested him at the hospital for allegedly violating the strict gun control law, Tokyo police said."


If I were in the mood, I could spread this story out and turn it into many days and many events and then bring them all together into this one event and finish it all with a Swizzle stick and a miniature umbrella.

That’s what I would do if I was more in the mood. Tonight, I just wanna get in, get ‘er done, and get to some quality couch time. Let’s see how concise my verbosity can actually be...

Pops taught me to stand up for obvious inequities. He always did, and as I grew, I learned what he meant. You step in and stop bullies. You chase down thieves. You get in the faces of bigots and tell them how ugly they are. You stand up for women and the weak and you don’t turn a blind eye.

I watched Pops take a few good punches to the chin because of this, and it always made me proud.

What that means is that if you cut in on a line, I will come and talk to you. If you light up a smoke around people who are obviously bothered, you will have to deal with me. If you are picking on someone smaller than yourself, you need to be prepared to explain yourself. If you are a gang of punks talking too loud during a movie and intimidating the ushers (ever see a scary usher?) then I get riled up and step in and people clap and cheer when the knuckleheads find themselves leaving the theatre.

So far, I’ve never taken the punch to the jaw that I saw Pops take a couple of times, but that’s not to say someday it won’t happen. The good news is that it is usually small, chicken breasted punks that cause most of the trouble. That always works out in my favor.

There was a bar just outside of the main part of Tokyo called “Maldives” in a suburb called Kamata that I used to go to. This was right after the Paul Newman and goofie-boy movie “The Color Of Money” came out and pool tables were being installed all over Tokyo. The owner of this bar didn’t have the room or the money, so he simply put up a dart board which worked to my advantage in an astounding way. I could head there early on a Friday night, get some games going for money, sucker in some drinking folks, get all their loose coins, and eat and drink the rest of the night for free. I would usually walk out with my two front pockets stuffed with 100 yen coins and my belly stuffed with some good eats and my brain a little fuzzy from some good beer... and... you know.. start heading toward passing out on my futon at home.

One night late on a really busy week-end night, I came out of the bar after the trains had stopped running and headed over to where people caught taxis. There was a line. I knew everybody in line. I had gotten 100 yen coins off of most of them. I probably stood there for about ten minutes staring at women’s calves (personal late night standing-in-line fetish of mine) shifting from foot to foot and trying to make it not look like drunk-staggering, and from what seemed like out of nowhere this nappy headed dude in a striped suit and very shiny shoes stepped in front of the line and started to get into the next available taxi.

I was thinking, like-- “Whoa! Dude! No, man. That ain’t happening on my watch.”

Nobody else seemed to be very moved to do or say anything about this asshole who just stepped right in. The Japanese can be too polite, sometimes, I was thinking. But hell. Not me. I stepped through the line and grabbed the closing door and pulled it open and motioned for the guy to get his butt out. He got really pissed and started yelling at me.

I was starting to speak some Japanese by that time, but not high-pitched, high-speed, expletive-filled screaming. I hadn’t had much opportunity to practice that. Which meant I had no idea what he was saying to me. Which was probably a good thing because it had to do (I was later told, by a girl I started dating) with the sharp removal of my nut-sack and the spreading of my entrails across a couple of city blocks and the removal of my head and the fitting of it somehow into my anus and losing all my fingers one by one and my toes too, and having a torch run up and down my stomach and other stuff too horrible to mention.

I thought, “Yeah, whatever dude, and reached in and grabbed his jacket in a bunch at the front with one hand and jerked him out of the taxi and not so ceremoniously threw him quite a ways down the street. He rolled a couple of times on the cement and then got up and started in on all that nasty yelling again, and then walked off doing that pointing thing like I was supposed to be listening to the threats he was spewing.

“Yeah, OK dude! You’re really bad, man. And I’m shaking here!”

The taxi driver got out of his cab and told me to get in, and most of the people standing in line pushed me toward the cab and were trying to herd me inside. My soon to be girlfriend hopped in with a few of her friends and another guy, and we all drove off.

“What’s going on? I asked. I looked at some pretty frightened faces.

“Yakuza. That man was Yakuza.”

Then it hit me. The suit. The kinky nappy hair...

“Oh shit. Yakuza. Why didn’t you tell me?”


ADDENDUM-- The last three weeks of my stay in Tokyo was spent looking over my shoulder and worried about all of those things happening to me that sounded rather innocuous at the time. I didn’t want my head cut off and shoved up my anus. I really didn’t. On a brighter note, it was how I got to know Hiroko "better" and this led to many adventures together for the both of us. (She kept telling me to pull my head out of my anus, but that's another story).

http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/gang/yakuza/1.html