A Clean Kill in Tokyo

“Otherwise, you’d go to the police.”
    She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me.
    “For Christ’s sake, Midori, tell me. Let me help you.”
    “It’s not what you’re hoping for,” she said.
    “I’m not hoping for anything. Just whatever pieces you can give me.”
    There was a long pause. Then she said, “I told you my father and I were… estranged for a long time. It started when I was a teenager, when I started to understand Japan’s political system, and my father’s place in it.”
    She got up and began to pace around the room, not looking at me. “He was part of the Liberal Democratic Party machine, working his way up the ladder in the old
Kensetsusho,
the Ministry of Construction. When the
Kensetsusho
became the
Kokudokotsusho,
he was made Vice Minister of Land and Infrastructure—of public works. Do you know what that means?”
    “Some. The public-works program channels money from the politicians and construction firms to the yakuza.”
    “And the yakuza provide ‘protection,’ ‘dispute resolution,’ and lobbying for the construction industry. The construction companies and yakuza are like twins separated at birth. Did you know construction outfits in Japan are called
gumi?
    Gumi
means “gang” or “organization”—the same moniker the yakuza gangs use for themselves. The original
gumi
were groups of men displaced by World War II who worked for a gang boss doing whatever dirty jobs they could to survive. Eventually these gangs morphed into today’s yakuza and construction outfits.
    “I know,” I said.
    “Then you know that, after the war, there were battles between construction companies so big the police were afraid to intervene. A bid-rigging system was established to stop these fights. The system still exists. My father ran it.”
    She laughed. “Remember in 1994 when Kansai International Airport was built in Osaka? The airport cost fourteen billion dollars, and everyone wanted a piece of it. Remember how Takumi Masaru, the Yamaguchi Gumi yakuza boss, was murdered that year? It was for not sharing enough of the profits from the airport construction. My father ordered his death to appease the other gang bosses.”
    “Christ, Midori,” I said quietly. “Your father told you these things?”
    “When he learned he was terminal. He needed to confess.”
    I waited for her to go on.
    “The yakuza with tattoos and sunglasses, the ones you see in the bad sections of Shinjuku, they’re just tools for people like my father,” she said, continuing her slow pacing. “These people are part of a system. The politicians vote for useless public works that feed the construction companies. The construction companies allow politicians to use company staff as ‘volunteers’ during election campaigns. Construction Ministry bureaucrats are given postretirement ‘advisor’ jobs at construction companies—just a car and driver and other perks, but no work. Every year during budget season, officials from the Ministry of Finance and the Construction Ministry meet with politicians loyal to the industry to decide how to divvy up the pie.”
    She stopped pacing and looked at me. “Do you know Japan has four percent of the land area and half the population of America, but spends a third more on public works? Some people think in the last ten years ten
trillion
yen of government money has been paid to the yakuza through public works.”
    Ten trillion?
I thought.
That’s maybe a hundred billion dollars. Bastards have been holding out on you.
    “I know about some of this, sure,” I told her. “Your father was going to blow the whistle?”
    “Yes. When he was diagnosed, he called me. It was the first time we had talked in over a year. He told me he had to talk to me about something important, and he came over to my apartment. We hadn’t talked in so long, I was thinking it was something about his health, about his heart. He looked older when I saw him and I knew I was right, or almost right.”
    She started pacing again. “I made us tea, and we sat across from each other at the small table in my kitchen. I told him about the music I was working on, but of course I could never ask him about his work, and there was almost nothing for us to talk about. Finally I said, ‘Papa, what is it?’
    “He smiled, and for some reason it reminded me of the way he used to look at me when I was a little girl. ‘I found out this week I don’t have very long to live,’ he said to me,