The yakuza and me, Fin

So now the news you have been waiting for...my eyewitness account of the yakuza...prepare to be shocked...

Or not. Because its not eyewitness. However, I'm as good as the next English major when it comes to narrative, so I hope you'll enjoy. When my friend Tomomi moved to Gunma, she got a job in a flower shop. Well, it turns out that said flower shop is quite popular with the local yakuza. On the birthday of the yakuza leader, everyone would send him a certain arrangement of flowers - really big and bold, the yakuza aren't known for their subtlety. Tomomi was hired to deliver flowers, many of which went to men's mistresses (she thinks) and yakuza houses (she knows). Men would be guarding the gate with guns, and it was a long, irritating process before the flowers could be brought into the house. In fact, Tomomi told me part of the reason that she was hired was that she was a woman (you will remember from my previous entries that women are not allowed to be in the yakuza). Before Tomomi had her job, there was a man working there who was secretly a yakuza member. As he was delivering flowers one day, he opened up the flower box and - suprise - there was a machine gun! A story right out of the movies, but it really happened in good old Gunma-machi!

So there you have it. My in-depth, up close and personal dealings with the yakuza. Perhaps they are not as close as we would all like them to be (even though I have volunteered to tattoo my entire body with yakuza tattooes and spike up my jew fro, they keep rejecting me...for some reason). For a funny yet pretty realistic take on the yakuza, check out Juzo Itami's Minbo, or the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion. It de-romanticized the yakuza and portrayed them as a bunch of loud, obnoxious petty thieves rather than the dark and dangerous anti-heros that they would like to be known as. In fact, the yakuza were so disgruntled with their depiction in this movie that there was a knife attack on Itami a few weeks after the film opened (Itami survived, but had a slash on his jaw ever after as a reminder). Itami supposedly committed suicide in 1997, but there were some suspicions that perhaps the yakuza were behind his death, although nothing has ever been proven.

On a completely unrelated note - for a very short time, my grad school acceptances (Tufts, UB, U of R, and U Mass at Amherst) outnumber my rejections (Michigan, Cornell and Rutgers)! Yay! Can't wait until I can make some decisions and figure out just where the heck I will be going next year.

Borne back ceaselessly

Today was the celebration of the third grade students' graduation from junior high (here in Japan the school year ends in March) and they screened an American movie for the entire school - The day after tomorrow, with Jake Gyllenhall and Dennis Quaid. I was watching it with my students, and (there's a spoiler coming up if you haven't seen the movie)I began to feel this hammering in my stomach just as soon as New York City was flooded - children stuck in cars, lifeless bodies laying in the water, people stuck in one location with no place to go, animals trapped in watery cages...and suddenly, even though this was a stupid disaster movie, I began to shake uncontrollably. The landscape was exagerrated but familiar. I walked out of the gym and went back to my desk to have myself a silent cry behind the computers. A few teachers came up to me and asked me what was wrong, but how could I explain it to them? How would I be able to convey to them, whose country had been through the Tokyo firebombing and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that a hurricane that killed only a few thousand people is the cause of my tears. They looked at me with blank faces and said, "but it was only a movie. It's fiction." They didn't know what to say.

I don't know if I ever felt so alone as this moment, mourning the destruction of a city and having no one around to say, I know, I understand. Its funny how a stupid disaster movie can ruin your afternoon. Its funny how you can feel stupid crying even though you're not ashamed of being upset. Its funny how you can know that America has been incredibly lucky in its lack of disasters and yet, at the same time, be overwhelmed by the horror and just the immense sadness of Katrina and what it has done to New Orleans.

The yakuza and me, Part Deux

Ok, so I have given you a little overview of the friendly neighborhood yakuza (although expert Bob tells me that those loud motorcyclists are not yakuza but just annoying street punks, so perhaps my expertise should be taken with a grain of salt). Now I will tell you about Gunma-machi (now officially Takasaki city, we have been merged with the large city next door) and the yakuza.

So I guess there are quite a few yakuza in my town. Last year there was supposedly an entire family murdered in my small little town - and it had yakuza written all over it (actually this is a story I have heard from Tomomi and a few ALTs but I have yet to find an actual news article about it, so chalk it up to heresay). This fall, as Negishi-san and I were driving past Munadaka lake, I noticed that they were draining it of water; in fact, for about a month, it was just a dark, muddy hole in the ground. Why, you might ask? Because a young girl was murdered, and they suspected that her body was in the lake. Now I have no idea if this was related to the yakuza, but for the sake of my story I'm going to keep on going. Not only is Gunma-machi a lovely little suburban location for yakuza, its also in the center of some interesting yakuza events - in our neighboring towns, Takasaki and Maebashi, the last three years have seen numerous yakuza killings (even inspiring the dreaded maebashi massacre, which made international news).

So what's my point, besides trying to inundate you with stories that I have no proof of (which is always fun) and let my imagination run wild? I guess Gunma-machi isn't such a small town after all....(insert dark, menacing laugh right about...here) In my next entry, look for some REAL (meaning, stories that I heard and assume to be real) accounts of encounters with the yakuza. Isn't my life exciting!