3/11/2023 0 Comments Japense mafia 4 fingersToday, her face is so flawless, it's almost too perfect. "They always used the excuse that they thought I was cheating on them to beat me up." At one point, her face was so badly damaged that she required surgery. "When I wasn't having sex or doing drugs with those men, I'd be listening to them boast about who they hurt that day," she says, adding that they were violent toward her, too. She spent years holed up in "love hotels"-seedy, neon-lit places where rooms are rented by the hour-waiting for lovers to deliver her fixes. With a sigh, she continues her story, explaining that once she was no longer protected by her father's power, she fell prey to a string of yakuza lowlifes attracted to her young body. Gangland creditors seized the house and threw the family onto the streets.Īs Tendo sips her coffee, I'm surprised that no one recognizes her, but she has a way of hunching quietly in her chair that renders her inconspicuous. "That's how I felt." Her world fell apart completely at age 16, when her dad's construction and real-estate business collapsed, leaving him in astronomical debt. "Society didn't accept us anyway, so what did we have to lose?" she says. Bullied for being a "yakuza kid," she dropped out of school to join a gang. Her teen years were equally tough, she says, with what seems to be a genuine lack of self-pity. He raised me, and I have his yakuza blood." "But I loved my dad, whatever his crimes. I've seen all the ugly things they do," she says. For Tendo, laying bare her "sordid past" is her way of trying to reconcile her conflicting feelings about who she is. Given that Japan is generally one of the world's most law-abiding nations, the yakuza are especially sinister figures in the national psyche. In recent times, authorities have been cracking down, forcing the gangs to find sources of overseas income, such as sex-trafficking and weapons. For years they ran rackets in corporate extortion, real estate, and loan-sharking. occupation in postwar Japan, when demand for black-market goods escalated. Descended from medieval gamblers and street peddlers, the yakuza came into full force during the U.S. Tendo was raised in a clandestine realm of violence and ill-begotten wealth. I still find it hard to trust people on either side." "I don't want to be part of the yakuza world anymore, but I'm not ready to join mainstream society. "My appearance is like me: mixed up," she says. Her hair is sharply cut, and her makeup is expertly applied, yet she hides it all under a baseball cap. She wears a diamond-encrusted Hermès watch but carries a big, battered canvas satchel. She doesn't stand out awkwardly, but she doesn't come close to the impeccable sartorial coordination of the Tokyoites around us. Tendo has a personal style that's impossible to pin down. I wanted to change my life, but I realized the only way I could do that was by first being honest about who I was." "People in Japan can smell it if you come from a background like mine-you can't hide it. "I needed to do this for myself to find out where I belong in the world," she says, explaining that yakuza women, while rarely involved in criminal activities themselves, are vilified by association. "But I think I've gotten away with it so far partly because I focused only on my own experience and didn't incriminate anyone else." Yes, she gets threatening phone calls, but Tendo, 39, insists she has no regrets. "I was really nervous about that," Tendo says. And the yakuza are an especially macho bunch, known for rituals that signify their fanatic allegiance, such as severing their little fingers to atone for mistakes. Usually, any kind of betrayal in the mob world is an automatic death sentence. She's more relaxed in person, with an iced coffee in hand, than she appears in her book, so I jump right in and ask why she's still alive after writing it. With the book's recent publication in the U.S., she has agreed to do her first-ever interview with a foreign magazine to discuss the impact of her decision to speak out-and about her life now as a single mother. Her best-selling memoir, Yakuza Moon, shocked this conservative nation three years ago with its graphic accounts of her addictions to sex, drugs, and violent lovers. In a knee-jerk way, I expect the russet-haired Tendo, whose father was a high-ranking mob boss, to be intimidating, or at least loud and brash, but she speaks to me with a quiet thoughtfulness in her native Japanese. Leaving behind her gangster loyalties, she has become a talk-show celebrity in Japan-the first female ever to break the code of silence and speak about life for women in the underworld. She's a different kind of rebel these days. Despite the cloying late-summer heat, she's clothed practically head to toe, in a long-sleeve lilac shirt layered over a white tee and skinny jeans. Instead, she's careful not to reveal that she comes from the yakuza, Japan's much-feared world of organized crime.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |