The Yakuza. Even the word had teeth.
In Japan, people didn’t say it the way Americans might say “mob”
or “syndicate”—casually, almost fondly, the way you’d refer to an old
neighborhood drunk who’d never actually hurt anybody. No. You said Yakuza
the way you’d say the name of a disease you’d just been diagnosed with.
Quietly. With your eyes down. Because somewhere, always, there was a chance
that the wrong ears were listening.
---
Pecunia non olet. Money doesn’t stink.
That’s what the Romans said, and the Romans built an empire
that lasted a thousand years on the backs of slaves and the blood of conquered
peoples, so maybe they knew a thing or two about the necessary ugliness of
power. The Yakuza understood this in their bones—in the stumps of their
fingers, more precisely, those pinky joints sacrificed on the altar of loyalty
like some ancient and terrible communion.
Yubitsume, they called it. You screwed up. You failed
your oyabun. So you took the short blade, and you pressed your hand flat on the
table, and you—
Well.
You apologized.
---
It begins, as so many terrible things do, with a phone call.
Late January, 1958. Tokyo. A city still rebuilding itself
from the memory of American firebombs, still wearing its shame like scar tissue
that itched in cold weather. Iskandar Ishak, Indonesia’s Consul General, sat in
his office and stared at the wall and thought about how a man could be
responsible for the safety of a president and have absolutely nobody willing to
help him.
Sukarno was coming.
The Sukarno. The Founding Father. The Great Leader of
the Revolution, the man who had looked the Dutch colonizers in the eye and said
get out and meant it with every cell in his body. The man who’d coined Nasakom—that
beautiful, impossible dream of Nationalism, Religion, and Communism all
sleeping peacefully in the same bed, like lions and lambs in some tropical
paradise that existed only in speeches.
He was coming, and somebody wanted him dead.
The rumors about the PRRI/Permesta rebels had been
circulating for weeks, passed from ear to ear in the hushed tones people
reserve for cancer diagnoses and ghost sightings. Anti-Sukarno operatives, they
said. Six of them. Maybe more. Slipped into Tokyo like razors hidden in silk,
patient and cold and waiting. Military men from eastern Indonesia who had
looked at their country’s direction and decided that the only cure was a
bullet.
Iskandar had gone to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.
Politely, hat in hand, the way you approach powerful men when you need
something desperately and have nothing to offer in return. The police had
smiled their practiced, impenetrable smiles and explained, with the particular
cruelty of bureaucracy, that since President Sukarno’s visit was unofficial,
the Japanese government bore no formal obligation to protect him.
Unofficial.
As though a dead president was only a diplomatic incident if
the proper paperwork had been filed.
He called Colonel Sambas Atmadinata, and Sambas knew a man
named Oguchi—a ghost of the Imperial Army who still walked the earth in
civilian clothes—and Oguchi said the words that would set everything in motion:
Use private bodyguards. The Yakuza are the most suitable.
The most suitable.
Standing there in the gray January cold, Iskandar probably
felt the world tilt slightly beneath him. The sensation you get at the edge of
something—not a cliff exactly, but a threshold. The place where the world you
understood ended and something older, darker, and considerably more efficient
began.
---
Kodama Yoshio answered the call.
If Tokyo had a shadow, Kodama was the thing that lived in
it. Born in 1911, he had spent his entire life in the complicated business of
being indispensable to dangerous men. Patriot. Fixer. Black-market profiteer.
Advisor to princes. He wore his contradictions the way other men wore
suits—comfortably, without apology, as though they had been tailored
specifically for him.
During the war, the Kodama Kikan—his private intelligence
organization—had burrowed through China like something purposeful and
subterranean, feeding information to Japanese military operations while Kodama
himself quietly harvested fortunes from the chaos. Tungsten. Cobalt. Radium.
The war was a catastrophe for millions, but for Kodama Yoshio it was, above all
else, an opportunity. He understood, perhaps better than anyone alive,
that ideology was a costume you wore for the people watching, and that
underneath every noble cause was the same ancient, honest hunger.
He had been appointed advisor to Prince Higashikuni’s
cabinet in August 1945—the last government of Imperial Japan, formed in the
smoking rubble of surrender. Even then, even at the absolute nadir of
everything the ultranationalists had fought for, Kodama had landed on his feet.
Some men were like that. They didn’t fall. They descended.
Purposefully. With a plan.
He assigned the detail to Kobayashi Kusuo—the Ginza
Policeman, they called him, and there was real respect in that nickname,
the kind of respect that has fear wrapped inside it like a blade in a cloth.
Kobayashi ran Dai Nihon Kyogyo, a construction company that was to actual
construction what a shark is to a goldfish—similar in silhouette, entirely
different in nature. His organization held the Ginza district the way a fist
holds a throat. Firmly. Without visible effort.
Twenty men. That was the number Kodama deployed to keep
Sukarno breathing.
---
Picture it, if you dare.
The six PRRI/Permesta operatives checked into the Hotel
Nikkatsu on January 28th. The Imperial Hotel was right down the street—you
could practically see it from their windows. They were patient men, military
men, the kind of men who had learned that waiting was itself a weapon. They had
their reasons, and in their own minds those reasons were noble: communism was a
cancer eating Indonesia from the inside, and Sukarno was the body it had
infected, and sometimes you cut out a cancer before it kills everything you
love.
They didn’t know about the twenty men.
They didn’t know that everywhere Sukarno went—to official
functions, to private meetings, to restaurants where he ate with the particular
gusto of a man who loved all of life’s pleasures—twenty hard, quiet men moved
with him. Not bodyguards in the traditional sense, not the stiff-backed,
earpiece-wearing professionals you might imagine. These were men who had grown
up in the violent grammar of the streets, who understood violence the way a
native speaker understands language—intuitively, without having to translate.
The operatives watched. The twenty men watched back.
Two weeks. Not a shot fired. Not a knife drawn. Not so much
as a tense confrontation in a hotel corridor at two in the morning.
Everything went off without a hitch.
---
The delicious, almost novelistic irony of it all would have
kept Stephen King up at night, chuckling darkly at his desk while the Maine
wind hammered the windows.
Sukarno—the great theorist of Nasakom, the man who
had made his peace with the Indonesian Communist Party, who had invited the PKI
into his tent and called it coalition—was being kept alive by men who would
have cheerfully burned that same Communist Party to ash and danced in the
cinders. Kodama’s Yakuza were not merely anti-communist in the casual,
political sense. They were constitutionally anti-communist, men for whom
the red flag represented something viscerally, almost physically repulsive.
They had grown up in the long shadow of the Imperial dream, and the Imperial
dream had no room for Marx.
And the men trying to kill Sukarno were
anti-communist too. The PRRI/Permesta rebels despised the PKI every bit as much
as the Yakuza did.
So there it was: anti-communists protecting a leftist
president from other anti-communists.
The world, it turns out, is never as simple as the people
killing each other in its name believe it to be.
---
Then came Kubo Masao, and the story took the kind of turn
that would get you accused of melodrama if you invented it.
Kubo was Kodama’s business associate, fluent in English, the
designated liaison between the criminal underworld and the legitimate one—which
is to say, he stood at the exact border where those two countries blur together
until you can’t tell which side you’re on.
He was also, it turned out, a perceptive student of human
nature.
He watched Sukarno during those two weeks. Really watched
him. Not for threats—that was the Yakuza’s job. Kubo watched the way the
President moved through the world. The way his eyes tracked. The way his
attention, like a compass needle, swung reliably toward a certain type of
beauty.
Sukarno had a fatal flaw. He knew it. His enemies knew it.
His wives—all four of them, at that point—knew it better than anyone.
Beautiful women. It was that simple. It was that
complicated.
---
June 16, 1959. Sukarno’s next visit.
Kubo introduced him to Naoko Nemoto.
She was nineteen years old. She was described as a flight
attendant, though some accounts used the word geisha with the particular
vagueness that implies everything and clarifies nothing. She was, by all
accounts, extraordinarily beautiful—the kind of beauty that doesn’t just turn
heads but turns lives, that rewrites the futures of men who should have
known better and didn’t and maybe, in their secret hearts, didn’t want to.
What happened next had the quality of a fever dream.
Love letters. The President of Indonesia, a married man
several times over, a giant of the postcolonial world, a figure who had stood
before the United Nations and commanded the attention of continents—writing
love letters like a schoolboy to a nineteen-year-old girl in Tokyo. Sent
through the Indonesian Embassy. He invited her to Indonesia for a two-week
romantic getaway.
Naoko traveled to Jakarta disguised as an employee of Kubo’s
Tonichi Trading Company, accompanied by Kubo himself.
She arrived September 15th, and at some point in the warm
Jakarta nights—perhaps lying awake listening to the city breathe outside her
window—she began to wonder.
Am I a pawn?
It was the right question. She had arrived in the middle of
a game that had been in progress long before she was dealt in, a game whose
stakes were contracts and construction projects and the complicated calculus of
post-war Japanese business interests in Southeast Asia. Kubo had seen the
weapon and knew precisely where to aim it.
He denied it, of course. In 1966, he denied everything. But
then he admitted—almost as an afterthought, with the studied casualness of a
man who knows the game is over—that yes, his company had provided housing for
the young woman in Jakarta. Housing that Sukarno had visited.
Between 1960 and 1963, Tonichi Trading secured four major
reparations contracts from the Indonesian government.
Kubo built the four-story Indonesia Hall in Tokyo. He won
the contract to expand the Indonesian Embassy. He obtained rights to build a
guesthouse at the Presidential Palace, the National Monument, a television
transmission tower.
Love is a door. Some men walk through it looking for warmth.
Others are carrying a clipboard and a set of architectural plans.
---
Naoko Nemoto became Ratna Sari Dewi. She became Sukarno’s
fifth wife.
In her memoir, published in a Japanese weekly magazine on
Christmas Day, 1969—and there is something almost unbearably poetic about that
timing, that particular holiday, with its freight of gifts and debts and the
complicated math of what things actually cost—she described those early
meetings at the Imperial Hotel. The letters. The invitation.
She did not describe herself as a pawn.
Maybe she wasn’t one. Maybe she was the most important
player at the table and nobody had told her. Maybe, in the end, the distinction
doesn’t matter as much as we’d like it to.
---
What’s left, when you pull back from all of it, is something
that doesn’t have a clean moral, doesn’t resolve into a lesson you can frame
and hang on a wall. It’s just the world, doing what the world does: churning
forward on the twin engines of money and desire, with ideology riding along in
the backseat, occasionally shouting directions that nobody’s really following.
Kodama Yoshio died in 1984. He had survived everything—the
war, the occupation, an assassination attempt in 1976 when a failed actor flew
a Piper Cherokee into his home (he wasn’t there)—and he died at
seventy-three in a Tokyo hospital, a man who had outlasted every version of
Japan he had served.
Kobayashi Kusuo—the Ginza Policeman, the man who kept
Sukarno breathing for two weeks in the winter of 1958—faded back into the
shadows where he had always lived.
The six PRRI/Permesta operatives at the Hotel Nikkatsu
packed their bags and went home.
Sukarno was gone by 1967. Suharto came, and the PKI was
destroyed with a thoroughness that the PRRI/Permesta rebels would have found
satisfying, had they lived to see it. Three decades of quiet, brutal,
profitable order.
And somewhere in all of that—in the long, complex aftermath
of those two weeks in Tokyo when twenty Yakuza kept a leftist president alive
through the sheer gravitational weight of their reputation—somewhere in there
is a story about what power actually is. Not the power in speeches, not the
power in ideology or principle or the noble causes men die for.
The other kind.
The kind that smells like money, like cigarette smoke, like
the slight copper note of old fear.
Pecunia non olet.
Money doesn’t stink.
Tell yourself that long enough, and you start to believe it.
---
The truth is, everything stinks eventually. You just get
used to the smell.
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