Tanzan Mino was known throughout Japan as a kuromaku, a man who made things happen. Named after the unseen stagehand who pulled the wires in Japanese theater, manipulating the stage and those on it from behind a black curtain, the kuromaku had been a fixture in Japanese politics since the late nineteenth century. He fit the classic profile perfectly: He was an ultranationalist who coordinated the interests of the right-wing underworld with the on-stage players in industry and politics. In this role, he had risen from the ruins of World War II to become the most powerful man in Asia.
It had been a long and difficult road. He'd begun as an Osaka street operator in the late thirties, a fervent nationalist and open admirer of Mussolini who made his followers wear black shirts in imitation of the Italian fascists. When the Pacific War began, he had followed the Japanese army into Shanghai where, under the guise of procuring "strategic materials" for the imperial Navy, he trafficked in booty looted from Chinese warehouses and operated an intelligence network for the Kempei Tai, the Japanese secret police. After Japan lost China, and the war, the occupying supreme commander for the allied powers (SCAP) labeled him a Class A war criminal and handed him a three-year term in Sugamo prison.
The stone floors and hunger and rats gave him the incentive to plan for better things. The ruins of Japan, he concluded, offered enormous opportunity for men of determination. The country would be rebuilt, and those builders would rule.
Thus it was that while still in Sugamo he set about devising the realization of his foremost ambition: to make himself oyabun of the Tokyo Yakuza. His first step, he had decided, would be to become Japan's gambling czar, and upon his release—he was thirty years old at the time—he had made a deal with various local governments to organize speedboat races and split the take on the accompanying wagering. It was an offer none chose to refuse, and over the next forty years he and his Mino-gumi Yakuza amassed a fortune from the receipts.
While still in Sugamo prison he had yet another insight: That to succeed in the New Japan it would be necessary to align himself temporarily with the globe's powerful new player, America. Accordingly he began cultivating connections with American intelligence, and upon his release, he landed a job as an undercover agent for the occupation's G-2 section, Intelligence. He'd specialized in black- bag operations for the Kempei Tai in Shanghai during the war, so he had the requisite skills.
When SCAP's era of reconstruction wound down, he thoughtfully offered his services to the CIA, volunteering to help them crush any new Japanese political movements that smacked of leftism. It was love at first sight, and soon Tanzan Mino was fronting for the Company, putting to good use his Mino-gumi Yakuza as strikebreakers. With Tanzan Mino as kuromaku, the Yakuza and the American CIA had run postwar Japan during the early years, keeping it safe for capitalism.
Then as prosperity returned, new areas of expansion beckoned. When goods could again be bought openly, the black market, long a Yakuza mainstay, began to wither away. But he had converted this into an opportunity, stepping in to fill the new Japanese consumer's need for cash by opening storefront loan services known as sarakin. Although his Yakuza charged interest rates as high as 70 percent, the average Japanese could walk into a side-street office and minutes later walk out with several thousand dollars, no questions asked.
Unlike banks, he didn't bother with credit checks—he had well-proven collection techniques—and before long his sarakin were handling more consumer loans than all Japan's banks combined. His success was such that foreign bankers wanting to gain a foothold in Japan soon started coming to him. Bank of America, Bankers Trust, Chase Manhattan, American Express Bank—all began placing capital wholesale through the Yakuza's sarakin.
When the CIA bankrolled the Corsican mob as strikebreakers in Marseilles in the fifties, they were merely financing heroin labs for the French Connection, but when they and America's leading banks hired on with Tanzan Mino's Yakuza, they were furthering the career of the man destined to become the world's richest right-winger. The CIA arrangement had lasted until a midlevel field consultant blew the whistle.
The score for that had yet to be settled.