Free Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein Page B

the
bonenkai
is a “forget-the-year party,” and in many cases, given the amount of alcohol consumed, it is not an idle threat. Everyone—employees and bosses—is supposed to let his hair down and have a good time. For the
Yomiuri’s
Urawa office this has traditionally meant getting into a drunken brawl. My first bonenkai was no exception.
    It was held at a local izakaya with the usual menu: fish (raw and cooked), yakitori, tofu, pickles, rice balls, and, since Urawa was famous for catfish, catfish tempura. Generally speaking, the Japanese don’t eatcatfish (the flavor isn’t subtle), but I was happy to see something on my plate that reminded me of home.
    The first act went reasonably well. All the freshmen were requested to do some kind of entertainment. Someone did card tricks, someone twisted balloons into animals. I managed to push a 500-yen coin up my nose, which was considered an incredible feat. It was at the party after the party where things got weird.
    We left the restaurant and were heading toward a hostess club when Kimura, the right-wing, emperor-worshipping head of the Kumagaya branch office, seemed to get wound up. Kimura was a short, stocky fellow with a tight-permed hairstyle reminiscent of the yakuza from my internship story. When he was sober, he was a great guy. He was a mean drunk, however, and he’d been putting it away all night. He kept picking on me as we entered the next izakaya, and once we were sitting down, he looked over at me and sneered. “I look at you, Adelstein, and I can’t figure out how we lost the war. How could we lose to a bunch of sloppy Americans? Barbarians with no discipline, no culture, and no honor. It beats me. Long live the Emperor!
Tenno ni banzai!”
    In my five-plus years in Japan as a college student, I don’t think I’d personally met any nationalists. I knew they existed. I knew that Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s major writers, was a bodybuilder, gay, and a nationalist. I’d seen the right-wing groups driving their black vans around town, blaring imperial marching music from loudspeakers. But I didn’t really know how to deal with Kimura. What was I supposed to say? “Sorry we won the war”?
    I make it a rule never to argue with drunks, so I just kept nodding and saying noncommittal, typically Japanese things like “That’s certainly one way of looking at it” or “Maybe that’s how it happened.”
    In the early 1990s, historical revisionists and emperor-worshipping guys like Kimura were generally regarded as lovable kooks whom no one took seriously. At the time that Kimura was carrying on, I didn’t take him seriously either.
    Yoshihara and Chappy managed to pull my ass out of the fire by switching seats with me a couple of times, but Kimura kept following me around like a pit bull chasing a squirrel. As we stumbled to a hostess bar, Kimura tapped me on the shoulder.
    “I read in the company newsletter that you do wing chun. That’s like some kind of Chinese martial art, right?”
    “Right.”
    “Do you know
shorinji kempo?”
    “Yes, that’s the Japanese martial art started by Doshin So. It’s a really interesting fighting style.”
    “It’s the best fighting style in the world. It’s a Japanese martial art.”
    “I’m sure it’s a great martial art. I prefer wing chun; it just suits me better.”
    “Shorinji kempo is the best.”
    I turned my back on him and started walking toward our next stop with Yamamoto. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kimura launch a roundhouse kick at me.
    As a martial artist, I generally suck. Wing chun, my choosen disipline at the time, is the martial art famous for the one-inch punch, a short-distance impact strike using the bottom two knuckles of the hand for the final impact. After years of wing chun, there were only three things that I could do correctly. The short-distance punch was one of them.
    Without thinking, I turned and blocked the kick and punched him full in the chest, knocking him on