[Yakuza.Moon]Shoko.Tendo

Yakuza Moon This is Horiedo, the tattoo master who gave me my Jigoku Daiyu tattoo. In this picture he looks a bit different from the image most people have of a traditional Japanese tattoo master! These days I'm a member of a Harley Davidson team—I don't have a license myself, but I love riding round on the back of a bike. This was our New Year's get-together at a tattoo event in 2008. That's Horiedo again, just behind me on the right. 251 Edited By Scatkevin

Yakuza Moon This photo was taken shortly after I extended my tattoo from my back to the front of my torso and along my upper legs. I just loved my tattoo and I wanted it to be bigger. 252 Edited By Scatkevin

Yakuza Moon Collected From Internet. 253 Edited By Scatkevin

Yakuza Moon Yakuza Moon, Shoko Tendo's heartbreaking memoir, has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Tendo lives in Tokyo with her baby daughter. 254 Edited By Scatkevin

Yakuza Moon HOW FULL IS THE MOON? by Manabu Miyazaki I didn't want to read Yakuza Moon. To be honest, I was afraid of reading it. I thought that all my own bad old memories would resurface. And, of course, it was just as I'd feared. But then I was struck by something else. However cruelly fate treats people, however miserable life can be, there are those who will accept the challenge to plumb the depths of that misery to find the essence of what really lies deep inside themselves. I found that deeply moving. As I read Yakuza Moon, I frequently recognized the same environment I grew up in, and the same experiences I went through. I'd like to write a little about that background. Sukiyaki with Mom The importance of the mother figure for children growing up in a yakuza household is slightly different from that of a regular household. The yakuza mom is at the beck and call of a violent husband who does whatever he wants, but to her kids she is the essence of motherhood. My own mother was born in 1913 and she was a very traditional Japanese woman. This was reflected in the way we ate too. When any of 255 Edited By Scatkevin

Yakuza Moon us kids had something special on, for example the night before a big game or an exam, my mother would make sukiyaki for dinner. In other words, she thought that sukiyaki was a special dish. I think she believed that it would give us strength. It seems Shoko Tendo's mother thought the same way. I have a very painful memory associated with the eating of sukiyaki, however. My yakuza father had a demolition business, which my older brother and I inherited. Unfortunately, due to our sloppy management practices, the business went bankrupt. This was around the beginning of the 1980s, when I was about thirty-five. It's a long story, but due to lots of things that were going on in my life at that time, I had made up my mind to kill myself. The night before I was planning to do it, my mother turned up at the dingy little one-room apartment where I was hiding out from debt collectors. She announced that she was going to make me sukiyaki, and right there in the communal kitchen of that horrible dump, she prepared some rice and cooked up a pot of sukiyaki. She never actually told me not to kill myself. She simply announced with a smile that she'd brought me some luxury Matsuzaka marbled beef. That smile stopped me from committing suicide. About a year before the bankruptcy problems, my brother and I had been put on the nationwide police wanted list over illegal business practices. When I decided to turn myself in to the police, my mother stayed tough, telling me not to worry what might happen, and above all 256 Edited By Scatkevin

Yakuza Moon not to tell the police any more than I needed to. For me there was no difference between the look on her face then, and the time she smiled and told me that she'd brought Matsuzaka beef. My mother passed away ten years later. At her wake, my older sister, brother, and I were placing her favorite possessions in her coffin for her to take with her, when I noticed her treasured tortoiseshell glasses were missing. My sister knew what had happened to them. It was only as my mother lay in her coffin that I learned that her precious tortoiseshell glasses had been sold to make me Matsuzaka beef sukiyaki ten years earlier. Sukiyaki with Mom is a truly painful memory. Yakuza Business As you know, both Shoko Tendo and I come from yakuza families. Her father's businesses started out well and appeared to be successful, but because they were run by a yakuza, they were eventually doomed to fail. And it was pretty much the same case with my father. Yakuza are by nature both flamboyant and cocky. If they weren't more flamboyant and cocky than the average guy, then they wouldn't become yakuza. But at the same time, simply because they possess these characteristics, they will end up either incredibly successful, or crash and burn spectacularly. Particularly if they are in business, these typical 257 Edited By Scatkevin

Yakuza Moon yakuza character traits are often the root of their demise. We can see this most clearly when they are faced with debt. Because of their position as yakuza, they have easy access to loans. They can amass billions of yen without putting up any kind of collateral, but only as long as the loan is at a super high rate of interest. This is because, among yakuza, the fact that the borrower is a yakuza is enough security. There is no mention of any of the usual bothersome details required by regular financial institutions, such as assets, or a guarantor, or even submitting a business plan. I would go so far as to say a yakuza's own body is his collateral. So yakuza can raise funds with ease. But that's the problem. That's where Shoko Tendo's experience overlaps with my own. In real life, businesses can't survive on loans with interest rates of 10 percent every ten days. Quite simply, with interest like that to pay, you go bankrupt. But because yakuza are so relentless in their need to show off, and too stubborn to stop when things are going wrong, they resort to taking out these questionable loans. Consequently, their failure ends up being utterly disastrous. When a yakuza goes bankrupt, it is common for a hitherto heroic male to suddenly hole himself up in his house or go on the lam, leaving his wife to swallow her pride and go right out the next day and find herself a job to support her family. I've seen this happen many times. She displays a necessary survival instinct, the very antithesis of her husband's flamboyant and cocky behavior. You could 258 Edited By Scatkevin

Yakuza Moon say that the woman who has always stood quietly in the shadow of her macho yakuza man turns out to be the one with true spirit. Juvenile Delinquency Shoko Tendo tells us her delinquency began in middle school. Mine was a little later, but it does tend to occur a little earlier with girls than boys. In fact, I've been very interested in this topic of juvenile delinquency for some time. In my case, my turning delinquent was actually an attempt to be more like an adult. If I was an adult, I wouldn't have to go to school anymore; I could go and see movies and hang around downtown without being scolded by my parents. That's why I wanted to grow up quickly. Unfortunately, growing up takes time, and I couldn't wait that long. So my friends and I played at being adults. A group of us who felt the same way got together. And that's how our gang was created. It's interesting to me now that in our gang whoever did the worst thing was the coolest—that is, they got the respect of the rest of us for being the most \"adult.\" So of course we ended up competing with each other for who could be the \"baddest.\" We didn't even hesitate to move from shoplifting to inhaling paint thinner, from thinner to sleeping pills, and then on to amphetamines. And this all happened in a very short period of time. We believed that speed was much cooler and adult than thinner. Each \"step up\" was like our own coming-of-age ceremony. That's 259 Edited By Scatkevin

Yakuza Moon how kids who had only just begun to stray from the straight and narrow rapidly ended up part of a whole subculture. Even though my gang was very loosely structured, and we did occasionally betray our friends or inform on them to police, it felt comfortable to be a member. There was one important element—we believed we had the kind of solidarity that had been lost in other communities such as school, neighborhood, and even family. The members who sensed this solidarity would stick with the gang, and those who didn’t quickly left. What I found the most interesting and surprising was that communication between gang members was always polite. The boys and girls in the gang treated each other with respect. And that was attractive to kids who were anxious to be adults. Speed Tendo has written a lot about her experiences with speed. I acknowledge that speed is a serious problem in today’s society. However, for someone like me, surrounded by so many users, I can tell you that lecturing people that using drugs is a crime is pointless. Words have no power over them. The problem is too deep. Where can I begin to talk about what speed does to people? Hallucinations are a common first symptom. Users become convinced someone is watching them and trying to kill them. I’ve had regular late 260 Edited By Scatkevin

Yakuza Moon night phone calls begging me to go and check out a shadow behind some lamppost. Another user’s mother came to me beside herself with worry, thinking her son had gone crazy. She explained that when he went to sleep at night he sprinkled a two-inch-wide rectangle of black pepper around his futon with such careful precision that it looked like he must have used a ruler to measure it. When she asked him if it was some kind of magic spell, he answered in all seriousness that he’d been troubled by bugs crawling all over his body while he slept, and the pepper was to keep them away. When she heard this, his mother was convinced her son had lost his mind. These stories sound like funny anecdotes, but things also go wrong, and these people can end up harming others. I’d often heard that there is far more of a connection between speed and sex for female users than for male. Reading Yakuza Moon was the first time I realized to what extent it was true. Of course, I know of cases where users have been hospitalized and treated for their addiction, but it seems to me the fastest way to kick the habit is to get arrested and thrown in jail .  .  . Yakuza Neighborhoods My early childhood interactions with neighbors seem to have been very like Shoko Tendo’s. The neighborhoods around yakuza families are usually filled with ill-will, accompanied by a degree of jealousy. Yakuza 261 Edited By Scatkevin

Yakuza Moon are outsiders with no chance of enjoying the feeling of being part of a community. Wherever a yakuza family lives, their non-yakuza neighbors tend to gossip about them, complaining about how they act like big shots with their expensive, imported cars, but how they’ll soon get what’s coming to them. How they’ll be brought down a peg or two when their business fails. Or how once the husband gets thrown in jail, the family will fall apart. And then at school, the kids of the worst gossipmongers repeat what they’ve heard to the kids of the yakuza families. They’ve heard their mothers tell these stories and they believe them as fact. Interestingly, the fathers of these households, being a little more knowledgeable about the power of the yakuza, tend to keep their mouths shut for fear of reprisals. Unfortunately, it often happens that these vicious rumors turn into reality. Many yakuza families live prosperously for a time but end up having to get out of town quickly. Yakuza mothers and kids are burdened with the bad karma of having to live and grow up in a community filled with malice. I see Shoko Tendo’s Yakuza Moon as her way of denying who she was. I think she probably hates yakuza. But by finally facing up to these yakuza, and accepting that the person she used to be only existed in the minds of the yakuza men in her life—including her father—she has set out to reinvent herself. That ‚moon‛ she saw shining down on the sad 262 Edited By Scatkevin

Yakuza Moon events of the first half of her life, I wonder how brightly it is shining for her now? Manabu Miyazaki is a best-selling Japanese writer, known for his social criticism and for his yakuza ties. His autobiographical work Toppa mono has sold more than 600,000 copies in Japan, and has been translated into English. 263 Edited By Scatkevin

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Yakuza Moon Praise for this best-selling memoir from the worldwide press ‚Raised with strict ideas of honor, Tendo was both spoiled and scolded by the tattooed men who frequented her family home. In response she joined a gang, took drugs and became the lover of several gangsters before near-fatal beatings and drug overdoses convinced her to change her life.‛ —Reuters ‚Tendo . . . hails from a section of Japanese society that most of her compatriots would rather did not exist. Her story . . . shines a light into a dark and little understood corner of modern Japan.‛ —The Guardian ‚Emotionally complex and thoroughly heart-rending, this book is recommended for anyone searching for a more thorough and personal understanding of Japanese society.‛ —Publishers Weekly 265 Edited By Scatkevin