Yakuza lady with Japanese Cherry Blossom Tattoo

Back in May, my wife and I went to the Sanja Matsuri, a famous mikoshi festival. There were some yakuza there showing off their tattoos, and one of them was this woman. My wife somehow got curious about what kind of person married a yakuza, and when we got home, she started doing some googling on the subject. She came across a blog called “Kekkon ni Mukenai Hito” (A Person Who’s Unsuitable for Marriage). It had this entry about a woman who got entangled with a yak, and I thought it was quite interesting, so I translated it below:

If you’re an ordinary office lady, you probably don’t get pursued by yakuza too often. This happened quite a while ago. I started secretly working part-time after my regular job, and soon after that, a yakuza started pursuing me.

I used to be kind of daring, and I got desensitized to partying. Half because I wanted to party, and half because I felt sorry for him, I became a yakuza moll. I just thought he was lonely and I felt sorry for him, without thinking about it seriously. He was the shadow-president of the company I was working part-time at.

For me, it was just a way to kill time. I wasn’t demanding, I was reserved (because I don’t like to be a burden), and I wasn’t sexy, so he said I wasn’t the kind of woman he usually dated. He might say it was because I was not beautiful and was working at an office that wasn’t connected with the entertainment business.

The days went by, and one night I got a phone call. It was his subordinate/slave, Maeda-san. “The boss is making trouble in Motomachi. Please come and help.” …Why? That sort of thing started happening a lot, and it was at that time that I began to be troubled by it.

I started feeling that I was getting too involved, so I went to talk to the organized crime section of the police department, and found out a few things about his record. He was in their records, but was not an active gang member. For an ordinary citizen like me, whether he’s an active- or former-yakuza, he’ll always cause trouble.

In the yakuza’s house, they took care of everything for me, even down to my change of clothes, giving me a key to the house, a key to the car, and a lot of money.  All I had to do was get meals ready and accompany him when he went out. That consisted of going shopping, and visiting his companies. I wasn’t interested in brand-name goods, didn’t get excited, and didn’t give him advice. When he asked me with a curious face what I wanted, all I could think of was something like mixed juice from the supermarket in the department store basement. He took me to one of the host clubs he owned a bunch of times (to make me happier, I guess), but people like me who (secretly) don’t like people, don’t like the kind of people who become, and it wasn’t fun.

The rest of the time, I stayed at his place doing what I liked all the time. It wasn’t because I wanted to. I got in a situation where I had to stay in the house, because I was naive and got tangled up in his web. I felt that there was a mysterious pressure or force on me. After a while, I wasn’t allowed to go back to my own home at all.  I was living on my own, so my parents didn’t know it, but they yakuzas started forbidding me to go to work.

The yakuza did some investigating about me, and found out that I was having an affair, which really got under his skin. I was beaten, but I thought it was unreasonable, and I knew he didn’t beat me as hard as he could, so I wasn’t afraid and just listened to him calmly when he said he was going to kill my lover.

Even though I wasn’t allowed to go out, I tried not to show my dissatisfaction and waited for a chance to escape. There were a bunch of shady-looking guys by the main entrance of the company where I work. They called the switchboard of my company asking for me, so I asked the person who answers the phone to tell them I wasn’t working there anymore, causing an uproar within the company. I heard that it finally got so bad that some yakuza visited the company where my father worked a place he had been working at for a long time and where he had built up a lot of trust.

My father works in the field of law, so he introduced me to a lawyer who specializes in cases involving organized crime. We couldn’t reach an understanding, so we had to get the lawyer involved. A lot of people get the wrong idea and automatically believe that no one would get involved with a yakuza if there was no money in it for them as a mistress. That’s explicitly written in the contract I signed for an out-of-court settlement. It also says that on the condition that I return the car keys, house keys, and bankbook, he promises never to contact me again, completely severing our connection. Actually, though, he did contact me one time after that.

Did I change? When I reflect back on it with some perspective, there’s not really a line between a prostitute and a mistress, and the things that go on between people are petty and a nuisance. I really regret acting like such a child and making so much trouble for my parents, who had been living as responsible members of society. I don’t think that being a mistress or a prostitute is bad, or that one should ignore a person who’s lonely, but I do have to tread carefully. That’s what I think.

The original entry is at: http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/miumiu6363jp/235052.html. If you visit the original entry, you can also see the out-of-court settlement that the yakuza signed. The rest of the blog has entries about how unsuitable for marriage and motherhood she is, and descriptions of her former career as a prostitute (where she met her husband).

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