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Whiting, Robert. Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1999.
This book is essentially a biography of Nick Zappetti, a.k.a. Nick Koizumi, an American expatriate of dubious probity who became rich by opening the first pizza parlor in postwar Japan. Zappetti, a former Marine sergeant, began his business career selling illegal gumballs and lighter flints on the Tokyo black market in 1946. Profits from this endeavor enabled Zappetti to found a company called Lansco which specialized in the transference of stoves and refrigerators from American PXs to the general Japanese economy. Profits from Lansco emboldened Zappetti to establish a Japanese branch of the "Bank of Texas," a nonexistent entity specializing in the printing of fake bonds and checks which were "discounted" and sold in a vast pyramid scheme (some of the documents were signed "Harry S. Truman" and "Franklin Delano Roosevelt"). Zappetti's activities were tolerated by the occupation authorities who looked to the "private enterprise" of Zappetti and others like him as a "bulwark against communism" that would make Japan a "showcase for democracy."
This was all in accord with the occupation authority's desperate attempt to get the Japanese to see the American social system as superior to Soviet communism. As part of this effort, contradictions existing in American life were routinely papered over. One publication of the occupation authority spoke to the question of racial prejudice in the United States:
Sometimes we are asked about racial prejudice against negroes in the U.S. Well, America is a free and democratic country and there is no such thing as discrimination. There's no difference between black and white. Both lead abundant lives.
Distortions such as this were not limited to the depiction of life in America. Virtually anything associated with American culture or American military power was depicted as benevolent. A hugely popular American-style sex and drug club in the Akasaka district was lauded for its "mood of freedom." Distortions even extended to the effects of atom-bomb tests in the Pacific. When the captain of the Lucky Dragon, a Japanese fishing boat that was caught too near an American test site, died of radiation poisoning, his death was described as having been caused by a...