White Matter

At the Yakuza lair

Something erratic was happening to my sense of time. One moment I was floating in midstream with no sense of the flow, the next I was going over the falls.

We changed trains at Shinjuku, taking the Keio Line out into the suburban hinterlands of western Tokyo.

The site was an abandoned factory. A major electronics conglomerate had once made air conditioners here; now nobody makes air conditioners in Japan any more. The building still stood – with Japan's population starting to decline, the respectable developers had shown little interest in taking it on. It had ended up, instead, in the hands of the Yakuza. In a country as law-abiding as this one, operating as an organized criminal cartel demanded a degree of lateral thinking, and property development was more than just a sideline for them. Their competitive advantage came from an ability to acquire assets at a discount. They specialized in distressed sellers.

Graeme told me all this as we walked through the suburban streets from the railway station, passing first through a tightly packed residential area, its cleanliness and shine holding resolute against the swamp air that enveloped us. The streets were not entirely empty – a few school children returning home, one or two housewives out on errands, using handkerchiefs to wipe the sweat from their brows.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen, though it was afternoon humidity, not midday sun.

Arriving at the factory, we could see no evidence of on-site security. We had already made our reconnaissance using StreetView, so we knew where to go: a narrow alley that abutted the wire perimeter fence. A row of cherry trees, flush with summer foliage, provided a modicum of cover, yet I couldn't dispel the image of a hundred neighbourhood eyes, all of them peering down at me. If the police did arrive, I wondered, whose side would they be on?

I removed the wire cutters from the backpack and got to it, working as quickly as I could. Graeme, meanwhile, took out his phone and brought up a GPS app that showed a map of the factory compound, including the building interior. Brains and brawn, it seemed, were to be our respective roles.

Once through the fence, it was a mere ten meters, under another row of trees and across a narrow road, to the side of the main building. Having changed at the railway station, we were now dressed in the ubiquitous beige uniform worn by technical staff everywhere in Japan, the same colour as old-style personal computers. It was odd to see Graeme in something other than a tee-shirt. I was wearing a cap to cover my blondness.

Next to the building was another wire fence; this one surrounded a small enclosure containing some weathered steelwork. Some sort of apparatus, a cooling tower perhaps. Graeme removed the plastic objects from the backpack and inserted one into the wire mesh of the fence.

"Cool eh? Found the design on the net. Had the boys run up a few copies on the three-dee printer."

They were footholds. Inserting them as he climbed, it didn't take him long to reach the top. From there he jumped the short gap to the steel framing and clambered up onto the roof. Had it been an office block, the building would have been about three stories high.

I followed, leaving the footholds in place. They were a discreet shade of grey. We didn't plan on being here long, and we might be coming back in a hurry.

When I caught up with him, Graeme was consulting his phone.

"This way."

I followed, relaxing a little as I went. Up here among the rooftop ancillaries, we were no longer visible from below. It was like a secluded metal garden, inert machinery betraying no signs of life – a silence so intense it let the faint roar of the surrounding city back into my consciousness. Perhaps some silent alarm was ringing out at this very moment, but inside my mind, this and other fears had receded to a background hum. If anything, the juxtaposition of tranquillity and threat was only making me feel more switched on.