私はこれまでお仕事の契約は、いつも一発ＯＫだ。どんなに安い金額を提示されても首を横に振ったことはない。
それは先方が私に対しての評価の金額だと思うからだ。
だから不満を言うこともしない。他の作家さんたちは時に「安過ぎる、もっと言わないと損だよ」と言ってくれるけれど、私は子供の頃から「お金に汚い人間にだけはなるな」と躾をされてきたから、何の不満もない。
私はこれまでお仕事の契約は、いつも一発ＯＫだ。どんなに安い金額を提示されても首を横に振ったことはない。
それは先方が私に対しての評価の金額だと思うからだ。
だから不満を言うこともしない。他の作家さんたちは時に「安過ぎる、もっと言わないと損だよ」と言ってくれるけれど、私は子供の頃から「お金に汚い人間にだけはなるな」と躾をされてきたから、何の不満もない。
2013年02月
http://blog.livedoor.jp/shoko_tendo/archives/2013-02.html
天藤湘子blog
http://blog.livedoor.jp/shoko_tendo/
天藤湘子ウェブサイト
http://www.shoko-tendo.com/
天藤湘子（てんどうしょうこ）
作家・ライター
1968年、大阪生まれ。
極道の組長の娘として生まれた。そのことで、小学生の頃、いじめに遭うようになり、やがて非行に走る。中学３年生の時に、傷害事件を引き起こし教護院で8ヶ月間過ごすこととなる。その後、覚せい剤、恋人の暴力、両親の死などを経験。
2004年4月に自らの生い立ちを綴った私小説『極道な月』(文芸社)を出版。大きな反響を 呼び、10万部を突破。2006年4月、幻冬舎アウトロー文庫より文庫版『極道な月』を出版。現在、実話系雑誌などにライターとして記事を書く傍ら、彫り師としても修行中。
趣味はイラスト描き、音楽・絵画・映画鑑賞、野球観戦、篆刻、読書、散歩など。
Meet Woman Who Lived to Tell About the Yakuza
by William Pesek
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a1pMOqZHoK5s
For Shoko Tendo, nothing brings back the bad memories like bloody fingers in the night.
“As a child, there would sometimes be knocks at the door at all hours from men holding pinkies that they’d just cut off,” the 39-year-old author tells me in Tokyo. “It was my earliest realization that my family was different.”
Tendo isn’t tapping her imagination, but her life story. Her father was a crime boss linked to the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest yakuza group. The late-night visitors were underlings looking to atone for some failure, part of a yakuza ritual.
Much has been written about Japan’s gangsters — their full-body tattoos, boozing, womanizing, strict honor codes and occasional explosions of violence. Very little has been heard from their lovers, daughters or wives. Tendo has been all three, and her book “Yakuza Moon” offers a fascinating look into one of the darkest and least understood corners of Japanese culture.
Hearing Tendo’s life story firsthand is just as difficult as reading her powerful book, which has just been published in English. Matter-of-factly, she talks about her teen years of hard drugs and promiscuity. Her face was scarred by repeated beatings and her psyche was marred by rape and addiction. Her eyes have the aura of someone who genuinely has been to hell and back.
Tendo’s experience also is intriguing because it dovetails with Japan’s economic boom in the 1980s (during which the yakuza thrived as rarely before) and its bust in the 1990s (which forced the yakuza to fend for its way of life as never before).
Tough Life
Life became difficult after 1992, when Japan passed an anti-gang law. The good times of the bubble years were replaced by the deflationary “Lost Decade.” While the police made it harder to profit from mainstay interests like prostitution, gambling, extortion and drug smuggling, recession reduced the number of construction projects, another traditional yakuza income stream.
“I saw it in my own family — how quickly the good times can be replaced by hardship and pain,” Tendo explains. “When my father fell on hard times, health-wise, and into debt, things turned very fast for my family.”
As her father’s health waned, Tendo found herself forced into sexual relationships with men to whom her father was indebted (of which her father was unaware). “It’s not a part of my life I like revisiting,” she says.
Tendo’s efforts to lead a normal life these days are belied by the slightest movement of arms, which expose a hint of the full-body tattoo beneath.
Tattoo
On the surface, Tendo looks like any other stylish 30- something Japanese woman. Only when she removes her sweatshirt does her persona take on a deeper, more mysterious dimension. Her body becomes a colorful and defiant canvas featuring a medieval courtesan, elaborate dragons, phoenixes and flowers.
“I know some people may judge me for my tattoos, and in a way they may limit my chances in life, but they are who I am, where I come from, and I find comfort in them,” Tendo says.
Tattoos remain reasonably rare in Japan and largely taboo. My health club in Tokyo, for example, doesn’t accept members with the smallest of tattoos.
Tendo has broken with the past — well, as best as one can. Long ago divorced from a husband with gangster ties, Tendo is now the unmarried mother of a 2-year-old girl. Yet she still harbors strong views about the life she left behind. One of her firm beliefs is that Japan’s efforts to clamp down on the yakuza are backfiring.
Diversified Mob
“On the surface it looks like the yakuza are being pushed back, but really they are diversifying and becoming harder to track,” Tendo explains. “They have gotten into areas like IT and others. I don’t think there are any sectors now that the yakuza isn’t involved in.”
A government “white paper” in July found that organized- crime syndicates had broadened their fund-raising methods to stock trading, real estate and other economic areas. In some cases, gangsters were said to be working with corporate extortionists and traders to manipulate equity prices and even to take over companies.
For many Japanese, such news is hardly surprising. Organized crime arguably has long been a bigger force in Japan’s economy than in, say, the U.S. For example, economists have long buzzed about the yakuza’s alleged role in prolonging Japan’s bad-loan crisis of the 1990s.
Gangland
There were 86,300 yakuza members as of Dec. 31, 2006, according to the National Police Agency. The ranks of the Kobe- based Yamaguchi-gumi, with which Tendo’s father was associated, were estimated at 21,700, an increase of about 900 for the year.
Gangland data are getting more attention following a handful of mob-related shootings this year, including the death of Nagasaki City Mayor Itcho Ito. These stories and others aren’t light reading in a nation where gun violence is rare. But then, neither is Tendo’s heartfelt memoir.
“Even as I have left this life behind, it will always be who I am,” she says, as her eyes fall onto her tattoo-covered arms. “Just as it will probably always be with Japan.”