Chapter One

THE FIRST
BLACK MARKET

Urgent notice to enterprisees, factories and those manufacturers in the process of shifting from wartime production to peacetime production. Your product will be bought in large quantities at a suitable price. Those who wish to sell should come with samples and estimeates of production cost to the following address:

Shinjuku Market, 1-8-54, Tsunohazu,
Yodobashiku, Shinjuku Tokyo.

Kanto Ozu Gumi
August 18, 1945

          It was surely some kind of record for speed. Three days after the end of the war—and a full ten before the first American soldier set foot in Japan—the above newspaper advertisement appeared for what would be the nation's first postwar black market. One of the very few paid announcements in print at the time, it was a call to commerce hardly anyone expected so quickly, given the wretched, bomb-ravaged condition of Tokyo.

    Once a teeming castle town of wood and paper houses, Japan's capital was now mostly cinder, the ground one massive flat layer of residue from the terrible B-29 Superfortress incendiary attacks. The heavily populated lowlands to the east by Tokyo Bay where the merchant and artisan classes had lived and worked had all but been obliterated, as had vast sections of the neighboring industrial city of Kawasaki and the port of Yokohama, further to the south. Drivers of what few cars there were frequently got lost because it was so difficult to distinguish the road from the rubble of shattered