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me. “Well. You’d better just run any- thing like this past me in the future,” he said.
    I told him that we would.
    â€œNo stunts!”
    I assured him we were not here to play stunts.
    As we were leaving, he called out: “I liked your picture in any case, Hal!”
    The rest of the staff certainly found it highly amusing. They’d been gathered outside Dutch’s office, eavesdropping upon our dressing down. For weeks, we couldn’t go anywhere without them holding up their hands like little paws and twitching their noses. One day a spoof story appeared on the notice board, claiming that rat meat was going to be brought onto the ration.
    But the publicity didn’t do the old bargeman any good. The Tokyo police somehow got wind of the story and they trooped down the next week to clear him out. Half the city was sleeping in holes and ditches at the time, but the authorities apparently considered it a violation of Japanese dignity for the old man to have so publicly shamed himself by talking to us about it. When I went down later that week with a flagon of soy sauce and some sake, he was gone. All that was left of the random clutter of his shelter were some charred sticks and a bent jerry can.

7
T HE T ICKET- H ALL G ANG
(
Hiroshi Takara
)
    T wo
yankii
sailors—enormous black men in flapping white trousers with tiny hats perched on the tops of their heads—were strolling amongst the clapboard stalls and counters of the Ueno Sunshine Market. I was quietly stalking them—
Captain Takara, 1st Ghost Army.
I’d collected half a dozen long cigarette butts already, and one of the sailors was about to fling another one to the ground.
    The markets had sprung up like mushrooms almost the day the war had ended, at all the main train stations on the Yaman­ote Line: Shimbashi, Shinjuku, and here at Ueno. At first, scruffy men and women had just laid out whatever they had to sell on patches of bare earth—cups, pens, any old rubbish. Next came the soldiers, returning home, their houses destroyed and pockets empty. One morning, I’d watched as one of them, thin as a rake, sold off his entire uniform piece by piece. First his greatcoat, then his boots, then his shirt and trousers, until he was standing there shivering in his underwear, and I thought for a moment he was even going to try and sell that, and go off with the money wedged between his buttocks.
    Soon enough, though, the yakuza gangs had decided to move in. Now the wasteground beneath the overhead train tracks was just like a real market, with electric lights and speakers chirping music and peddlers selling everything from saucepans to kimonos, blankets to bicycles. There were noodle shops and counter bars, and the place was patrolled day and night by the flashy toughs who worked for Mr. Suzuki, the market boss, who you could see making his rounds every evening in his pale grey silk suit, a felt fedora tilted over his bullet-shaped head.
    We called it the American Sweet Shop. GIs came along to swap their B-rations for whisky and fake antiques, and we shined their shoes and scrounged for their chocolate and chewing gum. Kids stole things from their pockets and some of the older girls took them off into the shadows under the railway arches. But I’d promised myself early on I’d never break any laws, no matter how tough things got. My father would have been ashamed of me.
    Instead, I became a cigarette boy. The yankiis all smoked like crazy—American cigarettes at that—and if you followed them for long enough, you could collect up a pile of butts and wrinkle out the tobacco into new two-sen smokes. You’d then palm these off onto some poor Japanese, who’d smoke them right down to the last cardboard embers.
    The sailor lifted his massive hand and flicked his smouldering cigarette to the ground. I pounced, but suddenly he moved, and I slammed into his leg. It was as thick as a tree trunk, and I sprawled