Photo Credit: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
Shoko Tendo calmly puffs on a cigarette beneath the twinkling chandeliers of The Cafe de Paris in Tokyo. She knows she could shatter the decorum by merely rolling up her sleeves. Her arms - and almost every other inch of her birdlike body - are plastered with the trademark tattoos of a Japanese gangster.
In a knee-jerk way, I expect the russet-haired Tendo, whose father was a high-ranking mob boss, to be intimidating, or at least loud and brash, but she speaks to me with a quiet thoughtfulness in her native Japanese. Her best-selling memoir, Yakuza Moon, shocked this conservative nation with its graphic accounts of her addictions to sex, drugs, and violent lovers.
Tendo tells me how her early life was dominated by her volatile father. He was the head of a gang allied with the largest yakuza syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi. She remembers discovering what a "big boss" he was: When she was 6, she opened the door to find a gangster dripping blood. He was clutching a box for her dad, which contained the finger he'd just hacked off his own hand. "The man was my dad's underling who'd done something wrong," she says. "Dad started hitting him. I couldn't believe my father was still angry with him, even though he'd cut off his finger to say sorry." Tendo hid behind her mom, but she'd seen enough to know that her dad, Yasuhiro Tendo, wielded a terrifying power.
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