Justin McCurry “Blood ties: Yakuza daughter lifts lid on hidden hell of gangsters' families” http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,330088079-108018,00.html
最近、著書のYakuza Moon: Memoirs of a Gangster's Daughterの英訳本が出たというShoko Tendoさんへのインタヴュー。これはGuardianの最も人気がある記事のひとつであるらしい。また、彼女の著書は2004年に日本で出版されたということだが、遺憾ながら全然知らなかった。また、http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/gallery/2007/jun/21/japan.internationalnews?picture=330063743には、Tendoさんの刺青姿の写真等がある。また上に示したのはprintable versionのURLだが、オリジナルの記事には「銭湯におけるやくざ」という写真がある。もしかしたら、これは「やくざ」ではなく、鳶職などの職人の写真かもしれない。というのは、刺青マニアとして知られていた故飯沢匡がやくざは自分の刺青を大っぴらにしたがらないと書いていたことを覚えているからだ。それもそうだ。刺青を公開するのは顔を公開するのと同じで、何かしでかした場合、面が割れていなくとも、刺青を手配されれば終わりだ。あと、下ネタで恐縮なのだけれど、やくざと結びついて語られることとして、〈真珠〉というのがある。知人の女性が飲み屋でナンパされて、いきなりその男が俺、真珠埋め込んでるんだぜといったと語ったことがあった。
また、仁義とか任侠に対する神話破壊；
Her status as the daughter of a gangland boss was the cause of her troubled youth, a history involving being bullied at school to dealing with the expectation of drug-fuelled sex among men to whom her father was somehow indebted. As a teenager she was repeatedly raped by men who fed her addiction to drugs then left her bloody and bruised in seedy hotel rooms. Only her make-up hides the scars from the reconstructive surgery she required on her face after a particularly bad beating. Her marriage to someone with gangster ties ended quickly, although she still talks of him as a "serious, well-intentioned" man who treated her well.Tendo's last speed fix came when she was 19, when her injuries from another beating in the room of a motel came close to killing her. "I kept thinking, 'I don't want to die in a place like this'. I was there for an hour and managed to drag myself home ... I knew it was time to stop," she said.
She quickly rose up the ranks of the Tokyo hostess scene, but it was her decision, in her early 20s, to tattoo the top half of her body, yakuza-style, that marked the end of her emotional and physical dependence on the men of violence, and the beginning of the new life she has since made as a writer and, now, as a mother.
The popular image of yakuza families as ostentatiously wealthy and loyal to the core bears little resemblance to Tendo's early experiences of poverty and betrayal. She has a hatred of gangsters that is partly due to the shabby way in which her father's associates treated him in his hour of need."They gave him 'sympathy' money to tide him over after his business failed and he became ill, but they basically left him to sink on his own," she said. "Only his really good friends ever visited him in hospital."
