About fifty yards long and three yards wide, the corridor is lined with small, barred windows and piss-yellow steel doors on the left side, a bank of windows on the right. As I make my way towards the bathroom, I see that most of the cells are cramped single-occupancy hutches like my own.
Halfway down the cell block, however, there are two cells side-by-side which are three times larger. Each accommodates four prisoners who are locked up behind a chain-linked fence. Judging by the elaborate tattoos that cover their torsos and thighs like an exoskeleton, many of the men moldering in the larger cells are yakuza.
In the first of these two cells, a middle-aged man sits on a cushion, fanning himself, while another leans up against a wall, his nose in a comic book. Two other inmates sit cross-legged before a small fold-up table, engaged in a quiet, but intense game of Old Maid.
I’ve read that yakuza consider time spent in jail a “holiday”, and, upon release from prison, can expect to receive a bonus equivalent to what they would have earned had they been out on the streets menacing society. These guys, however, don’t seem to be enjoying their “vacation” all that much. If anything, they look bored to tears. I suppose that a gaijin like myself walking past their cell must bring, as they say in the joint, a little ray of sunshine into an otherwise cloudy day, because they all perk up as I shuffle by.
“Gaijin,” they murmur to each other. “Check out the gaijin.”
Approaching the end of the corridor, I find a weather-beaten old man, eyes clouded with cataracts, staring vacantly out of his window. Like Castaway at the other end of the cell block, the old man’s thin, wizened body looks as if all but the very last drops of life have been wrung out of it. Even so, just as I am passing, this fossil of a man lets out a harrowing scream that gives me such a fright that I’ll be damned if I don’t nearly soil myself.
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