たばこの気持ち

元ヤクザ伝導集団ミッション・バラバ著『刺青クリスチャン』（早稲田出版、1998年5月19日発行）では、以下の4人（高原芳郎さん、吉田芳幸さん、中島哲夫さん、真島創一さん）の文中にタバコ（灰皿等を含む）が記述されていましたので、ご紹介させていただきます。

In the book 'Shisei Christian' by former yakuza conduction group Mission Baraba (Waseda Publishing, 19 May 1998), cigarettes (including ashtrays, etc.) were described in the text by the following four people (Yoshiro Takahara, Yoshiyuki Yoshida, Tetsuo Nakajima and Soichi Majima).

【60ページ】高原芳郎さん

父は酒もタバコもやりませんでしたが、その分をおぎなうかのように、女性関係が派手な人でした。

 

【62ページ】高原芳郎さん

（両親に捨てられた）こんな悲惨に追い打ちをかけたのは、突然の兄の自殺でした。当時兄は海軍の予科練に志願し、その直後国鉄に飛び込んだのでした。そして兄の残したタバコのピースの箱には、「天皇陛下のためなら命をも捨つる。人のためならをも捨つる」と書き残してありました。

 

【64ページ】高原芳郎さん

ヤクザの世界も下働きは厳しいものです。朝、便所そうじからふきそうじ、灰皿を洗ってきれいに変え、賭場に白い布をはって札に数字を書いてお客さんを待つ生活が始まりました。

 

【67ページ】高原芳郎さん

新婚時代にこんなこともありました。私が当時つき合っていた女性が、私の留守に家を訪ねてきたのです。妻が家に上げて、しばらくタバコを吸いながら私を待ってようですが、その2～3日後に署名のない手紙がきて、妻があけてみると、クシャクシャになった私の写真が入っていたらしいです。

 

【137ページ】吉田芳幸さん

当時のヤクザは今のヤクザと違って、部屋住みの時でも自分でお金を稼がなくてはなりませんでした。親分も兄貴分も小遣いなどくれません。兄貴分が「タバコ買ってこい」といっても、その兄貴分は自分の吸うタバコを買うお金さえくれません。買ってこいといわれた私は、お金が無ければタバコを盗むか、金を盗んでタバコを買うか、どんな事をしてもタバコを手に入れて兄貴分の所に持っていかなければならない、そんな社会だったのです。

 

【174ページ】中島哲夫さん

女房は私の強引な申し出に半ば呆れながら結婚を承知してくれました。″日曜日には必ず教会に行くおこと″という条件を付けて。彼女、26歳初婚。私37歳3度目。クリスチャン・ヤクザの誕生です。

結婚後の私は、月曜日から金曜日まではそれまで通り、しっかりヤクザの務めを果たしました。そして、土曜日にサウナに行き、アルコール、煙草、夜のクラブの脂粉の匂いを汗と共に体から吹き出させ、スッキリさせます。そのようにスッキリしたところで、日曜日には教会に行き、神の前に頭を垂れ、アーメン、と唱える生活を始めました。

 

【189ページ】中島哲夫さん

薬のため精神に異常をきたし、人を殺すとまで思い詰め、神の許しで生まれ変わる事のできた私。ヤクザをやめ、薬もやめ、女遊びもやめ、煙草もやめ、学校経営に専念する私に、それでもまだ一つだけやめられない悪癖がありました。

夜の赤坂で酒を飲む事です。

 

【196ページ】真島創一さん

中学に入って、「まあ、進学のときに有利だろう」といった軽い動機で生徒会長になりました。しかし、なったからといって急におとなしくなるわけではなく、″学校の校則を全部破る生徒会長″として、結構人気者だったのですから、ヘンな話です。

とにかく、規則規則と型にはめられるのが大嫌いですから、制服違反をし、校内でガムをかみ菓子を食べ、タバコも吸うという大変な破天荒ぶりでした。

 

【214ページ】真島創一さん

酒もタバコもやらずひたすら真面目な父に、私は反発し続けました。「遊びのひとつも知らないで、つまらない人だ」と思い続けてきたのです。その父とも、千葉のキャンプのときに心を語り合い、和解できました。父は、私の祖父が朝から酒を飲むような飲んべえだったのを見て、その反動で真面目な人間になったらしいです。

［Page 60] Yoshiro Takahara.

My father did not drink or smoke, but as if to compensate for this, he had a flamboyant relationship with women. 

[page 61~62] Yoshiro Takahara.

（What added to this misery was the sudden suicide of my elder brother. At the time, my brother had volunteered for the Navy's Preliminary Training Course, and immediately afterwards he jumped into the Japan National Railways. On the box of cigarette pieces he left behind, he wrote: "I would give up my life for the sake of the Emperor. I would give up my life for the sake of others".

 

[page 64] Yoshiro Takahara.

The yakuza world is also a harsh one for menial jobs. In the mornings, they cleaned the toilets, wiped the floor, washed and cleaned the ashtrays, covered the betting hall with white cloth, wrote numbers on the notes and waited for the customers to arrive.

 

[page 67] Yoshiro Takahara.

This happened to me when I was a newlywed. A woman I was dating at the time visited my house while I was away. Two or three days later, I received an unsigned letter, and when she opened it, she found a crumpled photograph of me.

 

[page 137] Yoshiyuki Yoshida.

Unlike today's yakuza, the yakuza of those days had to earn their own money, even when living in a room. Neither the boss nor the older brothers would give you pocket money. Even if the older brother asked me to buy cigarettes, he would not even give me money to buy the cigarettes I smoked. If I was told to buy cigarettes, I had to steal cigarettes if I didn't have money, or steal money to buy cigarettes, or do whatever I had to do to get cigarettes and bring them to my elder brother.

 

［Page 174] Tetsuo Nakajima.

My wife agreed to marry me, half-amused by my aggressive offer. She agreed to marry me on the condition that I would always go to church on Sundays. She was 26 years old and married for the first time. I am 37 and this is my third. A Christian gangster was born.

After our marriage, I did my yakuza duties from Monday to Friday as I had done before. Then, on Saturdays, I would go to the sauna and let the smell of alcohol, cigarettes and nightclub grease blow out of my body along with the sweat to refresh me. When I was so refreshed, I went to church on Sundays and began a life of hanging my head before God and saying Amen.

 

[page 189] Tetsuo Nakajima.

I was mentally deranged because of the drugs, and I even thought I was going to kill people, but with God's permission I was able to be born again. I quit the yakuza, stopped taking drugs, stopped playing with women, stopped smoking and concentrated on running my school, but I still had one vice that I could not stop.

Drinking alcohol at night in Akasaka.

 

[page 196] Soichi Majima.

When I entered junior high school, I became the student council president with a light motivation: 'Well, it will be advantageous when I go on to higher education'. However, just because I became president didn't mean that I suddenly became quiet, and I was quite popular as the 'student president who breaks all the school rules', which is a strange story.

Anyway, he hated rules and regulations, so he violated the school uniform, chewed gum, ate sweets and smoked cigarettes on campus.

 

［Page 214] Soichi Majima.

I was constantly rebelling against my father, who was a serious man and did not drink or smoke. I always thought he was a boring person who didn't know how to have fun. I was able to reconcile with my father after we had a heart-to-heart talk at the camp in Chiba. My father saw that my grandfather was a drunkard who drank alcohol in the mornings, and this apparently made him a more serious person.

The other day, I finished reading "About a Certain Destiny" (Chuko Bunko, published June 10, 1987) by Ryotaro Shiba, who loved Bosa "Rape Blossoms and Mild Seven" very much.

The following is an excerpt from the tobacco related description.

The personality of Takeo Hirose, who lost his life in Port Arthur and subsequently became a textbook military deity, is introduced.

[page 28]

Takeo was still the most popular among the Japanese living in Japan for his strength and courage, and his daily tastes were still unique, with no taste for alcohol or tobacco, and no desire to play with flowers.

At the time of the war, tobacco and alcohol were considered indispensable to the life of the Russian aristocracy.

Hirose was a retarded person and did not even smoke.

Makoto Nakaoki describes how he visited Tsuneo Fujiwara at Yumotokan, where he was recuperating from pulmonary tuberculosis. (This is when Mr. Nakaoki, who was preparing to go to war, spent a couple of days in Mr. Fujiwara's hospital room.)

［Page 57］

It seems that Mr. Nakaoki was extremely quiet at this time, and spent the whole day lying quietly in his hospital room, reading books and magazines with a cigarette in the corner of his lips, ----.

The last is from the description of Ms. A., a poet and professor at a women's university.

[page 352]

After his death, an elder critic of the short poem criticism once told me that he was well aware of this poet's existence as a poet and that he had changed his perception of him after his death.

He neither drank alcohol nor smoked cigarettes. He had no children and lived alone with his wife as if they were close to each other.