In those years, probably the most worthless thing in Tokyo was money.
Yet I did not have any.
The first time I heard someone say that ten million yen did not count as money at all was in an izakaya in Shinjuku.
By then, I had already left the construction site, worked night shifts in a warehouse in Shinagawa, moved goods for shops in Shinjuku, and was later sent by a labor agency to Shibuya to handle deliveries.
My salary was a bit higher than when I first carried cement, but as soon as it was paid out each month, the debt management company would deduct the greater part of it first.
The remaining money was put into an envelope, and I brought it back to Minami-Senju to hand over to my wife.
She would write down the rent, utilities, rice, miso, and public bath fees item by item in a notebook, and clip the last few remaining banknotes onto the wooden rack in the kitchen.
That was all the discretionary money we had for the month.
Yet the man in the izakaya was complaining that he only had ten million yen.
He did deliveries with me, was ten years younger than me, and his father ran a small printing factory in Saitama.
That day, having just received his bonus, he treated a few of us to drinks, talking as he drank about how he was planning to buy an apartment.
"Over in Ikebukuro, more than forty million."
The people beside him listened with their eyes lighting up.
"Where did you get so much money?"
"Borrowed from the bank, of course."
He acted as if he had heard a very strange question, holding chicken skin with his chopsticks and tapping twice on the soy sauce dish.
"A ten-million down payment, and the rest on a loan. The agent said if we buy in now, it will rise to at least sixty million in a couple of years. When we sell it then, pay off the loan, there will still be over ten million left."
Someone asked, what if it did not rise?
Everyone at the table laughed.
I laughed along too, just a little slower.
How could land in Tokyo not rise?
That was the question that least needed answering at the time.
Newspapers wrote about land prices every day.
In Ginza, Akasaka, and Shinjuku, a single square meter of land could sell for more money than an ordinary person could earn in decades.
Someone on television had seriously calculated that as long as that piece of land beneath the Imperial Palace was sold, the whole of California could be bought.
I did not know whether that calculation made any sense, but the people in the izakaya clearly all believed it.
To be more precise, they did not care at all whether it made sense.
As long as tomorrow was more expensive than today, that was enough.
Listening to them talk about stocks, land, and membership tickets, of course I felt envious in my heart.
I even understood these things better than they did.
At least, that was what I thought at the time.
I had been an Executive Director, met branch managers of banks, knew how a loan application should be written, and knew how to package a factory's land, equipment, and orders into something banks liked.
These people at the table could not even read a balance sheet, yet one by one they were starting to talk about multi-million-yen deals, while every day I bargained with the foreman over a three-thousand-yen night shift allowance.
For a few months, I felt extremely wretched.
In the delivery center, there was a young man named Kono who used five hundred thousand yen to buy stocks, which turned into 1.3 million after half a year.
He brought the securities firm's delivery slip to the lounge, and a group of people gathered around to look at it.
Standing on the outside, my very first reaction upon seeing that string of numbers was actually: "If you gave me five million, I could earn much more than him."
This thought was so familiar that it startled even myself.
Years ago, I had thought the exact same thing.
As long as you gave me another five billion, the factory could expand production.
As long as US orders continued to increase, the new production lines would quickly recoup their costs.
As long as the yen did not rise too fast.
As long as the bank was willing to keep lending money.
As long as... as long as what?
I used to stack so many "as long as" together, and then tell everyone that this was called business judgment.
But when people are poor, their memory becomes very good.
I patted my pocket; there was only a little over a thousand yen left inside.
After going home that day, I really thought about borrowing money.
I had even calculated it out in my head.
If I borrowed five hundred thousand, paid back the principal after it doubled, the remaining money would be enough for us to move into a place with a private bathroom.
My wife would not have to carry toiletries to the public bath every day either.
The next day, I found someone from the debt management company and asked if they could postpone the deduction for a month.
The other party flipped through my documents.
"Reason?"
"An emergency at home."
He looked up and glanced at me.
"Hospital?"
"...No."
"Then no."
I was somewhat irritated and asked him, "I am earning my own salary, why can I not even decide how to spend it?"
That person closed the documents and pushed them back across the desk.
"Mr. Tanaka, if you knew how to decide how to spend your own money, you would not be sitting here right now."
I stared at him for a long time.
In the end, I still left.
Many years later, I still remembered those words.
At the time, I felt like I was being humiliated.
Only later did I realize that he saved me once.
After 1988, Tokyo became increasingly outrageous.
The places where I worked changed faster and faster.
I had worked in warehouses, done deliveries, moved frozen stiff cardboard boxes in cold storages in Chiba, and gone to station backstages, following delivery trucks at four in the morning to send the day's goods into counters.
For a while later, I even did equipment maintenance at a karaoke joint on the edge of Kabukicho — of course, it belonged to Saionji.
That shop was very small, but the customers were frighteningly numerous.
On Friday nights, the line at the door stretched from eight o'clock until the early morning hours.
Young office workers carried briefcases to sing after getting off work, taking out a stack of ten-thousand-yen banknotes when paying, without anyone ever asking how much the private room fee actually was.
Once, a company rented out the entire floor to hold a welcome party for newly hired employees.
Drinking to the very end, a young man in his twenties stood in the corridor and scattered money onto the ground.
He was truly scattering it.
The ten-thousand-yen banknotes, one by one, were crumpled into balls by him and thrown to his colleagues, making them guess how many coins were wrapped inside.
Fearing something might happen, the manager had me and another person go over to persuade him.
Leaning against the wall with his face flushed from drinking, when the young man heard us tell him not to waste money, he actually laughed so hard he could not straighten his back.
"What is money anyway, old man?"
He patted my shoulder.
"Next month's bonus will be back."
I lowered my head to look at the banknotes on the ground.
Just one of those was almost enough for my wife and me to eat for half a month.
Suddenly, I really wanted to punch him.
But in the end, I only bent down, picked up the money one by one, and handed it to his colleagues.
On the train back to Minami-Senju, I kept thinking.
If the orders for the Osaka factory had been successfully completed back then, if the yen had not appreciated, if I were still an Executive Director of the Saionji Family, would I also feel that money was nothing special?
The answer made me somewhat uncomfortable.
I probably would.
Even more excessively than that young man.
Because I had a better surname, and a group of people who would explain away my wastefulness as boldness.
Thinking of this, I suddenly felt that not having money might not be entirely a bad thing.
Yeah, there is nothing bad about it either.
In those years, I had seen many people making a fortune.
Taxi drivers bought stocks, department store clerks bought apartments, and small contractors on construction sites used land as collateral to borrow more money to buy another piece of land.
Bank people would even actively chase to the site, their suits and leather shoes stepping on mud that had not dried yet, smilingly asking bosses if they wanted to increase their credit line.
Loans flowed out like water from a tap.
As long as you had a piece of land, the bank would be willing to tell you that this land would be even more valuable next year.
Once it really rose, you could use the increased valuation to borrow even more money.
I used to call this asset operation.
Later in the warehouse, I learned another kind of calculation.
A delivery truck could only load this many boxes today.
One person could only move this much goods in a single night.
No matter how long a shop's doorway was, it could only squeeze in this many customers.
Stocks could double on a piece of paper, and land could double in a bank's appraisal book, but a human's arms would not suddenly gain twice as much strength just because Tokyo land prices went up.
This logic was ridiculously simple.
Yet I had never seriously thought about it before.
By 1989, I was already able to lead a few people in some temporary positions.
Not because anyone promoted me, but simply because having worked long enough, I knew how goods should be stacked, when new workers would slack off, and when the foreman reported the progress too favorably, I should first go to the site to count how many boxes of goods were left.
That year, the Nikkei index hit a new high every single day.
There was an extra small television in the lounge; during lunch breaks people stopped watching baseball and started watching financial programs.
Some people would cheer when the index rose, and others would hold newspapers and calculate how much they had made yesterday.
Kono later bought a second apartment.
He no longer did deliveries, having resigned to go to a real estate company.
Before leaving, he treated me to a drink; his suit was newly bought, and there was a very shiny watch on his wrist.
"Uncle Tanaka, are you really not going to buy?"
He still remembered me.
"If you do not buy now, you will be even less able to afford it in the future."
I smiled and told him that I did not even have a down payment.
Lowering his voice, he said he could introduce a credit company he knew to me; as long as I had a stable job, there would always be a way with the paperwork.
At that instant, my heart stirred again.
I already owed a lot of money; it seemed it made no difference if I owed a little more.
Besides, everyone else was making money.
If the entire Tokyo Metropolis proved me wrong, what qualifications did someone who had already gone bankrupt have to persist?
But in the end, I still shook my head.
The reason was not noble at all.
I really could not borrow money.
My name had entered the credit record, and my salary had long been withheld by the creditors.
After hearing my situation, the credit company Kono knew politely told me to go back and wait for news, and then never contacted me again.
So when the whole of Japan felt that it would get rich, I could only continue moving goods.
This matter felt extremely humiliating to me at the time.
Until later on, it became one of the luckiest things in my life.