URA HELLO WORK CHAPTER 5 – LOCKSMITH (鍵師, KAGISHI)
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RISK:**
SALARY:**
HARD LABOR:***
ILLEGALITY:**
“THE CLIENTS FROM KABUKICHO ARE RATHER IRREGULAR!”
“Being a kagishi (locksmith) is really not a shady job, yo!” says Mr. Mountainhill (38, not his real name) in a very lighthearted way. ”Of those studying locks, a small fraction drop out and become burglars, but I think those guys were never real locksmiths to begin with.”
“Recently, as regular folks have become more safety- and crime-conscious, they’re buying stronger, more complex, anti-crime locks. As the sales of these locks go up, so too does the value of a kagishi’s service! But if you want to be a kagishi, first you have to develop your intelligence as well as your techniques. Self-study is very hard, and going to a trade school requires very intensive labor. Of course you have to study hard, but the school fees run to several thousand dollars. And if you want to open up your own shop, you’ll have to pay a lot more than school fees! That’s why sometimes guys turn to robbery, since they can use their “lock knowledge” without investing all that capital.
“Back when I was studying in the trade-school, there were some guys in class you could just look at ‘em and tell they had a dark past. The kind of guys where they’re hiding something. I’m not prejudiced against Chinese, but the Chinese students at that trade school wouldn’t talk to anyone. Afterwards, they’d leave quickly. Even if you did talk to them, they wouldn’t say one word about their private lives. After they graduated, there was no indication that they ever opened their own locksmith shop, but I never heard that they were working for a legitimate shop either. In that case, you got to think they were members of a larceny gang – they got ‘time off work’ to go back to school and learn new skills, right?”
After he graduated, Mr. Mountainhill spent more than three years working at a chain-store of a lock-smithing company, before finally opening up his own store. As a rule, lock-smithing is the kind of job where you often get sucked into your clients’ troubles, but no one got sucked in more than Mr. Mountainhill. Why? His shop was really close to Kabukicho, Tokyo’s most famous gangster neighborhood.
Kagishi is a solitary occupation. Some guys might have their wife work at their office, but when it’s time to do work, you go alone. Mr. Mountainhill had paid dues for over three years, and had self-confidence, but that hard-one confidence could go to pieces in an instant. Why is that? I asked him:
“It’s not because I can’t open the damn lock! It’s because the clients can be . . .a little special. I worry if I can get along with them. When I first opened my shop, I thought there’d be some weirdness, but nothing like this! I wanted to expand my customer base as far as (neighboring ‘hood of) Yotsuya, but the fact is . . .fully half my clients are from Kabukicho. And I’m the only kagishi close to here, so you can imagine how many people are knocking on my door! Some are legitimate, and then there’s those ‘grey area’ clients: Yakuza, police, and people that look like groups of robbers!” Mr. Mountainhill said with a gloomy expression.
“I’ll get a call from the Yakuza, saying ‘Come down to our office and open up this safe.’ I’ve been to their offices many times, but no matter how often I go, I still feel like a cold wind is blowing down my back. The gangsters are always polite: I can’t say I’ve had any really scary experiences with them. But when I go to their office, I can’t help but see things that I don’t want to see: bags of white powder on a shelf , a gun-shaped bulge inside a jacket pocket. And if I think too hard about what might be INSIDE the safe I’m opening, I can’t concentrate on my work at all!
“One time in particular sent chills down my spine: I opened the safe up and there were rows of small glass bottles full of formaldehyde, with little, sausage-shaped things inside them.
“There’s a lot of different kinds of locks. A complex lock can take half a day to break, even for a professional locksmith. One time, after I finished such a long, tiring day of work, I came back to my office. No sooner had I arrived than the phone rang, with a very suspicious call! And unknown person asked me to come to such-and-such a place and open a lock. Now there’s lots of people who call up because they lost the keys to their own front door, or something like that – it’s easy for me to tell these ‘legitimate’ callers just from their tone of voice: legitimate people tend to sound kind of embarrassed, like, “Aah, silly me! Doy!” but robbers sound really stressed, seething with barely-controlled panic. If they sound suspicious, I try to get as many details over the phone as I can, before I decide. In this case, finally I gave in and went to meet the guy.
Another common type of job is what we call ‘enforcement work’: the clients are police or Finance Ministry people. The scariest ‘enforcement’ jobs are the ones where the cops say, "The suspect is hiding in this building, so open the front door’s locks." The locks are not the problem! The worry is that the panicking suspect will fly out the door at me! I don’t know if it’s true or just a rumor, but they say that in the past, the criminal would take the kagishi hostage, and threaten to kill him unless some crazy demands were met! Also, Kabukicho is a pretty small town. And some of the doors that the police ask me to open, I’ll go there and be like, ‘Oh deeeeyamn! This is the Yakuza office where my old clients work!’ Of course, I can’t refuse to help the police, but I hope the Yakuza can tolerate me after that.
“Anyway, the keiji (刑事：detectives) are always very impatient to open the door. If the lock is simple, that’s fine, but if it’s a really complicated job, it can take a long time. If you take your time, they think you’re just fucking with them. They get mad and try to rush you.In fact, a co-worker of mine says the keiji got so mad they kicked him!
“But, after a job, the Yakuza usually tell me, ‘I owe you one!’, which makes me feel relieved, and honorable. The police, on the other hand, are unking: ‘I don’t care if you’re busy! Come now! Do it faster!’ And they never even say thanks.”
"THANKS TO THIS JOB, I’VE WITNESSED SOME OF THE MOST DRAMATIC MOMENTS OF MY LIFE!"
Kabukicho’s ’special’ clients are not limited to police and thieves, however:
"One time, a lady called up, very hysterical. She begged me to come to her apartment right away. She pressured me so hard I left right away. She’d told me that her boyfriend was inside, unconscious, and she couldn’t open the door. She had gone out shopping without taking her key, and when she got back, it was locked. She’d called for him to open it a million times but there was no response. It sounded like she wasn’t telling me the whole truth, but I went ahead and opened the door anyway. The moment it opened, everything became clear. Her boyfriend’s body was sprawled in the center of the room. He’d taken too many downers, overdosed, and collapsed – but clearly he’d locked his girlfriend out first. If she’d called the police, they would have arrested him for drugs. But if she left him, he would have died. And that’s where I came into the picture: I suggested that she take him to the hopsital herself – told her they don’t arrest patients who OD. I didn’t go with them, figuring that I’d be in the way.
He then told me the most dramatic thing he’d ever seen in his life:
"This one started with a woman, too! She said, ‘I’ve got a small storage shed, and I can no longer open the door to it. Please come and fix it.’ It sounded suspicious, but worrying about that was pointless. She didn’t sound like a robber, but definitely she sounded like she felt guilty about something.
"I went to her house. She ws in her mid-thirties, and had a very dark aura, like a refugee from a terrible place. I started to ask her for more details about her situation, when I heard a little girl’s cry from inside the shed. It turned out that the daughter (just five years old) was playing in the backyard sandbox with a neighbor boy, and bullied him until he cried. The mother scolded her but the daughter refused to apologize. So the mother locked the daughter in the shed! But she had forgotten where she put the key. It sounded like child abuse to me – I thought about calling the police or Child Services. But the mother looked really repentant and the child’s wailing told me this was no time for me to dither about ’should I do this or that?’ – I got to work and opened the simple lock easily. The mother grabbed the daughter in a bear hug, crying and apologizing. The daughter looked relieved to be out of there – I figured that there was no need for me to involve the authorities. But being a kagishi, you get to witness a lot of private dramas like this."
One time he was called by some worried parents, to unlock the door of their hikikomori boy (hikikomori = person who has such social anxiety they can’t leave their room). He’d heard about hikikomori, but the scene inside went far beyond the rumors he’d heard:
"Normally I turn down clients if it looks like they want me to take sides in their little family dramas. But this time was different. They told me their son went in his room when he was fifteen, and for five years has only come out when they were asleep! He’s now twenty and they can’t take it anymore. They wanted to talk to him face-to-face, but apparently he’s been going out at night, unbeknownst to them, and buying locks, and installing them in his door! I agreed to do the job.
“As usual, the locks weren’t the hard part – only four of them. The hard part was this kid, who’s been going slowly nuts for five years, inside, screaming at me that he’s going to kill me the second I open the door. The parents are behind me, saying, ‘Let’s talk about it!’ while the kid is constantly repeating, ‘I’ll kill you all!!!’ When you back someone into a corner like that, no telling what he’ll do. By the time I got to dismantling the final lock, I felt like I was dismantling my life-span instead! "
When he finally undid the last lock, he retreated down the hall. The rest was the parents’ problem. But he couldn’t bring himself to go home just yet.
"The parents hesitated for a few minutes with their hand on the doorknob. There was an eerie silence from the room. ‘We’re coming in,’ whispered the father. No response. They slowly, timidly opened the door, when suddenly an ungodly scream tore the air. It didn’t sound like anything human - I can’t describe it. Maybe a monkey? The mother froze up at the sound, but the father seemed to make some sort of internal decision and charged in. It was really a do-or-die situation. From the room came the sounds of a terrible struggle. I couldn’t just stand by. I helped the mother evacuate,and then I went inside. There was an overwhelming sour stench, and garbage everywhere. Totally dark except for the glow of flourescent orange power lights. It didn’t look like a place where a human could live.
"Meanwhile, the father and son were grappling – but their attitude towards each other was startling. Their eyes were red with primal hatred. I hesitated to breakup such a fight, but, well, what else could I do? I stepped in and tried to separate them. The son clawed my neck until I bled – there was no way I could separate them myself. What should I do? I asked myself. Just then, the mother returned, with some people from the neighborhood, and together we separated the two. After that, the neighbors stood guard while the family tried to talk things out. But the son was so shocked that it’s not clear he even heard what people were saying. As for the father, it seemed that, he’d rather despise his son than save him. So there was no way that particular conference was going to accomplish anything. I excused myself and went home. Try as I might, I can’t think of anything good to say about that family."
BE CAREFUL OF GANGS OF ROBBERS, AND MAKERS OF DUPLICATE KEYS
So how long does it take to open the typical kind of lock we all have on our apartment doors? When I asked Mr. Mountainhill, he responded by producing such a lock, and a number of tools, and giving me a live demonstration of his technique. First, he inserted a tool called a ‘tension.’ Then he made one pass around the lock with a ‘pick’, and in five seconds, he’d opened the lock. I was flabbergasted that my, your, our doors could be opened in such a short time!
"Anyone with my tools and training can do that! Any lock can be broken open. Of course there are some very sophisticated locks, but even they have their weak points."
That’s why, Mr. Mountainhill continued, there are criminal kagishi out there. People can use the skills for good or bad.
"To buy the specialized high-quality lock-picks, one needs to show one’s locksmith license. That’s how they try to keep crooks from getting those tools. But, there’s groups of crooked kagishi that act as fronts for burglary gangs – the ‘legit’ locksmith will buy the tools, and then turn around and sell them to the gangs. If a kagishi is feeling REALLY crooked, he can get into the ‘duplicate key’ racket.
“Say a lady comes to his shop and asks him to make a spare key. Sure, he makes it, but he also makes a SPARE spare for himself. Then he uses his cell-phone to take a picture of her when she isn’t looking. He packages her picture and her key as a set – such a set commands a high price! The men who buy such sets, I don’t know what they want, but it’s a dark world out there. So you have to be very careful not only which lock you choose, but which kagishi you choose as well."
“If you have private things you want to hide, you use a lock. But most locks are just toys – they give you the FEELING of safety, not the real thing. If someone wants to see your secrets, they can! The only way to protect your privacy is by investing in a high-quality lock. The same principle applies to kagishi! We are people who go into your most private places and install the locks. If you don’t trust a guy to go to those places, why would you buy a lock from him?? Just like when choosing a lock, you have to be careful! If you forget your keys, don’t just call the first kagishi in the phone book. Take your time when choosing. Ask him plenty of questions over the phone, and if he sounds shady, you can refuse him and try another one.”
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buyakasha !
i am so going to watch out for chinese con-locksmiths