Books

Tokyo Vice

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Marco Werman talks with “Tokyo Vice” author Jake Adelstein. Adelstein’s new book chronicles his years covering Japanese organized crime and vice as a reporter for Japan’s Yomiuri Shinbun newspaper.

Jake in Tokyo-Ayano Sato. Japanese graffiti in traditional mode. Photo: Ayano Sato

Jake Adelstein reads an excerpt:

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• Book information: Tokyo Vice
• www.japansubculture.com

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is The World.  Japan’s version of the Mafia is known as the Yakuza and its activities are about what you’d expect.  The Yakuza engages in extortion, blackmail, smuggling, drugs, and gambling.  And, as Jake Adelstein learned when he was a reporter for Japan’s largest newspaper, the Yakuza is heavily involved in the sex industry and the human trafficking that feeds it.  Mr. Adelstein details the workings of Japanese organized crime in his book, “Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.”  He’s in the studios of KUOW in Seattle.  Jake Adelstein, I want to find out more about the Yakuza in a moment, but start out by telling me how you, an American kid from Missouri, ends up on the crime beat for Japan’s biggest newspaper.

JAKE ADELSTEIN:  Well, I went to Japan in 1988 because I was very interested in Japanese culture and I was very lucky to quickly find lodgings in a Zen Buddhist temple in the sort of suburbs of Tokyo.  And that gave me the cultural immersion thing going on there.  And as I was about to graduate in 1992, I decided that I would try and take the newspaper examinations so that I could test my Japanese ability.  Newspapers in Japan, and there are five major ones, have a yearly test, which are kind of like the SATs for journalists.  Usually college students take them, and if your scores are good enough, you go onto a series of interviews.  And if you pass the interviews, you get hired.  It’s highly competitive.

WERMAN:  Right.  It’s not like in the United States where you work a small newspaper in a small market and eventually, with luck, you work your way up to the New York Times or the Washington Post.

ADELSTEIN:  No, no, no, no. You get a shot at the big leagues, right from the beginning.  However, while you may be entering a big company, you’re immediately going to be sent out to the boonies, or the New Jersey of Japan to do your stint in the countryside before you can come up and play in the big leagues.

WERMAN:  Now you got into the underworld of Japan very quickly after becoming a crime reporter.  And on the so-called “good” side of things, you spent a lot of time hanging out with the police in order to cultivate them as sources.

ADELSTEIN:  Yes.  You know, sometimes Japanese police reporters are referred to “male geisha,” “otoko geisha” because so much of your job appears to be wining and dining and schmoozing with the cops in the hope that they’ll leak you some kind of detail or story, so that you can get a scoop on the competition.

WERMAN:  And just how much time are you spending with the police officers?

ADELSTEIN:  It becomes all consuming.  When you’re on the police beat, there’s really not any days off.  Usually, typically, I would get done with work 7:00 or 8:00.  Then I would go out drinking with some cops, or maybe go to their houses, then come back and check the newspaper, to see all the headlines and everything were good, about 2:00 in the morning.  Then I’d get up at 5:30 in the morning and try and catch police officers before they were going to work to see what was going to happen for the evening edition of the paper, since we had a morning and evening edition.  All my time was consumed, spent with cops or criminals, or people in between.

WERMAN:  And buying gifts for them as well.  Did you have a family at the time?  You had just come out of college.  Would you have a family or girlfriend who might have been upset by this amount of time you were spending with the cops?

ADELSTEIN:  Oh yes, my college girlfriend basically dumped me when we were in the middle of making out and I had to leave to go cover a murder, with the ultimatum, “If you leave now, you’ll never see me again,” and that was true.  I said, “Gotta go.  Gotta go to this murder scene,” and when I came back, she’d actually cleaned up the apartment and left me a very nice note, like; “I never want to see you again.”  But at least she cleaned the apartment.

WERMAN:  So the cops were among some of your better sources.  Your reporting also took you into the Japanese underworld, especially the sex industry.  In Kabukicho, this is the red light district, you provide a pretty, no-nonsense, vivid description of the place.  At one point, you go to what you call a no-panty, shabu shabu restaurant.  It’s where they cook soup and stuff, where half nude young women prepare beef dishes at your table and flirted with you while you ate.  And this is just a restaurant. What is the rest of the place like?

ADELSTEIN:  The Japanese sex industry is very, very legal.  Essentially, it works like this: anything besides actual sexual intercourse is permitted.  That leaves a variety of possibilities, and because actual intercourse is forbidden, according to the law, they spice up the menu with very strange things like girls in schoolgirl outfits or nun outfits.  There’s a place to cater to every particular whim you might have.  There was an infamous place called “Child” in which men would go in and have their genitalia shaved and diapered, and then all the women there were lactating.  The police busted them for sanitation violations because they weren’t keeping the bottled milk, mothers’ milk, in the right refrigerator kind of containers.  That’s one of the more bizarre ones.  There are clubs that are designed to look like the insides of subway cars, where you can pretend to molest a woman while she’s commuting to work.  Or you can pay money and have a woman molest you while you’re commuting to work.  And they have an actual subway car built inside the shop.

WERMAN:  And just how mainstream is this stuff?  How mainstream are the people who visit these clubs?

ADELSTEIN:  This would happen now and then: a couple of my colleagues on the newspaper would want to go out to one of these sexual massage places.  And I could never go, because they don’t accept foreigners, not that I was particularly upset about that.  But it’s very common.  The Japanese attitude towards sex and marriage is very different from what we have here.  Essentially, traditionally, it’s not considered infidelity if the man is paying for it and he’s careful.

WERMAN:  That’s extraordinary.  Now immediately, you are brought into the circle and start to cover the Japanese mafia.  That’s presumably part of the cop beat when you’re working for a newspaper in Tokyo.  Is the Yakuza like the mafia, with different families, each with a different turf and a different collection of extortion businesses?

ADELSTEIN:  The Yakuza in Japan are very interesting.  The very first time I ever met a Yakuza, I actually went to the guy’s office.  I mean, he had an office and a business card.  It wasn’t hidden at all.  In Japan, they have fan magazines.  If I wanted to know who’s running the Yamaguchi-gumi, which is the largest group with 40,000 members, I’ll just go to the newsstand, you know, pick up this month’s copy of Jitsuwa Jidai and it’ll tell me the latest personnel changes, probably with photos.

WERMAN:  Now your book focuses on one major Yakuza player, Mr. Goto, and a strange tale of how he came to the United States to get a liver transplant.  And effectively, that story that you’ve told essentially ended your newspaper career.  It’s a complicated story, but tell us what happened.

ADELSTEIN:  First of all, I should say that Goto Tadamasa is probably one of the most– was one of the richest and most powerful Yakuza in Japan.  But here’s the story.  I heard that Goto Tadamasa had come to the United States and gotten a liver transplant in the year 2001.  I thought it was an incredible story, because this man was so infamous and so definitely blacklisted by the United States.  I couldn’t figure out any way that he could have gotten into the United States.  So while I was working on that story and gathering all the facts, it leaked out to the Goto-gumi and by March of 2008, I was under police protection, and the police were telling me, if you want to deal with this guy, you need to write up everything you know about his liver transplant and that will neutralize him.  And that’s what I did.  Except I couldn’t get a Japanese periodical to write the story, so I ended up writing it for the Washington Post.

WERMAN:  Among these Yakuza, vengeance is valued and justice is theirs.  So you’ve published this book now.  Does it put you in danger?

ADELSTEIN:  Well, there was a political calculation done before I published this book, or even before I wrote the Washington Post story, is that Goto has been seen as a troublemaker by people in his own organization. And the Yamaguchi-gumi is like 40,000 people.  He is one faction.  So I approached another faction and I showed them essentially what I was about to write and I asked them for a comment.  They didn’t give me a commentary, but they did try to bribe me to not write this story.  But essentially, I was able to play one Yakuza faction against another and they kicked him out of the Yamaguchi-gumi in October of 2008, and then I felt much safer.  There’s only one other organized crime group that’s still slightly angry with me.  I’m working out an apology to those guys.

WERMAN:  Jake Adelstein, author of “Tokyo Vice,” thanks very much for your time.

ADELSTEIN:  Thank you.

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