Their website makes it appear that the audio files are only up for seven days, so don’t miss these as they come out!

Listen to Tokyo Vice on Radio 4′s Book of the Week.

Tokyo Vice: An Education on The Way of the Journalist

An evening with Jake Adelstein, investigative journalist and author of Tokyo Vice

Thursday, April 29 7-9 p.m
Richards Auditorium
(Murkland Hall G115)

Jake Adelstein has experienced the dark side of Tokyo’s urban culture and emerged to tell the tale in Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. Starting out in Japan as an American college kid in search of enlightenment, Jake got himself hired as a reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper and worked there for twelve years, becoming the only foreigner ever to gain admittance to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club. While learning how to cultivate his relationships with both the police and organized crime in pursuit of the scoops and leads, Adelstein dove deep into a part of Japan most foreigners, and even most Japanese, never see. He recounts many of these adventures in his book and will share more with his audience here on the UNH campus.

This event is brought to the UNH community by the Deans Office of the College of Liberal Arts, The English Department and The Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.

Hopefully Jake will see a few of our readers there!

Jake Adelstein will be giving a book talk for Tokyo Vice, possibly including the reading of an unpublished chapter, at Temple University on Friday, March 5. The event is organized by Temple’s Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies and is open to the public. Hope to see both familiar and new faces there!

Click here for more info.

Tokyo Vice: The Australian Edition

If you have a few minutes and are interested in some of what didn’t make the book and some of what happened afterwords, give the interview a listen. Thanks to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for asking some good questions. Thanks to Scribe Publications for that wonderfully “unique” cover. Ahem.

The accompanying article is below:

Tokyo Vice – a journalist in a crime underworld
By Robbie Buck

Imagine how tough it is to go to another country and try to eke out a career for yourself, especially if it’s a country with a different language and a vastly different culture, and then imagine if your job involved immersing yourself in the seediest and most crime-ridden parts of that country, only to have your life threatened on many occasion.
This picture is what American journalist Jake Adelstein’s life was like after having become the only reporter from the US to be admitted to the insular Tokyo metropolitan police press club and his harrowing experiences have been catalogues in his book Tokyo Vice: A Western reporter on the police beat in Japan.
He relates his relationship with yakuza bosses, including an ex-yakuza who is Adelstein’s bodyguard and driver so, “it’s kind of nice not having to drive, [so] there’s a good thing about having people want to kill you, sometimes,” he jokes.
Seriously, though, he points out that he had protection but, “the most scary thing is wondering who will they go after next.”
Things certainly do work differently in Japan and Adelstein notes that a key part of being a reporter on his round was visiting police at their homes, “you knock on the door, bring some Japanese sweets and have a chat over tea – that kind of give and take between police and reporters is part of information exchange [and] when you become a better reporter you bring the cops information they want and if it turns into a good case, you get the scoop.”
Adelstein had various sources for his book, though, and, “I don’t know how much of what some of my sources had told me were true,” but all he has been told makes for a murky picture of a dangerous world.
In fact, “there were some positive aspects of the reporting,” he modestly admits, as some of his work helped the Japanese Government look at human trafficking in that country.
He is now involved with a non-profit organisation that combats human trafficking in Japan and he is writing a new book called The Last Yakuza, a kind of biography of his bodyguard.

When I was a young reporter, circa 1995, I made an appointment with a Sumiyoshikai (住吉会)boss, Kaneko Naoya, at his office in Minami-Ginza at 7pm.  I showed up at 7:20. And Kaneko was pissed. Unreasonably so, or so I thought.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said apologizing.

“Why were you late?”

“I had some work to do.”

“Why didn’t you call?”

“I guess I should have.”

“No, ‘I guess I should have’ isn’t good enough. You should have at least called.  And you should have been here when you said you would be here in the first place.”

I bowed my head and apologized again.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were so busy.”

“I’m not busy,” he laughed. “That’s not the point.”

“Then why are you so pissed?”

“Because you promised you would be here at 7pm.”

“Is it such a big deal? It was a little promise. (大した約束でもないでしょう)”.

He was silent for a second and then stared me in the eyes, and said, “There are no small promises. You need to learn this now if you’re going to be a good reporter and if you’re going to walk in and out of our world. If you’re going to be a man. Trust is built on little promises and it can all be lost by failure to live up to them.  All promises are important. Do you know the saying, 武士に二言はない–bushi ni nigon wa nai? *Literally—A samurai does not have a second word.

I said I wasn’t familiar with the proverb and asked him what it meant.

“It means this: a samurai values his honor, his good faith more than anything and once he has given his word, once he has made a promise he always keeps that promise. If you say it, you do it.  I’m not saying I’m a samurai but this is what an honorable man does. If you didn’t think you could have been here exactly at 7pm you shouldn’t have said that you would. “

I was a little pissed when I heard this, the way anyone is when he or she gets lectured. I thought he was just being a cantankerous old bastard or giving me crap because he could.

“I’ll say it again—I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep my promise.”

“Could not or did not? Which is it?”

And before I opened my big yap one more time, I thought about it again. I’d spent too much time at a bookstore on the way there.  I stopped to have a can of coffee. I could have been there on time—I wasn’t. For him, my answer was going to be critical in his decision if he could really trust me. I could feel that.

“Did not. I’m sorry I did not come here on time. I do not have an excuse. I will try not to do it again.

(二回と同じ失敗しないよう頑張ります.).”

He offered me a cup of tea and smiled.

“That was almost the right answer. Don’t try, just do it.

（惜しかったな。がんばるんじゃないよ。やるんだよ。約束を守るんです。）

He then very politely explained to me why I should pay attention to his words.

“When you’re a yakuza or a reporter or a cop, people count on you to keep your word, to do what you’ve said you’ll do.  In our business, sometimes we got to war—over turf, over money, over a meaningless quarrel. But that’s part of the business. If we’re going to bump heads with the Kokusuikai and one of my soldiers says that he’ll be at his post at seven pm sharp and he’s not there—what do you think will happen? Maybe the guy he’s supposed to back up will have to go in alone—maybe his buddy will get killed.  Maybe we’ll lose the chance to make the strike. Apologies don’t cut it. You’re a reporter, you have deadlines.  If you don’t meet your deadline—what happens? Can you just blow it off? Do you think your editor will just say, ‘no problem, we’ll just leave part of the paper blank.’  I don’t think so. You can get fired for things like that.  I don’t know how it is in America, and maybe I don’t know how it is for the civilians but for us, a man’s word is the most important thing in the world.  You need to learn not to promise things lightly and to know the difference between promises you can’t keep and promises you don’t keep.  Nine times out of ten, the failure to keep a promise is in yourself, not something you can blame on the world.”

I nodded once more but I think I smirked a little and he raised his finger and pointed at me quite forcefully and said, “And when you break a promise, you need to show in your attitude that you are sincerely sorry. And you should try to make amends.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“I’d like you to listen to what I’ve told you and take it to heart.  If people don’t think they can trust you, you will never be a good reporter. You have to show them that they can trust you. Every little promise you keep, every time you’re punctual, every time you do something that you said you would do—you build trust. And every missed appointment, every favor you forget, every loan you fail to repay, every time you say you’ll call and don’t—these things add up.  You do some things right.  But you still don’t get it. Think about what I’m saying. And we’ll call it even.”

Kaneko passed away years ago and I’m still not batting a hundred on keeping my promises. I still fail to keep them but I try my best to uphold them and when I can’t do it, I try to make amends as best as I can.  Lately, I’ve been so bombarded with work and other things, that I have a very hard time keeping up to date or writing back to everyone who’s read the book and is kind enough to send me a letter.  I haven’t promised I’d respond to each person but I do a feel a duty to do it—it seems like the bare minimum of required politeness.

Honor is a hard currency to trade in.  There are promises and debts that can lock you down and not let you go.  In the thick of a scary time in my life, I promised Mochizuki-san, ex-yakuza boss, my friend, bodyguard and driver—that no matter what happened I would look after him and his family. And he promised that he’d lay down his life for me if he had to, and that if he failed to do his job, he’d find the person who took me out and kill him.  Sure, it’s pretty melodramatic crap but that’s how it went.  I meant what I said and he meant what he said. It can be a cumbersome thing.

Sometimes, I’d like to leave Japan and not come back but I owe the man and his family. And until I’m reasonably sure that he, his wife and their son are taken care of, I can’t leave.  When he had to move out of his apartment on short notice, I put up the money for his moving expenses. When his car broke down, I bought him another one. I’m not wealthy but these things are essential and I scrambled each time to find the money so I could keep what I see is part of my promise to him. He has severe diabetes and that means that a minor injury can set in motion a chain of events that might result in him losing his hands or his feet. Necrosis. He’s in the hospital today. He bought a new pair of shoes and they didn’t fit well and in a short time, his foot was severely infected. It’s touch and go whether they’ll amputate or not. I’m hoping they won’t have to do it.  But even then, I’ll still take care of him. I’ll find work for him, even if he can’t walk.

It’s the same way with the Polaris Project Japan. I said I’d be a director on the board and that I would take on certain duties. Honestly, I want out of that as well, sometimes.  Valuable things come out of the work but it’s hard.  Last week, the information brought to us about a homosexual pedophile ring that makes child pornography was so horrible and unpleasant that it made me physically ill. The informant wanted us to validate the evidence before going to the cops,  and he showed it to us. Horrible, horrible, horrible. Some of what we deal with gives me flashbacks that keep me up for days. However, I said I’d do it and I’m not going to back out just because in retrospect that promise is slightly detrimental to my mental health or I didn’t quite see what I would get myself into.

God knows, there are some promises that I have colossally failed to uphold. My marriage vows would be up there. I could argue that I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but I don’t have a good excuse. No one put a gun to my head. I could argue that I’m not solely at fault but so what? It doesn’t matter. All I can do is make amends for that—I’ll be paying them off financially, emotionally, and in many other ways for the rest of my life. And I should.   Not all promises are stated either. There are some promises that are understood. Journalists have an unstated promise that they will protect their sources. The sources don’t have to protect the journalist. And I can’t say I expect them to do it.  Promises are often unilateral. And sometimes honor.

As a journalist, I have a promise to protect my sources and my friends and family. I have gone to extraordinary lengths to do that and I have done some terrible things in the process. I don’t regret keeping that promise. I only regret the times I have been unable to do it. Those are the things that haunt me.

The thing is that the damages people can suffer are immense, when you fail to do your job and honor your word as a journalist.  If you blow a cop source, he might be disciplined, fired, or since technically they could be seen as  violating the government worker confidentiality laws–they might even go to jail.  If you don’t conceal a yakuza source–they might be expelled temporarily from their organization, banished for life, or just vanish, completely.   If you are careless with government sources, they might be demoted, fired or harassed for the rest of their careers.  Sometimes, to protect a source you have to kill a story. I’ve done it before. But I’d rather lose the story than lose what little honor I have left.  There will always be other news. People only have one life.

Even when we realize that we’ve made shortsighted, foolish, or difficult promises–it’s doesn’t nullify the promise. If we could retroactively change every promise we didn’t like or wish we hadn’t made—a vow wouldn’t mean anything at all. Of course, it’s hard to learn to not make those promises in the first place. Maybe that’s even harder than keeping a promise, learning the gravitas of our words. But when you break them, no matter how foolish they might have been–if you don’t at least regret it and ponder it, you haven’t yet learned anything. And ultimately that lack of regret makes a person untrustworthy and prone to do it again. People remember every missed appointment, every casually promised thing not delivered, or book not returned. Just as they remember every little favor you have done, or kindness you have bestowed upon them, or little promise to them that you kept.  These all add up when we judge a person and ourselves and how others judge us as well.  And if they don’t, they should.

I don’t have many close friends and it’s probably because I hold people to the same standards that I try to live up to. Maybe that’s not fair.  I don’t know. But the people who are my close friends, are invariably very good about keeping their word.  They don’t forget. They pay their debts. Alien Cop (as I still think of him) may be a little shady, but if he says for example, “Oh, I have a good book about the new revisions of the organized crime laws. I’ll bring it to you next time we go drinking”—well, he will bring it. I almost never have to remind him. If he says he’ll do it, he does it.  If he says, “I’ll call you back tomorrow”—he calls. It’s not a big deal, but over time, his pattern of behavior has established that he is trustworthy.  I don’t really believe that there are no small promises but each one has considerable weight.

The keeping your word thing has a lot to do with leadership, I think. There are hundreds of crappy books written about leadership.  I haven’t read many that impressed me. I’m not a leader. I work best alone with a small group of people. And I also believe if you have people following you, then you should know where the hell you are going. I have a terrible sense of direction, the proverbial sense and the literal sense, what the Japanese would call a方向音痴 (hook-onchi). Well, actually, I’m not bad navigating on horseback and out in the wild but unfortunately I don’t really have the space for a horse here.

However, I’ll defer to what  Shibata-kumicho once told me  about what it means to be a yakuza boss. I’ve internalized the words so well, that I forget they are not my own.

“If you are a leader, the people who follow you have to know that you are as good as your word and that you won’t leave them stranded behind and that if you did, you’d make every effort in the world come back for them. Or that at the very least, you wouldn’t forget about them—that you’d agonize over the decision. Otherwise, no one will follow you. The measure of a man is the promises he’s kept and the promises he hasn’t. In the end, that all we have. Our honor, our memories and the decisions we’ve made.”

I’m not a cop, or a samurai, or a yakuza but I admire some of their ideals. Maybe, I’ll come close to living up to them someday.

.

I also feel that I should say I am not a hero. I’ve also apparently broken most of the major rules of journalism that most journalists in the west follow so please don’t see me as an example to emulate, to all you budding journalists out there.

However, personally, I still feel that really the four most important things in journalism are 1) get the the story anyway you can 2) write the truth 3) try to write something that makes the world a better place 4) protect your sources and your friends. I’ve always considered the fourth one to be the most important of them all. I have not always been able to keep that rule.

I appreciate the compliments but I’m deeply flawed as a person, I’ve been a lousy husband, and I could be a better father to my children. I’ve made moral compromises that I’m not proud of but in my defense I’ve tried to do what’s right and protect my sources, my family and my friends and innocent people victimized by the predators of our society. I’ve done some dark things to make sure those people were protected. I’d hate to see my karma score.

A number of people who read the book have pledged money and/or time to the Polaris Project and Polaris Project Japan, both of which fight modern day slavery, and I’m very grateful for their efforts. Thank you. It’s nice to see some good come out of the book.

Below is one letter that particularly moved me and made me contemplate a lot about what has happened in the last two years. It’s representative of many of the letters I’ve gotten and I think it’s good food for thought.

どうもありがとうございました。

NOTE: PLEASE DO NOT READ THIS LETTER IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED THE BOOK YET.

Jake-san, (Though after finishing your book, perhaps sama would be
more appropriate)

You certainly weren’t exaggerating when you said the book got progressively darker. Here I was initially thanking you for the entertainment and information your story provided me, but then… at the end…the death of Sekiguchi, Helena’s disappearance, the strains placed on your friends and family… I found myself skipping ahead just because I wanted to know that everything would be okay. I guess it should be expected though that in a story filled with questions of the ends justifying the means and the gray area between the moral and immoral that there’s no such thing as a truly happy ending.

I don’t know if i could ever do what you did in writing about all this. You put everything on the line for a cause you believed in and there’s no telling the amount of good you did just in tearing down the Goto-gumi let alone your continued work in the Polaris Project as noted on the book flap. I get the sense that if I were to call you a hero, or define your actions as heroic, you’d likely point out the ambiguity of some actions you had to take, as noted in one of your latter conversations with “Alien Cop”. But risking your life for the greater good…God bless you man.

Though questions come to mind about some of your cases, I won’t take up your time with them. I did however want to offer up two thoughts. Firstly, in your epilogue when one of Goto’s mistresses compared you to Goto himself. I reflected back to a moment recently in my life. A couple months ago there was the national news story about the “Craigslist Killer” who mugged three women and killing one of them in the Massachusetts area. The alleged killer, Phil Markoff was a friend of mine through high school, and we were both very similar in personality. For a while I questioned what separates him from me, under what circumstances could I have become what he allegedly is? It took a good friend to remind me that I could never find happiness in hurting others, I’d only find guilt. And if the chips were really down, I’d rather suffer myself than inflict it upon others. So regardless of whatever you had to do, you apparently stuck to your efforts, and the world is a better place because of you. Thank you.

Second, and finally, in reading your epilogue, I too don’t know how much I believe in karma and reincarnation, (raised Baptist, now more spiritual than anything) but I do believe in the immortality of the human soul. From the experiences in my life and my studying of various religions I don’t believe the departed ever leave us entirely. So for what it’s worth, from one amateur theologian’s perspective, wherever Sekiguchi and Helena are, I’m sure they’re proud of what you have accomplished for the betterment of others. Keep on fighting the good fight; I’m already planning my donation to the Polaris Project.

【書評】米国人元新聞記者がえぐり出す日本の闇社会

元読売新聞記者のジェイク・アデルスタイン氏の近著「トーキョー・バイス」は、居直ったヤクザから始末するぞと静かな脅しを掛かけられた著者が、たばこの煙をもくもくと上げながら取材戦略を練るシーンで始まる。

同書はアデルスタイン氏が警視庁記者クラブメンバーで唯一の米国人記者として連続殺人事件などを追いかけた12年間の取材の追想録で、ヤクザの中でも特に暴力的な勢力をかぎまわって窮地に陥るに至った経緯が描かれている。

「トーキョー･バイス」 に収められたのは、後藤忠正氏という病んだヤクザのボスと手下の３人がどうやって米当局のお膳立てで米国での肝臓移植手術にこぎつけたかを探ったアデルス タイン氏の調査報道の記録。今回の出版は結果的に、アデルスタイン氏の知名度を高め殺害を難しくしたため、この本は著者の救い主とも言える。

アデルスタイン氏は「ヤクザをムカつかせるようになる」前は上智大学の学生だった。ミズーリ州生まれの同氏はテレビ局や球団なども持つ日本の大手メディアの読売新聞の入社試験を気まぐれで受けたという。

超組織的犯罪

「トー キョー･バイス」は日本の警察と犯罪組織との複雑な関係を説明する入門書だ。ヤクザは組織犯罪の「組織性」を重視する。暴力事件を目立たぬようにしたり、 社会に隠された欲望の一部である売春や麻薬を提供したりすることで、警察当局や大衆から黙許されているという。

アデルスタイン氏が警視庁を担当していた時期に、ヤクザは恐喝と売春、麻薬から、不動産詐欺や株式市場操作にまで手を広げていった。今でも東京証券取引所はヤクザの市場への干渉を公式文書の中で「反社会的勢力」と呼びながら遠まわしに認めている。

この本で詳述された最も有名な事件はルーシー・ブラックマン事 件。東京の歓楽街六本木でホステスとして働いていた英国人女性ルーシーさんが、後に複数の婦女暴行の罪で起訴された男の自宅近くで体を一部切断された形で 発見された事件だ。この事件の取材を通じてアデルスタイン氏は日本の風俗産業の世界に深く潜入していくことになった。

ア デルスタイン氏はその間ずっと、自身の外国人としての特異性を強みとして利用できたという。米国人を抹殺すれば警察から一斉摘発されかねないというヤクザ の不安が自身の命を救ったと同氏は記している。また米中央情報局（ＣＩＡ）やイスラエルの情報機関モサドのスパイではないかと疑われたことで命拾いしたと いう。

ほめ殺し

アデルスタイン氏はある凶悪犯から「間抜けで鈍感で、頑固で無謀だが、それこそ良いジャーナリストを作る要素だと思う」とお世辞を言われたと記しており、この本の大部分でこうした同氏に対する数々のほめ殺し発言が映画タッチで再現されている。

同氏の語り口は心をつかむものだが、結末の紹介を急ぐ筆者の緊張感ものぞかせる。この本で最も迫力のある部分である後藤氏の肝臓移植話は、冒頭に触れられた後、再び登場するのは250ページ後だ。

後藤氏は過去と縁を切り仏門に入ったという僧侶の話をアデルスタイン氏は懐疑的に伝えているが、東京で少しでも安心して暮らすには十分かもしれない。

（ロッキー･スウィフト氏はブルームバーグ・ニュースの記者で、内容は同氏自身の見解です）

See the Japanese review on Bloomberg’s site here.

Read the English version of the review here.

After Jake’s interview on NPR earlier this month, Thomas Dreisbach and other interns put their skills to work in editing a segment about Jake’s time covering the case of Gen Sekine, animal breeder turned serial killer in Saitama. It’s a fun, quick-and-dirty summary of “The Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances, Part 1 & 2″ (pages 102-135), and artist Kathryn DeFeo got Jake’s hairdo down pretty good.

Check out NPR: In Other Words, Japan Confidential

By the way, I was angered, a few days go, when someone posted my parent’s address on the thread, urging the Goto-gumi to pay them a visit. Not very nice. And also very typical of the low level of discourse that you often find on that BBS.

2 Channel

My favorite scratchings on the blog so far are the one’s accusing me of being a CIA spy, which I’ve heard before, but also allegations that I’m actually a pawn of the Yamaguchi-gumi top executives, paid off to get Goto out of the way.  I’ve had some unpleasant things said about myself before, most of them deserved, but I don’t think anyone has ever accused me of working FOR the yakuza before.  The person writing the blog did a nice job of collecting of what I’ve written in Japanese about the yakuza, about Goto-gumi, and what happened at UCLA. He’s also collected some supporting evidence and some of what others have written about the Goto-gumi and UCLA and myself as well. On the other hand,  some of what is attributed to me, I didn’t actually write but that’s okay.

If you read Japanese, you will find some amusing sections which recreate some of the more heated exchanges I had with Goto supporters and anti-semetic conspiracy theory loving bloggers.  It’s kind of a thrill to have that ultimate barometer of Japan subculture, 2 channel, actually devote a whole page to me and the book. I don’t know who put it up but thank you. どうもありがとうがございます。

Jake Adelstein’s “Tokyo Vice” at The Page 99 Test