The Dark Side of the Rising Sun
Jake Adelstein Delivers Tokyo Vice

By John Hood

“Either erase the story, or we’ll erase you.” That’s what the soft-spoken Yakuza member told reporter Jake Adelstein one day in a Tokyo hotel lobby. Seems Adelstein had uncovered the facts behind crime boss Tadamasa Goto’s Stateside liver transplant, and since those facts were not very flattering to the Godfather, his minion wanted to ensure they were kept sequestered. Or else.

At the time Goto was head of the 950-strong Goto-gumi, a branch of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest organized crime group. And he was considered “the most notorious Japanese gangster of them all.” That Goto had made a deal with the FBI in order to receive treatment did not bode well – for anyone.

How a nice Jewish boy from the Midwest found himself face-to-face with some of the baddest men on the planet is what lies behind the rapaciously revealing "Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan" (Pantheon, $26), a book that steps on so many powerful toes it almost never saw the light of day.

In fact Adelstein told Tokyo Reporter that “the international branch of [his book’s] Japanese publisher decided to pull out after doing a risk analysis.” Then again, when a publisher discovers that “their offices may be bombed, their employees may be kidnapped and that violent retaliation was likely,” a little healthy reticence seems almost understandable.

They weren’t the only ones afraid to print what the gaijin had uncovered. The Japanese press “didn’t want to touch the story” either. But a cop Adelstein trusted told him to ‘publish or perish,’ so he made arrangements to get out the story through The Washington Post. That move probably saved his life.

If all this sounds like the perfect set-up to an action-packed crime spree, well, you’re partly correct. "Tokyo Vice" is action-packed, and it’s as spreeful as any 40,000 member organized crime clan can get. But Vice also explores the less glamorous side of the Tokyo underworld, including, as he wrote in WaPo, “serial killers who doubled as pet breeders [and] child pornographers who abducted junior high-school girls.” And Adelstein did it all while walking the police beat for the 10-million reader Yomiuri Shimbun, easily Japan’s largest daily.

Adelstein spent a dozen years of 80-hour work weeks with the behemoth paper, and the relentlessness of Japanese media life is another enthralling aspect of Vice. It’s also about as foreign as the 9 fingers of a Yakuza soldier. Here reporting is not just a profession; it’s a calling more akin to the priesthood. And to succeed you’re expected to devote the whole of your life to the cause.

Or as one of Adelstein’s first mentors tells him after the obligatory hiring ceremony: “It’s not about learning. It’s about unlearning. It’s about cutting off ties, cutting out things, getting rid of preconceptions, losing everything you thought you knew… [Y]ou have to amputate your past life. You have to let go of your pride, your free time, your hobbies, your preferences and your opinions.”

Adelstein complies, and, bolstered by some good old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity, he comes through at a rapid clip. Within weeks he’s sharing donuts with detectives and scooping some of the more seasoned reporters. Within months he’ll be breaking some of the seamiest stories ever to see print anywhere.

"Tokyo Vice" takes us through it all. It’s fast, it’s keen, and it’s perhaps the most candid account of the dark side of the Land of Rising Sun anyone has ever dared publish. You want bang for your buck? Buy this book.

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