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hardcover $26.00
Pantheon Books
Paddyfield.com
Powells.com (USA)
More reviews by Todd Shimoda
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein
TOKYO VICE is a fascinating, highly readable, and unflinching story of an American reporter working for the Japanese newspaper, Yomiuri Shinbun. The memoir covers JAKE ADELSTEIN's 12-year career reporting on crime and vice, as well as the beginnings of his work fighting human trafficking. After graduating from Sophia University in Tokyo, Adelstein applied for one of the few positions at the newspaper available for new graduates. He scores just well enough on the tests to get hired and is assigned to the regional office in one of the outlying suburbs of Tokyo.
The story is fascinating, revealing not only the inner-workings of Japanese journalism, but also the sex industry, organized crime, and the police. Despite being a gaijin (the somewhat disparaging word for foreigner), Adelstein does a fairly good job of fitting into the otherwise all Japanese staff. Being the newbie, he finds out he must serve his elders tea and perform many of the menial tasks such as typing in sports scores.
But it's getting the scoop over the competition that matters most. Adelstein is a quick learner, and soon picks up the unique Japanese journalism rules of gathering information. He must cozy up to police officers as well as criminals, bring them gifts as well as information to trade like baseball cards. In order to get information about a murder from a police detective, Adelstein trades him information he learned from a gangster about another crime. These deals are expected and encouraged, and are built on weeks and months of building mutual trust. In American journalism, such intimate relationships are considered unethical.
The story is fast-paced, reading like good hard-boiled detective fiction. The cases he covers include rare murders, like the homicide of an ex-gangster dog breeder. The case takes many turns and uncovers many unsavory characters. Adelstein works hard and has a few successes in the case. He gains respect from most of his colleagues, and along the way makes a good friend with a police detective, whom he visits at his home, bringing him cigarettes and ice cream for his wife and children.
After a few years, now married and a father, Adelstein is transferred to Tokyo, stationed in the Shinjuku/Kubuki-cho section of Tokyo, one of the centers for the sex business. The newspaper's office, improbably, is in the police department building. As in the suburb office, Adelstein has to cozy up to the police as well as the sex workers to get a good story. Yes, getting cozy in the vice business does include hands-on experience. One of those stories turns out to be the well-known case of Lucie Blackman. A young British woman who worked in the hostess business disappears after a date with a client.
Following the leads in the Blackman case leads Adelstein into the world of hostess bars, which are typically staffed with young Western women who serve drinks and provide company to the Japanese men, but rarely sex. It comes across as a sleazy, demeaning business, but relatively safe. Lucie Blackman however picked the wrong man to date away from the club. He turns out to be a serial rapist and killer.
The case is not given much police attention at first, the reason given is that it's the sex business and women are always disappearing with men. Plus rape is not a severely punished crime in Japan, practically ignored if the woman is in the sex business. If not for the presence of Lucie's relatives in Japan pressuring the police and media, the case may have faded away. Eventually her body turns up and the suspect is tried in court, with surprising results.
Adelstein goes further into the depths of vice and organized crime, finding leads on human trafficking and a yakuza (organized crime) boss who may have bribed his way up the waiting list for a liver transplant at an American university hospital. Both cases take over his life, making him a morose and cynical person, and eventually the crime boss threatens his life, his wife and children's lives, and those of his sources.
As the cases wrap up, Adelstein must look to his conduct in his career and his life. He realizes he must change, somehow return to a normal existence away from the underworld and floating world, while also continuing to fight some of the injustice he discovered. And wallowed in.
Todd Shimoda
13/01/2010
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