This is my next book order from Amazon:
Q&A with Jake Adelstein
Question: What drew you to Japan in the first place, and how did you wind up going to university there?
Jake Adelstein: In high school I had many problems with anger and self-control. I had been studying Zen Buddhism and karate, and I thought Japan would be the perfect place to reinvent myself. It could be that my pointy right ear draws me toward neo-Vulcan pursuits–I don’t know.
When I got to Japan, I managed to find lodgings in a Soto Zen Buddhist temple where I lived for three years, attending zazen meditation at least once a week. I didn’t become enlightened, but I did get a better hold on myself.
Question: How did you become a journalist for the most popular Japanese-language newspaper?
Jake Adelstein: The Yomiuri Shinbun runs a standardized test, open to all college students. Many Japanese firms hire young grads this way. My friends thought that the idea of a white guy trying to pass a Japanese journalist’s exam was so impossibly quixotic that I wanted to prove them wrong. I spent an entire year eating instant ramen and studying. I managed to find the time to do it by quitting my job as an English teacher and working as a Swedish-massage therapist for three overworked Japanese women two days a week. It turned out to be a slightly sleazy gig, but it paid the bills.
There was a point when I was ready to give up studying and the application process. Then, when I was in Kabukicho on June 22, 1992, I asked a tarot fortune-telling machine for advice on my career path, and it said that with my overpowering morbid curiosity I was destined to become a journalist, a job at which I would flourish, and that fate would be on my side. I took that as a good sign. I still have the printout.
I did well enough on the initial exam to get to the interviews, and managed to stumble my way through that process and get hired. I think I was an experimental case that turned out reasonably well.
Question: How did you succeed in uncovering the underworld in a country that is famously “closed” or restricted to foreigners? Do you think people talked more openly to you because you were American?
Jake Adelstein: I think Japan is actually more open than people give it credit for. However, to get the door open, you really need to become fluent in the spoken and written language. The written language was a nightmare for me.
You’re right, though; it was mostly an advantage to be a foreigner–it made me memorable. The yakuza are outsiders in Japanese society, and perhaps being a fellow outsider gave us a weird kind of bond. The cops investigating the yakuza also tend to be oddballs. I was mentored into an early understanding and appreciation of the code of both the yakuza and the cops. Reciprocity and honor are essential components for both.
I also think the fact that I’m too stupid to be afraid when I should be, and annoyingly persistent as well–these things didn’t help me in long-term romance, but they helped me as a crime reporter.
Question: Do you feel that investigative journalism is being threatened or aided by the expansion of the Internet and news blogs, and the closing down of many printed newspapers?
Jake Adelstein: In one sense it is being threatened because investigative journalism is rarely a solo project. It requires huge amounts of resources, capital, and time to really do one story correctly. Legal costs and FOIA documents are expensive things. The bigger the target, the greater the risk and the more money is required. The second-biggest threat to investigative journalism is crooked lawyers and corporate shills who sue as a harassment tactic. In general, it’s rather hard and time-consuming to be an army of one. It took me almost three years to break the story about yakuza receiving liver transplants at UCLA on my own. The costs in financial terms were immense, and so were the losses along the way. A team of reporters could have done the work much faster, probably.
However, these things said, blogging is also a great source of news that might go unreported, or be overlooked, by the mainstream media. Twitter, too, has had an interesting impact, actually helping a journalist get out of jail in the case of James Karl Buck. We’re beginning to see kind of a public option in investigative journalism, too–such as things like ProPublica. They do an awesome job at investigative journalism, partly through donations, and they have a great web site. So the Internet is not all bad for investigative journalism, as long as we proceed with caution and forethought. At the same time, real intelligence-gathering work actually requires you to put down your cell phone and your computer and get off your ass and meet people in the real world. As odious as it may be, we have to sift through garbage, pound the pavement, and visit the scene of the crime. Not all answers can be found in front of a keyboard, or on Google, and the “it’s all in the database” mentality is the bane of reporting and often generates shoddy reporting.
The individual journalist can do great investigative work–it’s just a lot harder, and usually financially difficult to do unless you’re independently wealthy, like Bruce Wayne. Most of us don’t have the time or the resources or the luxury of holding down a day job and doing investigative journalism on the side, as a hobby.
Question: What do you hope your American audience can learn from your book?
Jake Adelstein: I think everyone will take away something different from the book. I suppose you can learn a lot about how journalism works in Japan, how the police work, and how the yakuza work. I would also hope that people take away from the book an understanding of some of the things I really like about Japan and the Japanese, things like reciprocity, honor, loyalty, and stoic suffering. I think in Japan, I learned how important it is to keep your word, to never forget your debts–and not just the financial ones–and to make repayment in due course. Perhaps that’s what honor is all about.
There’s a word in Japanese, hanmen kyoshi, which means, more or less, “the teacher who teaches by his bad example.” At times, I’m an excellent hanmen kyoshi in the book.
Everything I’ve learned that’s important to me is in the book somewhere. I hope there’s something universal in the contents beyond just making people aware of cultural differences between the United States and Japan, or reiterating the importance and value of investigative journalism. Like a book I would choose to read to my children, I hope there’s some kind of moral to it all. Maybe the real lesson is to be kind and helpful to the people you care about whenever you can, because it’s good for them, and good for you, and your time with them may be much shorter than you imagined.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A young Japanese-schooled Jewish-American who worked as a journalist at Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun during the 1990s, debut author Adelstein began with a routine, but never dull, police beat; before long, he was notorious worldwide for engaging the dirtiest, top-most villains of Japan’s organized criminal underworld, the yakuza. A pragmatic but sensitive character, Adelstein’s worldview takes quite a beating during his tour of duty; thanks to his immersive reporting, readers suffer with him through the choice between personal safety and a chance to confront the evil inhabiting his city. He learns that “what matters is the purity of the information, not the person providing it,” considers personal and societal theories behind Tokyo’s illicit and semi-illicit pastimes like “host and hostess clubs,” where citizens pay for the illusion of intimacy: “The rates are not unreasonable, but the cost in human terms are incredibly high.” Adelstein also examines the investigative reporter’s tendency to withdraw into cynicism (“when a reporter starts to cool down, it’s very hard… ever to warm up again”) but faithfully sidesteps that urge, producing a deeply thought-provoking book: equal parts cultural exposé, true crime, and hard-boiled noir.
Here is a chapter from the book:
From Part I
“Bury Me in a Shallow Grave”
Like many reporters, I covered the yakuza for quite some time without actually ever dealing with them directly. That changed very quickly when a call came in from Naoya Kaneko, aka “The Cat,” the number two man in the Sumiyoshi-kai for all of Saitama, who left a message with The Face. He wanted to speak to me. This unnerved The Face, and when he passed on the message, he asked nervously, “You’re not in trouble, are you? Why does the Sumiyoshi-kai want to talk to you?”
I told him that I didn’t think I was in trouble and that I had no idea why he wanted to talk to me. I thought to ask Yamamoto how I should proceed, but then I thought twice: he’d probably say to ignore the call or dispatch a senior reporter to go with me. I told The Face I’d handle it.
This was at a time in my life when I was a regular at the Maid Station, ostensibly teaching English after hours to some employees. Maid Station was in the “image health” genre of adult entertainment. The girls dressed as maids, referred to the customers as “master,” and would bathe you, massage you, and blow you. Five of the girls were planning a holiday to Australia, and their solicitous manager, whom I had known when he drove a cab in Saitama, arranged for them to have private English lessons. That was me.
The club was located in Minami Ginza, in the heart of Sumiyoshi-kai territory, and I pondered the possibilities why Kaneko had called. Was I misbehaving on his turf? Maybe he was going to blackmail me? But what for? I was a single guy, and in Saitama during the nineties, going for a “sexual massage” was as Japanese as sushi.
I really didn’t know what to do, but my cop source assured me that Kaneko was not a threat and that it could actually be good for me as a reporter to know him, so I called Kaneko’s office from a public telephone.
The guy who picked up was loud and surly. I identified myself, and there was a long pause while he seemed to be figuring out how to address me. I had to repeat my name seven times. Then the guy spoke to Kaneko. It went something like this: “Hey, there’s this fucking gaijin on the phone, and he says he’s a reporter. Do you know this asshole?”
Kaneko roared at him, “Cover the mouthpiece of that phone, and treat the man with respect. I’ve been waiting for his call.”
I’d expected Kaneko to come off as a raspy, threatening, unintelligible thug, but when he came on the line, his voice had an amazingly smooth finish. He sounded like Ernst Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever. He had what the Japanese call a cat-stroking voice, a kind of purr. “So you’re Jake,” he began. “I apologize for calling you at work. I didn’t know how else to reach you. And please forgive my underlings. They are rude, impolite, and uneducated. Please take no offense.”
“Umm, none taken. What can I do for you?”
“I have an unusual problem. It’s rather sensitive, and I was hoping that you might be able to help me solve it.”
“Well, I’m not really in the habit of solving problems for yakuza.”
“Of course not. I realize that I’m putting you into an awkward position. However, I would very much like to talk to you about this personal matter. I could make it worth your while . . .”
“I’d be happy to talk to you. I just can’t accept anything from you.”
“All right. When would you be available?”
“How about after lunch tomorrow?”
“Good. Thank you. Here is how to find me . . . If you get lost, just ask around. People know where I am.”
Since I have no sense of direction, I did get lost and had to ask the tout at a “pink salon”* to point me the way to Kaneko’s office. The tout politely drew me a map. He then mentioned that I’d be welcome to come in and sample the salon’s pleasures. Normally foreigners weren’t allowed, but any friend of Kaneko was a friend of the establishment. Besides, he added wryly, business was slow in the afternoon.
I declined. I had a job to do.
Located just past a row of sex clubs, a Vietnamese restaurant, and a taxidermist, The Cat’s headquarters looked like a branch office of a small construction firm. There was a company name on the glass door that slid open at my touch. In the reception area, a scary-looking fellow was sitting on a sofa, thumbing through a pornographic magazine. He looked up, got up, and saying not a word, knocked on the door to an office.
Out stepped Naoya Kaneko. Kaneko was about five feet seven, probably in his late fifties. His eyes were narrow, he was a little thin on top, he had a goatee. Dark suit, white shirt, paisley tie, black loafers. Two gold rings on his right hand. He looked more like a politician than the second in command of the Sumiyoshi-kai organized crime group.
We shook hands, and Kaneko motioned for me to sit on one of the three dark brown leather sofas. He sat down opposite me. The scary looking guy stepped out of the room and came back with two cups of green tea served in lacquer saucers (meant to show respect).
Kaneko sipped his tea, but I let mine sit.
“You don’t want the tea?”
“I’m not a big green tea fan,” I replied, waving my hand.
“How about coffee?”
“Sounds good.”
“Right.” He turned to the scary guy and barked, “Bring him some coffee.”
He seemed relieved when the coffee came and I brought the cup to my lips.
Now we began our formal introduction. Kaneko handed me his meishi, which I took with both hands and bowed. I then handed him my card, which he in turn received with both hands and bowed (but not as deeply as I had)…
We made small talk. He asked me how a foreigner had gotten hired by the Yomiuri Shimbun, and I summarized my life in Japan up until that point, including going to school at Sophia University. He listened and we chatted, all unnervingly normal.
“I wish I’d gone to college,” he said. “It would have been a different life for me. I could have gone. You’re lucky that you had the opportunity.”
I acknowledged that and then cleared my throat and got to the point: why had he called me?
“I heard that you’re trustworthy and that you’re good at what you do.”
“Who did you hear this from?”
“That would be telling. Let’s just say I’ve heard good things about you. There’s something I need to know, and I think you could find it out. I think you would keep it to yourself too. People say you’re like a Japanese, an honorable man.”
“That’s news to me. You sure you have the right gaijin?”
“I’m sure.”
It’s not often a yakuza pays you a compliment. It was probably insincere, but I didn’t mind.
So I returned the favor. “Well, I hear that for a yakuza you’re not a total scumbag. I hear that you’re a gentleman and more of a white-collar criminal than a thug. In your line of business, I guess that would mean you’re like Mother Teresa.”
He chuckled at that and asked who I knew that knew him. I told him that would be telling. It was a touché that made him smile.
He offered me a cigarette, which I accepted, which he lit, and which I tried not to inhale. He, on the other hand, lit up and inhaled so deeply that the tobacco sparked, and then he pointed at my cup of tea, sitting untouched.
“You want to ask me why I don’t like green tea?” I asked.
Kaneko laughed. “No, but the story is about tea, actually. You see, a few detectives from the Saitama police force drop in here once or twice a week. I usually offer them a cup of tea, maybe some pastries. We chat; they leave. That’s the usual protocol. But lately, when I put tea out for them, they won’t touch it. They won’t touch anything. They make a point of refusing.”
“That’s a problem?”
“Let me finish. I asked them why they were refusing my small gesture of hospitality, and they said that the word on the police force is that I’m bribing a cop, that I have one of the detectives in my pocket. These guys tell me, ‘If we take anything from you—tea, candy, even a calendar—Internal Affairs will be all over us.’ So they refuse.”
“Why is that a problem for you?”
“Because now everyone in the organization thinks that the police are just posing. They think that I’m now an informant for the police, that I’ve turned.”
“Because they won’t drink your tea?”
“Exactly. I think the cops really believe that I’m bribing one of them, but the people I work with don’t believe them. They think it’s a police ruse to make me look like I’m not an informant. If this keeps up, I’m going to be in serious trouble.”
“What would serious trouble mean in your line of work?”
“It would mean that my own crew and the people I have raised like my children are going to drag me out to the mountains of Chichibu in the middle of the night, shoot me in the head, and bury me in a shallow grave.”
“Ouch. Could it get any worse?”
“Oh, yes. They might make me dig my own grave, beat me to a pulp, and then bury me alive. But I don’t think that will happen. I’ve been around for a long time. I think I’ve earned enough respect to be buried only after I’m completely dead.”
I was about to laugh and looked for some indication that he was making a joke. Didn’t see one. The Cat must have been pretty desperate, calling me.
“Well, who do you have in your pocket?” I had to ask.
“No one. I don’t bribe cops. And I’m not a snitch. That’s not how I do business. The cops and I have always had a good working relationship, so I have no idea where this shit is coming from.” He was hunched over the table now, almost whispering to me. Our noses could have touched. It could have been my first Eskimo kiss with a yakuza.
“So . . .”
“I’d like to know why the Saitama police are so convinced I’m bribing them. I’d like to know the name of the cop I’m supposed to be bribing. If I knew that, I could handle the situation.”
I had to think about this for a little while. It took me another cigarette to figure out what to say.
“Well, Kaneko-san, I’m a reporter, not an informant for the yakuza. And to tell the truth, I really don’t like doing favors for the yakuza. I do know one person I can talk to. If I decide that there is information that I can pass on to you, I will. I won’t make any promises.”
“That’s all I ask.”
*Otherwise known as blow job parlors; hand jobs are also available. Usually 3,000 yen ($30) for thirty minutes. You get a cup of coffee in addition to the gratification. There aren’t many of these parlors left in greater Tokyo. According to one magazine that targets women who want to work in the sex industry, there is the occupational risk of carpal tunnel syndrome.
Amazon Japan