The man who cracked Japan’s crime gangs is back for a sequel
Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice exposed Japan’s yakuza. Now he’s out of police protection and releasing a new book. From the upcoming May issue out on April 26.
His friends joke it is a miracle Jake Adelstein made it to 55. The former newspaper crime reporter and expert on Japan’s notorious crime gangs, called the yakuza, lived for years under Tokyo police protection. He survived death threats, beatings, health scares and years of hard drinking and smoking with the cops and crime bosses inhabiting Tokyo’s seedy underworld.
While he is wary of romanticising crime figures, Adelstein says he is actually writing about family loyalty, friendship and a group of people bound by a code of honour. And this is what fascinates audiences.
“Of course it’s the tattoos and the missing fingers and the toughness and the sword fights. But whether people are able to articulate it or not, there is respect for this set of people that have this set of values that they are willing to die for,” he tells The Australian Financial Review Magazine during an interview in his kitchen.
Adelstein at home in Tokyo. His latest book, Tokyo Noir, will be published in Australia in May. Christopher Jue
Adelstein, who moved from Missouri to Japan as a college student, was relentless in his pursuit of the yakuza, despite the obstacles thrown at him as the only foreigner to work for a major Japanese newspaper at the time. His own life story is currently being played out on television screens around the world after a 2009 memoir, Tokyo Vice, about his years on the police beat was turned into a two-season HBO series. The second-season finale aired in early April. Adelstein is hopeful there will be a third series “so I can retire” but no decision has been announced.
Adelstein’s latest book, Tokyo Noir, picks up where Tokyo Vice left off. It will be published in Australia in May, the first market for its global release, and the author will appear at the upcoming Sydney and Brisbane writers’ festivals. “How am I still alive? I never made enemies out of entire yakuza organisations,” he says. “There is being fearless and there is being stupid.”
No longer under police protection, Adelstein now lives a relatively ordinary life in a sleepy Tokyo neighbourhood. Last month, he bought a modest traditional house, which he is renovating. He spends long days in the study drinking coffee and writing books, podcast scripts and story pitches to media outlets. And he is under strict instructions from his girlfriend not to have yakuza friends over to the house.
“I had some people still in the biz call me and I’m like, I’d love to hang with you, but I’m in a different place now. Maybe when you leave the organisation, we can have a cup of coffee. There are still some cops I drink with. I stopped smoking, so it makes it a little harder, but even these guys have switched to smokeless tobacco.”
Adelstein has lived in Japan for more than three decades. Bullied at school, he took up karate and became obsessed with Japanese culture. He moved to Tokyo as a college student, became fluent in the language and lived as a student in a Zen Buddhist temple for three years.
In 1993, he passed a stringent language exam to become the first foreign journalist to land a job at Tokyo’s highest-circulating newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun. He got his first break while assigned to cover a story about a serial killer who murdered a yakuza boss, opening the door into a world that would shape his life and career.
Tokyo Vice is based on Adelstein’s investigative reporting into Japan’s shadowy criminal underworld, where tattooed crime bosses with missing pinky fingers have business cards, offices and fan clubs, and his complex relationships with them and the police officers determined to shut them down. There have been questions raised about the veracity of some of Adelstein’s exploits. A 2022 article in The Hollywood Reportersuggested some parts of his memoir had been embellished. Adelstein denies any exaggeration, saying that the article was subsequently corrected seven times.
Tokyo Noir will reveal more details about his most infamous scoop, a 2008 Washington Post exposé of gangster Tadamasa Goto and three others who jumped the queue to receive liver transplants in the United States. Adelstein was put under police protection and his then-wife and two kids left for the United States.
Jake Adelstein in Tokyo in 2010. Anna Przeplasko
He has also written a book about the crime world told through the eyes of his former bodyguard, The Last Yakuza, which was published last year. And he has just returned from the US where he has been working on a podcast about an alleged serial killer nurse in his hometown, Columbia. His interest in that case was sparked by his father, a medical examiner who worked at the hospital that called for an investigation.
Adelstein says he is most proud of his lesser-known work, including as an investigator on a US State Department-sponsored investigation into human trafficking in Japan. In 2022, he made a true-crime podcast called The Evaporated about people who make themselves disappear in Japan.
He has two university-age children who live in the US. “The States is expensive,” he says. “I probably could have made a better deal [with HBO on Tokyo Vice]. My father was like, ‘why aren’t you wealthy, son?’ I said because I am not a good businessman.”
A registered trained Zen Buddhist priest, he hopes to earn enough from the show’s second season to take some time off and meet his training obligations. “I have to grade up in the next three years, or I get kicked out. It’s like the army.”
While he has spent his life documenting the yakuza, Adelstein says there is not a lot of new material left to dig up. The number of members of the mafia-like organisations has dwindled from 80,000 to 24,000 since the country’s economic bubble burst in the 1990s and tough new laws made it illegal to pay them off, or provide them services. “Being a yakuza means you can’t buy a car, get a cell phone, get a bank account. They have inconvenienced them out of existence.”
The May issue of AFR Magazine is out on Friday, April 26 inside The Australian Financial Review. Follow AFR Mag on Instagram.
