POOR OLD JAKE ADELSTEIN. Like an everyman’s idea of a great news reporter, he is as driven as he seems troubled. The author of the recent memoir Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, Adelstein met me in the no-man’s lobby of a hotel near the Portland Airport on Tuesday night, February 9, with a fractured scapula. He was to catch a flight to Tokyo the next morning, where he would take advantage of free government-run health care to assess the extent of the injury he had, ironically, received last time he was in Japan.
“I had a rather acrimonious meeting with a source, which ended up with me getting my ass kicked,” said Adelstein.
Self-destructive streak? Check. Adelstein’s a reporter’s reporter, all right.
Bit of an asshole? Also, check. I asked if he’d found it difficult to go from writing in the third person, during his years as a reporter in Japan, to writing Tokyo Vice, a more personal account of his investigations into the Japanese underworld. Particularly, was it difficult airing intimate details of his sexual exploits? One source, a prostitute, demanded that he “jack her off” (his words) in return for information, for example.
“I didn’t want to put that sex stuff in the book,” he said. “But the Yakuza own private detective agencies, to dig up any embarrassing information about you to discredit you and undermine what you write. So, I thought well, fuck that, I’ve got skeletons in my closet, I’ll air them all out so that I don’t have anything to hide.”
And did his wife mind, when he told her he’d had to put his fingers inside a prostitute in the line of duty?
“I don’t think I told her that,” said Adelstein. “I think that’s probably one of the reasons why this book is a precipitator of our probably impending divorce.”
Awkward. Still, whatever this book coming out may have cost Adelstein personally, there is no denying he’s been professionally vindicated by the reception it has garnered.
Fresh from interviews on NPR and The Daily Show, Adelstein appears to have unearthed a pretty enormous conspiracy: A Yakuza boss named Goto traded information with the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a visa to enter the United States. Once here, Goto and three of his Yakuza buddies jumped the line for liver transplants at UCLA before returning home, largely stiffing the feds on the information side of their visa bargain.
Goto threatened to kill Adelstein if he ran with what he knew, and Adelstein’s wife has since hit out at him, he says, for “risking everyone’s lives for a stupid story.”
But I’m with Adelstein: It’s not a stupid story. It raises significant issues: Does a person’s moral character have any bearing on whether they deserve an organ transplant? Should the US government have allowed Goto a visa in exchange for information on the mighty Yakuza?
“So when my wife, who I kind of expected to have my back on this one, says it’s a stupid story, that creates a huge rift,” he told me. “I’ve got a lot of friends who ask, ‘Are you such an egomaniac that you want to risk your wife and children to write this?’
“But I don’t want to teach my son that when you stand up to the bad guys and they shout at you, you capitulate,” he continued. “Otherwise the world would be run by assholes.”
Now that’s a reporter I can believe in, whatever you may think of him, personally. I just hope he makes it back from his trip to Japan for his appearance at Powell’s.
I don’t see it as a question of “moral character”. That’s a slippery slope, especially in America where goodness and righteousness have a Christian flavor.
It’s jumping the line that grates. And then not delivering on a deal. The FBI should have made him wait like everyone else and only let him go through with the operation if he delivered the goods.
Thank you (I think) for clarifying that you only think of him as an asshole as a person outside of his profession. And where exactly do you draw the line? You were not clear on why he’s “kind of an asshole.”
I’m not sure he’s entirely clear, either. And are any of us? That’s what made interviewing him so interesting.
Matt,
I liked the article. I’ll accept that I’m a “bit of an asshole” as long as I can keep the “reporter’s reporter” accolade. Well, one of the investigative reporters I used to admire at the Yomiuri, Suzuki Eiji, once said, “If everyone likes you, you’re a lousy reporter. If you’re not pissing off someone, you’re not doing your job.” However, I don’t have a self-destructive streak–I have a self-sacrifice streak which outbalances my self-preservation streak. It just LOOKS like I have a self-destructive streak.
I don’t doubt I’ll make it Powell’s in one piece. I’ve got a bruised vertebrae says the Doc, #4 on my lumbar region and the fractured scapula is doing better. I just have to move my arm every day to keep a range of motion so it doesn’t become the dreaded “frozen shoulder”–which sounds like something you buy in meat department of a grocery store.
Nice. Look forward to seeing you in town. And I’m obviously a bit of an asshole too.
Jake Adelstein is an endearing a-hole. There are a-holes & then there are a-holes. But endearing a-holes are what separate the men from the boys. That`s why the women like him.
The book was indeed fascinating, but the truth of the matter is… he’s ruining his life for no reason other than to entertain people.
The world is full of scum-bags, & it always will be… Tokyo Vice or not. The Polaris project on the other hand is another story.
Jake’s book on Tokyo’s crimes was fascinating, especially because of the anthropological comments — Japanese often take off their shoes and socks before committing suicide, reporters butter up cops and take gifts to their houses to gain case information, the yakuza push younger criminals to confess to crimes they may not have committed in order to later “promote” them, there are “host” bars for lonely women to waste money on greedy Romeos, etc. It’s also a wrenching portrayal of sexual slavery and abuse of foreign women who get worked over for three months until their visas expire and whose wretched lot is often ignored by the cops because these women are merely foreigners. My heart goes out for the tragic and evil loss of Helena with whom he wanted to share investigative excitement. Jake is to be admired for his continuing efforts to combat sexual exploitation in Japan.