“I admire your desire to be prepared,” he said. “But the truth is that we’ve never had anyone wanting to work before officially beginning. You’re an unusual case, though, so I’ll see what I can do.” He took me to the third floor for a cup of coffee, handed me materials that are given to freshman reporters, and sent me on my way.
He called about two weeks later. He had arranged a mini-internship of about a week for me to spend in various offices. My first miniposting was to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (TMPD) press club.
Matsuzaka met me in the lobby of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters, a gigantic labyrinth of a building that towered over all the others in the government district. It was the nerve center of the Tokyo police force, which was comprised of roughly forty thousand people. He was going to hand me over to Ansei Inoue, a legendary journalist and the author of Thirty-three Years as a Police Reporter. Inoue was the police beat captain and was loved, feared, and envied within the Yomiuri empire. His claim to fame was proving that a university professor convicted of murdering his wife was innocent. He had not only exposed the missteps of the police machinery and the prosecution involved but also found the real murderer. The case became a classic example of how innocent people can be convicted when caught in the brutally efficient wheels of the Japanese justice system.
Inoue was about five feet eight and thin, with long, unkempt hair swept to the side of his face. He was wearing a gray suit, black tie, and scuffed shoes. His eyes were hidden behind brown-tinted glasses, which made them seem dull, but when he saw who I was, they sparkled. He seemed quite amused by the situation.
“So you’re the gaijin I’ve been hearing about,” he said animatedly. “You speak Japanese, right?” He aimed the question more at Matsuzaka than at me, but I answered anyway.
“I speak Japanese. Writing it is another issue.”
Inoue laughed. “Well, you probably write it better than the people I have working for me. Let’s go upstairs.”
Technically, anyone visiting the TMPD without being a registered member of the press club or an actual employee or someone with security clearance was required to have a police escort before entering the building, but Inoue came and went as he pleased. It was still three years before the Aum Shinrikyo cult sprinkled sarin on the Tokyo subways, which had the effect of tightening security procedures all over the city.
In the elevator, Inoue gave me a breakdown of the police organization, but most of it went over my head. We got out at the ninth floor, which held the public affairs section of the TMPD and three press clubs: for the newspapers, television, and radio and local newspapers in the country. There was no space for the weekly or monthly magazines, which the police considered to be subversive scandal rags and kept off the official press club list.
There were no foreign media representatives either; the mainstream Japanese media outlets have not protested this lack of foreign media and never will. When you’re part of a monopoly, it’s not in your best interest to break yourself up.
Some reporters were hanging out playing cards on a battered desk in the open area near the kitchen. There was also a dank tatami room in the back where reporters could unroll futons and sleep off their hangovers while they waited for the next handout of news.
When Inoue and I walked into the Yomiuri section of the press club, which was essentially a cordoned-off rectangular room with a curtain for a door, all the reporters were gathered around a desk, poring over a photo book. I looked around. The space hardly fit my notion of the press accommodations for the biggest newspaper in Japan: the walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves; newspapers and magazines were strewn across the couch and onto the floor; garbage cans overflowed with crumpled-up faxes, used containers of instant ramen, and beer cans. Each desk had a word processor. At the far end was a radiator/air conditioner, and on the deep windowsill there were six televisions and three video decks stacked high. All of the televisions were on. A CB radio tuned to the fire department frequency blared. In a bunk bed next to the “door,” someone slept, still in his shoes, the day’s morning edition covering his face.
Inoue and I walked over to the cluster of reporters; the book they were poring over was Sex, by Madonna, which had just been released, and the reporters (all of them male) were studying and commenting upon her breasts. Inoue made the introductions, then picked up the book and handed it to me: “Do you think this book is obscene?” It was the Japanese version, so a lot of the more graphic stuff (which meant genitals and pubic hair) had been obscured.
“No, not to me.”
“Well, if they had published this,” Inoue went on, pulling the unexpurgated American edition off the shelf, “the police would have raided the publisher and confiscated every copy. The producers of Santa Fe1* barely escaped getting busted for showing a little pubic hair, but this stuff from America is damn close to porn. Maybe arty porn, but it’s porn. We would have had a story if the Japanese publishers hadn’t pussied out.”
“The police would arrest someone for this?”
“The Supreme Court determined in 1957 that anything that sexually excites the viewer for no good reason, that violates the sense of propriety of the normal citizen, that is shameful, and that violates the sexual-moral conceptions of the general public, is obscene. By being obscene, such works are illegal and their distribution is a crime.”
“Which means?”
“Well, to the cops it means no pubic hair. Or it used to.” Inoue snickered. “It’s an odd thing about this country. The police don’t mind if you get a blow job in the middle of the day or if the operators of sex clubs advertise their services right out in the open, but they get their shorts all twisted up about people looking at people having sex. Pubic hair is too close to the real thing. The moral of the story: do it, but don’t watch it.”
“Is it legal to sell this stuff in the United States?” one reporter asked me.
That led us into a twenty-minute discussion of the differences between Japanese and U.S. porn. The reporters were shocked to learn that octopuses and other animals of the sea were rarely used to drape the genitals in American porn and that sex through panty hose wasn’t a popular theme. I was asked to bring back some videotapes on my next visit to America.
As we left the room, Inoue cautioned, “Don’t do it. Forget about bringing back any porn for those idiots. The last thing we need is for you to get seized at Customs. They’ll survive without it.”
He took me up to the coffee shop, ordered some green tea, and asked what I wanted to do at the Yomiuri.
“Well,” I said, “I’m interested in investigative journalism and the side of Japan I don’t know much about. The seamy side. The underworld.” I told him that my father was a country coroner and that crime and the police beat had always interested me.
He recommended I shoot for shakaibu, the national news section, which was responsible for the police beat. Inoue put it this way: “It’s the soul of the newspaper. Everything else is just flesh on the bones. Real journalism, journalism that can change the world, that’s what we do.”
I asked him for some advice as a reporter, and he was silent for a while. He smelled a little of sake when he began to speak, and I later learned he’d been drinking until five that morning. It was only nine now, and I don’t think he would’ve spoken as frankly if he’d been completely sober.
“Newspaper reporting isn’t rocket science,” he said. “The pattern is set. You remember the patterns and build from there. It’s like martial arts. You have kata [the form], which you memorize and repeat, and that’s how you learn the basic moves. It’s the same here. There are about three or four basic ways to write up a violent crime, so you have to be able to remember the style, fill in the blanks, and get the facts straight. The rest will come.”
Then he got more serious.
“There are eight rules of being a good reporter, Jake.
“One. Don’t ever burn your sources. If you can’t protect your sources, no one wi
ll trust you. All scoops are based on the understanding that you will protect the person who gave you the information. That’s the alpha and omega of reporting. Your source is your friend, your lover, your wife, and your soul. Betray your source, and you betray yourself. If you don’t protect your source, you’re not a journalist. You’re not even a man.
“Two. Finish a story as soon as possible. The life of news is short. Miss the chance, and the story is dead or the scoop is gone.
“Three. Never believe anyone. People lie, police lie, even your fellow reporters lie. Assume that you are being lied to, and proceed with caution.
“Four. Take any information you can get. People are good and bad. Information is not. Information is what it is, and it doesn’t matter who gives it to you or where you steal it. The quality, the truth of the information, is what’s important.
“Five. Remember and persist. Stories that people forget come back to haunt them. What may seem like an insignificant case can later turn into a major story. Keep paying attention to an unfolding investigation, and see where it goes. Don’t let the constant flow of new news let you forget about the unfinished news.
“Six. Triangulate your stories, especially if they aren’t an official announcement from the authorities. If you can verify information from three different sources, odds are good that the information is good.
“Seven. Write everything in a reverse pyramid. Editors cut from the bottom up. The important stuff goes on top, the trivial details go to the bottom. If you want your story to make it to the final edition, make it easy to cut.
“Eight. Never put your personal opinions into a story; let someone else do it for you. That’s why experts and commentators exist. Objectivity is a subjective thing.
“And that’s it.”
It was shockingly frank advice from a man who had a reputation for being, well, sneaky. After all, Inoue had needed to play some serious hardball politics to make it to his position. He’d been a regional hire as opposed to a national hire. In the old days, regional hires were basically second-class citizens, flitting from local office to local office without ever spending more than a few years at the head office—which kept them from covering major news events and making a career in Tokyo. Inoue had bucked the system, somehow managing to push his way into national news and make a home in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police club.
Like any Yomiuri employee, he understood that for those who aspire to be investigative journalists, national news was the place to be. If getting there was hard, staying there was even harder. Within the paper it was said that national news reporters worked the longest, drank the most, got divorced most often, and died the earliest. I don’t know if those claims have ever been statistically validated, but almost all present and former national news reporters have a masochistic pride in their status.
After three days at the TMPD, I was sent to the Chiba office to spend two days working with other reporters. The Chiba bureau chief was a former national news reporter and a former TMPD beat captain; his name was Kaneko. The office was clean and modern, with two islands of desks, several fax machines mounted on shelves, and everything filed neatly in bookshelves in chronological order. It was Venus to the Mars of the TMPD press club.
Kaneko gave me a warm reception. He was especially interested in my Jewish background. We sat down on facing sofas in the corner of the office while he grilled me, finally getting to the question he really wanted answered: “Do you speak Hebrew?”
I didn’t.
He seemed disappointed, so I asked him why he was interested.
“Well, I notice a lot of Israelis selling watches, jewelry, and brand-name goods—fake ones, of course—on the streets near the station,” he said. “And I think they’ve got to be paying protection money to the yakuza.”
I didn’t really know much about the yakuza at this point. I knew they were gangsters and that they could be violent. But other than that I was oblivious—which, of course, would change.
He offered me a cigarette while he expounded. I accepted it, lit up, and tried not to cough.
“So, you being a gaijin,” he went on, “maybe you could talk to them, find out. It would be interesting to see how much of a cut the yakuza are getting and how the deals are being worked out. What do you think?”
I said I’d be delighted—but it wouldn’t be in Hebrew.
Kaneko called over a reporter named Hatsugai and assigned him as my editor. I was given a pen, a notepad, and a tape recorder and sent out the door within thirty minutes of arriving at the office.
The street sellers were everywhere, especially near the station. Most of them appeared to be Israelis on a pan-Asian trip, selling items they had picked up in Nepal or Tibet. Some of them had fake brand-name watches and handbags they’d purchased in Thailand. I sat down at a Mister Donut across from one of the vendors and started my surveillance.
After two days and numerous doughnuts, I saw two Japanese men with white pants, loud print shirts, and tightly permed hair walking toward an Israeli vendor. They were clearly thugs. One of them was tall with a wide forehead, but he let the short guy lead the way. I left the doughnut shop and strolled casually by the scene.
They flanked both sides of his table, and I heard the short thug say four or five words to the Israeli; one of them was shohadai, a word I’d never come across before. Muttering in Hebrew, the vendor pulled out a wad of cash from his table drawer and handed it over. The short yakuza handed it to the tall yakuza, who brazenly counted it in wide-open sight before pocketing it and leaving the vendor to his sales.
I walked over to the Israeli and looked through his jewelry, clucking my head in sympathy. “I didn’t know you had to pay rent to open up a street shop,” I said.
The Israeli whipped back his ponytail and looked at me, a little suspiciously. After a moment he relaxed, pegging me as a fellow foreigner. “You do if you don’t want the cops or those guys on your ass. They get thirty to thirty-five percent of whatever I make.”
“Well, how do they know what you make?”
“They know,” he said. “They look at what’s out on the stand and what’s not there when they come back. You can’t bullshit them.”
“Why don’t you go to the police?”
“You must be fresh off the boat, brother. I’m on a tourist visa, so if I go to the police, I go to jail. The yakuza know it, and I know it. That’s the cost of doing business here. No choice.”
“Bummer,” I said. “I was thinking of doing this myself. Teaching English sucks.”
“It’s not bad money,” he said. “Maybe one hundred thousand yen [about a thousand U.S. dollars] on the weekend. It’s good business here but better in Yokohama, I hear.”
I offered him some doughnuts and hung around listening to his adventures in Thailand. About thirty minutes later another Israeli showed up in a van with his Japanese girlfriend and started unloading merchandise.
Vendor number one introduced me. Vendor number two was named Easy, and he wasted no time complaining about the gangsters in a thick Israeli accent: “The fookers! I hate them. The more we make, the more they take. I want to give them nothing. But Keiko,” he said, pointing at his girlfriend, “she says that would be bad news.”
Keiko nodded. Asking first if I spoke Japanese, she proceeded to chat: “Do you know the Sumiyoshi-kai?”
Even I had heard of the Sumiyoshi-kai. They were one of the largest yakuza factions operating in Tokyo and generally not to be messed with. Clearly he was doing the only thing he could to maintain his business.
As we went on talking, Easy started to look annoyed, so I stopped with the nihongo (Japanese) and spoke in English about the weather with the two vendors, then made my way back to the office.
When I told him what I had learned, Kaneko did not hide his pleasure, and I was pleased for it in turn.
“What does shohadai mean?” I asked.
“It’s slang for ‘rent.’ Basho means ‘place,’ and dai means ‘money.’ Instead of ‘bashoda
i,’ the yakuza say ‘shobadai.’ They like to twist words around so that straight citizens don’t understand them. It’s standard lingo—a term used to shake down street merchants.”
Then Kaneko told me, “Write the article.”
Right away, I was being led into deep water. The angle was that yakuza were preying on foreign street vendors who couldn’t complain to the police and that this was a new form of revenue for organized crime. I tried my best, but I suspect I did a lousy job. I didn’t know much about the anti–organized crime legislation that was new to the country, and I didn’t have any police connections to add depth to the story. It was like Journalism 102.
Hatsugai looked over the article. “Not bad,” he said politely. “It’s a good starting point. I’ll talk to the Chiba police and see what they think. We’ll put it together and try for the local edition.”
When I came in the next Monday, Kaneko greeted me excitedly. “Adelstein,” he said, “great news! It’s a slow news day, so your article is going to make the national edition. The evening news!”
He assured me that for a regional bureau reporter, getting a “scoop” to run in the national edition was a major accomplishment. He was almost as excited as I suddenly was.
The headline read, “Organized Crime Targeting Non-Japanese Street Vendors. Yakuza Find New Way to Squeeze Out ‘Rent’ by Taking Advantage of Illegal Workers (Who Can’t Seek Police Protection).” Somehow there was enough of a universal element to warrant it being national news, at least that day. No byline, of course—rarely did even a seasoned reporter get one, so who was I to complain?
All in all, it was a respectable piece of journalism, and Inoue called to congratulate me the same morning. I’d made the national edition with a scoop, and I wasn’t even an official hire!
Feeling a bit more self-confident, I decided to take some time off to travel before entering the salaryman life. The Yomiuri had a system that allowed new hires to take an interest-free loan from the company and travel overseas before starting work. It was a benevolent perk and one that effectively made you an indentured servant, but I took advantage of it to plan a few months in Hong Kong to study the Chinese martial art wing chun, which had been an interest of mine for a long time. But soon the Yomiuri called with bad news: it hadn’t been able to take care of my visa. I was told to come back and take care of it immediately. If I didn’t, my job would be all but lost.
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