I was met with a faint salty smell and what I can only describe as the aroma of hot dogs combined with burned chocolate chip cookies. The living room was packed with boxes, as if someone had just moved in or was in the process of moving out.
Takagi led me to the back bedroom, which looked as if it belonged to an adolescent male: posters on the wall of Japanese teen idols with bad teeth, manga stacked up in the corner, instant ramen packs on the floor. The kid was lying on the top of a bunk bed, facing the wall, his naked back toward us.
I don’t know what I was thinking, but I was about to tap the kid on his shoulder when Takagi stuck out his foot and tripped me.
“What the—?”
“You’re not paying attention, Jake-san. You almost got yourself killed. You can read Japanese. Take a look, you idiot.”
With his arm on my shoulder, he led me closer to the kid, and upon closer inspection I saw, attached to the kid’s back, a piece of paper with small writing that said, “Do not touch me, please. Imminent danger of electrocution.” I leaned over and saw wires taped to his chest and nipples that ran along the wall and down directly to the electrical outlet.
My mouth must have been hanging wide open. Takagi laughed at my shock. “You have to be careful, Jake-san.”
“What happened?”
“This happened,” Takagi said, picking up a book from the desk next the bed. It was The Perfect Manual of Suicide. “He’d studied up on electrocution, followed the instructions perfectly. Here, I’ll hold it, you read it. Just keep your hands off it.”
According to the manual, electrocution was painless, pretty much. Only a prick of pain when the first shock hits, but immediately you stop breathing, your heart short-circuits, and in seconds you’ll be dead. A clean death. There is very little damage to the body, so it’s possible to hold an open-casket funeral. The author pointed out that very few people actually choose to kill themselves this way, but self-electrocution is cheap and painless and fast; if you want to die, it deserves reevaluation.
“You should write about this,” Takagi said to me. “We aren’t going to announce the kid’s suicide, but I think this book should be written up. It is an evil book. Parents should know about it, and if they see this book in their kid’s room, they should be worried. It doesn’t just aid suicide, it encourages it.”
“Why’d he kill himself?”
“His family just moved here from Osaka. Maybe someone made fun of his accent. Maybe he didn’t want to move. Who knows? He didn’t leave a note—just the warning label on his back.”
“That was thoughtful, actually.”
“It’s a damn shame. But that warning was thoughtful—and polite too. He even said ‘please.’ And he did it without making some horrible mess. I’ve seen a lot of teen suicides, and some kids have absolutely no consideration for their family.”
I wrote the article that day. I had some reservations about writing it. In a way, I felt as if I were promoting the book, but making more people aware of its insidious nature was probably a good thing.
Aside from killing oneself, improving one’s sex life, or increasing one’s finances, how else are manuals integral to everyday Japanese life? Well, remember, the first thing I was handed when I started as a police reporter was a manual: A Day in the Life of the Police Reporter.
The police reporter manual is a riveting read, to be sure, but allow me to sketch out the Japanese police system in simple, de facto terms. The way the Japanese police system is supposed to be and the way it really works are two different things.
Police in Japan are organized in pyramidal fashion. At the top is the National Public Security Council, which is under the prime minister’s cabinet. Under the National Public Security Council is the National Police Agency.
The NPA is a political and administrative bureaucracy that does no investigation on its own but may coordinate investigations crossing prefectural lines. It gives general guidance to all police organizations in Japan. Think of the FBI with all of the bureaucracy and none of the investigative powers, and you have a good sense of what the National Police Agency is like. Many who rise to the top of the NPA signed up after passing a national exam and had little or no real police experience before being put on the career fast track.
Below the NPA are the forty-seven prefectural police bureaus that investigate crimes in their region. The most prestigious of these is the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, which functions a little like the FBI in that it often takes on cases more national than local in nature.
Each prefectural police department governs local police stations and neighborhood outposts called koban. The NPA appoints its own bureaucrats to high administrative posts in local police headquarters, ensuring the NPA’s grasp on power while also ensuring that no one who knows the turf and is truly competent to run a large police organization is actually ever appointed to the job. The local police do all the nitty-gritty police work, investigations, and traffic control.
Each police station usually consists of the following divisions: violent crime, fraud, white-collar crime, traffic, juvenile crime, crime prevention, and lifestyle crime (including vice), plus an organized crime control division. Drugs, credit card fraud, and the flesh trade fall under organized crime (or anti–organized crime, I should say) in some prefectures, but the turf has not yet been delineated clearly.
In most major cases, the detectives from police headquarters take charge and the detectives at the local police station function as subordinates, doing the footwork, driving the limousine for the chief of homicide, buying bento box lunches for the senior detectives, and generally functioning at the whim and will of the honbu (headquarters). When the TMPD works a joint investigation with other prefectural police, the TMPD functions like the honbu and expects everyone else to function like low-ranking police station minions.
Even within a news organization covering the police beat, there is a hierarchy. In Tokyo, the TMPD press club reporters handle the headquarters detectives and announcements; the district reporters handle assigned areas of Tokyo.
As a cub police reporter, your job is to make friends with low-level detectives and pick up an interesting case before headquarters gets its teeth into it. If you’re really good, you can get a scoop from the bottom of the food chain. This usually means getting knowledge of an arrest before it’s officially announced.
The police make regular announcements of cases, written out in short press releases, which the reporter is expected to augment by asking questions over the telephone or by actually going to the crime scene himself.
Each major case is announced in advance, and a lecture is given in addition to a flimsy press release. This takes place in what is called a press club, which is housed in the actual building of each prefectural police headquarters. Large police stations may also have a pressroom.
But, of course, not any old reporter has entrance to these press clubs.
What you won’t see in a reporter’s manual is how to get along with the cops, which is probably the most important thing on the police beat. I once heard the job of a police reporter characterized as being a “male geisha.” That’s actually a fair approximation of what was necessary to get a story—at least for some of us. “Male prostitute” might also be another way of putting it, but I don’t think it accurately captures the subtleties of the task involved. Some heavy entertaining is involved, but there’s a little more foreplay than a quick getting off “up against the wall.” Personally, I prefer to gather my own data and bargain with the police rather than beg for a tidbit, but that was simply my style. I was just as guilty of being a male geisha as most of my peers, except sometimes I managed to put myself into a better bargaining position: on top.
The following is a memo that a former supervisor once wrote to us reporters on the police beat. It offers great insight into the amount of schmoozing and massaging involved in our job. I will say that the guy who wrote it is an excellent reporter who is willing to do real work to get a story rathe
r than rely on the kindness of cops he’d done favors for. Be that as it may, the man is also a brownnoser without equal.
A Memo to Whom It May Concern:
It’s really sad that I have to write the ABCs of being a police reporter down for you losers. It may have been ten years since I was last on the crime beat, but let me say this: The TMPD Club team is capable of making great war plans but not winning the battle. Don’t take this as advice from your boss, but take it as advice from your elder and a senior reporter—the job is harder than you think it is. If you just mechanically make the rounds or get by on the Yomiuri name, only one or two cops out of ten will leak anything to you. Maybe.
If you just aimlessly visit cops at their homes during the evening, you won’t get them to say anything. Anybody can get the addresses of detectives from their senpai [senior reporters] and go to the house, wait a couple of hours, and, when they come home, butter them up and occasionally prime the pump with tickets to a Giants baseball game. If it were just a matter of doing that over and over, even a first-year reporter at Jiji Press could do it.
I’m aware that each person on the beat tries to shore up the sections he/she is in charge of. I know that you are figuring out which cop is worth bringing into the fold, but the issue is what are you doing to get that cop to be a source? What are you doing to distinguish yourself from other reporters? Take a moment to reflect on your efforts.
Do you take care of the cop you want to crack? Have you asked him his birthday, place of birth, family lineage, the birthdays of his wife and kids, his wedding anniversary, when his kids start school, whether they have found a job, what holidays or special events the family has coming up? Do you say proper greetings on those occasions or, even better, bring a present?
Do you take small gifts when you call on the cops in the evening? If you take them tickets to the Yomiuri Giants game, they won’t be impressed. “Oh, he’s a reporter for the Yomiuri newspaper, so he probably gets them for free” is what they’ll be thinking. Go to Daimaru in Tokyo station or someplace like that and buy a regional food or drink from the area where you were born. Then tell your cop buddy, “I had someone back home send this.” Or “I brought this back from a trip for you.” Those kinds of lies are very effective. And timing is important. If you take him a warm meat pastry or a hot sweet-bean pastry on a cold day, all the better. If the cop doesn’t come home, give it to his wife or girlfriend or mistress. Tell her, “Here, if it gets cold it doesn’t taste good.” This at least gets her to open the front door, and that’s always an important first step.
Do you ask the cops to get food or something to drink with you? Do you make efforts to get the police to ride in the hired limousine with you? On a rainy day or when the snow falls, this is the perfect opportunity to send them from their house to the train station or vice versa.
Do you randomly visit cops in the morning? Do you take copies of the Yomiuri to cops who don’t subscribe to the Yomiuri? Even if you just spend 100 yen [about a dollar] to give the guy a can of coffee or a sports drink, that’s enough to set you apart from the pack.
If one of your cop buddies is sick, do you take the time to visit him in the afternoon? If you just go visit him in the evening, that’s about the level of a first-year reporter for Yamagata [Hickville] Television. If the wife or kids of the cops have a cold, buy some cold medicine, some orange juice, and take it to the house.
When you have the night shift, do you always let your cop buddy know that “Hey, I’m up all night at the office, so if anything interesting goes on, give me a buzz”? If your pal is on the night shift at the head office, take him a snack and bullshit for a while. Instead of complaining that you can’t get through to the police when a new case breaks, make an effort to get in good with the public affairs guys so you are the first one to catch the story.
If you just complain, “The cops really favor the television reporters,” nothing will change. That’s the kind of whining you hear from first-year reporters at the Yamagata newspaper or even a part-time chick employed at the Akita office. If all you do is complain, you could have ten years on the police beat and still not win against the TV reporters. If you don’t know your cop’s birthday, use the branch offices, senior reporters, even employees at the local ward office to find out. Public utility companies also know the names and phone numbers of cops and where they have moved to recently.
Are you making use of the association of people from your prefecture (such as the Saitama Prefecture Native Association)? Even if you are a Tokyoite, join the prefectural association of where you were first assigned as a reporter. Use your police connections from when you were at a regional office to meet Tokyo cops who attended the police academy at the same time as your sources did.
Hanging out with your family and their family at the same time is the ultimate way to cultivate a source. Families that play together, stay together.
Have you ever taken your wife and kids with you on a Saturday and stopped by “because we were in the neighborhood”?
Do you get your sources to introduce their kohai [younger officer friends and protégés] to you? If you know a cop who’s going to retire this year, shamelessly become friends and get him to introduce his remaining buddies.
If you think this system creates a very cop-friendly, biased reporting style, you are absolutely correct. The Japanese police are extremely adept at manipulating the press, and we were extremely willing to submit to this manipulation for the possibility of getting a scoop.
The Chichibu Snack-mama Murder Case
For a reporter, dating is impossible. My budding relationship with my first serious Japanese girlfriend effectively ended with a phone call. Not from her but from Yamamoto, at nine in the evening. It was the first day I’d had off in three weeks, and I-chan and I were on my futon, catching up on some long-missed sex, when the phone rang. I had no choice but to dismount and pick up.
“Adelstein, we got a probable murder in Chichibu, and we need you to go to the scene. Get your ass down here in ten minutes. The car is running.”
I started pulling on my clothes, and I-chan pouted.
“I’m sorry, hon,” I said. “I’ve got to go to work.”
“You bastard! You’ve gone, but I haven’t gone yet.”
(If you thought that was a typo, let me explain: In Japan, the act of achieving orgasm is referred to not as “coming” but as “going.” This lends itself to the joke that Japanese-American couples have so much trouble communicating that they can’t tell whether they’re coming or going.)
“I-chan, I hate to leave you high and dry, but duty calls.”
In perfect English, she replied, “Work, work, work. Make them wait five fucking minutes!”
I had already put on my shirt and was hunting for my Yomiuri armband, camera, wrinkle-free necktie, and pen. “I’ll make it up to you. You can be on top next time,” I said earnestly.
We’d been going through a rough patch in our romance lately. I was working nonstop, forgetting to call, and usually so tired, drunk, or hungover on my day off that I was far from entertaining. Things had not been good for a while, but I was hoping she’d get used to an absentee boyfriend. In a passive-aggressive way, I hadn’t been helping by neglecting to make a determination about “our future.”
“Look, I’m really sorry. People are waiting for me.”
“If you walk out that door, you walk out of this relationship,” she said.
“I have to go,” I said.
I got on my bicycle and pedaled to the office in record time. Yamamoto was waiting in the car, I hopped into the driver’s seat, and off we sped toward Chichibu.
Yamamoto filled me in. The victim ran a snack bar1* in Chichibu. She’d been found in her bedroom, in her pajamas, in a prefectural public housing development at 7:45 that evening by an employee who’d gone to her apartment when she didn’t show up at the bar and who then called 119 (Japan’s version of 911). Initial reports made it sound as if she’d been hit on the right side of
her head with a blunt instrument.
Yamamoto dropped me off at the crime scene with instructions to find a photo of the mama-san and to find someone who had nice things to say about her. He was heading to the Chichibu police station for the briefing. I was usually the reporter on the scene because the newspaper was reluctant to have me cover a police briefing. They were afraid I’d miss something important—a fear that was probably well founded then.
The victim lived in a dismal apartment complex—row upon row of uniform beige buildings typical of public housing in Japan. They were all faced with balconies with metal railings that had been rigged with clotheslines that always had laundry hanging from them, rain or shine, night or day. The place was ill lit, and the only sound of life within was the vague din of television sets bleeding through the thin walls of the apartments.
The police had cordoned off the entire building where the mamasan had lived. I played the stupid-gaijin card and ducked under the KEEP OUT yellow tape. I was able to talk to two people before an officer approached me and said sternly, in English, “Go away. No can be here.”
I tried to make conversation with some folks who were hanging around the edges of the police barrier, looking up at the building. I walked into the adjacent beige building, ringing doorbells, asking about the mama-san, until I found a foreman at a concrete plant who’d been a regular at the snack bar.
He even had a picture of her—Snack-mama was surprisingly chubby—and he was willing to let me borrow it.
“Do you have any idea who would want to kill her?” I asked, deep in reporter mode.
“Hmm, I don’t know. Maybe some deadbeat customer who ran up a huge tab. She could really ride your ass if you didn’t pay your bill on time. I’ve known loan sharks who were more easy-going.”
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