“I’m long past forty, and I’ve branded myself for life. I’ve got no education, no diploma. I don’t have social security or health insurance. I have money in the bank, and I have this organization. Where could I go? If I run, the Sumiyoshi-kai will hunt me down and kill me because they’ll think I’ve turned into a dog for the cops. If I stay, I have a chance to survive. It’s not much of a life, but I’m not ready to throw it away. So I’ll deal with this problem.”
I thanked him for the tea and got ready to leave. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eyes.
“You’ve saved my life. I don’t forget these things. If there’s anything you need—information, women, money—come talk to me. There are some debts that are never repayable. I’ll owe you until I die.”
“I didn’t really do much.”
“It’s not how much you do that counts, it’s what you get done.”
“Then what I’d like is information. I don’t want it if it has strings attached, though. I don’t ever want to owe a yakuza.”
“That’s not a problem. But I’ll tell you now: I will share information with you on what other yakuza groups are up to, but not our own. Our business remains our business. You can ask questions and I won’t lie to you, but if it involves us I’ll tell you I won’t discuss it. Is that understood?”
“Understood.”
“You sure you don’t need any pussy?”
“No, I’m okay.”
“Is it because you like boys?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Well, then, all right.” He walked me to the door and shook my hand.
Two weeks later the Saitama police were once again drinking green tea at The Cat’s office. I never asked what had happened to Saito; Kaneko and I never discussed the incident again.
From that point, Kaneko and I carried on a very businesslike relationship. I’d drop by for tea every couple of weeks, and I’d always call in advance. He’d give me some leads on a few stories, we’d chat about the predations of yakuza life versus that of reporter life, and then we’d go our separate ways. He’d always try to fix me up with a hot Japanese woman, and I’d always decline.
Having The Cat on my side was a huge plus as a reporter. Of course, I had reservations about taking his information. I was sure that sooner or later he would lean on me for a favor; but he never did. I also wondered if taking information from a man who was, by his own admission, an antisocial lawbreaker was morally defensible. I suppose that’s all part of Informant 101, but still I had qualms. Eventually, I came to understand the lesson that had been taught to me from the beginning: information is neither good nor evil; information is what information is. The people providing the information have their reasons and motives, many of them impure. What matters is the purity of the information, not the person.
Thanks to The Cat, at one point in time, I knew when a gang war was breaking out between yakuza factions before the police did. It helped me stay on the ball. He was the best source a crime reporter could ask for, since it’s always better to have one great source than a hundred lousy ones.
1* The Japan Anti-Social Organized Crime Database (JASOC), a private corporate database, as of March 2009, lists more than 2,400 in the Kanto area.
2* 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.
The Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances, Part One:
So You’re Asking Me to Trust You?
My focus now was on organized crime, theft, and public security. In other words, the yakuza 24/7.
Yamamoto had moved up and was running the show, which made Nakajima number two in the office. Nakajima and I weren’t really getting along, and everyone had started to refer to us as “the Cobra and the Mongoose.” I got the mongoose moniker because, one, I had more hair, and, two, I was more squirrely, running around manically all the time. Nakajima, on the other hand, had what the Japanese call “a poison tongue” (dokuzetsu), meaning that he was very critical, sarcastic, and good at putting people down. He also had less hair, and he moved with precision. He was orderly, precise, and organized, and I was none of those things. I could see why I annoyed the hell out of him.
Yomawari, the night visits reporters made to cops at their homes, had become a daily part of my life. If I was lucky, after I bid my cop good night, I could go straight home; my report could wait to be written up in the morning. But most of the time, I’d have to go back to the Urawa office or the press club and type up sports records or other crap before going home to catch a few hours of sleep.
It was on one such night in January that Yamamoto and I found ourselves sitting around the office, eating leftover pizza, when The Cobra walked in; he was his usual subdued self but with an undercurrent of excitement. He would lay out the case for us but not before announcing, “Adelstein, this is supersecret stuff, so keep your big mouth shut.”
• • •
According to Cobra’s cop source, a dog breeder near Kumagaya by the name of Gen Sekine was under suspicion of being a serial killer. Sekine was a yakuza, an ex-yakuza, or a yakuza affiliate. In the previous ten years, several people associated with him had seemed just to disappear. There had been a Saitama police investigation when the first three people vanished, but all leads had dried up and nothing came of it. In fact, everyone had forgotten about the original case.
That all changed when Akio Kawasaki, the president of a waste management company, failed to come home. After several days, his wife went to the police. The police showed little interest and asked perfunctory questions: Has your husband exhibited any strange behavior lately? Were there problems at home? Has he ever gone away for a few days without notice? Does he have any enemies?
Mrs. Kawasaki’s replies were negative, but in the course of the questioning, she mentioned her husband having had a disagreement with a dog breeder. Suddenly the officer in charge grew serious, even grave. “If your husband was involved with Sekine,” he said, lowering his voice, “you should brace yourself for the worst.”
Mrs. Kawasaki went home in shock. The police pulled a very cold case out of the morgue.
Two months later, Kawasaki was still missing, and the Saitama police homicide division officially set up a special task force to look into his disappearance. By the time Nakajima’s source brought him into the loop, ten detectives were working on the case. Importantly, the source assured Nakajima that there was no rush to get the story into print. If the Yomiuri would wait patiently, we’d get the exclusive. Even the top brass at the Saitama police didn’t know the details of the case yet, so there was little chance of the story leaking to other papers.
All this was pretty heady stuff. Dog breeders, yakuza, missing persons. It was right out of a bad Japanese TV movie. So, relying on our TV detective instincts, we knew why the investigation was focusing not on missing persons or suspicion of murder or anything big-time like that but on the minor charge of fraud. The hurdle for getting a warrant for nonviolent crime was a lot lower than for homicide; once you had a suspect in custody you could interrogate him (or her) for any old thing, including murder. This was standard operating procedure for the homicide guys.
My assignment was to check the newspaper files for anything on the dog breeder or his pet shop, which had the catchy name of African Kennel. This was before the Yomiuri kept an electronic file of its past editions, so this meant going through scrapbooks the old-fashioned, easy-to-get-bored way. Finally, after two days of my eyes bugging out, I found a July 14, 1992, article with a headline that read, “Good-bye Dangerous Animal: Cute Lion Baby to Be Sent to Gunma Prefecture Zoo. Kumagaya Pet Breeder Caught Raising Lion on His Balcony.”
Apparently, Sekine had been raising a lion cub on the balcony o
f his home when nervous neighbors called animal control. Raising wild animals at home was in violation of several city ordinances, so the cub was shipped to a zoo and Sekine was fined a pittance.
Finding this article was a breakthrough because, among other things, it confirmed the Chinese ideographs for Sekine’s name. In Japanese, the pronunciation of a name alone doesn’t necessarily help much. I once had to look for a Japanese woman whose name we had from her attendance at New York University; we knew the romanized spelling of her name and we knew her age, but there were several kanji variations of her last name and at least twenty kanji combinations for her first. If her romanized name was a misspelling foisted on her by an ignorant American or if the name was spelled in some esoteric way, you can imagine how helpful a database would be. You have to have the kanji to tell who’s who. We could now look Sekine up in available databases using the ideographs.
Sekine, it turned out, was a pretty famous guy—in fact, he was one of the most successful dog breeders in the country. Featured in magazines and television shows, he had single-handedly made the Alaskan malamute one of the most prestigious show dogs in Japan. He claimed in interviews to have lived in Africa, hunted animals in the bush, and stared down threatening tigers. Sekine was losing his hair, and what hair he still had was sprinkled with gray. His little beady eyes gave him a permanent squint, and the furrows in his forehead suggested deep contemplation. His raspy voice sounded as if he’d been smoking Golden Bats (the worst, sometimes best cigarette in Japan) since birth. He owned three shops and had announced plans to create a miniature safari park. In a news program he’d been on recently, he’d told the awestruck interviewer about jumping out of helicopters and wrestling lions to the ground. This is a guy, I thought, who could kill and not flinch.
• • •
By the end of January, due mostly to Nakajima’s work and leadership, we had gotten a handle on the cases of four people who were missing and believed to have been offed by Gen Sekine: Kawasaki, a housewife, a yakuza boss, and his driver. But we couldn’t finger the motives.
Our Yomiuri team was conducting top secret research. Our plan was to hold off publishing anything until right before the arrest of the dog breeder. That plan fell apart on February 17.
I was at the Saitama police press club typing up some notes when Yamamoto returned from lunch and breathed into my face, reeking of kimchi. “I just had some delicious Korean barbecue,” he said. “Adelstein, do you think I need a breath mint?” he asked.
“Yes, I think a breath mint might be advisable, Yamamoto-san.”
“Okay, go buy me some,” he said, handing me 200 yen.
I took the elevator to the basement convenience store, which was stocked with essentials for emergency situations exactly like this. I picked up a pack of Black-Black, the black supermint chewing gum that turns your tongue and teeth black as well (I’ve never figured out the market for this), and as I was making my way back upstairs, my beeper went off. I dashed back to the press club, and Yamamoto, taking the Black-Black from me, stuck a copy of the sports newspaper Asuka in my face.
“Take a look,” he said grimly. “The dog’s out of the bag.”
Indeed it was. A giant headline read: “Four People in Saitama Missing; Mysterious Dog Breeder Involved.” There was even a chart of the victims—horribly incorrect, but still, there it was. We’d been scooped by the lowest of all media possible: a sports newspaper.*
“Call everyone and tell them to get to the Urawa office right away. There’s going to be an emergency meeting in thirty minutes.”
By the time we got to the office, Hara, the bureau chief, was huddled with the head editor, poring over the evening edition of Asuka. As we gathered around, Hara, with his large Buddha-like presence sucking up the air in the room, turned to Yamamoto and said loudly, “I thought we had this thing locked up?”
Yamamoto gulped, then began, “Well, the article isn’t well researched. And Asuka is new to this game … no one reads it. It just wanted to make a splash. We should ignore it and keep working on our story.”
“What’s your take on it?” the head editor asked The Cobra.
The Cobra concurred with Yamamoto.
But the editor thought otherwise. “What happens if tomorrow every other newspaper in the country except us follows up on this story? We’ll look like we’ve dropped the ball. How do we know the real competition isn’t ahead of us on this one?”
“I don’t think that’s the case,” Cobra replied demurely.
“You don’t think that’s the case? Do you know that’s not the case? Are you willing to take the heat for a dropped story?”
Cobra was silent for a while, and I almost felt sorry for him. Then he piped up, “I think writing this up now is premature.”
“Well, the story’s already out there. It’s pretty clear that we need to get on the wagon. Maybe things are moving faster than we like, but we have no choice. It’s time to stop discussing and start writing. The bureau chief for this region is going to be breathing down my neck any second now.”
I was listening to all this, and in a moment of rare bravery as a newbie reporter, I raised my hand, ignoring Yamamoto’s fervent gestures indicating that I should keep my mouth shut. “May I say something?” I said.
“Who asked you?” The editor brushed the air with his hand in the typical Japanese fuck-off sign.
Hara intervened. “Jake, say what’s on your mind.”
“Well,” I began, my voice cracking, “we’ve kind of made a deal with the Saitama police. They’ve been giving us everything in exchange for us sitting on the story. When the time comes for the arrest, they’ll give us the exclusive. That was the deal. If we break that deal, we lose their trust and we break our promise.”
“Good point, Jake,” Hara said, nodding. “But the landscape has changed. There’s already a story out there.”
“It’s in a paper nobody reads, with no credibility, and it’s way wrong. There’s a huge difference between us writing it and them writing it,” I said, echoing previously stated sentiments. “If we write this story now, we may win the battle, but we’ll lose the war.”
Hara pondered these words for a bit. No one wanted to speak. Hara looked at the article, shifted his weight back and forth. Then he sighed. “I don’t think we can ignore this. I know the police. They’ll be a little upset, but they’ll get over it. Let’s get to work. We need this for the morning edition.”
With that the meeting adjourned. The Cobra cornered me in the hallway, and I thought I was about to get yelled at again. Instead he said, “Thanks for saying that. You understand more about the police beat than I thought. You’re still sloppy, your writing is horrible, and you are undisciplined, but you’ve got some good instincts. You may not be a lost cause.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
“Hey, no problem.”
Yamamoto was in the back of the office. “Adelstein, you’re right,” he said quietly to me while shuffling through pages. “Going ahead with this is a terrible idea. But that’s how it breaks sometimes. From this point, this is going to be the most important story we’re working on, so I’m assigning everyone a victim. Your job is to find out everything there is to know about your victim, how he knew Sekine, when he was last seen alive, what kind of person he was, why he might have been killed, and anything else that will come in useful down the road. That means we need pictures, comments, testimony, everything we can get. You’re the guy covering the Saitama Organized Crime Control Bureau. That means you’re a natural for the yakuza Endo and his driver Wakui. Both have been missing. From tomorrow, your life is Endo’s life.”
That’s how my Year of the Dog began.
Our first article on the Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances appeared on the morning of February 19, running under a four-column headline: “Several Dog Lovers Missing in Saitama from April to August. Trouble over Sales.” The article came out in the morning, and the other papers scramble
d to catch up after the article appeared. Everyone now knew that the Yomiuri had the lead on this case.
Unfortunately, however, we completely alienated the police by publishing the article, which had to have tipped off Sekine that he was under investigation. That would make him less likely to show his hand and give him a greater incentive to destroy evidence.
We’d effectively broken our promise, and the police were not forgiving. The chief detective made that clear to The Cobra in no uncertain terms, and Yokozawa, the gentlemanly head of the forensic department, put the Yomiuri on his personal shit list. They didn’t care about other newspapers, which were also following up on the story; they cared that we were the first legitimate newspaper to break the not-ready-to-be-known news. In their eyes, we were completely to blame if anything went wrong.
Nonetheless, that same day, I made my first trip down to the town of Konan and began looking for more information on Endo. Konan was a throwback to the sixties. It had one giant Zexel factory, a golf course, a town hall, an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. It had one grocery store and a family restaurant. Other than that, there were lots of empty fields, a little agriculture, and not much to do. It did have a temple devoted to the Buddha of Wisdom (Monju) that was kind of famous. If there was a downtown, I couldn’t find it.
I started making inquiries at the fire department, since I had always found firemen to be more talkative than cops, and this is what I learned. Until he vanished, Endo was the number two man in an organized crime gang known as the Takada-gumi (under a man with the name of Takada). The gang was a third-tier group in the Inagawa crime family. I had expected that people, if they talked at all, would regard Endo with a mixture of dread and awe; but no, everyone spoke well of him. In fact, they seemed worried for his welfare.
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