Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  “Were you sleeping with her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she was a good friend. I mean, she is a good friend.”

  “You had issues with what she did?”

  “That’s not it.”

  “Are you screwing anyone else?”

  “I’m a gentleman. On principle alone I won’t answer that question.”

  “I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “About?”

  “You know.”

  “Oh, yeah. Expediency rules. You were wrong about one thing, though.”

  “Which was?”

  “It’s not a slippery slope, it’s a friggin’ waterslide.”

  “Well, Jake, sometimes, you know, you have to fight poison—”

  “—with poison. I’m familiar with the proverb.”

  “Well, you do what you have to do to get the job done. That’s what matters at the end of the day. You get that.”

  “I do,” I assured him. He wasn’t anything like Sekiguchi, but he was wise in his own way. Maybe not a good cop but a good person and a good friend. He was putting his career on the line for me, breaking the blue wall of silence. I wasn’t sure I deserved his benevolence, but I was glad to have it.

  We kept drinking until 11:30, when everyone split to catch the last trains home. After they had gone, I poured myself a drink and lit a cigarette, turned on some Miles Davis, and turned down the lights, thinking.

  When you drink alone, you know you have problems. The whole world seemed dead, and the only sounds were the crackle of cigarettes, the wind lightly shaking the rain shutters, and the CD gently spinning in the Bose stereo, radiating the sounds of “Final Take 2.”

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt that lonely in my entire life.

  It hit me like a punch in the gut: the realization that I’d endangered every person I cared about, liked, loved, or simply knew. And it didn’t really matter how they felt about me—anyone I’d called on that damn phone was now potential leverage for a man who had no qualms about using people like cannon fodder.

  I really needed someone to talk to. I was a little drunk and not thinking very clearly, and I called Sekiguchi’s cell phone. It was still in my address book; I’d never taken it out. It rang a few times before I realized that he could never answer it. I had no one to guide me now. No one to ask for good advice. No mentor. I was on my own.

  What would Sekiguchi do?

  That was my mantra to myself. Okay, first he’d assess the situation. I did. It didn’t look good.

  Most yakuza leave civilians out of a conflict. At least that’s what they’re supposed to do. It’s not considered honorable to attack the wife, the lover, the best friend of a guy who’s wronged you. Any real yakuza isn’t going to beat up the brother of a deadbeat; he’s going to beat up the deadbeat himself.

  Tadamasa Goto was a different breed. He had a reputation for scorching and burning. And this fucking cop had practically handed him a can of gasoline. Now I had to figure out who he was the most likely to burn, maybe literally.

  I needed to do some damage control, and I decided it couldn’t wait. I went upstairs, grabbed my box of business cards, and came back down. I dumped all the cards on the floor, fanning them out. I opened my laptop and typed the names of everyone on my cell phone, not being bright enough to transfer them to my computer digitally. I ranked my friends by potential risk. I didn’t have my own phone records, so I went through two months of e-mails and tried to reconstruct from them where I had been and whom I had been with.

  And among all the business cards, there was Helena’s. Crumpled, the edges frayed from being stuffed in my wallet and taken out, discolored from being carried in my pockets, creased, faded.

  I remember when she gave it to me. I had to earn that meishi. I’d given her mine on the first meeting. It wasn’t until the third or fourth time we met that she trusted me enough to tell me her real name. She was wearing a black leather jacket over a simple red dress and riding boots, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She did an elaborate parody of a Japanese bow as she offered her meishi with both hands, adding, “Helena desu. A whore but not just any whore—a professional whore.” And she had laughed when she said it, her eyes twinkling with amusement at her own joke.

  I’ve always kept a haphazard diary. It’s a good thing to have because we forget so much. As a reporter you meet so many people, cover so many tragedies, write so many stories, it’s hard to keep track of what’s gone by and where you have been. But in some objects there are more memories than in a phonebook-sized diary. I held that card in my hand, and I felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds’ worth of memory.

  We’d used that card once to represent Park Place in her Monopoly set. I dropped by her place on a rainy Sunday, after doing some work at the office, and we played a marathon session. We were missing Park Place, so she put down her card in its place. I argued that it didn’t have the rent or any of the pertinent information on it, and she recited all the figures from memory, adding, “I know Park Place, baby. This woman only goes for the high-class real estate, and I am so going to own your ass by the time we’re done.”

  It was true. By the time the game was over, I was Lehman Brothers Japan. She was really good at tactical games. Monopoly, Battleship, Othello. It was bad for my ego. I think those were her only hobbies.

  Among the piles of business cards, I found the deed for Park Place. I guess I’d been the culprit.

  I couldn’t recall the last time I’d played Monopoly. And then I remembered how much I missed having her to speak to, and then I couldn’t breathe for a few seconds.

  I didn’t want to think about it. But I did.

  If I hadn’t backed down in 2005, maybe Goto would’ve been ousted from power and this wouldn’t be happening. At the time, it had seemed like the right decision. A strategic retreat. But had it really been that? Had it been an act of cowardice? Maybe just laziness? I replay that moment a lot.

  I decided then that I would do anything to bring him down. I was tired of running. Realistically, I didn’t have much. I didn’t have nine hundred people working for me or a couple million hidden in the bank. I had some good friends, some information, some contacts, and a lot of raw anger.

  But before I could do anything, I had to make some phone calls, send some e-mails. Many people were not very happy to hear what I had to say. Some of them were never my friends again. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bitter about that but I understand. Friendship does not usually include an implicit agreement to become a human target.

  I wrote the piece.

  It seemed like such a simple thing: publish or perish. Literally.

  The problem was that no one would publish my article. Not even the people I was counting on.

  “The story is too old.” “We don’t want to upset the NPA, they’d look pretty foolish if this is true.” “I don’t think the FBI would confirm this for us.” One newspaper seemed interested in publishing it, but all it wanted to do was lambaste the FBI. I didn’t think that served any real purpose. I didn’t think the FBI was wrong to have made the deal, and I didn’t want Jim lampooned. I couldn’t go along with that.

  Only one person, a senior editor at a publishing house, was straight up with me. “This is scary stuff. We publish this, and not only will we have to deal with Goto’s lawyers, we’ll have to spend a fortune on beefing up corporate security. Retaliation will be certain. People will get hurt. Maybe our offices will be firebombed. And frankly, we do some printing for Soka Gakkai, and Goto will have it drop its contracts with us. Sorry.”

  I think it was probably one of the worst times in my life. I had almost everything, but I couldn’t do anything with it. One magazine assured me that it would run the story if I could just get a little more hard evidence. I made a quiet trip to the West Coast of the United States to talk to an art dealer who laundered money for the Goto-gumi. It was a disastrous meeting.

  I couldn’t get what the m
agazine wanted and demanded. I had an increasing sense of things falling apart. I spent one evening with the The Perfect Manual of Suicide in an old hotel built in the twenties, contemplating giving it a try. It seemed like an option. In Japan, after a certain number of years, many life insurance policies pay off even in cases of suicide. If I took myself out, I’d leave behind money for my family and there would be no reason for Goto to bother anyone I cared about. I never would have imagined a decade before that I might even consider joining the ranks of the unfortunate who put the manual into practice. I wasn’t very happy with myself, and I worried—about everything.

  You could say I was a little depressed. If it hadn’t been for a phone call at the right time from the right person, I might have taken that route, which I’m ashamed to admit.

  Finally I decided to write the story myself—in English. I was smoking a cigarette, watching the sun come up at an airport, and getting ready to go back to Japan, and then I suddenly knew what to do. I should have known that my article would never be published in Japanese first. I should have taken a different approach from the start.

  I figured I could get it published in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ) newspaper. I was wrong about that as well. After submitting the story, I was accidentally e-mailed a memo from one of the editors, the gist of which was “The FBI giving a visa to an infamous yakuza so he can get a liver transplant? Sounds totally unbelievable. Maybe this guy is a little nuts.”

  That hurt. Yeah, I’m sure I came across as a fruitcake. You have to admit, it was an incredible story.

  I reached out to everyone I knew, and then a family friend introduced me to John Pomfret, the editor of The Washington Post’s Outlook section. He thought I was a little crazy as well. I didn’t blame him. He asked for proof. I gave him everything I had, about a hundred pages.

  I’ve never had a story vetted as hard as that one. I spent hours a day answering questions, checking facts, and sourcing my material in the more than a month it took for Mr. Pomfret to be satisfied. Finally, The Washington Post got independent confirmation from the FBI that I was telling the truth. And on May 11, it ran the story. The FCCJ came around as well, publishing my article but omitting Goto’s name.

  I did one more thing before the article was published. I contacted a guy in another faction of the Yamaguchi-gumi—the board. I knew that Goto was considered a troublemaker by its top executives.

  I explained to the guy from the board that I was writing an article about Tadamasa Goto making a deal with the FBI. It would be in English. I asked him to pass on the article, and I requested a comment from Yamaguchi-gumi headquarters, not that I thought they’d really give me one. I told him, “I want to know if this deal was okayed by the Yamaguchi-gumi headquarters and if so, why? Is this considered a problem or not?”

  I gave him the the story in English and my translation of it. He read it on the spot. He showed no reaction at all.

  He called me a few days later. He was very polite.

  “We don’t have an official comment. The Yamaguchi-gumi, as you know, doesn’t do interviews anymore, nor do we make comments. However, I have been authorized to say thank you very much for bringing this to our attention. We did not know. We would really prefer to handle this matter internally. We realize you’ve spent a lot of time on this story, and we’d like to compensate you for your time and effort.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, so I asked bluntly, “I’m not Japanese. I’m a foreigner. Subtlety is lost on me. What are you saying?”

  “I can offer you three hundred thousand dollars not to write the story. I just need the name of your bank, your account number, and the branch you bank at. You’ll have the money tomorrow.”

  “I can’t accept that.”

  “I can get you half a million in a week. But I’ll have to send it to two different bank accounts. You can set up another one easily if you don’t already have one.”

  “It’s not the amount that I have trouble with. Thank you. I will continue to keep you posted.”

  “Well, I don’t think you’re making the wisest of decisions. You could accomplish what I think you’d like to accomplish and walk away a wealthy man. Start a new life.”

  “I like my life. I appreciate the offer, and I am honored. I will have to decline.”

  “Please keep me posted.”

  I promised I would.

  I would be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to take the money and run. But if I had, they would have owned me.

  I sent a copy of the article to the Yomiuri before it came out. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do. It ignored it. So did every other newspaper in Japan. I had pretty much figured that this would be the case.

  That’s why I had already begun talking to the Los Angeles Times before the Washington Post article was ready to go. I’d met the San Francisco bureau chief, John Glionna, on his trip to Japan that May, and he’d quickly picked up the scent of a good story. I worked with him and Charles Ornstein for weeks. The Washington Post article hadn’t mentioned UCLA, and that made them very happy. It was the frontpage story of their newspaper on May 31. This time the Japanese media couldn’t ignore it, although some did. Almost every media outlet that did report the story chickened out by writing, “According to an article in the Los Angeles Times …” It’s a standard tactic in Japan for reporting troublesome news: blame it on someone else. “We didn’t say it—it was the Los Angeles Times!” I didn’t see a single article in which anyone attempted independent verification of the story or an attempt to dig any deeper.

  The story was out. However, Goto remained unfazed. I don’t know how he explained it away, but it had no visible impact. I, on the other hand, slept a lot better at night. Now I was a very visible target, and in many ways that made it a lot less likely for me to be snuffed out or harm to come to anyone associated with me. But it was clear that if I wanted to take Goto down, I’d have to write everything in detail and in Japanese.

  Tomohiko Suzuki, a good friend and former yakuza fan magazine editor, approached me and asked if I was interested in writing a chapter of an anthology of “forbidden news stories” for Takarajima Publishing House. I asked if we could write it together. It was a hell of a thing to ask him because it meant that he’d be raising the ire of the Goto-gumi as well. He didn’t flinch. He warned me that I’d be taking a huge risk. I said I was willing to do it.

  That’s when he told me I’d need a bodyguard. I recognized the name of the guy, Teruo Mochizuki. He had been a good friend of Yasunobu Endo’s, the yakuza crime boss that Gen Sekine had killed in the 1990s. They weren’t in the same organized crime group, but sometimes friendships among yakuza transcended organizational restraints. A Sumiyo Shikai member could be “blood brothers” with an Ina-gawakai member; a Yamaguchi-gumi member could be brothers with a Kokusuikai member. Mochizuki and Endo had one of those relationships. What mattered is that we knew each other. I asked Suzuki why Mochizuki was willing to do it.

  “He’s no longer a yakuza. He left last year. He has a one-year-old son and no job. He’s the perfect bodyguard and driver. He’s a good guy.”

  “Yeah, I know him. But he used to be a crime boss! He had, like, a hundred guys working for him, I think.”

  “Yes.”

  “So isn’t that a step down, working for me?”

  “Absolutely. But it’s not like a middle-aged yakuza with nine fingers and a whole-body tattoo has a lot of options. It’ll be fine!”

  So I hired Mochizuki. I had some money saved away from a well-paid project researching the pachinko industry for a company in California. I didn’t really think I had much of a choice.

  By July the anthology was ready to go. Mochizuki had been with me for some time by then. I wanted his opinion before I submitted the final draft. He knew Goto fairly well; I thought he’d be a good person to ask.

  He read the manuscript, and he did not look well for the reading. He’s a very polite fellow, and it took him a few second to say
what was on his mind.

  “Jake, you know, if you write this, he may try to have both of us killed. You first, of course. He really hates you. No one will think less of you if you don’t want to do it. You could walk away.”

  Mochizuki-san took out a cigarette from his coat pocket, handed it to me, and shielded the flames of his Zippo as he lit it for me.

  It’s a weird feeling having an ex–yakuza crime boss light your cigarettes and make coffee for you in the morning.

  Of course, he wasn’t a crime boss now; he was working for me. I’d like to say he was working with me—but that’s not how Mochizuki-san would see it. I paid his salary; that made me the boss. He was fifty years old, I was thirty-nine. He was my senpai and a lot tougher than me, but he was following my orders. I never quite understood that yakuza soldier mentality, but I appreciated the work ethic.

  He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt as usual; it covered up the tattoos. The missing finger on his left hand, though, couldn’t be covered up. He should never have been a yakuza, he should have been an artist. He’d been an artist once and not a bad one. But he’d hung out with the wrong people, racked up debts in Soapland, and drifted into the yakuza. When his subordinate screwed up and he chopped off part of his pinkie to show atonement and remorse, that pretty much killed his chances of returning to life as an artist—you need all ten fingers to do his kind of art. He was forced out of the yakuza as well—for insubordination. He didn’t like the increasingly “money at all costs” approach the upper management was taking; he was behind the times, a relic of a period when all yakuza adhered to some sort of code, morally flawed as it might have been. A year ago, he’d been in charge of a hundred gangsters; now he was lighting cigarettes for some weird Jewish guy who was more Japanese than American. And putting his life on the line as my bodyguard twenty-four hours a day.

  We were both outcasts in our own way, I guess. We certainly hadn’t ended up where we’d planned to be. I inhaled shallowly, and I exhaled deeply. My lungs weren’t what they used to be. I looked at Mochizuki. He was waiting for my answer.