The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013

by Dave Eggers

  In Japan, yakuza sometimes speak of themselves in terms of acting. “It’s an atmosphere, a presence,” an ex-gang member once told me. As a young criminal, he had been given valuable advice by his oyabun, the “foster parent” within his gang. “My oyabun told me that when you’re a yakuza people are always watching you,” he said. “Think of yourself as being onstage all the time. It’s a performance. If you’re bad at playing the role of a yakuza, then you’re a bad yakuza.”

  The name refers to an unlucky hand at cards—yakuza means “eight-nine-three”—and bluffing has always been part of the image. Many gangsters are Korean-Japanese or members of other minority groups that traditionally have been scorned. These outsiders proved to be nimble after Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, an era that is explored in “Tokyo Underworld,” by Robert Whiting. During this period, organized-crime groups established black markets where citizens could acquire necessities, and they were skilled at dealing with the occupying Americans. As Japan rebuilt, the yakuza got involved in real estate and in public-works projects.

  For the most part, the yakuza eschewed violence against civilians, because the image of criminality was effective enough in an orderly society. Gangsters decorated their backs and arms with elaborate tat toos, and they permed their hair in tight curls that stood out among the Japanese. If a yakuza displeased a superior, he chopped off his own pinkie finger as a sign of apology. Gang members excelled at loan-sharking, extortion, and blackmail, and they found creative ways to terrorize banks. A few months ago, I accompanied Adelstein on a visit to the home of an aging mid-level gang member, who, along with a former colleague, reminisced about extorting banks in the nineteen-eighties.

  “Sometimes we’d send three guys with cats, and they would twirl the cats around by the tail in front of the bank,” one said, with Adelstein translating. “They’d do that until the bank finally gave them a loan. Or we’d have a hundred yakuza line up outside a bank. Each would go in and open an account for one yen, which was the lowest amount allowed. It would take all day, until finally the bank would agree to give some loans, to get rid of us.” He said they wouldn’t pay the loans back. “But we’d give the bank some protection, as well as help with collecting other bad loans,” he said. “So it wasn’t a terrible deal for them.”

  Both men were heavyset, with broad noses that looked to have been broken in the past. Their eyes were incredibly expressive—they had high arched brows, as fine as manga brushstrokes, that fluttered whenever they got excited. One had had his shoulders and arms tattooed with chrysanthemums, a patriotic symbol of imperial Japan. The men believed that true yakuza do honorable work: they go after deadbeats who don’t repay loans, and they allow people to solve problems without wasting money on lawyers. Yakuza groups also engage in charity, especially after earthquakes or other disasters.

  Many yakuza became rich during the bubble economy of the eighties and nineties, and they developed extensive corporate structures. (There’s never been a law that bans the gangs, which are fully registered.) Nowadays, yakuza run hedge funds. They speculate in real estate. The Inagawa-kai, one of the three biggest gangs, keeps its main office across the street from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in midtown Tokyo. At least one Japanese Prime Minister has been documented socializing with yakuza, and politicians have the kind of contact with criminal groups that would destroy a career elsewhere. In the midnineties, Shizuka Kamei, who was the minister of exports, admitted that he had accepted substantial donations from a yakuza front company, though he denied being aware of the criminal links. This did so little damage to his reputation that he eventually became minister of the agency that regulates Japan’s finance industry.

  As a foreigner, Adelstein moves easily between the yakuza and the police, playing the flamboyant outsider with both. Yet he follows strict rules: Information that comes from cops can be taken to other law-enforcement officials, but it cannot be passed to yakuza. In contrast, if a yakuza tells Adelstein something, the goal is usually to expose a rival group, so this information can be passed on to the cops. Adelstein says that the key to his work is the Japanese concept of giri, or reciprocity. His typical routine involves exchanging small favors with contacts, collecting bits of information that can be leveraged elsewhere.

  One afternoon last spring, I accompanied Adelstein to a Mexican restaurant in the neighborhood of Roppongi, to meet with a gangster who had a favor to ask. He was around forty years old—I’ll call him Miyamoto—and he was college-educated, with perfect English. During his pre-yakuza days, he had worked for a public-relations firm in Tokyo. Back then, one of the agency’s clients was an American auto manufacturer that regularly sent high-level management to Japan. In the evenings, it was Miyamoto’s task to escort the gaijin to the massage parlors known as “soapland,” where customers can enjoy a bath, a massage, and sex. Eventually, some yakuza extorted the public-relations firm, threatening to go to the tabloids with stories about American auto execs at soapland. Miyamoto handled the payoff, and then the next shakedown, and soon he became the firm’s de-facto yakuza liaison. The gangsters liked what they saw and recruited him away from the agency.

  Since then, Miyamoto had become a full gang member, although his oyabun had told him to avoid tattoos, because they would be a liability in the corporate world. He had kept all his fingers for the same reason. Nowadays, he helped his gang manage three hedge funds. At the restaurant, he handed Adelstein a new business card. “Be really careful with this card, because it’s my legitimate business,” he said, in English. “If this gets out, we won’t get listed on the stock market.”

  The favor he needed was personal. His wife had left him after he became a yakuza, and he hadn’t seen his child for years. The recent tsunami, which had occurred less than two months earlier, made him want to get back in touch. He asked Adelstein to contact his estranged wife and tell her that he wasn’t a yakuza anymore.

  “I can’t lie to her,” Adelstein said. “I can say you’re doing legitimate business. But I can’t say you’re not a yakuza.”

  Miyamoto agreed, and then he talked about other corporate gangsters, mentioning a well-known gang. “They now have a guy who worked for Deutsche Bank,” he said.

  Adelstein remarked that Miyamoto had posted his gang symbol online, and he warned him to be careful. “You need to back off on Twitter.”

  “Man, I’ve got a thousand followers!”

  “You shouldn’t say that stuff on Twitter about your bitches giving you money.”

  “The police won’t read it. People think it’s fake, anyway.”

  “Well, there’s a new law going on the books in October, and if you’re talking about taking protection money you could get arrested,” Adelstein said.

  There was never any mention of what Miyamoto might do in exchange for Adelstein’s contacting his wife. But after a while the yakuza leaned forward and spoke in a low voice about the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, which owns and manages the Fukushima nuclear reactors that had been damaged by the tsunami. There had been accusations of mismanagement, and Miyamoto suggested that Adelstein research potential links between TEPCO and the Matsuba-kai, a criminal organization. “You know what’s really interesting?” he said. “The Matsuba-kai guys play golf with the waste-disposal guys for TEPCO. That’s what you need to look into.” He also named a yakuza from another gang who had supposedly made a million-dollar profit from supplying workers and construction materials to the reactors.

  During the following weeks, Adelstein took pieces of information about the reactors to various contacts. Over the summer, he published a number of articles in The Atlantic online, the London Independent, and some Japanese publications, exposing criminal links at TEPCO. He described how yakuza front companies had supplied equipment and contract workers, and he quoted an engineer who had noticed something strange when he saw some cleanup crews change clothes: beneath the white hazmat suits, their bodies were covered with tattoos.

  When Adelstein worked for the Yomiur
i, he says there was a tacit understanding that investigative reporting on the yakuza shouldn’t go too far. Media companies, like many big Japanese corporations, often had links to criminal groups, and even the police tried not to be too combative. For one thing, tools were limited: Japanese authorities can’t engage in plea bargaining or witness relocation, and wiretapping is almost never allowed. In the past, yakuza were rarely violent, and if they did attack somebody it was usually another gang member, which wasn’t considered a problem. One officer in the organized-crime-prevention unit told me that, in the nineteen-eighties, if a yakuza killed a rival he often turned himself in. “The guilty person would appear the next day at the police station with the gun and say, ‘I did it,’” the cop said. “He’d be in jail for only two or three years. It wasn’t like killing a real person.”

  Even the police officer believed that yakuza serve some useful functions. “Japanese society doesn’t really have any place for juvenile delinquents,” he said. “That’s one role the yakuza play. Traditionally, it’s a place where people can send juvenile delinquents.” The fact that these delinquents are subsequently raised to become yakuza didn’t seem to bother the cop too much. When I asked if he had ever fired his gun, he said that he hadn’t even used his nightstick. His business card identified his specialty as “Violent Crime Investigation,” and it featured the smiling Pipo-kun with his antenna, which symbolized how police can sense things happening everywhere in society. The officer explained that until recently the cops would notify yakuza before making a bust, out of respect, which allowed gangsters to hide any particularly damning evidence. “Now we don’t do that anymore,” he said.

  He lamented a loss of civility among a new generation of yakuza. “It used to be that they didn’t do theft or robbery,” he said. “It was considered shameful.” He blamed greed: when the bubble economy collapsed, in the nineties, many wealthy yakuza had trouble ad justing. After years of adopting the façade of dangerous sociopaths, some began to live up to the image. The officer identified a gangster named Tadamasa Goto as an example of the new breed. “He’s much more ruthless than yakuza were in the past,” he said. “He’ll go after civilians. Unfortunately, more yakuza have become like that.”

  Six days before our conversation, one of Goto’s former underlings had been shot dead in Thailand. For years, he had been on the run, a suspect in the murder of a man who had stood in Goto’s way in a real-estate deal. The cop said that Goto was cleaning up potential witnesses, and he reminded me that the gangster had also issued death threats against Adelstein. The most recent had been made last year, when Goto published his autobiography. “We suspect Goto of being involved in the killing of seventeen people,” the cop said.

  The criminal autobiography is a perverse genre anywhere, but this is especially true in Japan, where Goto’s book appeared with the title Habakarinagara, a polite phrase that means “with all due respect.” At the time of publication, the author announced that all royalties would be dedicated to a charity for the disabled in Cambodia and to a Buddhist temple in Burma. The book begins in a David Copperfield vein: As a boy, Goto lacked shoes, and he ate barley instead of rice. (“Those years were extremely tough, with an alcoholic bum for a father.”) He describes the rise from juvenile delinquency to the yakuza with a nice baseball metaphor. (“I felt as though we had been playing neighborhood baseball in a weedy field then suddenly got scouted to play in the major leagues.”) Crimes are mentioned breezily, with few details, although even the offhand ones tend to be memorable. (“My third brother, Yasutaka, was one of the guys who threw leaflets and excrement around Suruga Bank, and he went to prison for that.”) Goto emphasizes his sense of honor; if nothing else, he has the courage of his convictions. (“I couldn’t go apologize and beg forgiveness. I am not cut out that way. I have pride. So instead I chopped off one of my fingers and brought it to Kawauchi.”)

  For years, this auto-amputee was one of the largest shareholders of Japan Airlines. According to police estimates, Goto’s assets are worth about a billion dollars, and he controlled his own faction within the Yamaguchi-gumi, the top criminal organization in the country. He is notorious for an attack on Juzo Itami, one of Japan’s greatest film makers. In May of 1992, Itami released Minbo, or the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion, a movie that portrayed yakuza as fakes who don’t live up to their tough-guy image. Days later, five members of Goto’s organization attacked the filmmaker in front of his home, slashing his face and neck with knives.

  Afterward, Itami became even more outspoken. Five years later, he apparently committed suicide, leaping from the roof of his office building. He left a note explaining that he was distraught over an alleged love affair. But Adelstein, citing an unnamed yakuza source, subsequently reported that the filmmaker had been forced to sign the note and jump, and the police have treated the case as a possible homicide. The American lawyer who researches organized crime told me that some yakuza groups specialize in murders that look like suicide. “I used to think they committed suicide out of shame, because the Japanese do that, culturally,” he said. “But nowadays when I hear that somebody killed himself I often doubt that’s what happened.”

  At the Yomiuri, Adelstein started investigating Goto. He had been making progress when one of his sources, a foreign prostitute, disappeared. Adelstein was convinced that she had been murdered, and soon he became obsessed with the case. He was married to a Japanese journalist named Sunao, and they had two small children. But Adelstein rarely made it home before midnight, because Japanese crime reporters are expected to smoke and drink heavily with cops and other contacts. Sometimes he was threatened by yakuza; once he was badly beaten and suffered damage to his knee and spine. Like many people with Marfan syndrome, he took daily medication for his heart, and there were signs that his life style was becoming self-destructive. He had always had a tendency to dramatize his health problems—this was part of his image—but now he seemed to be growing into the role of the troubled crime reporter.

  Years later, both Adelstein and his wife said that this period destroyed their marriage. It also finished his career at the Yomiuri. After a certain point, he says, the paper balked at publishing more stories about Goto, and Adelstein quit. To this day, nobody at the paper will speak on the record about him; some reporters told me that he was a liar, while others said that the Yomiuri had been frustrated by his obsession. A couple of people alleged that he worked for the C.I.A. Staff from competing papers seemed more likely to praise his work, and a number of people indicated that the Japanese media tended to shy away from stories that would anger powerful yakuza figures like Goto. They also said that people at the Yomiuri were angry about Adelstein’s departure because it violated traditional corporate loyalty.

  After leaving the Yomiuri, Adelstein kept investigating, until finally he homed in on Goto’s liver. For yakuza, the liver is a crucial body part, a target of self-abuse on a par with the pinkie finger. Many gangsters inject methamphetamines, and dirty needles can spread hepatitis C, which is also a risk of the big tattoos. In addition, there’s a lot of drinking and smoking. In the yakuza community, a sick liver is a badge of honor, something that a proud samurai like Goto brags about in his memoirs. (“I drank enough to destroy three livers.”) But it also means that yakuza often need transplants, and a criminal source told Adelstein that Goto had received a new liver in the United States, where his extensive record would make him ineligible for a visa. After months of investigation, Adelstein discovered that Goto and three other yakuza had been patients at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center, one of the nation’s premier transplant facilities. Goto had been granted a visa because of a deal with the F.B.I.—he had agreed to rat out other yakuza.

  Adelstein broke the story in May of 2008, first in the Washington Post and then with details that he gave to reporters at the Los Angeles Times. Jim Stern, a retired head of the F.B.I.’s Asian criminal-enterprise unit, confirmed the deal, although he told the L.A. Times, “I don’t think Goto gave the bureau anythi
ng of significance.” (Stern was not involved in the deal.) According to Adelstein’s Japanese police sources, the U.C.L.A. Medical Center received donations in excess of a million dollars from yakuza. An investigation at U.C.L.A. found no wrongdoing, and the medical center reported only two hundred thousand dollars in donations, although it acknowledged other signs of giri—for example, one yakuza gave his doctor a case of wine, a watch, and ten thousand dollars. The year that Goto received his liver, a hundred and eighty-six Americans in the Los Angeles area died while waiting for a transplant. Long before the articles appeared, Goto’s men had contacted Adelstein. He says that they threatened to kill him, while another gang leader offered him half a million dollars to drop the story. After that, Adelstein was placed under Tokyo police protection, and the F.B.I. monitored his wife and children, who had moved to the United States.

  In 2008, the Yamaguchi-gumi officially expelled Goto. He undertook the training necessary to be certified as a Buddhist priest, a step that’s not uncommon for ex-yakuza who fear retribution from former colleagues. It’s bad karma to kill a priest, even if he’s a former crime boss who reportedly still commands many loyal followers. And Goto is the type of Buddhist priest who uses his autobiography to issue oblique threats. “Just because I’ve retired from the business, doesn’t mean I have the time to track down this American novelist,” he says in With All Due Respect. “If I did meet him it would be a serious matter. He’d have to write, ‘Goto is after me’ instead of ‘Goto may come after me.’”

  In 2010, Adelstein hired a lawyer named Toshiro Igari to sue Goto’s publisher and force the retraction of this threat. Igari was involved in many anti-yakuza cases, including investigations into fixing sumo matches and professional baseball games. In August, the lawyer went on vacation to the Philippines, where he was found dead in a room with a cup of sleeping pills, a set of box cutters, a glass of wine, and a shallow cut on his wrist. The Philippine police report was inconclusive, although most Japanese newspapers reported the death as a suicide. In Japan, Goto’s book has sold more than two hundred thousand copies, and, since the earthquake in March, all royalties have been dedicated to tsunami relief.