Jake Adelstein's Blog, page 98

Fuzoku Friday: "Prostitution" vs Prostitution

The Japanese law draws the line between legal and illegal sexual services by whether or not the ball makes it into the goal, so to speak. And while some businesses, namely soaplands, manage to work their way around these rules, law enforcement chooses to "focus their efforts" on places that are plainly and evidently illegal.

The first clip is from "The Zokufu 24 Hours," a program on a local Chiba TV station. We find ex-pro wind surfer and host, Saito Ryotsu, here to learn along with viewers...

Local areas to beef up anti-organized crime legislature

There was news this week of four prefectures working on additional legislative measures to stop organized crime organizations from working their way into the operations and offices of legitimate businesses.

In Ehime, it was reported by the Mainichi that on Dec. 15 the prefectural government started a project team for the creation of a prefecture ordinance to eliminate organized crime (県暴力団排除条例総合対策プロジェクト). The ordinance will reportedly be based on Fukuoka Prefecture's anti-organized crime...

Fuzoku Friday: The Alibi

On an Internet message board, a concerned mother writes:

Hello.

My child has been attending kindergarten from March, and since then I've been working as a delivery health girl. I tell my husband, "I'm still looking for a job.. today I went to the employment office but still haven't been able to find anything," but in reality I'm doing good business every weekday from 10am-3pm.

I want to tell the hubby that I've found a job, but am not sure how to go about it. Before I got pregnant I worked an...

PTSD Funny Stories

Well, I don't know if it's PTSD but I have terrible trouble sleeping and sometimes I sleepwalk. Two days ago I dreamed about a knockdown brawl with a low-life chinpira, where we smashed each other into a glass door and had pieces of glass stuck in each of us, and I pulled a sheet of glass out of my shoulder and stabbed him in the gut-- to wake up on the floor of my tatami room, with my shoulder hurting like hell and feeling like I had shards of glass in my feet. It took about ten minutes to assure myself that it was a dream and even then it still felt like I had glass in my feet, and I walked around all day very daintily because I expected sharp pain when I walked.
Well, the gist of it is that I heroically body-slammed the wall of my room and almost dislocated my shoulder but after two days, my left arm is pretty much back to normal, if I don't raise it up very high.
I talked another yakuza boss a few days ago and he says the same thing happens to him sometimes--he wakes up with his knuckles bruised because he's punched the wall in his sleep.
By the way, I'm not making a claim to be as tough as a yakuza or like a yakuza--I just have bad dreams. But I guess that unpleasant physical encounter and threats probably produce the same kinds of things in people--and knowing that Mr. Purple--as we like to call him--also fights in his sleep made me feel a lot less crazy.
Well--in my dream I was very heroic. In reality, I felt very much like a goofball.

Police and government fighting back against junior idols?

A 10-year-old "junior idol" poses at a bookshop in Akihabara. Fans who buy a girl's DVD get...

The Cheshire Cat

My face is still a little purple but I went as one today to an amazing unbirthday party for a friend--with an Alice in Wonderland theme. I went as the Cheshire Cat--one of my favorite characters in literature. I certainly feel like him at times--especially in Tokyo.


Alice: But I don't want to go among mad people.
Cheshire Cat: Oh, you can't help that. Most everyone's mad here.
[laughs maniacally; starts to disappear:]
Cheshire Cat: You may have noticed that I'm not all there myself.

Eating sushi off a naked girl: yay or yuck?

The Japan Times featured an interesting article by Brett Bull about nyotaimori (女体盛り), the custom of feasting on food served atop a [mostly:] naked woman. Googling for images for this entry, I'd reckon a guess that the practice is far more popular overseas than it is in Japan nowadays, with specialty services popping up stateside and the infamy of the practice amongst people all around the world. A colleague whose job it is to entertain people from overseas on tech tours of Tokyo once...

Thank You For The Kind Letters About TOKYO VICE (from Jake)

I've been heartened by a huge number of letters I've received in the last three weeks from people who read the book and were moved by it, inspired by it, appalled by it, and/or who felt they were wiser for reading it. I've tried to answer every letter I've gotten. If I haven't answered yours, my apologies.

I also feel that I should say I am not a hero. I've also apparently broken most of the major rules of journalism that most journalists in the west follow so please don't see me as an...

Interviewed on BBC's "The World" about Tokyo Vice and Tokyo's vices

http://bit.ly/6MKNit
I actually thought my story about the repulsive "baby-play" sex club that got busted in Kabukicho would be cut from the interview but this was not the case.

I also read part of a chapter from the book, called "The Perfect Manual of Suicide" and they were nice enough to put the mp3 of it on the web-page as well. I tend to stutter a little when speaking English these days. Maybe I always have.

TOKYO VICE Reviewed In Japanese — Bloombergが東京ヴァイス （東京の性悪・米国人事件記者の警察回り体験記）を日本語で書評

Rocky Swift, a journalist at Bloomberg Tokyo, has posted a review of Tokyo Vice in both Japanese and English:

【書評】米国人元新聞記者がえぐり出す日本の闇社会

元読売新聞記者のジェイク・アデルスタイン氏の近著「トーキョー・バイス」は、居直ったヤクザから始末するぞと静かな脅しを掛かけられた著者が、たばこの煙をもくもくと上げながら取材戦略を練るシーンで始まる。

同書はアデルスタイン氏が警視庁記者クラブメンバーで唯一の米国人記者として連続殺人事件などを追いかけた12年間の取材の追想録で、ヤクザの中でも特に暴力的な勢力をかぎまわって窮地に陥るに至った経緯が描かれている。

「トーキョー･バイス」 に収められたのは、後藤忠正氏という病んだヤクザのボスと手下の３人がどうやって米当局のお膳立てで米国での肝臓移植手術にこぎつけたかを探ったアデルス タイン氏の調査報道の記録。今回の出版は結果的に、アデルスタイン氏の知名度を高め殺害を難しくしたため、この本は著者の救い主とも言える。

アデルスタイン氏は...