Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan

by Jake Adelstein

At the apartment were a Colombian girl and a Canadian girl. Three people in one tiny room. I started to feel a little uneasy. Viktor pulled out a drawer and told me to put anything of value in it, including my passport, so that it wouldn’t be stolen. I did as he said. “The next day, around five in the afternoon, Viktor and Slick, a Japanese man, came to the apartment. They then took us to the Den. It was totally different from the picture I was shown in Poland. Viktor very rudely told us we were to work there. I got mad, thinking what the hell is this? Then the two guys explained the job to us: We were going to be providing sex services. Give massages and jerk the men off. For oral sex, we would get four thousand yen [$40]. Whether we had customers or not, they would collect seventy-five hundred yen [$75] from us each day. If we didn’t pay, that amount would become a ‘loan’ we would have to pay back. The plane ticket was the first thing they were charging us for; they said we already owed them three hundred thousand yen [$3,000]. The apartment cost was ten thousand yen [$100] a day. ‘Don’t drag your feet about it,’ they said. ‘If you want more money, you can sleep with a customer; you can make twenty thousand yen [$200] for that. You have three months in this country, so if you work, you can pay back all your loans.’