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

by Jake Adelstein

“Either erase the story, or we’ll erase you. And maybe your family. But we’ll do them first, so you learn your lesson before you die.” The well-dressed enforcer spoke very slowly, the way people speak to idiots or children or the way Japanese sometimes speak to clueless foreigners. It seemed like a straightforward proposition. “Walk away from the story and walk away from your job, and it’ll be like it never happened. Write the article, and there is nowhere in this country that we will not hunt you down. Understand?” It’s never a smart idea to get on the bad side of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest organized crime group. With about forty thousand members, it’s a lot of people to piss off.

To be honest, I didn’t really think I’d be hired by a Japanese newspaper. I mean, what were the chances that a Jewish kid from Missouri would be accepted into this high-end Japanese journalistic fraternity? But I didn’t care. If I had something to study for, if I had a goal, however unreachable, the time spent chasing it might have some collateral productivity. At the very least, my Japanese would improve.

“You learn to let go of what you want to be the truth and find out what is the truth, and you report it as it is, not as you wish it was. It’s an important job. Journalists are the one thing in this country that keeps the forces in power in check. They’re the final guardians of this fragile democracy we have in Japan. “Let go of your preconceptions, dignity, and pride and get the job done. If you can do that, you can learn to be a great reporter.”

Everything in Japan, even theft, is an art. Even assault is an art—judo, aikido, and kendo, all of these are more than just learning to decimate your opponent, they’re about learning to master yourself. In many ways, Sato was a master of his art. Personally, I wish I’d spent a little more time mastering the martial arts in college; I’d find that surviving as a Yomiuri reporter was a little more physically demanding than I’d anticipated.

Today the Japanese obsession with manuals is unabated. A few years ago, the term manual ningen (“manual humans”) was in vogue to describe a generation of younger Japanese who seemed incapable of independent thought. The term is now part of the vernacular, used for someone who can only follow instructions and can’t think outside the box. A synonym for manual ningen is shijimachi ningen (“the waiting-for-instructions people”), which, as you can imagine, refers to passive employees with no initiative.

It’s not uncommon for books labeled as manuals to spend weeks on the best-seller rankings. Amazon Japan (www.amazon.co.jp) listed 9,994 manuals on its Web site at the time I first wrote this chapter, and both the sales rankings and the books themselves are a microcosm of Japanese society.

Police in Japan are organized in pyramidal fashion. At the top is the National Public Security Council, which is under the prime minister’s cabinet. Under the National Public Security Council is the National Police Agency. The NPA is a political and administrative bureaucracy that does no investigation on its own but may coordinate investigations crossing prefectural lines. It gives general guidance to all police organizations in Japan. Think of the FBI with all of the bureaucracy and none of the investigative powers, and you have a good sense of what the National Police Agency is like. Many who rise to the top of the NPA signed up after passing a national exam and had little or no real police experience before being put on the career fast track.

Below the NPA are the forty-seven prefectural police bureaus that investigate crimes in their region. The most prestigious of these is the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, which functions a little like the FBI in that it often takes on cases more national than local in nature.

Each police station usually consists of the following divisions: violent crime, fraud, white-collar crime, traffic, juvenile crime, crime prevention, and lifestyle crime (including vice), plus an organized crime control division. Drugs, credit card fraud, and the flesh trade fall under organized crime (or anti–organized crime, I should say) in some prefectures, but the turf has not yet been delineated clearly.

In most major cases, the detectives from police headquarters take charge and the detectives at the local police station function as subordinates, doing the footwork, driving the limousine for the chief of homicide, buying bento box lunches for the senior detectives, and generally functioning at the whim and will of the honbu (headquarters). When the TMPD works a joint investigation with other prefectural police, the TMPD functions like the honbu and expects everyone else to function like low-ranking police station minions.

The police make regular announcements of cases, written out in short press releases, which the reporter is expected to augment by asking questions over the telephone or by actually going to the crime scene himself.

Each major case is announced in advance, and a lecture is given in addition to a flimsy press release. This takes place in what is called a press club, which is housed in the actual building of each prefectural police headquarters. Large police stations may also have a pressroom. But, of course, not any old reporter has entrance to these press clubs.

There are twenty-two officially recognized yakuza groups in Japan. The big three are the Sumiyoshi-kai, with 12,000 members; the Inagawa-kai, with 10,000 members; and at the top the Yamaguchi-gumi. There are 40,000 members of the Yamaguchi-gumi and more than a hundred subgroups. Each group is required to pay monthly dues, which are funneled to the top of the organization. In essence, every month the Yamaguchi-gumi headquarters takes in (at a conservative estimate) more than $50 million in private equity.

Japan’s National Police Agency estimates that, including the Yamaguchi-gumi, there are 86,000 gangsters in the country’s crime syndicates, many times the strength of the U.S. Mafia at its violent peak.

According to “An Overview of Japanese Police,” an English document by the National Police Agency distributed to foreign police agencies in August 2008, “Boryokudan (yakuza) groups pose an enormous threat to civil affairs and corporate transactions. They are also committing a variety of crime to raise funds by invading the legitimate business community and pretending to be engaged in legitimate business deals. They do this either through companies, etc. which they are involved in managing or in cooperation with other companies.”

Like their Italian cousins, they have deep if murky historical links with the county’s ruling party, in Japan’s case the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Robert Whiting, the author of Tokyo Underworld, and other experts point out that the LDP was actually founded with yakuza money.

The Yamaguchi-gumi has a high-walled central compound in one of the wealthiest parts of Kobe. They own land, and are impossible to drive out. Of course, that’s because the yakuza are recognized as legal entities in Japan. They have the same rights as any corporate entity, and their members have the same rights as ordinary citizens.

fact, the Aichi police, when raiding a Kodo-kai office in 2007, were horrified to discover that the faces, family photos, and addresses of the detectives working organized crime were posted on the walls of the yakuza headquarters. The names of all the organized crime detectives of another major police agency in Japan were leaked onto the Internet last year. The yakuza, especially the Yamaguchi-gumi, are not only not afraid of the police anymore, they are saying, essentially, “We know who you are, we know where you live, so be careful.”

The rituals of meishi exchange are well known. This is what I was taught: You hand your card over with one hand to show that you are a lightweight, a nothing, and humble. You take the other man’s card with both hands, to show that he is more substantial and weighty than humble you. You lift his card up slightly to eye level, look over the card, and assess your mutual social positions to determine the proper mode of polite speech. You take his card and put it in your card holder if you are both standing. You never fold, spindle, or mutilate the other person’s card, which would be a grievous insult.

Kaneko then proceeded to outline his style of organized crime to me. The Sumiyoshi-kai in its heyday had been very active in jacking up land prices for a kickback from the Realtors or the banks. It had also made money by getting tenants out of apartment buildings or houses that would be worth more if sold on the open market, a practice known as jiage, or “land-sharking.”

Sometimes it would buy the property itself and sell it to a front company. Waste disposal—illegal waste disposal—was a good source of revenue, and then there was protection money from the sex industry in Omiya. But the biggest cash cow was extortion.

What Kaneko meant was that the Sumiyoshi-kai would shake down businesses and businessmen that had embarrassing secrets. Or it would sometimes get wind of a company that was struggling financially and approach it with offers to help. It’d strip the company of all remaining assets and real estate, taking the company down after using it for other fraudulent enterprises.

Finally, when the property was seized and put up for auction, the yakuza would interfere with the process, buy the land and buildings at a low price and sell them off or let a third party buy the property and take a cut of the transaction as a kickback.

The Sumiyoshi-kai also ran several front companies: temporary staffing agencies, loan-sharking operations, even an insurance company. The insurance company was used to generate false claims to rip off real insurance companies. It had a collection agency that recovered bad debts for legitimate consumer-loan companies. It scalped tickets and ran pawnshops trafficking in stolen goods. Of course, it also had a talent agency, which supplied young women to porn producers. The women were paid well. No coercion was involved.

One of the problems with Japanese newspapers, and maybe Japanese companies and the government as well, is that you are never allowed to do the same job for very long. There are constant personnel changes, just for the sake of change, which hurts job continuity and makes it very difficult for a reporter to have his or her own specialized field of knowledge. The lack of a byline on most stories also hurts a reporter trying to get recognition as an expert on a certain subject matter.

Hamaya’s field of expertise was the mentally disabled, especially involving the appropriate measures to be taken with them when they broke the law. She was also an enthusiastic advocate for the handicapped, an area where Japan is still decades behind the United States in terms of social integration.

As has been noted, the Yamaguchi-gumi is the largest of the three main yakuza groups in Japan. It is also the most violent and the most active in infiltrating the stock market and high finance. Extreme loyalty is demanded; anyone caught snitching on his boss may be forced to sacrifice an appendage or even be murdered. In terms of expansion and methods, it is like the Wal-Mart of organized crime. It has its own financial division and maintains strong ties with politicians, including former prime ministers.

It was because of lawyers. The Yamaguchi-gumi had a lot of them. And they were always ready to sue on behalf of their big boys. That’s another problem with organized crime in Japan—so damn organized, so damn corporate. Allegedly (we’ll never know for sure), a couple of cases were quietly settled where the yakuza sued civilian credit-rating firms that had dared to label one of their operations a front company.

When three people are driven to commit suicide by debt collectors, people take notice. And it was criminals like Kajiyama who were behind those deaths. Sometimes, as a reporter, you forget the victim. You develop a kind of admiration for criminal genius and ruthless efficiency, and you forget that the criminal empire is built on human pain and suffering.

I had set up a little information network of strippers, prostitutes, hostesses, touts, and street vendors. As a result, I knew who was dealing and who was supplying, and I also had an early-warning system in place that would inform me when there was to be a big raid on a club. Drug busts were news only if someone famous got caught, but you had to know about the bust in order to have something to work with.

At the steps in front of Quest, I lit a cigarette while fending off propositions from transsexual Colombian prostitutes who had flocked near the public toilet, making crow imitations. A blond girl in a party dress approached me, asking directions. I told her I was going to Shinjuku and offered her a lift. In the taxi, she told me her story: she was from Israel and was earning a living in Tokyo as a hostess and hating it. If only the Japanese clients knew how much those women despised them.

I knew Cyclops through his father, who had invested heavily in a Korean-run credit union/bank that eventually had to be bailed out by the Japanese government. The reason for the bank going under, according to a different yakuza source, was corporate malfeasance and bad loans to the Inagawa-kai crime group. Along with two other reporters, I pursued the story for almost a year before finally getting something into print. Our investigative reporting had the gratifying result of spurring the Saitama police into arresting the people responsible for the bank failure. No investor got his money back, but the Korean community was happy to see justice done.

“Kajiyama blew a couple million dollars at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. He lost it gambling, but maybe you can call that money laundering. He’s spent a lot of time in the United States. He puts the cash in a safe deposit box here and pulls it out when he goes over there. He has some overseas bank accounts too.”

Kajiyama had stashed more than $50 million in a Swiss bank account with the help of a Japanese employee of Credit Suisse. Fifty million dollars was a lot more than several million dollars. The Swiss froze his account.

The yakuza like foreign banks; they find them useful. Credit Suisse wasn’t the first foreign financial institution that had been used for money laundering. Citibank lost its private banking license in Japan in September 2004, in part because it was allegedly being used by the yakuza to launder money.

Some of his disciples went on to run elaborate “it’s me” scams, which are sometimes complex operations where criminals impersonate the child or grandchild of a mark over the telephone, convincing the mark that because they are in trouble he should make an immediate cash transfer. These hardworking guys apparently didn’t make as much money with this new enterprise—but at least it was a dishonest living.

Japanese lending laws were revised to make the penalties for loan sharking much harsher, and a crystal-clear cap was set on interest rates that even legitimate consumer loan companies could charge.

If you spend enough years as a crime reporter, you get callous. It’s only natural. If you grieved for every victim or shared the pain of the family, you’d become a mental case. Murder, arson, armed robbery, family suicide, they all become routine. There’s a tendency to dehumanize the victims, sometimes to even be annoyed with them for ruining your day off or a planned vacation. It sounds horrible, and it is. But that’s how it works.

I thought I knew a lot about the “dark side” of Japan. I’d covered the Lucie Blackman case, investigated a serial killer, nearly touched a body full of electricity, seen a man burn himself to death, and more. I thought I was pretty tough—in my own way.

I had covered Kabukicho and hunted for tips in Roppongi. The girls at Maid Station had been very frank about how their whole operation worked. I was pretty conversant with the legalities of the sex-for-money industry in Japan. In fact, I thought the whole idea of sexual slavery was some urban myth created by puritanical bureaucrats in the West who didn’t understand Japan’s sex culture. But I was about to get a real lesson.

“You’ll break your code sooner or later. Vice does it to you. Like the saying goes, lie down with dogs and get up with fleas. You’ll get fleas.” “I’ll get a flea collar.” “Hah. Won’t work. You’ll sleep with someone not just for money or information but because it seems like the thing to do. Like shaking hands. It’s a slippery slope. And you won’t even feel guilty about it. It won’t occur to you that it isn’t right or out of the ordinary. The job screws you up. You should ask for another posting. You’re lucky you’re already married, at least. I could never get married.” “Why not?” I asked, now surprised. “Because I’ve spent too much time with people that sex doesn’t have any meaning for. It already doesn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t be faithful to one woman, and I wouldn’t believe she could be faithful to me.

The company fronting the operation was, no surprise, J Enterprise, a Roppongi-based LLC that was not registered with the Japanese authorities. The company was owned and run by Slick Imai. Viktor was his partner. Their operation involved bringing foreign women into the Tokyo area and placing them in sex clubs and massage parlors. Slick ran four clubs—Club Angel, Den of Delights, Club Divine, and Club Codex—in the Roppongi area, supplied the Den of Delicious in Shibuya, and ran an escort service on the side. He was the king of foreign flesh in the ward, pocketing the equivalent of $20,000 a month. The focus of Slick’s recruitment was girls from Israel and also Hungary, Poland, and other countries in Eastern Europe.

Once the girl arrived in Tokyo, she was met and taken to the company apartment, which she would share with other working girls. If she hadn’t figured it out by then, she would quickly be informed what was expected of her. Financial pressure, lies, subtle (and not-so-subtle) threats to hurt her family, and plain and simple indoctrination were brought to bear. The girls worked a full nine-hour shift at a sex parlor and earned the equivalent of about $100 a day; of this $75 was reclaimed as fees. Essentially this left the women $25 per day, a far cry from the $40,000 a month they’d been promised. All were on tourist visas, which is good for a three-month stay and don’t allow employment. The benefit of this—for Slick and Viktor—was the revolving-door supply of fresh girls as well as constantly collecting on the hiked-up airfare. Many girls left the country actually owing Slick money.

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.’

“I was horrified. I was absolutely repulsed, but there was nothing I could do. I left the bar, but I didn’t know Tokyo at all, not even the way back to the apartment. Somehow, though, I remembered certain places, and after two or three hours, I made it back to the apartment. I thought I would grab my passport and plane ticket and get ready to go back home. When I got back, though, everything had been taken from the drawer. There was nothing I could do but wait.

“When I saw Viktor, his face was so … proud and triumphant. I was angry. ‘What the hell are you doing? Give back my passport! Give me my return ticket! You’re a thief, and if you don’t give them back, I’ll go to the police.’ He was totally unfazed, and he told me, ‘We’re the ones who bought the ticket—the ticket was ours, not yours. I’m not stealing anything, you ungrateful bitch. Go try the police. You have no passport, right? They’ll arrest you for being an illegal alien. The police here are worse...

“My daughter I had left with my mother. The man who introduced me to all of this knew where they lived. With Viktor’s threat, I was very afraid. I thought they would hurt my family. I thought that if I escaped, while I was escaping, my daughter would be killed … and my mother, too. If I could do it over, I would have gone to my embassy. But I worried that Viktor could have somehow messed that up for me too. I thought that he might even have friends in the embassy. God, I was stupid.

“I had no place to sleep, no money, and nowhere I could go. There was only ‘work.’ It was the first time I had done anything like that. They had explained that for just a massage, it was a thousand yen [$10]. I hated doing it, but I did. Touching the men was one part of it, but the clients always demanded a blow job. I got more money for that. For the first week, I only did massage, but Viktor and Slick were demanding ten thousand yen [$100] a day for the apartment. So I tried to do a blow job, but I just couldn’t do it with someone I didn’t know. I started choking really violently. I started to hate myself. One day, I started crying and went begging to the manager of the shop. He said that he’d had no idea they’d taken my passport. I don’t know what he said to Viktor, but he got back my passport for me. The manager told me that I could try to look for work at another place. Then he lent me his telephone, so I called my mother and daughter and told them to go to a safe place. They said that Viktor had called them once. I wanted to go straight home to them, but I couldn’t. I had no money.

“They also do sex tours, you know, for businessmen. They have a big boat in the Maldives, and the girls are the escorts. The men can sleep with a different girl every evening if they like … There was another Polish girl who told me she worked on one of these tours. She was promised two hundred thousand yen [$2,000] for five days, but Viktor kept taking money out for ‘rent’ and ended up only paying her half of what he owed her. ‘It was like a vacation for you,’ he told her. ‘I don’t think one hundred thousand yen is too much to pay for a vacation.’ “I don’t understand it. Why do the Japanese police allow this?

“There’s no point in going to the Japanese police to complain. Even if I told the local police in Poland, they’d just call me a whore. “I don’t want to be with a man anymore. I don’t even want to be with anyone. That’s how I feel now. I’m just … filthy. Not even a woman. Not anything.” Veronika talked for a long time. I scrawled notes while she did. What she had to say was not too different from what I’d heard elsewhere. Different motives for coming to Japan, different details, but the same fundamental horror story.