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

by Jake Adelstein

There’s no way we can ignore someone working here illegally and give them shelter, even if they are victims. There are no criteria for identifying human trafficking victims. That’s why it’s impossible to build a case against the traffickers. The victims are classified as illegal workers and forcibly repatriated. There are no witnesses, and therefore no cases can be built. If we did not arrest one of the women deceived into working for those people, that would be negligence of duty.”

I was so mad and frustrated that I took everything I had on the whole debacle and gave it to a State Department contact at the U.S. Embassy. I figured at the very least that it might be good cannon fodder for the annual white paper on human trafficking. I made sure the article was translated into English properly, and I was happy to see that it spread across the Internet fairly rapidly. I heard that Viktor began to have trouble recruiting women. I was really delighted when in June that year the U.S. State Department put Japan on a watch list of countries doing a piss-poor job of addressing human trafficking problems.

The U.N.-backed International Labor Organization (ILO) had carried out a study, funded by the Japanese government, on the state of human trafficking in Japan. The report was scathing: Japan had failed to punish human traffickers or to take care of the victims. The Japanese government ordered the ILO to keep the report under wraps; it would never be published.

I wasn’t very good at talking to the victims and keeping my distance. Their stories stuck in my head. There were images that rattled around as well. The skinny, toothless six-year-old boy of a Thai sex worker. She wasn’t allowed to get dental care for her son, because the traffickers didn’t want the authorities to realize that they were both in Japan illegally. The Korean woman who had been brutally beaten by a customer, cigarettes stubbed out on her breasts. The man who had done it, probably a low-ranking yakuza, had also given her AIDS and a child. She felt that God had cursed her. I found it hard to disagree with that. There was the Estonian woman who had been sodomized with a sake bottle for spitting on a customer, so savagely that she required surgery. And there were more.

After resigning, I returned home to the Midwest. I had enrolled in an LSAT preparation course and was getting ready for law school. I was diligently trying to make the transition to a new way of life. No cigarettes. No drinking until three in the morning. No friends calling after midnight. No yakuza cops or strippers or prostitutes to hang out with. Nothing more dangerous around than a lawn mower.

You’re going to keep the family in the States while you do this, right?” “Of course.” “Good. Because it’s dangerous stuff you’re doing. Let me tell you something about reporting about the yakuza. You can write all you want about their gang wars, their tattoos, their sexual exploits, but when you start looking into how they really make their money, what companies they own—you’re walking into scary territory. And make no mistake, human trafficking is a source of revenue for these guys. Child porn. Prostitution. Anything where the profits are high. It’s all about the money with these guys now, and that kind of reporting threatens to screw up their business.”

Because if the police know where the yakuza offices are and the local citizens know where the yakuza offices are, why doesn’t the government shut them down? Well, yeah, why doesn’t it?

According to Sekiguchi, it wasn’t unusual for yakuza to use a private detective agency as a cover, but the preferred fronts were real estate agencies and construction companies.

“The punks today are afraid to go to jail. Too damn weak. That’s why we farm out the dirty work to the Chinese and the Iranians. If they get caught, they don’t talk and they just get deported.

Goto’s control over Burning Productions was a valuable tool in his surpression of unfavorable reporting. Any television station that crossed Goto risked being denied access to Japan’s top actresses, singers, and entertainers. This also meant that almost every newspaper affiliated with a television network, which is common in Japan, could also be indirectly threatened. Entertainment programming revenue beats news revenue every time.

In January or February 2001, Goto’s doctors at Showa University told him that if he did not get a liver transplant soon, he would die. Goto had hepatitis C and a heart condition and was a very unlikely candidate for a liver transplant in Japan. In April 2001, Goto approached the FBI via Hoshi Hitoshi, the former “fixer” for Nobusuke Kishi, with deep connections to the LDP. (Mr. Kishi had served twice as prime minister of Japan. Kishi’s grandson, Shinzo Abe, became prime minister in September 2006.) Kishi relayed Goto’s offer. The FBI wanted the names of important yakuza because Japan’s National Police Agency refused to share that information with it, due to “privacy issues.” This effectively made it impossible for the FBI to monitor yakuza activity in the United States. Goto promised to give the FBI (and possibly another intelligence agency) a comprehensive list of Yamaguchi-gumi members, related front companies and financial institutions, and information on North Korean activities. In exchange for that information, Goto wanted a visa to the United States so he could get a liver transplant at UCLA.

I’d like to believe. I’d like to believe that evil is punished and good is rewarded, that love conquers hatred, truth conquers lies, and everyone gets what’s coming to them. You don’t have to be too cynical to look around the world and see that that’s not how it works.

The only way to really atone for doing wrong is to do the right thing. “I’m sorry” just doesn’t cut it.