Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  He spent his sophomore year in Tokyo and never came back. He transferred to a Japanese university, and as a student he lived in a Zen Buddhist temple for three years. Somewhere along the way, he abandoned plans to become an actor, and he changed his name to Jake, for reasons that seemed to vary depending on when you asked him about it. He learned Japanese so quickly that within five years of studying the language he had passed the three-part exam to become a police reporter for Tokyo’s Yomiuri Shinbun. Adelstein is believed to be the first American ever to make it through the newspaper’s rigorous exam system.

  The Yomiuri is the largest daily in the world. It prints two editions every day, and the total circulation is thirteen and a half million, more than ten times higher than that of the New York Times. The Internet has hardly affected the Yomiuri, which does not emphasize its Web site. Bylines are rare; most stories are covered by teams of journalists. At the Yomiuri, rookie police reporters are assigned to cover high school baseball, because the sport is supposed to be good training for crime journalists—the teamwork, the statistics, the attention to detail. When Adelstein started at the paper, his colleagues were stunned to discover that an American male could be totally ignorant about the sport. He didn’t know the difference between an inning and an out; reading a box score was harder than staring at a page full of kanji. He told me that he spent his training period longing for a major crime to be committed. “In the middle of the high school baseball season, we were saved by the murder of this really beautiful girl who was killed and her body was found in a barrel,” he said. “It’s terrible to say, but I was happy to be doing something different.”

  In 2004, when I was living in China, I made a trip to Tokyo and contacted Adelstein. One evening, he gave me a tour of the red-light district in Kabukicho, telling outlandish stories about yakuza pimps. As part of his job, the Yomiuri provided a car and a full-time driver. Adelstein sat in back, dressed in a suit and tie; periodically he instructed the chauffeur to stop so he could meet a contact at a pachinko parlor or a dodgy massage joint. The last time I had seen him, a high school buddy was driving him around mid-Missouri in a station wagon, because his vision was so bad, but now he had transformed backseat status into a mark of prestige. A Missouri friend named Willoughby Johnson once said that Adelstein was still essentially an actor. “There’s a degree to which anybody who becomes a character does so through self-fashioning,” Johnson told me recently. He had been Adelstein’s most faithful chauffeur in high school, and he still called him Josh. “I think of Josh in this way,” he said. “He decided that he wanted to become this international man of mystery.”

  In Japan, the 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 important 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, and you won’t make a living.”

  The image has always been that of the underdog who survives through toughness and guile. The name refers to an unlucky hand at cards—yakuza means “eight-nine-three”—and bluffing is a big part of the routine. Many gangsters are Korean-Japanese or members of other ethnicities 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 itself, the yakuza got involved in real estate and in public-works projects.

  For the most part, they eschewed violence against civilians, because the image of criminality was effective enough in an orderly society. Gangsters decorated their backs and arms with elaborate tattoos, 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. They found creative ways to terrorize banks. In Tokyo, I accompanied Adelstein on a visit to the home of an aging midlevel gang member, who, along with a former colleague, reminisced about extorting banks in the 1980s.

  “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 for a new account. 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 had served time in prison for minor crimes. They were heavyset, with broad noses that looked to have been broken in the past. They had a cool, understated way of speaking, but 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. Each man said that he knew about a hundred colleagues who had died in various gang struggles. “It’s part of yakuza life,” one said. “You kill people, and eventually you get killed.” But they emphasized that they hadn’t targeted innocent civilians. They 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 1980s and 1990s, and they developed extensive corporate structures. (There’s never been a law that bans the groups, which are fully registered.) Nowadays, yakuza run hedge funds. They speculate in real estate. The Inagawa-kai, one of the three biggest groups, 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 mid-1990s, Shizuka Kamei, who was the minister of exports, admitted that he had accepted millions of dollars in donations from a yakuza front company, although 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. But 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 is adamant about protecting sources. He 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 spring afternoon, 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 st
ories 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 you couldn’t tell from looking at him. 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 2011 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. “Tell her I’m clean, and that I’m not a yakuza anymore,” he said.

  “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.”

  “OK, I understand. Just try to convince her to see me again.”

  Miyamoto talked about other corporate yakuza, 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.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  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 Yomiuri, 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 wire-tapping 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 1980s, 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 mouse ears and 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. But now that’s not the case anymore.” He blamed greed: when the bubble economy collapsed in the 1990s, many wealthy yakuza had trouble adjusting. After years of adopting the facade 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. “That murder in Thailand means that he can still reach out.”

  The criminal autobiography is a perverse genre anywhere in the world, 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 had to eat barley instead of rice. (“Those years were extremely tough, with an alcoholic bum for a father.”) He uses a nice baseball metaphor to describe the rise from juvenile delinquency to the yakuza. (“I felt as though we had been playing neighborhood baseball in a weedy field and 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 filmmakers. 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. Goto claimed that he hadn’t known about the attack in advance. In his book, he describes it with a mixture of surprise and pride, like a boss who returns from vacation to find that his staff has been proactive. (“My
first thought was, ‘If I find out whose men did this, I’m going to have to send them a little something to pay my respects.’ ”)

  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 lifestyle 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 CIA. 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.