Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  The old immigration office was literally three minutes away from the main office of the Yomiuri. It was a poorly lit, crumbly old building, and the first two floors were always teeming with disgruntled foreigners. I had received a postcard to show up for an interview and had to wait more than an hour. While waiting, I auditioned as a human jungle gym for two little half-Filipino, half-Japanese toddlers who were running amok in the waiting area while their mother and her manager argued with a clerk about her visa. The youngest kid, about five, was hanging from my nose by his fingers when I got called in. I pried his fingers out and walked to the room in the back.

  My interviewer was an old bureaucrat with lots of gold teeth and gray hair slicked over to the side with some kind of pomade. He wanted to conduct the interview in English, and I humored him.

  “You will work for The Daily Yomiuri2* from next April?”

  “No, I’ll work for the Yomiuri Yomiuri from this April.”

  “Yomiuri Yomiuri?”

  “Yes, Yomiuri Yomiuri. The one that’s in Japanese.”

  “You are photographer, then.”

  “No, I will be a reporter.”

  “Reporter? You write in Japanese?”

  “Yes, that’s why it’s the Yomiuri Yomiuri, not the Daily Yomiuri.”

  “Yomiuri Yomiuri?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you write in Japanese, is that international work or local work?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the immigration guy.”

  “Oh. You have contract?”

  “No contract. I’ll be a regular employee. Seisha-in.”†

  “Seisha-in? And you are not Japanese?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Then you need a contract.”

  “I don’t have a contract. I’m a seisha-in. Seisha-in don’t get contracts; they get hired for life.”

  He scratched his head and inhaled air through his teeth. “I think you should go get contract. You get contract and then come back.”

  “When?”

  “When you have contract.”

  “Well, who do I talk to then?”

  That perturbed him. He seemed to realize that he might actually have to take personal responsibility for my visa application. I could see his eyes darting up to the left as he tried to think of someone else to hand me over to before, reluctantly, giving me his card.

  “You can call me.”

  I walked out of Immigration very confused and a little pissed. I’d earned the Japanese dream—full employee status in a huge corporation. I didn’t want some contract hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles. I wanted the works: the lifetime employment, the company health plan, the prestigious business card, a never-ending job, and a better visa.

  I went to the Yomiuri reception desk at headquarters and asked for someone in human resources. One of the section’s bigwigs personally came down to meet me. I explained the situation and why I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of having a “contract” with the company. I expected him to mutter something bureaucratic like “Well, it just can’t be helped” and to be put in limbo while I waited for a contract to be hastily drawn up.

  Instead, without even blinking, he looked at me and said, “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. We have hired you as a regular employee, and that is your status. None of your colleagues is being given a contract, and you should not be treated any differently.”

  He took the immigration guy’s business card from me and told me to go home. “I’ll handle this,” he said.

  The next morning, as I was eating a bowl of Morinaga chocolate flakes, I got a call from Immigration. The young woman on the phone asked me if two in the afternoon would be a convenient time to come by to finish up the paperwork. I was a little taken aback. In more than five years of living in Japan, I never had Immigration ask me about “my convenience.” I didn’t push my luck. Yes, two would be fine.

  When I showed up that afternoon and walked into the waiting room, I was immediately escorted to Mr. Gold Teeth’s office. He stood up when I entered.

  “My apologies for the confusion. Yours is an unusual case. Did you bring your passport?”

  I handed it to him. He came back in five minutes with a three-year visa allowing me to work under the international affairs and humanities category of employment. Wishing me good luck, he nervously hustled me out the door.

  I don’t know whether it took a threatening phone call or was just a matter of procedure, but I was impressed. It was my first encounter with the power behind the Yomiuri.

  That April 1, all sixty rookies were sworn in as Yomiuri employees at a ceremony conducted at company headquarters. The president of the company spoke; our names were read out; pictures were taken. I’d already met many of the newbies at preemployment events, including a softball game we had played at Tokyo Dome, the home of the Yomiuri Giants.

  After the ceremony, Matsuzaka, the Sophia graduate who had lobbied for my hiring, took me out for drinks. At this point in my career, I still didn’t drink alcohol. We went to a little shot bar in Ginza, John Coltrane on the loudspeakers buried in the ceiling, marble tables and jiggers lined up so shiny that the low lights sparkled off them. It was a classy place and not the usual dive that Yomiuri reporters tend to gravitate to.

  I ordered a Coke and began spouting about how much I was looking forward to being assigned to an office and “learning the trade.”

  Matsuzaka cut me off with a wave of his hand. “It’s not about learning. It’s about unlearning. It’s about cutting off ties, cutting out things, getting rid of preconceptions, losing everything you thought you knew. That’s the first thing you’ll learn. If you want to be an excellent reporter, you have to amputate your past life. You have to let go of your pride, your free time, your hobbies, your preferences, and your opinions.

  “If you have a girlfriend, she’ll be gone as soon as you’re not around, and you won’t be around a lot. You have to let go of your pride, because everything you think you know is wrong.

  “You have to act friendly to people you won’t like politically, socially, and ethically. You have to pay deference to the senior reporters. You have to not judge people but learn to judge the value of the information they give you. You have to cut down on your sleeping hours, your exercise time, and your time to read books. Your life will boil down to reading the paper, drinking with your sources, watching the news, checking to see if you’ve been scooped, and meeting deadlines. You will be flooded with work that seems meaningless and stupid, but you’ll do it anyway.

  “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.”

  He said it all without pausing in a very quiet, even-paced monologue. It was clear to me that he’d been thinking about this a long time.

  But he wasn’t finished.

  “Remember this. You have to be careful, or you will lose everything that is important to you and you will lose yourself. It’s a tough balancing act. Sometimes people end up losing everything for the job and gaining nothing from it. This company will take care of you as long as you are useful, and unless you commit a criminal act, you will never be fired. That’s great job security. However, as a reporter, you are an expendable commodity. When you have outlived your usefulness, you won’t be a reporter anymore. You’ll be doing something else. A reporter has a short half-life in this company. Enjoy it while it lasts. Simplify, cut down on things you don’t need, but be sure to leave something behind worth having.”

  After that, he abruptly changed the subject to baseball—a sport, despite my American heritage, that I knew nothing about.

  It wasn’t the
first time I would be surprised by how serious Yomiuri people were about the calling of journalism. The Japanese press is often characterized by the foreign media as a bunch of sycophantic lap-dog office workers, but this isn’t exactly the case.

  I was still taking in Matsuzaka’s words while pretending to understand the finer points of America’s pastime, when we were joined by a young female reporter whose hiring he had also supported a few years ago. She was upset because she’d come up from a regional office only to be assigned to do layout for a few months. Matsuzaka explained to her that it was part of the process everyone had to go through before getting on the reporter roster in the big leagues. It was an initiation ritual.

  Then he sent us both home in the same hired car. The Yomiuri has its own fleet of cars used to escort reporters to interviews, press conferences, and sometimes their homes. As I was getting into the car, Matsuzaka tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Jake, you’re going to be assigned to the Urawa office,” he said. “It’s a tough gig. The office has a Spartan atmosphere, and it’s in the heart of Saitama. It’s a good thing because you’ll have chances to write for the national edition and you will be doing a lot of writing. You will be extremely busy.”

  “Urawa? Really? Is that close to Tokyo?”

  “Very close. But once you’re there, Tokyo will be on the other side of the planet. Urawa keeps its people very busy, but remember what I told you. Don’t quit. We have high hopes for you.”

  • • •

  While we rode home, I told Matsuzaka’s protégé that I’d been assigned to Urawa. Her response was “Goshushosama desu.” It’s the phrase used at funerals to express your condolences.

  Saitama is a large, half-rural, half-suburban prefecture just outside Tokyo, and Urawa is a giant bedroom city from which tired workers commute to the capital.

  Saitama. A place considered so uncool by urban Japanese that it had spawned its own adjective, dasai, meaning “not hip, boring, unfashionable.”

  In other words, I’d been assigned to the New Jersey of Japan.

  1* Santa Fe was a book of nude photos of the popular actress Rie Miyazawa published before Sex. The publication of Santa Fe was significant because it showed pubic hair. The “artistic qualities” of the work earned a tacit approval from the authorities, cracking open the door to the more relaxed policy of today.

  2* The Daily Yomiuri is an English-language edition of the Yomiuri Shinbun with some original reporting. Most of the content comes from articles selected to be translated from the Japanese version of the Yomiuri. A number of foreign journalists and foreign correspondents in Tokyo got their start working there, and it has some great original writing. On the other hand, many Japanese staffers consider being put there a form of demotion, torture, and punishment or a trial of passage to a better position in the international news department.

  † A seisha-in is a full-fledged employee. In 1993, that meant employment for life. Once hired, you were never fired. Lifetime employment in Japan has always been a bit of a myth, but in the nineties several major corporations implicitly offered that kind of hiring.

  All Right, Punks, Grab Your Notebooks

  The reputation of the Urawa office preceded it. An article by a former reporter assigned there had appeared in Tsukuru magazine, a journal for the media trade, and it had been scathing. “Yomiuri Shinbun: My Three Months of Disillusionment” was the title, but if that didn’t get the point across, there was the subtitle: “Disillusion, Desperation, Suffering, and Finally a Decision.”

  The exposé documented the endless trivial tasks the author had been forced to perform 24/7. It told of abuse by an editor who went ballistic upon encountering the use of a kanji not on the approved list for the paper, cursing out the young reporter and throwing a sandal at his head. It told of the stench of sake permeating the office at six each evening, when the editor declared the workday over and always opened a bottle.

  I would come to view my own first year at the paper as a partial validation of the article. I say “partial” because I don’t think the author really understood the full picture, which is: the first year of life as a reporter in Japan is an elaborate hazing, punctuated by a little on-the-job training. If you survive that, things get a little better. If you’re lucky, you get your own fresh slaves to boss around and begin to discover the fundamentals of journalism.

  The Yomiuri had only recently decided to shore up the ranks of the Urawa office. Part of the reason was that our sworn enemy, the Asahi, had put its Urawa office under the auspices of its shakaibu (metro/national news). It meant that while our office could draw only upon the meager resources of the regional bureau, the Asahi office could call up an army of a hundred reporters to be sent to Saitama for a big story. The Asahi was kicking Yomiuri’s ass, and the powers that be had decided to even the odds.

  There were four rookies who were to be cannon fodder in the battle of Urawa: Tsuji, Kouchi, Yoshihara, and myself. In Japanese company life, the people you enter the company with, and especially the people who go with you on the first posting, become the closest thing you will ever have to a family. The fact that you are doki, which translates, literally, as “of the same period of time,” creates a strange but important bond that continues as long as you are in the company and often even after you leave. It’s comparable to the brotherhood ceremony for young yakuza, where sake cups are exchanged: a bond is created that will never break.

  I was extremely lucky. I had taken an instant liking to my future comrades when we first met at the Yomiuri swearing-in ceremony—and they seemed to like me back.

  Jun Yoshihara was twenty-two, two years younger than I, and looked like a pop idol. He was a graduate of Waseda University’s commerce department. (This is rare; though many Waseda grads enter the mass media, usually they’re from the journalism department.) He was tall, in good shape from playing soccer, and so pasty-faced that he looked Caucasian. For a short time we called him The Face, and that’s how I still think of him.

  Naoki Tsuji, “Frenchie,” was twenty-five, also a graduate of Waseda, also not from the journalism department but from French literature. Of the four of us, he was the most intelligent. He was also always immaculately coiffed, wore tailored suits, and was constantly reading some obscure Japanese novel or French masterpiece. He radiated sensitivity and good breeding.

  Of course, everything I’ve just described made him a terrible match for the Yomiuri and was probably why he became the subject of harassment by the older reporters, who found his very existence to be annoying. It’s likely that he would have flourished at the Asahi, but you never really know. In many ways it was like a cum laude of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism taking a job at The Washington Times. Today he is a successful writer, with four novels to his name.

  Yasushi Kouchi was nicknamed “Chappy,” though I can’t remember why. He was twenty-four and had a degree in international relations from Tsukuba University. He was prematurely balding, which made him look older than he was, and had an extremely round face, making him appear Chinese (from a Japanese perspective). He was one of the most dependable people I have ever known, and his quick thinking saved me a number of times.

  We were an odd crew: The Face, Chappy, the Frenchman, and the Gaijin. But from day one we covered one another’s asses. There’s not much more you can ask or expect from your friends or colleagues at any workplace. And in my case, I found myself relying on their good graces very, very soon, when a minor incident could have ended my career prematurely.

  It was the night before we were to report to the office for our first official day on the job. A welcome party was held at a local izakaya pub, and even though I had a horrendous cold, I showed up. It would have been worse if I hadn’t.

  The whole staff was there: Hara, the station chief with the physique of a sumo wrestler, a laugh that was deep and jolly, an Italian suit, and a Rolex. He had a punch perm of sorts, glasses perched precariously on the nub of his nose, and hair that curled around
his ears, making him look vaguely Hasidic.

  Ono, a reporter on loan to the Urawa office, was head of the team of prefectural police reporters, which made him the direct supervisor of us recruits. He was built like a smaller version of Hara, with eyes that looked as if they were slits cut into a pumpkin. Ono took great pride in being a shakaibu reporter, and within five minutes he had made it clear that he was not just an ordinary regional reporter; he wasn’t going to be stuck here in the boonies forever.

  Hayashi and Saito, the two editors. The latter had a regional dialect so thick you thought he was missing some teeth; he could be very supportive when sober. The former was short and sensitive about it, and famous for being a hard-driving, hard-drinking tyrant. Luckily for us, he was a happy drunk most of the time.

  Shimizu, the computer keyboarder, who had a mustache, yellow teeth, and no hair on the top of his head; apparently an indispensable fixture of the office.

  Yamamoto, number two to Ono on the police beat and the man who would prove to be my mentor and sometimes tormenter. Yamamoto was my university senpaí—that is, senior to my sophomore. His features looked almost Mongolian, and for some reason he reminded me of a porcupine. Then there was Nakajima, his sidekick, who was hair-challenged, like Chappy, and had a long Ichabod Crane face. He’d been a science major in college and fit the classic image of the classic scientist: cold, analytical, dry. Unlike the classic image of the classic scientist, however, he was dressed better than anyone else.