Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  Finally Hojo, the bureau photographer, whose nose was so red, with so many broken blood vessels, he could have been Irish. By virtue of his seniority, he could say anything to anyone without fear of incrimination, and this night he did.

  We rookies were made to stand at the table in the back of the pub and introduce ourselves. Ono was the first to fill our cups with sake, and we then spent the rest of the night filling his in the Japanese way, saying kanpai (“cheers”) with every pour. The inferiors pour the sake of the superiors. Occasionally the superiors reciprocate.

  Ono and Hara told war stories, and I, in my cold-ridden, befuddled state, tried to keep track of the conversation as best I could. Even on a good day, my listening skills were still wanting, but I didn’t want anyone to know that. Hara raised his glass for a toast.

  The sake wasn’t helping my congestion, though. In the middle of Hara’s toast, a giant sneeze suddenly made its way through my passages and exploded before I could raise my hands to cover up. Out of my nose flew a giant ball of snot, slicing through the air with a whoosh, winging The Face and Chappy before splattering its target—the unsuspecting Hara, my first boss and holder of my future.

  There was a sudden, horrific silence, which seemed to last forever.

  Then Chappy whacked me on the head with a newspaper. “Jake, you are such a barbarian!” he howled. Yoshihara bonked me too. That broke the ice, and everybody laughed, including Hara, who wiped his glasses with the oshibori napkin The Face quickly handed him. I bowed profusely in apology. Hojo joined the lineup, hitting me right in the head with his wet oshibori. “Do you know how to use this, idiot?” he said.

  What could have been a terribly awkward situation had turned into a joke in a matter of seconds. Even Ono was amused.

  “Omae,” he began, using the second rudest form of “you” in Japanese, “you are one ballsy gaijin. Omae, I’ve never seen anyone do that before and live to tell the tale.”

  I continued to bow and apologize, but Ono just swept his hand through the air as if it was already nothing. He poured more sake in my cup and told me to drink up.

  Shimizu dragged us all to his favorite hostess club afterward, and I passed out listening to Ono belting out some karaoke. Then someone put me into a car and sent me home.

  My new apartment was a small flat above a traditional tea and confectionary shop, a five-minute bicycle ride from the Urawa office. In 1993, many places would still not rent to foreigners, but the company had found it for me and signed on as my guarantor. The wonderful thing about the flat was the shower/bath unit that came with it. In my five years as a college student in Japan, I had never lived in an apartment with its own bath; I had to go to either the public bath or the coin shower down the street. Five minutes of hot water for 100 yen in the coin shower, 300 yen for the public bath.

  As I soaked my aching body in my very own furo that night, praying that the hangover would be mild, I felt great! I’d really moved up in the world. I had a job, had survived a potentially fatal sneeze, and had my own bathtub. What more could a man possibly want?

  The next day, April 15, 1993, at 8:30 in the morning, I showed up at the Urawa office of the Yomiuri Shinbun and sat down in the lobby along with the rest of the new guys. Compared to the pristine Chiba office, this was, to put it subtly, a bit of a comedown. Chappy breathed deeply and said, “This is a rat hole. I was hoping for something a little snazzier.” Frenchie said, “Sure doesn’t look like the typical newspaper office in the company pamphlet.” The Face said he’d heard of worse.

  The office consumed most of the second floor of an office building in a residential neighborhood. The bureau chief had his own office with a door. The rest of the office was all open space, no cubicles, no privacy. The reception area near the window wasn’t the most welcoming place. There were three faux leather sofas surrounding one long table overflowing with newspapers, hiding the reams of magazines piled underneath. The blinds over the window were covered with a nicotine glaze that, like flypaper, had trapped everything from dust to particles of food to, oh yeah, insects.

  There were two large islands of desks. The two editors had the desks near the middle of the room. The senior reporters had the three desks in the back and the luxury of a sofa jammed against the wall. There was a darkroom and, next to it, a tatami-mat room where the night staffers slept. (It came complete with a shower/bath and a desk stuffed with porn in the lower drawers.) The editors would take naps there, but it was off limits to the other reporters while the sun shone. As for the four new guys, their desks were in the middle of the room, where they were most vulnerable.

  Almost every desk had a multibutton phone but no computer (too early in history for that). There was a modified network station where stories were typed in and sent to the head office for final review. We sent our stories over the phones to the terminal, and Shimizu retyped and formatted them. It was pretty inefficient.

  Ono showed up around nine, bleary-eyed and cranky, appearing to have slept in the suit he had been wearing the night before. He stood in front of the reception table and glared at us.

  “Who the hell told you you could sit down here!” he yelled.

  We immediately stood up.

  He laughed and told us to sit down. Nakajima then handed us a copy of the police reporter manual, version 1.1, titled A Day in the Life of the Police Reporter; a beeper, which would forever be clasped to our hips and which had to always be on; and, finally, a set of documents—collections of articles under such categories as Robbery, Homicide, Assault, Arson, Drugs, Organized Crime, Bid Rigging, Traffic Accidents, and Purse Snatching. Yes, purse snatching. In 1993, serial purse snatching was still enough of a newsworthy item to merit its own reporting style; sometimes, apparently, it was good enough to command the lead story for the local edition.

  “These are examples of the types of stories you will be covering as police reporters,” Nakajima explained. “Study the articles and remember the style. I’ll expect you to know it within a week. You have everything you need now to write an article. Now it’s about getting to work.”

  That was the beginning and the end of our formal training as police reporters.

  The next item on the agenda was an explanation of our daily duties other than reporting. When we came to the office in the evening, for example, we were expected to take dinner orders from the senior staff. And when we ended up on the night shift, we were required to update the scrapbooks.

  The scrapbook rules were incredibly complicated. There were instructions on where to write the date of an article, how to write which edition of the paper it came from, where to file, where to multiple-file, and how to note national editions and front-page articles. The manual for handling the scrapbook was considerably longer than the one for covering the police beat.

  We were also introduced to other duties, including writing mini-biographies for a section known as “The Little King of Our House” in the free local paper distributed by the Yomiuri as a civic service. Essentially, these were birth announcements. And so that we had the broadest exposure to all manner of news, we were expected to write up the results of local sports events, compile statistics, and report weather forecasts. Each of these, needless to say, required a different style of recording and writing and inputting.

  We were then given a calendar for the month, indicating when and who had early duty, late duty, overnight duty, and sports coverage. Some of the senior staff had little squares with diagonal lines noted for certain days. I asked what they were.

  “Vacation days,” answered Nakajima.

  “But there’re no such diagonal lines for us,” I said.

  “That’s because you have no vacation days,” he said.

  Around 1 P.M., we were getting an intensive course in typing sports records into the computer when there was a call from the police press club. A man had been found stabbed to death in a station wagon in Tsurugashima. The Saitama prefectural police had made the announcement, and it looked as if they were going to
set up a Homicide Special Investigation Unit.

  Ono was visibly excited. “All right, punks, grab your notepads. Take your cameras, and let’s go.” Murder was always big news in Saitama, just as it is anywhere in Japan. It says a great deal about the safety of the country that a murder, any murder, is national news. There are exceptions, however, and that’s when the victim is Chinese, a yakuza, a homeless person, or a nonwhite foreigner. Then the news value drops 50 percent.

  Ono explained the protocol. “We’re going to do kikikomi [crime scene and related interviews] at the site of the murder and at the company of the deceased. Your job is to find out anything about him—who he was, when he was last seen, who might have wanted to kill him—and to get a photo. And bring back a head shot; I don’t care where you get it from, just get it. If you find anything interesting, call it in to the reporter in the police press club or the Urawa office. Now go.”

  We went. New employees were forbidden from driving a car for the first six months, so two of us went with Yamamoto and other reporters, and two of us grabbed a taxi from a company that had a contract with the Yomiuri.

  Tsurugashima was a long way from Urawa. The Nishi Irima police were handling the initial investigation. Investigative Division One (homicide, violent crimes) from the SPP headquarters was dispatching the division chief. When I arrived at the crime scene, Yamamoto brought me up to speed:

  Around 11 P.M. the night before, Ryu Machida, aged forty-one, had been found dead by his wife in a station wagon parked in the middle of a heavy industrial area. He was lying in the backseat, stabbed in the left breast. He had apparently bled to death. Machida had last been seen three days earlier, when he had gone to work. He hadn’t returned home, and his family had filed a missing persons report with the local police, asking for a formal search for him on the fourteenth.

  It was still cold for April. I was thrilled to be out in the field, armed with my official Yomiuri business card and armband. The crime scene, though, proved to be elusive. The police had cordoned off a large area around the car with yellow tape that read KEEP OUT. The surrounding area was almost empty of human life. I dutifully walked around knocking on doors, trying to find someone who might have seen something. Most of the time people were stunned into silence, seeing my white face, and if they ever recovered, it was only to say, blankly, no.

  The Face and Chappy weren’t having any luck either.

  At a car parts factory, I introduced myself to an older employee as “Jake Adelstein from the Yomiuri Shinbun.” I got what was turning out to be the usual reception: “I don’t need any.”

  “I’m not selling anything.”

  “I already have a newspaper subscription.”

  “I’m not selling newspapers. I’m a reporter for the Yomiuri.”

  “A reporter?”

  “Yes, a reporter.” I handed him my business card.

  “Hmmm.” He read the card over three times. “You’re a gaijin, right?”

  “Yes. I’m a gaijin reporter working for the Yomiuri.”

  “So why are you here?”

  • • •

  This process was repeated endlessly, as everyone’s immediate assumption was that I was a newspaper boy. One middle-aged man who answered the door wearing a sweatsuit even complained about his morning paper not being delivered on time.

  So I changed tactics. “Hello,” I began, “I’m a reporter for the Yomiuri Shinbun working on a story. Here is my card. I apologize for being a foreigner and taking your time, but I’d like to ask some questions.”

  It sped up the process, but the results were still nada. The same for my colleagues, so we were sent to the company where the victim had worked, joining the mob of reporters from other media. When we got there, it was just after closing time and workers were filing out of the building. They must have been instructed not to speak to the press, because we were met with a wall of silence.

  I strolled around back to see if I could improve my luck. I encountered a man in green overalls loading a truck. I greeted him, and he didn’t bat an eye at my non-Japanese face. Did he think anyone would have had reason to bump off his colleague? I asked.

  “Well, he was having an affair with a coworker,” he said. “Everyone knew that. So I figure it could have been his wife or maybe the mistress. You want the name?”

  Of course I wanted the name. I tried to write it down, but I sucked at writing Japanese names. There are so many variant readings and kanji for names that it’s often a nightmare even for Japanese.

  He finally took the notepad out of my hands and wrote the name down for me. I thanked him profusely, but he just waved his hand.

  “You didn’t hear it from me, and I never talked to you.”

  “Understood.”

  “Yoshiyama, the mistress, hasn’t been to work in a couple days. End of story.”

  Could it be this easy? I called Yamamoto from a public phone. I was so excited that I was unintelligible. Yamamoto made me slow down and give him the information in detail. He told me to grab Yoshihara and work with him.

  We started calling every Yoshiyama in the phone book. Yoshihara finally found the right Yoshiyama, but, according to her husband, she couldn’t come to the phone because she was talking to the police. Bingo!

  Our next order was to make our way to the Nishi Iruma police station for the press conference. The local satellite-office reporter, Kanda, was already there, speaking to the vice captain. Freshman reporters from the Asahi and the Saitama local newspaper mulled around, but the largest cluster of people was near the coffee vending machine.

  Kanda had already gotten his can of coffee. Kanda was a veteran reporter, diligent and aggressive. He wore steel-rimmed glasses that covered most of his face and had long, greasy, stringy bangs that hung over his glasses like a sheepdog’s. He called me over to the desk of the vice captain and introduced us. We exchanged pleasantries, and then Kanda pulled me over to the corner. He congratulated me on my work but warned me to keep my mouth shut at the press conference.

  “If you ask anything important at a press conference, you ruin your own scoop. You ask only for details about things everybody already knows, not details about things you only half know. Just watch and listen.”

  The press conference was held in a meeting room on the second floor. The television crews were pushing their way around, and people placed their tape recorders on the podium where the homicide chief would be speaking.

  When he did speak, it was brief and straight from his notes: “It looks like the victim, Machida, was killed a few days ago, probably on the night he vanished. The long-bladed knife appears to have pierced the heart, killing him instantly. The official cause of death is loss of blood.

  “The victim appears to have been killed in the car, judging from the blood splatter. We are talking to his friends and employers to develop any leads. We have officially set up a special investigation headquarters; we’ll come up with a name for it later tonight.

  “That’s all we have for now. Questions?”

  Hands did not immediately go up. The general consensus seemed to be not to ask real questions at the official press conference but to lob the zingers at the police after the conference, at their homes, or on their way out the door. Still, people felt obligated to ask something.

  “According to your earlier reports, the wife found the body. How did she find it?”

  “She was searching the area with a friend when she saw the family car. The body was in it.” I myself took that as a broad hint.

  “When did the police receive notification that Machida was missing?”

  “Two days after he’d gone missing.”

  “Why did they wait so long?” It was an Asahi reporter, arching his eyebrows.

  The detective didn’t take the bait. “Well, how long are you supposed to wait? If you don’t get home tonight before two in the morning, is your wife going to file a report with us?”

  “My wife? Absolutely.”

  That got some laughs.
The rest of the conference was benign, and the group dispersed.

  Eventually we headed back to Urawa and compared notes. When Yamamoto returned at around three in the morning from the police chief’s home, where he’d gone for information, he corroborated the the details we’d put together. The woman who had “helped” Mrs. Machida discover the body of her husband was the same Yoshiyama who had allegedly been having an affair with him. Naturally, the police considered her the main suspect.

  The next day was fruitless, spent polling the neighborhood. We were able to confirm that the police were interrogating Yoshiyama but she was refusing to break. On the morning of the next day, though, she confessed to her husband, who called the Saitama police, who made the arrest just in time for us to make the evening edition with the news.

  It went something like this:

  Yoshiyama was a part-time employee at the same company where Machida worked. The two had been having an affair since the spring of the previous year, and Machida was trying to break it off.

  On the twelfth, after work, they met at a nearby park before going for a drive, which lasted three hours. Around nine P.M., Machida parked the car near their workplace, where the two of them argued. Yoshiyama then stabbed him in the chest with a mountain knife, killing him almost instantly. She claimed that Machida had wanted to end the relationship and his own life and she had just complied.

  Yoshiyama was socially acquainted with Mrs. Machida, so she had volunteered to help Mrs. Machida search for her husband. The police had yet to find the weapon, but they did find a can of juice in the car with Yoshiyama’s fingerprints on it. In September 1994, she was sentenced to eight years of hard labor.

  It was not a particularly exciting case, one I’m sure has long passed from the memory of the police and even the reporters who covered the story. I did get some brownie points for getting a lead on the killer so early in the game. Of course, it was more luck than skill, but I learned an important lesson: journalism is always about the results, not the effort.