Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  Saeki told everyone to shut up and listen.

  The body was found on the north side of the Summer Pavilion, in the bushes. Her head was pointed toward the pavilion while her body was laid out parallel to the shrubbery. She was found faceup, both hands spread out. She was wearing dark blue overalls with a striped blouse. She was wearing shoes and socks. (Another telling sign: if she didn’t have her shoes and socks on—and if they weren’t part of the crime scene—that opened up the possibility of a double suicide attempt in which her partner chickened out. The reason: typically Japanese remove their shoes and socks before killing themselves. Just as it is a terrible faux pas to walk into a Japanese house with shoes on, it is considered rude, however unconsciously, to enter the afterlife without such decorum.)

  Her blouse was pulled up slightly, and you could see her underwear. She was wearing the same clothes she been wearing the day before.

  And she had been strangled to death with a pink scarf.

  In her pockets were car keys and a handkerchief. The car had been located nearby; under the driver’s seat was a drawstring purse containing 6,000 yen (about $60) in cash, potentially ruling out the motive of robbery, and the victim’s ID. Her family name was Nakagawa.

  There was nothing more.

  Yamamoto sent me back to the park to join the police seeking any eyewitnesses. Other reporters were dispatched to the victim’s home.

  After a few hours, we met and reviewed our notes: Saitama police had found the victim’s address book, and among the forty names listed were several foreigners. Police were questioning each of them. The pink scarf, supposed to be the murder weapon, did not belong to the victim; her family members had never seen it before. But the critical thing (again) was: the victim had a foreign boyfriend. On the day she was killed, she had gone to meet him. His name was Abdul, but he went by “Andy.” Apparently, he was an Iranian pretending to be French. According to a friend of the victim, the couple had originally met at a gym in Ageo.

  Hearing that, Nakajima and Takahashi took off for Ageo, hoping to learn something at the gym. Instead, they were promptly turned away by staff who had been warned by the police not to speak to the press.

  Enter the gaijin’s great idea: I would try my luck at the gym by posing to be a buddy of the Iranian boyfriend. As expected, Yamamoto thought it a clever tactic but Nakajima thought it was nuts. But finally all agreed: what the hell. I changed into jeans and a polo shirt. I hadn’t shaved that morning, so I had a nice growth of stubble. I was sure I could pass.

  Once I got in the door, I went to the reception area and, speaking in my made-up Iranian-accented Japanese, mentioned that Andy was my friend and countryman and asked how much membership at the gym would cost me (it wasn’t cheap). The staff looked wary but slowly warmed to my pushiness. They talked about what a cute couple Andy and Nakagawa had been. That was my chance to say, ever so casually, that since membership cost so much I needed to borrow some money from Andy. I knew where he worked, but did they know where he lived?

  They were very accommodating. With the address in my hand, I walked out of the gym feeling like Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible.

  Jumbo and I immediately went to Andy’s address, a run-down, two-story wooden structure with a washing machine in the hallway for common use. We learned from the surly landlord that police had raided the place a few hours after the body had been found and hauled off a dozen so-called foreigners for overstaying their visa. This little discussion was interrupted by two police officers who just happened to come back to the apartment building, and they kicked us out.

  Meanwhile there was havoc at the police station. The gym staff had called the station within minutes of my being there, and a sketch artist was dispatched to make a composite drawing of the “suspicious friend of Andy.” Several detectives were assigned to find this friend, a potential accomplice, and began pounding the pavement for clues, showing the composite drawing to people in the park. Another two detectives were assigned to surveillance at the gym, in case the suspicious friend came back.

  It was the next morning when I learned what had happened. Around midnight that night, the forensics chief, Yokozawa, was studying the composite drawing when the realization hit. “You idiots!” he yelled at his detectives. “This is no Iranian! This is the Yomiuri’s gaijin reporter pretending he’s an Iranian!”

  The gentlemanly Yokozawa was sorely pissed off, and the detectives were ready to lock me up. Yamamoto got an irate phone call and apologized profusely, bowing unseen as he did so. He had the decency not to yell at me but politely suggested I get down on my knees and beg the forgiveness of Saeki and Yokozawa. I’d wasted an entire day of the police department’s time, sending several detectives on a fool’s errand.

  The next day, before the press briefing, I walked up to Saeki and, feeling a little queasy, stuttered an apology. Saeki was not amused. For a second, I thought he was going to hit me. He glared at me for two seconds, then said slowly, “You know, Adelstein, I have half a mind to haul your ass to jail for interfering with an investigation. But you’re a young, green, clueless barbarian, so I’ll let it slide this time. Don’t do it again.”

  “I promise I won’t,” I said, and then, shamelessly making the most of the opportunity, I continued, “By the way, it looks like you guys rounded up every Iranian in town, including her boyfriend, no?”

  Saeki was stupefied by my balls. He took off his glasses, wiped them with a tissue, and began, “Well, I see that you’ve had some success with your Iranian impression. I won’t say that you’re right or wrong, but you’re not so far off.” He smiled and put his glasses back on. “Gotta run. Be a good kid and stay out of our way.” He headed back up to the conference room on the upper floors.

  I found Yokozawa buying a can of apple juice at the vending machine on the first floor and offered my apology, bowing so low that my forehead scraped the floor. He patted me on the head as I stood bent over and said, “Apology accepted. Just don’t pull a stunt like that again. I’m not going to let you live this down, by the way.” Even now, more than a decade later, I can’t run into him without his making a reference to my Iranian heritage.

  I continued working on the case, but in the end we got our ass kicked. One morning, both the Mainichi and the Sankei scooped us with articles suggesting that Abdul, the Iranian boyfriend, was the killer and that he was already in custody. I remember it as being a bad day to be on the police beat. We’d taken the cautious approach, and the competition had hotdogged it and run all over us.

  I’ll never know if part of the police’s reluctance to give us the facts was due to my little masquerade at the fitness club. It’s probably better that I don’t know.

  1* A snack bar is kind of a low-rent hostess club. Usually it has a karaoke machine, a few girls serving drinks, and some light fare. The manager is usually a former hostess past her prime, but that’s not an ironclad rule.

  2* The order of birth is a big deal in Japan. I was chewed out many times for not checking whether a person named in an article was the oldest, second, or youngest son or daughter. Even when there is an only child involved, you refer to him or her as eldest daughter or eldest son. The eldest sibling in a family is automatically given deference, respect, and authority, and is often literally called eldest daughter (onē-san) or eldest son (onī-san). I tried to explain this to my younger sisters in Missouri; their response: “In this country, you may be the eldest son, but you’re still just a geek.”

  Bury Me in a Shallow Grave:

  When the Yakuza Come Calling

  The history of the yakuza is murky. There are two major types: tekiya, who are essentially street merchants and small-time con artists, and bakuto, originally gamblers but now including loan sharks, protection money collectors, pimps, and corporate raiders. Almost half of the yakuza are Korean-Japanese, many of them the children of Koreans brought over as forced labor during Japan’s colonial period. Another large faction is made up of dowa, the former untouchable caste of Japan
that handled butchering animals, making leather goods, and doing other “unclean” jobs. Even though the caste system is gone, racism toward dowa remains.

  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. The Yamaguchi-gumi originally began as a loose labor union of dockworkers in Kobe. It began to branch out into industry in the chaos following the Second World War. 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.

  The yakuza are structured as a neofamily. New recruits pledge their loyalties to the father figure known as the oyabun. Ties are forged through ritual sake exchanges, creating brotherhoods, and those who are in the business world are allowed to become kigyoshatei, or corporate brothers. Each organization is usually a pyramid structure.

  The modern-day yakuza are innovative entrepreneurs; rather than a bunch of tattooed nine-fingered thugs in white suits wielding samurai swords, a more appropriate metaphor would be “Goldman Sachs with guns.” A 2007 National Police Agency white paper warned that the yakuza have moved into securities trading and infected hundreds of Japan’s listed companies, a “disease that will shake the foundations of the economy.” 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.”

  The yakuza have long occupied an ambiguous position in Japan. 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. It’s such an open secret that you can buy comic books at 7-Eleven discussing how this happened. Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s grandfather was a member of the Inagawa-kai crime group and heavily tattooed. He served as a cabinet minister and was referred to by his constituents as Irezumidaijin—“the tattooed minister.” In the past the yakuza’s reputation for keeping disputes between themselves and not harming the families of other mobsters, or “noncombatants,” protected them from the ire of citizens and the attentions of the police. They were considered a “necessary evil” and a “second police force” that kept the streets of Japan safe from muggers and common thieves. Yet they were still considered outlaws.

  That ambiguity was supposed to have ended in 1992, when the government introduced the toughest antimob legislation in a generation, punishment for the excesses of the yakuza during the booming 1980s, when they shifted en masse into real estate and other legitimate businesses. But the state still hasn’t made membership of a criminal organization illegal or given the police the antimob tools long considered crucial in other countries: wiretapping, plea bargaining, and witness protection.

  It seems unlikely that such radical tools to dismantle the yakuza will soon be given to the Japanese police forces. In many ways, the yakuza are stronger than ever despite almost seventeen years since the first laws targeting them went on the books.

  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. They are fraternal organizations—like the Rotary Club. Even in cases where they do not own the property where they have set up their offices and are simply renters, they are almost impossible to remove. The Nagoya Lawyers’ Association advises that many businesses and landlords should insert an “organized crime exclusionary clause” into any contract drawn up, to make it easier to sever ties with yakuza tenants or businesses when the time comes. Nagoya is the home of the Yamaguchi-gumi’s leading faction, the Kodo-kai, which has roughly four thousand members.

  Problems with organized crime in Nagoya are so extensive that in 2001, the lawyer’s association issued a manual of sorts entitled Organized Crime Front Companies: What They Are and How to Deal with Them. There are lawyers who specialize in dealing with yakuza.

  The Tokyo Metropolitan Police compiled a list in 2006 of roughly one thousand yakuza front companies in greater Tokyo;1* about a fifth of them are real estate firms. The most recent list shows further movement into securities, auditing, consulting, and other areas generally associated with the finance world.

  A 1998 NPA examination of the front companies of the three major crime groups in Japan listed construction, real estate, finance, bars and restaurants, and management consulting as the top five types of yakuza front companies.

  Some police officers in Tokyo use the word “Realtor” as a synonym for yakuza, so strong are the connections. In March 2008, Suruga Corporation (formerly listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Second Section) was revealed to have paid more than 14 billion yen ($146 million) to Yamaguchi-gumi and Goto-gumi affiliates over several years to have the yakuza remove tenants from properties it wished to acquire. The scandal that followed resulted in the firm being delisted and again cast light on the tight relationships between the yakuza and the real estate industry.

  What is also significant about this incident is that on the Suruga board of directors were a former prosecutor and also a former bureaucrat from the Organized Crime Control Bureau of the National Police Agency. This suggests that the people who are supposed to be policing the yakuza are easily deceived by them or perhaps knowingly working in collusion with them. There certainly exists case after case that suggest that the authorities are unable to contain the yakuza and/or are afraid to even try.

  All this simply goes to show that the yakuza are very well aware of how the law protects their rights to live and operate where they wish and they will not easily be removed.

  The major gang bosses are well-known celebrities. Bosses from the Sumiyoshi-kai and the Inagawa-kai grant interviews to print publications and television. Politicians are seen having dinner with them. They own talent agencies that the general public knows are yakuza front companies—such as Burning Productions—but that does not stop major Japanese media outlets from working with them. There are fan magazines, comic books, and movies that glamorize the yakuza, who have metastasized into society and operate in plain view in a way unthinkable to American or European observers.

  As the yakuza continue to evolve and get into more sophisticated crimes, the police have had a tough time keeping up. The so-called marubo cops (organized crime control detectives) are used to dealing with simple cases of extortion and intimidation, not massive stock manipulation or complicated fraud schemes.

  The Yamaguchi-gumi have been notoriously uncooperative since Shinobu Tsukasa took power in 2005. The police used to be able to play the various organizations against one another to extract information—the Yamaguchi-gumi would rat on the Sumiyoshi-kai, the Sumiyoshi-kai on the Yamaguchi-gumi, and so on. But now the Yamaguchi-gumi is increasingly the only player in town and it has no reason to cooperate. In 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 orga
nized 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.”

  A detective from the Osaka Prefectural Police Department concurs. “Since the anti–organized crime laws went on the books in 1992, the numbers of the yakuza have changed very little—hovering around eighty thousand—for sixteen years. They have more money and more power than they ever had before, and the consolidation of the Yamaguchi-gumi has made it a huge force to be reckoned with. In many ways, the Yamaguchi-gumi is the LDP of organized crime, operating on the principal that ‘Power is in numbers.’ It has capital, it has manpower, it has an information network that rivals anything the police have, and it is expanding into every industry where money is to be made.”

  In the old days, the yakuza left the general population alone. But that was a long time ago. No one is off limits anymore, not even journalists—or their children.

  Like many reporters, I covered the yakuza for quite some time without actually ever dealing with them directly. That changed very quickly when a call came in from Naoya Kaneko, aka “The Cat,” the number two man in the Sumiyoshi-kai for all of Saitama, who left a message with The Face. He wanted to speak to me. This unnerved The Face, and when he passed on the message, he asked nervously, “You’re not in trouble, are you? Why does the Sumiyoshi-kai want to talk to you?”

  I told him that I didn’t think I was in trouble and that I had no idea why he wanted to talk to me. I thought to ask Yamamoto how I should proceed, but then I thought twice: he’d probably say to ignore the call or dispatch a senior reporter to go with me. I told The Face I’d handle it.