Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  When the police could not promise him that, Shima took off. No one knew where he went. Not Takada, not Sekiguchi, not the Saitama police. The police had Arai in custody, but once again everything was at a standstill.

  Yet once again Sekiguchi’s unusual yakuza information network came through as the Consigliere handed him several audio tapes. The sound quality was terrible, but you could tell it was Arai talking with Sekine and Shima. A lot of things were said in a kind of code, but for a lot of things the meaning was plenty clear.

  Shima—in probable reference to the disappearance of Endo—assures Arai that there is no problem. “The body is invisible,” he says. Then he adds, “The body is in Gunma.” Shima makes references to other dead bodies. He tells of driving Kawasaki’s car to Tokyo station, where he abandoned it in the parking lot; he implies he helped transport Kawasaki’s corpse.

  There was nothing damning, but there was enough to work with in the interrogation room. Shima was key, but without Shima there would be no questioning, there would be no case. And so began another wait-and-see period. In November, Sekiguchi left the team and returned to the Anti–Organized Crime Division. The unspoken assumption was that Shima had been killed and that, after all this, the case would never be solved.

  I was wrong.

  It was the yakuza boss Takada who remained dogged in his personal pursuit of justice. In late November he succeeded in tracking down Shima, who had also changed his name and married; Takada passed the word on to Sekiguchi, who in turn reported it to the Saitama police. They nabbed Shima in December, and, when confronted with the existence of the tapes, Shima sang.

  His information proved good. Searching the site in Gunma Prefecture that Shima pointed them to, the police found enough of Kawasaki’s teeth to make their case. They had sent a very small crew. No one knew. Not the Yomiuri. Not anyone.

  On January 5, right after the New Year’s holidays, the Saitama police let Shima out on bail and announced the arrest of Gen Sekine and his wife, Hiroko, for the dismemberment of Akio Kawasaki. Within hours of his arrest, Sekine admitted almost everything. After an agonizing year and, depending upon how you look at it, more than a decade, the Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances case was closed.

  Did I get the scoop? Did the Yomiuri get the scoop?

  Noooooo.

  I felt betrayed and angry and broke away from the madhouse at the office to call Sekiguchi.

  “Jake, why didn’t you call?”

  “Why didn’t I call?”

  “You never gave me your home phone number, so I called the Urawa office three times since New Year’s and couldn’t get hold of you. I thought you were overseas.”

  “Did you leave a message?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I was in shock. Was he lying to me? I felt like a girlfriend who had been cheated on.

  I asked around the office if anyone had called for me.

  “Oh, yeah, you got a few calls,” one of the newbies volunteered. “I think it was insurance or something. The numbers are here somewhere.” He shuffled through the pile of baby pictures, sports records, and clippings on his desk until he found a piece of paper with a number scribbled on it. It was Sekiguchi’s home phone number.

  It was everything I could do to keep from throttling the kid. Caught in my throat was a scream: “You’re the guy! You’re the guy that fucked up a year’s worth of work because you were too damn lazy to call me!” But it stayed in my throat.

  I’d screwed up. If I had gone down to Sekiguchi’s place over the holidays, it would have changed everything. I’d made the fatal mistake that Sekiguchi had warned me about, not dropping in when nothing appeared to be going on, not keeping tabs on open cases. And I’d never given him my home phone number. The fact that he’d called the office at all put him at amazing risk.

  So that’s the anticlimactic end to the tale. I had a solid lead on the story. I knew the game plan. Up to that last chess move, I knew all about what was going on with the investigation, and I could have known that they’d found the remains of Kawasaki. I could have had the scoop of the year. I didn’t.

  In the end, Sekine and his wife were convicted for the murders of only four people. How many they really murdered is still a mystery.

  PART 2

  The Working Day

  Welcome to Kabukicho!

  After a brief and relatively boring stint covering local polictics in Saitama, it wasn’t long before the police beat came calling again, this time in Tokyo proper. I was finally hitting the big time. And when it was time for all of us new to the Tokyo shakaibu to be assigned to our prospective beats, I was assigned to Hell. The vice squad.

  I was married by now, and Mrs. Sunao Adelstein was not excited by my posting to temptation alley. We’d been married for about three years. It had been a whirlwind romance. I’d met her at an event she was covering as a reporter for Nikkei Publications, and I’d managed to ask her on a date. She was twenty-nine and wanted to be married before she was thirty. After several dates, she laid down the terms: we could go out for three months, but if at the end of those three I wasn’t serious about marriage—sayonora. She was funny, bilingual, and foxy—still is—and it seemed like an excellent business deal. I stated my terms: marriage—okay! but I demanded a three-year ban on producing offspring. She agreed, and we were engaged in record time. We actually got married the day before her thirtieth birthday, on my lunch break at the Urawa City Hall. It was almost nullified the same day because I had written my birthday down according to the traditional Japanese imperial calendar, Showa 44, rather than the Western calendar, 1969. However, a little yelling and screaming made things work out just fine.

  She was excited about moving up to Tokyo, and so was I. Out of New Jersey at last. I was back on the police beat in the big city.

  Technically, it was the Fourth District of the Metropolitan Police, but in reality it was like being assigned to a combat zone. The Fourth District contained the Shinjuku police, almost all of Shinjuku Ward, and the notorious Kabukicho. Kabukicho had nothing to do with kabuki, the traditional theater art performed exclusively by men (including the roles of women), but a lot to do with the traditional sex industry.

  Kabukicho used to be the largest and most volatile and profitable red-light district in Tokyo. Under Governor Shintaro Ishihara, the TMPD has made a concerted effort to clean it up, leaving it a shadow of its former self. The impetus probably was the horrific fire at the Mei-sei 56 Building in September 2001, which killed forty-four people. The building was owned by Shigeo Segawa, a yakuza-backed flesh merchant also known as the King of Soapland, whose buildings had been cited time and again for safety violations.

  It focused attention on what a lawless area Kabukicho had become.1* Something needed to be done. Maybe not a full-scale cleanup but forced compliance with safety regulations would have been enough. Maybe.

  I’m not a New Yorker, but I guess you could compare it to the old Times Square versus the new post-Giuliani Times Square.

  As far as entertainment districts went, in 1999 nothing beat Kabukicho for pure sleaze. Drugs, prostitution, sexual slavery, rip-off bars, dating clubs, massage parlors, S-and-M parlors, pornography shops and porn producers, high-dollar hostess clubs, low-dollar blow job salons, more than a hundred different yakuza factions, the Chinese mafia, gay prostitute bars, sex clubs, female junior high school students’ soiled uniforms/panties resale shops, and a population of workers more ethnically diverse than anywhere else in Japan. It was like a foreign country in the middle of Tokyo. Of course, I didn’t have any idea of how seedy the place was at that time. All I knew was that I had been assigned to cover it.

  I hadn’t been there in years. I wondered if the mysterious tarot machine that had so accurately predicted my future in 1992 was still there. Maybe it was time for an update. I could use some advice. The Fourth District was a heavy burden to carry.

  I wasn’t left to do it on my own. Inoue assigned Okimura to cover it as well. Okimura was a 1993
entry, like me, and a lot more savvy about those things than I was. He had been in Yokohama, another hotbed of criminal activity, and been tested and tried on the fields of the police beat. He had married a hostess, one of the most beautiful in Yokohama, alienating at least one senior editor at the Yokohama branch who had been courting the woman at the same time. Okimura had been a kickboxer in college, and he still had that lean and fit look. He had the thousand-yard stare that you see in some Special Forces veterans.

  The police beat district reporters were under the command of the TMPD reporters, who were stationed at the headquarters of the TMPD. They commanded; we obeyed. We also were at the mercy of the yu-gun (reserve corps) reporters, who could generally pull us off the beat any time they wanted a warm body. Inoue had given orders that this year, we newbies were going to actually be allowed to cover our beat and not be errand boys for the senior reporters in the Yomiuri office on the day shift. It would be an interesting experiment.

  The Shinjuku police station was a ten-minute walk from Kabukicho, next to the Nishi Shinjuku station, close to an island of office buildings. It was fairly new and towered over the area. It was at least seven stories tall. A police officer with a long pole was always stationed in front of the police station, standing guard. I had to get past the guard to even enter the police station. I told him I was a reporter for the Yomiuri. He didn’t bat an eye. He looked at my ID and waved me in. I guess they were a little more used to dealing with foreigners in Tokyo, or at least at the Shinjuku police station.

  Almost every district in Tokyo has one police station with a press club inside. The Shinjuku police station held the press club for the Fourth District. I took the elevator to one of the upper floors. The club was huge by most standards. It was a giant square room with a reporter’s desk from each newspaper/television outlet lined up against the wall, forming an L from the front to back. Next to the door was a closed-off tatami room, loaded with futons and completely dark unless you went in and turned on the light. A place to sleep. I felt in my bones that I was really going to like this assignment.

  The tatami room would definitely come in handy. Sunao and I were trying to have children, and come hell or high water, night or day, we were not missing her ovulation day. In a pinch, this room would do.

  The current tenant of the desk I was about to occupy was snoring when I got there, leaning as far as possible on the low-backed desk chair, on the edge of teetering over, his arms dangling limply, his nose pointing at the sky, his messy hair sticking up. He was making gurgling sounds. His shirt was covered in rice cracker flakes; a half-open pack lay discarded at his feet. I’ll call him Crumbly.

  The young female reporter from the Asahi sitting two seats away from him—Ms. Beanpole is how I’ve always thought of her—was curling up her lips in disgust at him when I walked in. She gave me a funny look, made eye contact, but didn’t say anything. I dropped my backpack filled with books, my camera, and my computer on top of Crumbly’s desk, casually. It made a loud thud when it hit. It startled Crumbly, who slid off his chair and landed near my foot.

  “Sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  Crumbly stood up, grabbing the rest of the rice crackers as he came to his feet.

  “No problem. Just catching up on some sleep. So.”

  “So.”

  “So you’re taking over, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t have much information or wisdom to pass on to you. It’s not like I’ve been doing the Fourth District for long, and frankly, the district reporters are kept so busy doing odds and ends, we are barely here at all.”

  “Inoue-san said the same thing. He said this year he’s going to encourage the district reporters to really cover their beats. It’ll be good prep work for being a police reporter at headquarters.”

  He pulled a red notebook out of a pile of notebooks on the desk and said, “Yeah, well, I wish that it had been that way with me. Here’s the list of officers’ addresses I have. It’s not much.”

  It wasn’t. The list hadn’t been updated in more than a year. If that was all he had, I would basically have to start from scratch, compiling my own list of police officers and where they lived to make the evening rounds. He handed me a collection of Fourth District police station announcements, newspaper clippings, a guidebook to Kabukicho, a plastic bag full of meishi. I noticed that there was a pile of discount tickets to sex shops in the trash basket next to the desk and an empty box of condoms, but I couldn’t say if they were his and I didn’t want to ask.

  I asked Crumbly what I should do to cover the area effectively.

  He bit off half a rice cracker and offered me the other half. I took it.

  While he chewed, crumbs blew through the air. Some of them caught in the breeze from the fan, then wafted to and hovered over Ms. Beanpole, who swatted at them like flies. Crumbly gave me his take on what it meant to be a district police reporter.

  “Basically, Adelstein, you’re cannon fodder. The district police reporters are errand boys for the TMPD police reporters and the guys in the head office. All the big cases are done under the direction of TMPD headquarters, and anything that the local police do on their own is probably not newsworthy. You’re lucky if it even gets into the local edition, let alone the national edition. Nobody expects you to get a big scoop on this beat, and nobody gets too pissed off when you get your ass handed to you on a silver platter. Get to know a few cops, write a couple human interest stories, feed some intel to the real police reporters, and you’ll have done all right.”

  “I thought Kabukicho was a hotbed of criminal activity.”

  “It is. But that doesn’t make it newsworthy. People get killed or injured here all the time. But who cares if some Chink, yakuza thug, or whore gets whacked? The cops don’t, and the public doesn’t either. Nine times out of ten, no matter how much it looks like a murder, the Shinjuku police will write it up as a case of assault resulting in death—or manslaughter. Why? So they don’t have to launch a full-fledged investigation. They could find a Chinese skimmer2* stabbed thirty-six times in the back on the streets of Kabukicho, and they’d call it an accidental death. Probably they wouldn’t announce it either.”

  “So what is newsworthy here?”

  “Anything involving someone famous or a civilian or a teenager. That’s about it. If yakuza start whacking each other and it looks like a gang war—maybe newsworthy.”

  “I thought I was supposed to get to know the names and addresses and phone numbers of every major detective in the police station.”

  “Ahhh, they tell you that, but it can’t be done. It’s not like the old days. In the old days, you’d go to the vice police chief and he’d give you a list with the names and addresses of the head of each investigative division and the squad leader names as well. They won’t do that anymore. Especially not the Mole.”

  “The Mole?”

  “That’s the vice police chief here. He’s always squinting like he can’t stand being in the light. Spent his whole career in administration. He believes his job is to keep you from getting any information, including press releases. He’ll do everything possible to interfere with whatever story you want to work on. Totally worthless and hates reporters. Good luck.”

  Ms. Beanpole snickered at that. I turned to her.

  “Is that true?”

  “Absolutely. Maybe he’ll be different with a foreigner. Who knows?”

  He wasn’t. I asked The Mole when I could see the chief of police and make my formal greetings. Refused. I asked when I could speak with detectives from each section and was told, “Never.” The Mole’s answer to everything was always the same.

  “I handle public relations. Anything you want to know, you ask me. Besides, the TMPD headquarters handles all the big stuff. Don’t bother the detectives.”

  Fortunately for me, the chief of police had heard about me from Misawa, the most senior and most venerated police reporter at the Yomiuri, and while The Mole was busy brushin
g me off, the chief emerged from his office and invited me in. I ended up asking if it was all right to at least greet the head of each section, and the chief told The Mole to set it up. I could see The Mole cringe when he was given the order, but he did what he was told.

  It wasn’t my charming personality alone that got the chief on my side.

  I’d come prepared, of course. I knew the chief was a heavy smoker and I knew he liked Lucky Strikes, so I’d had a friend stock up at the duty free for me. They were packed in the hard-shell case rather than the soft pack, which was rare at the time, I was told. A carton of cigarettes could buy a lot of goodwill in Japan.

  After exchanging business cards with about ten police officers under the watchful eye of The Mole, I headed back to the press club.

  Beanpole was waiting. She introduced me to the reporters from Jiji, Kyodo, NHK, the Mainichi, and Nikkei. We made chitchat. I got the usual twenty questions. I was a good sport. I explained how I’d gotten into the Yomiuri. Yes, I could eat sushi. Yes, I liked the cops. Yes, I could read and write Japanese.

  I complained about The Mole. We all disliked him. In that sense, he did a lot to unify the club. There was nothing exciting on the news and no announcement scheduled for the day, so the first thing I did after lunch was pull out a futon, turn out the lights in the tatami room, and sleep. The Fourth District is Hell? Hah. It was the sixth realm, the Western Paradise—or so I thought as I was nodding off.

  Paradise didn’t last long. At two in the afternoon, The Mole called from downstairs to let us know that the Shinjuku police would be announcing an arrest for violations of the Prostitution Prevention Law. The vice squad head, Shimozawa-san, would be giving us a lecture downstairs in the chief’s office. I called the TMPD club to let them know. We all hustled down to the room, and there was the chief behind his desk and the lead detective on the case standing in front of the desk with handouts. Another detective was sitting in the corner, taking notes. The press handouts didn’t have a lot written on them. It was always that way with the TMPD. The Saitama police press releases were like novels compared to the skimpy materials TMPD handed out.