Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  3* Outline was raided by the Azabu police in the fall of 2006. One of the girls working there who’d known Lucie was arrested, deported back to Australia, and forbidden to return to Japan for five years.

  4* In the most recent ruling, in December 2008, Obara was found guilty of dismembering and abandoning Lucie’s body but not her manslaughter or rape.

  ATMs and Jackhammers: A Day in the Life of a Shakaibu Reporter

  I awoke in the sleeping quarters on the third floor of the Yomiuri Building, tired and sweaty. I’d had to stay at the office so late the night before that I’d missed the last train home.

  There were two sleeping quarters on the third floor: one for the political beat and economic beat, the other for the national news and delivery. Our quarters had lumpy mattresses, bean-filled pillows, and a heating system that made you feel as if you were sleeping in a sauna. Other features: an EXIT sign that cast a flickering light over everything and a phone next to the bed that you were expected to answer at all times. Of course, the political beat had a room that was dark and temperature-controlled, with new beds and no phone.

  I shaved, hopped into the company car, and headed off to Saitama, my old beat. I was working on a piece about a string of spectacular ATM robberies. There had been about fifty-seven in the last year. It works like this: The ATM robbers break into a construction site or a construction company near a lonely ATM in the suburbs. They steal a power shovel; if a forklift is available, it’ll do (and it’s easier to heist one than you might think). They go to the ATM, rip the entire machine out of the ground, and take off with it. In a more secluded location they whack open the ATM, remove the safe, transfer it to another car, and split. The crime usually takes about four minutes, and the average police response time to an alarm is about six minutes, so the robbers have to be pretty fast. About half the time they can’t get the safe out fast enough and they have to leave the dough behind.

  I talked to Scotland Yard, which had been called in to investigate a series of similar incidents in the late 1990s (it was known as ram raiding). The police in Britain had urged the banks to bolt their ATMs to the ground or floor, and that had virtually eliminated the problem. It can’t stop a power shovel, but it adds a couple minutes to the demolition time, making it easier for the cops to catch the thieves. The other solution was to insert ink packs into the machines; whenever a machine was shaken or knocked over, ink would spurt onto the bills, thus marking them. In Japan, however, the banks have insured all their ATMs so that they don’t lose a yen if they get robbed, and they’d rather pay the insurance than go to the expense of reinforcing their machines. As regards the ink pack option, it was vetoed by the Bank of Japan, which didn’t want to have to exchange clean bills for inked-up ones. So the cops are stuck with the mess.

  My first stop was the Saitama police headquarters to ask questions about the seven ATM robberies in the area. The people I had pestered ten years before, including some of my good sources, had risen up the ladder, which would make it easy to get answers. In a way, they still knew about me because I’d been sending New Year’s cards to them since I’d left. In Japan, you send New Year’s cards every year. It’s a ritual. If you don’t, you’re considered an outcast. Personally, they drive me crazy, but I dutifully sent those cards out every December, so that the guys would know where I was, what I was doing, and how old Beni was.

  The minute I walked onto the seventh floor, I ran into the former head of the railroad police—“Jake, thanks for the New Year’s card. Your son is really cute.” I chose not to point out that the cute little thing was a daughter. Then people passing by stopped in their tracks to say, hey, hello, long time. It was like having a mini–fan club for a couple minutes. I then headed over to see Chiba, who used to head the Organized Crime Task Force and was now the head of the Vice and Crime Prevention Bureau. This means he actually had an office to himself, complete with a big desk, two sofas, and a marble table with a crystal ashtray and a crystal lighter. Plus he could smoke in the building. That was about as good as it got in the Saitama Police Department.

  Chiba gave me a warm welcome. The ATM robberies, he said, were helped by the fact that most construction equipment in Japan is designed to run with a generic key. This enables anyone at a construction site to use any machine on the lot without having to search around for a key. Even machines made by different manufacturers can be run with the same key. This means that anyone with the key can walk onto a lot and steal a machine. No one wants to go to the expense of changing the locks on machines. Plus, the machines are rarely stolen by the criminals; they are just borrowed and then left behind.

  Chiba and I then walked across the hall to pick up Yoshimura, who was now the head of the Theft and Stolen Property Division. His second in command, Kohata, used to be vice police chief of Omiya police station. I knew all three of them. We went out for eel over rice and shot the breeze. They asked about my family, and when I showed them pictures of my daughter and wife, they gawked. Sunao is considered quite beautiful by contemporary Japanese standards; they couldn’t believe she’d have anything to do with me. Then there was the usual fight about who would pay the bill. I was hoping to pay so that I would be one up on the you-owe-me-I-owe-you scale that is important in dealing with older Japanese, who still have a sense of honor. However, I had to concede because Chiba had already handed cash to the proprietor before we ate.

  Kohata, who looks like John Malkovich but with more hair, filled me in on the latest trends in both ATM robberies and housebreaking. Recently, Japan had had a huge surge in break-ins by Chinese nationals, some of whom, it turns out, are adept at picking locks. Japanese locks are pretty easy to pick. But after a wave of these thefts, people installed stronger locks, so now the crooks walk around carrying power drills, corkscrews (which are effective in turning the lock), and cute little stickers of happy faces, Hello Kitty and the like. Why stickers? They’re used to cover up the drilled hole in the lock so that while the thief is inside pilfering the place, nobody walking by will notice anything amiss.

  I traveled to Yoshikawa, in east Saitama, to check out the latest scene of an ATM robbery, near a Home Depot–like store. I tried finding a witness, but everyone just slammed the door in my face and told me they didn’t need a paper. It was very déjà vu. One lady complained that the Yomuiri wasn’t giving her movie tickets when she renewed her subscription and she was tired of getting detergent. I couldn’t get in a word. Some things never change.

  It was pretty easy to see why this ATM had gotten knocked over. It was plopped down like a little shed in a corner of the parking lot, next to a bus stop, very visible from the road, with absolutely nothing to obstruct an oncoming power shovel. A cursory look at the remains revealed that the machine had been bolted down in three places with thin sheets of metal. The crooks had made off with 6 million yen (about $60,000 at the time).

  I finally found an eyewitness across the road, little Mrs. Ishikawa, who opened the door only after I showed her my business card, my photo ID, and an article about me in a Yomiuri brochure. Her story went like this:

  “I heard a big noise that sounded like gon gon gon, and I thought it might be an earthquake or something. I could feel the ground shake. But then I remembered that construction had been going on down the road and thought maybe they were just starting very, very early today. But then I heard this gan gan sound, and my husband got up to look out the window, and I looked out too, and we could see these two men working a big power shovel, ripping the ATM out of the ground and smashing it into little pieces. My husband called the police. Of course, by the time the police came, there was only a big pile of rubble and the men had driven the safe off in a white station wagon and were nowhere to be seen.

  “I was a little surprised, but my husband, who reads the newspaper every day—although we don’t take the Yomiuri, sorry—had read about those ATM robberies. As a matter of fact, he said to me just last week, ‘I think it’s just a matter of time before they get that machine across th
e street.’ And what do you know, they did! I think the criminals were very smart or very lucky because everyone in the neighborhood thought it was just more construction work and we were all a little slow to call the police.”

  Local color, quotable, good.

  The police chief of the city of Yoshikawa was someone I knew well; he used to be the second in command of the Saitama Homicide Division. After we greeted each other, he expressed great embarrassment about the robbery happening on his turf. Police had marked fifteen sites as potential ATM robberies, but the one that had gotten hit wasn’t even on the list. As a matter of fact, police had been staking out another site when this robbery occurred. The Yoshikawa Police Department is responsible for 30 square miles that comprise two cities and a town, so it isn’t surprising that with its limited manpower the crooks had gotten away, but still he didn’t feel good about it.

  • • •

  Having done my job, I figured that since I was in Saitama I shouldn’t waste the chance to visit Sekiguchi-san and his family. I called to warn him I’d be coming, then gave directions to the driver, and off we went to northernmost Saitama. It’s so remote there that occasionally the local schools had a problem with wild boar running loose in the schoolyard. It’d been ten years since I was a young reporter in Saitama, but Sekiguchi was still my mentor and his family treated me like one of their own. It would be good to see them.

  We pulled up to the house about seven in the evening, and it was sort of like old times again. Everyone greeted me warmly. Sekiguchi-san and Mrs. Sekiguchi looked great, but the two daughters sure had changed. They were no longer little elementary school girls.

  Despite having recently being diagnosed with cancer, Sekiguchi was in good spirits, going on about the pleasure of being back doing real detective work as his wife laid out well-remembered junk food for me. Yuki-chan had a giant Hello Kitty pillow that she and her sister wanted me to give Beni. We laughed and nibbled and talked some shop, Sekiguchi relating the details of his latest case, which prosecutors had removed him from. The investigation had been halted for political reasons, having to do with the governor. Some things never change.

  Sekiguchi and I didn’t smoke that night. He was trying to quit.

  I got back to Tokyo at 10:30 and went straight to Edogawa Ward, where I was scheduled to meet a North Korean Japanese who was president of an industrial waste management company.

  The Japanese colonized Korea during their warlike days, and after the war a lot of the Koreans who had been brought over as slave labor remained in Japan. They later split into two groups: those pledging allegiance to South Korea and those pledging allegiance to North Korea. The North Korean Japanese have their own school system and a kind of local government board. This guy used to be part of that local government.

  As you can imagine, with North Korea admitting that twenty years ago it had abducted Japanese citizens—one simply walking along a beach—and spirited them away to North Korea to teach the Japanese language to spies and never let them leave, North Korean Japanese were and always will be tense. This guy had agreed to meet me to talk about the situation of North Koreans in Japan and their support for the North Korean government.

  During a period when many Koreans had returned to North Korea to help rebuild the country, his elder sister had gone to join the effort. By the time she and everyone else figured out that the “workers’ paradise” was really a hell on Earth, there was no way to get his sister home and he was forced more or less to pay a “ransom” in terms of support for North Korea. That was not uncommon, he said.

  As he was going on about North Korean government activities in Japan, our conversation was interrupted by a tough-looking young guy who immediately engaged the company president in a loud, heated discussion in Korean. I recognized him as a young executive-class yakuza in the Yamaguchi-gumi Yamaken group. I’d seen his face in a yakuza fan magazine. There were several available at the time; and any good police reporter covering organized crime made sure to read them regularly. Of course, I didn’t understand a word the two were saying, but later they didn’t mind explaining that it was about a botched murder attempt the previous week.

  Two punks in motorcycle helmets had burst into a bar and fired guns at the former Sumiyoshi-kai syndicate boss. The punks were crappy shots; five people were killed, three of them innocent bystanders; the former boss wasn’t touched. This mishap spurred the police into cracking down hard on the Sumiyoshi-kai. The yakuza hadn’t been successful in giving the police anything to make them lay off. They offered up a fall guy, but it didn’t look as if he was the killer.

  The young executive gave me the name of the guy who was really responsible for the killings. I wasn’t there to get information about that story, but I passed what I’d learned on to our local bureau and a cop I used to know well.

  Around eleven, I met the corporate blood brother, or kigyoshatei, of a Kokusui-kai faction at a bar and pumped him for info on the ATM robberies. I paid for the drinks and handed him front-row tickets to a prizefight.

  I got home past midnight. Sunao and Beni were asleep. I washed the dishes in the sink, took a shower, and went to sleep on my own futon, finally.

  Evening Flowers

  The Japanese have words for sadness that are so subtle and complicated that the English translations don’t do them justice.

  Setsunai is usually translated as “sad,” but it is better described as a feeling of sadness and loneliness so powerful that it feels as if your chest is constricted, as if you can’t breathe; a sadness that is physical and tangible. There is another word, too—yarusenai, which is grief or loneliness so strong that you can’t get rid of it, you can’t clear it away.

  There are some things like that. You get older and you forget about them, but every time you remember, you feel that yarusenai. It never goes away; it just gets tucked away and forgotten for a while.

  There is a beautiful children’s song, written by the artist Takehisa Yumeji, called “The Evening Primrose.” The evening primrose is a yellow, sometimes white flower that blooms only at night, then tinges with red in the morning and withers. The song is almost impossible to translate because it says more in what it does not say than in what it does. Any translation would be an interpretation. But here’s mine.

  You live and wait and wait and wait

  But the other may never come

  Like waiting on the evening primrose

  This feeling of sadness without end

  This evening, it does not seem

  That even the moon will come out

  Every now and then, you meet someone who nurtures you as a person or, in my case, as a reporter. I suppose that I always come across as a stray dog that people feel a need to take in, to nurture. Mami Hamaya took me under her wing when I first got to the shakaibu. She had been a police reporter as well. When I started on the Fourth District beat, she was the only one to actually give me some useful contacts. I don’t know why we hit it off, perhaps because we were both minorities within the department. From early 2000, we spent a lot of time working together. I thought of her as an older sister of sorts.

  Hamaya looked a lot like Velma, the girl with the thick-rimmed, thick-lensed glasses on the old cartoon Scooby-Doo. She had her hair in a Beatles cut and had a button nose. She would usually forgo a skirt, wearing only slacks and a collared shirt to work, dressed a little like a guy. She was tough and hardworking, as is every woman in the National News Department. There is a macho vibe to the whole department, and women are few in number. In 2003, there were six or seven females out of a hundred reporters in the department. To survive in the shakaibu women have to put up with the same lousy hours as the men, they’re expected to pour the drinks for their male counterparts on social occasions, and they can never complain. In many ways, they have to work harder than the men.

  One particular phone call sealed our friendship.

  I was at work on the day shift, which basically involved sitting around the newsroom answering the phon
e and waiting to dispatch people and orchestrate panic when and if something happened. For about nine hours. At that point in time, I was a member of the yu-gun (reserve corps), an elite special forces unit of the National News Department that mobilized for breaking stories and had the freedom to run around writing about anything interesting during a slow news period. I was also responsible for working on the feature “Safety Meltdown,” a long-running series about how crime rates were rising in Japan, why, and what it meant for the country. Even though crime rates were still ridiculously low, the police clearance rate (ability to solve a crime) in several categories of felony had hit an all-time low. It was a hot topic.

  The day was flat and quiet, and nothing of any particular importance was on the horizon. Then the phone rang, with an irate Yomiuri Giants fan on the other end. He didn’t like the current coach. I told him that we were the news department of the paper and that we were neither the sports department nor the managers of the Yomiuri Giants. I suggested he call elsewhere.

  He gave me his name and then demanded I give him mine. I did—sounding it out in Japanese style.

  “Jei-ku A-de-ru-su-te-in.”

  The caller was not pleased.

  “Is this some kind of trick? Who the hell are you?”

  He demanded my name several times.

  “I’m a reporter for the Yomiuri. I’m also a foreigner.”

  “You’re not a foreigner. You’re some kind of machine, designed to trick people and make them hang up.”

  “I assure you that I’m not a machine. I’m a human being; a non-Japanese human being.”

  “A foreigner, huh. No wonder you don’t get what I’m saying. Put someone else on.”

  The only other person nearby was Hamaya. She nodded her head and asked me to give her the phone.

  “Hello, this is Hamaya. I believe that Jake already answered your question.”