Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  That got her a little upset. “If these girls get caught talking to you, they could get in trouble. Real trouble. You understand that, right?”

  I said I did. I said I’d be careful. So Helena promised she’d introduce me to one of the girls. And we parted ways.

  I did some checking on my own.

  Sekiguchi popped into my mind, but this wasn’t his beat. Then I thought of Alien Cop, who had done such a good job of showing me around Kabukicho. Alien Cop had since been transferred from the Shinjuku Police Department to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters, where he might be able to tap into some good information. He’d be a good source. But in order to get what I wanted, I’d have to pay for it. A night on the town, certainly. A bar or strip club employing foreign women, definitely. It wouldn’t be cheap, but by that point I had some connections.

  I called up a lawyer acquaintance working for a company promoting mixed martial arts tournaments. These slugfests were like a cross between boxing, wrestling, and karate, and they were wildly popular. I talked him into coughing up two second-row seats, and I took them over to the manager of the Eighth Circle of Hell, a strip club, who agreed to comp me for the night.

  I texted Alien, and we had a date.

  Alien was still a decent, straightforward guy. We got caught up with our latest doings, and while a buxom redhead named Jasmine ground her curvaceous ass on his crotch and ran her fingers through his crew cut, I told him Helena’s story. Jasmine was content to sip the champagne Alien had bought. When I was done with the story, Alien frowned. He lifted Jasmine off his lap and told her, in fairly good English, “Please go get me some smokes, angel. I must talk to my friend now. Come back in five minutes.” Jasmine dutifully excused herself and was gone.

  “You know,” Alien said, sucking on a cigarette and switching back to Japanese, “I’ll look into it. What your friend says is probably true. I see more women like that now, but there isn’t much I can do to help them. It bugs me.”

  “It bugs you?”

  “I like women in the business like that. I know my money is buying their attentions, but I like them anyway. It’s a game. But when a woman doesn’t want to be in the business, if she’s being forced to do it, then I don’t want to be with her. It’s not fun. It’s not a game then. Your friend is right: if they’re not getting paid, that’s not okay.”

  He took a notepad out of his pocket and I gave him what I’d been able to find out: the location of Slick’s office and the real estate deed, which was under the name of J Enterprise.

  Jasmine was taking more than five minutes to come back. While we waited, our conversation got personal.

  “Jake, you ever sleep with any of these women at the clubs? They seem to like you. I can see that.”

  “They like me because I don’t sleep with them. I don’t want to sleep with them. This makes me different from the usual customers.”

  “Because you don’t like white women?”

  “No, because it’s a bad idea.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they give me information sometimes and you’re not supposed to sleep with your sources. I did before I was married but not now. I might bring home some horrible STD and give it to my wife, who would hate me and dump me.”

  “Well, what if there was this hot girl who had some information you really wanted—but she’d give it to you only if you slept with her?”

  “Yeah, I would sleep with a woman for good information. I’m a total information whore. What about you, Alien? You ever sleep with a source?”

  “Of course. It’s like a fringe benefit. I’m not married; I don’t have kids.”

  “So you think I’d be a slimeball if I did what you’re doing?”

  “No. I just think you’re strange. Not a strange gaijin but a strange person. You have a code. You stick to it. It’s a weird code, but it’s a code. I admire that. And you’re a good guy. Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ll tell you something …”

  “Tell me.”

  “You’ll break your code sooner or later. Vice does it to you. Like the saying goes, lie down with dogs and get up with fleas. You’ll get fleas.”

  “I’ll get a flea collar.”

  “Hah. Won’t work. You’ll sleep with someone not just for money or information but because it seems like the thing to do. Like shaking hands. It’s a slippery slope. And you won’t even feel guilty about it. It won’t occur to you that it isn’t right or out of the ordinary. The job screws you up. You should ask for another posting. You’re lucky you’re already married, at least. I could never get married.”

  “Why not?” I asked, now surprised.

  “Because I’ve spent too much time with people that sex doesn’t have any meaning for. It already doesn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t be faithful to one woman, and I wouldn’t believe she could be faithful to me. Monogamy is bullshit. Sex is like exchanging New Year’s cards, a ritual. I understand that for the rest of the world it’s different. It’s a big deal to them. I’m out of sync with the normal world, and I won’t be in sync with it ever again. I’ll never marry a regular chick because the gap would bury us. I could marry a prostitute, but she’d have to promise to have sex with me primarily. Otherwise it wouldn’t be safe, and I might get jealous. Maybe I could marry another cop who had worked vice. But not a hostess. They’re bloodsuckers.”

  “That’s pretty bleak.”

  “Wait and see. You’ll understand. But let me tell you one thing that I’ve learned about all this cheating and monogamy shit: Never admit anything. Never confess. If you love the woman you principally want to be with, the main one, then lie. Confession is for the confessor. It makes you feel good; it ruins the lives of everyone else. It’s a selfish thing to do. Don’t confess.”

  “That’s not advice I expect to get from a cop.”

  “I’m only telling you because I think you have got a good heart. When you talk to me about these girls, I can see it bothers you. You’re like me, you dig these women. So I’m telling you an important secret of life. Never confess.”

  Jasmine came back, cigarettes in hand. She sat on Alien’s lap, swigged directly from the champagne bottle, lit a cigarette, sucked suggestively on it, and then put the cigarette between Alien’s lips, her left hand cradling the back of his head. She turned to me and smiled and then looked over my shoulder. A tall, thin brunette in a black silky negligee was sauntering over to our table. She sat gently on my lap. I ordered her a drink as Alien readied himself to go to the back room for a private dance.

  • • •

  Alien Cop came through with some strong information. And three days later, after knocking on doors and trading favors for information on my own, I had the book on Slick and Viktor’s operation. A lot of it was confirmation of what Helena had told me; some filled in the gaps.

  The company fronting the operation was, no surprise, J Enterprise, a Roppongi-based LLC that was not registered with the Japanese authorities. The company was owned and run by Slick Imai. Viktor was his partner. Their operation involved bringing foreign women into the Tokyo area and placing them in sex clubs and massage parlors. Slick ran four clubs—Club Angel, Den of Delights, Club Divine, and Club Codex—in the Roppongi area, supplied the Den of Delicious in Shibuya, and ran an escort service on the side. He was the king of foreign flesh in the ward, pocketing the equivalent of $20,000 a month.

  The focus of Slick’s recruitment was girls from Israel and also Hungary, Poland, and other countries in Eastern Europe. He placed hostesses wanted ads on www.jobsinjapan.com. One Canadian girl, age twenty-two, who responded to the ad was filtered through a recruiting agency in Germany before she eventually got to Japan. In 2003, the firm was known as Entertainment Valentina; the name may have changed. Typically the girls were promised an astronomical 4 million yen ($40,000!) a month for working as high-class hostesses, accompanying rich businessmen to dinner. The company agreed to pay an agent in their home country a fee of 3,000 euros for the girl’s airfare a
nd lodging in Tokyo.

  Once the girl arrived in Tokyo, she was met and taken to the company apartment, which she would share with other working girls. If she hadn’t figured it out by then, she would quickly be informed what was expected of her. Financial pressure, lies, subtle (and not-so-subtle) threats to hurt her family, and plain and simple indoctrination were brought to bear.

  The girls worked a full nine-hour shift at a sex parlor and earned the equivalent of about $100 a day; of this $75 was reclaimed as fees. Essentially this left the women $25 per day, a far cry from the $40,000 a month they’d been promised. All were on tourist visas, which is good for a three-month stay and don’t allow employment. The benefit of this—for Slick and Viktor—was the revolving-door supply of fresh girls as well as constantly collecting on the hiked-up airfare. Many girls left the country actually owing Slick money.

  Viktor, who was tall and good-looking, was rumored to be married to a Japanese woman, which would have given him solid ground to conduct business in Japan.

  A source at the Ministry of Justice uncovered a company that had been registered under Slick’s name: “R&D,” a car-importing, clothing sales, consulting, and insurance brokerage firm established in 1993, apparently no longer in business. The director of the firm, Ko Kobayashi, had had a brush with the Prostitution Prevention Law; he’d been arrested in 1989 in Shizuoka (Goto-gumi territory) for bringing Taiwanese women into the country and putting them to work as prostitutes. Slick had allegedly been on the board of directors. So it was clear that Slick had a history of trafficking since way back.

  Alien Cop had one pretty disturbing bit of news: Slick could not be touched. I suspected as much because his intel had provided one of the keys to breaking open the Lucie Blackman case. Until the TMPD got a new chief in the Roppongi jurisdiction, Slick was free to do as he pleased. Slick had done one good deed in his life; everybody else had been paying for it ever since.

  Viktor did most of his recruiting directly in Europe. He handled the logistics and arranged sex tours to the Maldives, which was the real moneymaker.

  By early December, I had enough material together to write a story. I showed a draft to my supervisor at the time, Yamakoshi, aka Steve McQueen. Why he considered himself the Japanese equivalent of Steve McQueen instead of, say, Tom Cruise beats me, but he was interested.

  However, given the sensational nature of the story, he wanted about twenty things cleared first. He turned the story and me over to Mr. Bowtie, the scariest, most demanding editor/senior reporter in the National News Department.

  Over coffee Bowtie told me, in no uncertain terms, what he wanted. One was that I talk to the brokers/traffickers and hear their side of the story. The other was that I find an “innocent victim.”

  “What do you mean by ‘innocent victim’?”

  “What do you think I mean, shithead? Some slut who comes to Japan to make a couple thousand dollars a night on her back and finds out she isn’t going to make so much, that’s hardly a crime. I want a girl who was duped, an innocent. I want a sad story. If it’s just an underpaid whore unhappy with her job, you don’t have a story.”

  “I don’t think you get it.”

  “I get it. I know the deal. I’m just telling you how it is. You want to write the story, write a story that will make people feel sorry for those innocent women and hate the traffickers. If you can’t do that, you don’t have a story. And you’re wasting my time and your time.”

  I didn’t like his attitude, but I was hell-bent on writing this story. The fact was, it was becoming a cause with me. So I leaned on Helena for help. She told me how to reach one of the women who’d escaped, Veronika. She had been lucky enough to steal back her passport before fleeing.

  Veronika was short and thin, and her blond hair had been pulled back into a sloppy ponytail. She did not look well. A thick layer of makeup obscured but didn’t hide the dark circles under her eyes. She was wearing a white leather coat with a fur collar. Her left ear looked as if it had been crushed.

  She was twenty-six, from a small village thirty miles from Warsaw. “I saw this ad on the Internet: ‘Work in Japan as a hostess! Anyone can make a lot of money in a short time! Now hiring blond women.’ I answered the ad.

  “I went to Warsaw and met this talent company representative named Mikel. He showed me pictures of a club—a really extravagant place—and he said, ‘You’ll be here, dancing with Japanese men, chatting with them in English. For one hour you’ll earn a hundred dollars U.S.’ My daughter was six, so I asked my mother to take care of her. I left Warsaw and flew to Tokyo. I was given instructions to go to the ANA Hotel, and there I first met Viktor. He was from the Netherlands, very handsome, and played the part of a perfect gentleman. I felt so relieved.

  “Viktor drove me to where I would be staying. He said that I was probably tired from the long flight, so I could relax. It would be fine if I started work tomorrow. He took me to the apartment—it was on the fourth floor in a building in Nishi-Azabu. I remember the address very well. At the apartment were a Colombian girl and a Canadian girl. Three people in one tiny room. I started to feel a little uneasy. Viktor pulled out a drawer and told me to put anything of value in it, including my passport, so that it wouldn’t be stolen. I did as he said.

  “The next day, around five in the afternoon, Viktor and Slick, a Japanese man, came to the apartment. They then took us to the Den. It was totally different from the picture I was shown in Poland. Viktor very rudely told us we were to work there. I got mad, thinking what the hell is this? Then the two guys explained the job to us: We were going to be providing sex services. Give massages and jerk the men off. For oral sex, we would get four thousand yen [$40]. Whether we had customers or not, they would collect seventy-five hundred yen [$75] from us each day. If we didn’t pay, that amount would become a ‘loan’ we would have to pay back. The plane ticket was the first thing they were charging us for; they said we already owed them three hundred thousand yen [$3,000]. The apartment cost was ten thousand yen [$100] a day. ‘Don’t drag your feet about it,’ they said. ‘If you want more money, you can sleep with a customer; you can make twenty thousand yen [$200] for that. You have three months in this country, so if you work, you can pay back all your loans.’

  “I was horrified. I was absolutely repulsed, but there was nothing I could do. I left the bar, but I didn’t know Tokyo at all, not even the way back to the apartment. Somehow, though, I remembered certain places, and after two or three hours, I made it back to the apartment. I thought I would grab my passport and plane ticket and get ready to go back home. When I got back, though, everything had been taken from the drawer. There was nothing I could do but wait.

  “When I saw Viktor, his face was so … proud and triumphant. I was angry. ‘What the hell are you doing? Give back my passport! Give me my return ticket! You’re a thief, and if you don’t give them back, I’ll go to the police.’ He was totally unfazed, and he told me, ‘We’re the ones who bought the ticket—the ticket was ours, not yours. I’m not stealing anything, you ungrateful bitch. Go try the police. You have no passport, right? They’ll arrest you for being an illegal alien. The police here are worse than the hounds of Hell. Please, by all means, go ahead and try it. They’ll deport you, but the money you owe us won’t disappear. Quite the contrary. We’ll get compensation from you. I know where your family lives, and my friends know, too.’

  “My daughter I had left with my mother. The man who introduced me to all of this knew where they lived. With Viktor’s threat, I was very afraid. I thought they would hurt my family. I thought that if I escaped, while I was escaping, my daughter would be killed … and my mother, too. If I could do it over, I would have gone to my embassy. But I worried that Viktor could have somehow messed that up for me too. I thought that he might even have friends in the embassy. God, I was stupid.

  “I had no place to sleep, no money, and nowhere I could go. There was only ‘work.’ It was the first time I had done anything like that. They had expl
ained that for just a massage, it was a thousand yen [$10]. I hated doing it, but I did. Touching the men was one part of it, but the clients always demanded a blow job. I got more money for that. For the first week, I only did massage, but Viktor and Slick were demanding ten thousand yen [$100] a day for the apartment. So I tried to do a blow job, but I just couldn’t do it with someone I didn’t know. I started choking really violently. I started to hate myself. One day, I started crying and went begging to the manager of the shop. He said that he’d had no idea they’d taken my passport. I don’t know what he said to Viktor, but he got back my passport for me. The manager told me that I could try to look for work at another place. Then he lent me his telephone, so I called my mother and daughter and told them to go to a safe place. They said that Viktor had called them once. I wanted to go straight home to them, but I couldn’t. I had no money.

  “I looked for work at a different hostess club, but the fact I was doing that got back to Viktor almost immediately. He came to the club and said to me, ‘You can’t work in Roppongi. I am in charge of you. Nobody will give a job to an ungrateful bitch like you.’ Slick was with him, too.

  “I didn’t come to Japan to be a prostitute. I was promised a job as a hostess. The shop manager had given me my ticket and passport, so the next day, I decided I would run away. I spoke with some women who were in the same situation I was in, and we made a plan to go to the police, but everyone got so scared they ended up not going. They said things like ‘They’ll arrest us’ or ‘Now we can’t repay the loan, but if we go, we have to get a lawyer’ and ‘Japanese prisons are terrible.’

  “Viktor is unforgiveable. Slick too. Hell is too good for them.

  “They also do sex tours, you know, for businessmen. They have a big boat in the Maldives, and the girls are the escorts. The men can sleep with a different girl every evening if they like … There was another Polish girl who told me she worked on one of these tours. She was promised two hundred thousand yen [$2,000] for five days, but Viktor kept taking money out for ‘rent’ and ended up only paying her half of what he owed her. ‘It was like a vacation for you,’ he told her. ‘I don’t think one hundred thousand yen is too much to pay for a vacation.’