Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  I asked Helena to look into it for me. She was well connected and knew everyone in Roppongi. I warned her to be very careful, but I don’t think she really heard me. She was excited about it. She wanted to help out.

  We had an awkward parting.

  “Listen,” I said, shaking my finger at her, “if you hear anything, great. Don’t poke around too much. I don’t know much about the people running this NGO other than that they are not very nice.”

  “I got it. I will be cautious.”

  “Just ask around a little bit. If you have the slightest sense that you’re in danger or anything—cease and desist. You have my number. Call me anytime—in the United States or here.”

  “I promise that I will be cautious.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  I asked her how much longer she planned to be in Japan. She said that she was thinking of leaving in the spring. She’d bought a home in Australia and was considering going back to college—maybe studying “literature or something equally as worthless.”

  I got up and prepared to leave after giving her some materials. She tapped me on the shoulder and held out her arms, shook her butt a little.

  “Do I get a hug for the road?”

  “Absolutely.”

  • • •

  In March, she called me at home in the United States. She told me that she had been asking around and that she believed that the International Entertainment Association was a front for the Goto-gumi.

  I almost dropped the phone.

  I told her to stop right there, and she got upset. Perhaps she thought I was overreacting or that I thought that she was weak. She could have easily been high. I certainly accused her of that. Either way, our conversation escalated almost to an argument, and then she hung up.

  I tried reaching her, but she wouldn’t answer the phone. I called all the next day. I called a friend and asked him to check on her. He promised to and he did—nobody home at her apartment. I was afraid that if I called the regular police, she’d get busted for being a prostitute. I had to go and find her. I shouldn’t have waited even a day. I bumped up my flight to Japan. Sunao was furious.

  I kept e-mailing her on the long trip there. I went immediately to the place where she used to work after arriving in Narita. Except when I got there, she wasn’t there. There weren’t any foreign women working there at all. Her e-mail account was not responding, and her phone was dead. I went to her apartment, and the landlord said she hadn’t been back in two or three days.

  After a week, there wasn’t any doubt that she had vanished from her apartment and her day job as an English teacher; I checked there as well. She’d provided no forwarding address and had left everything behind in the apartment.

  I had no idea what to do.

  I did the only thing I could think of. I went to work. International Entertainment Association was associated with the Goto-gumi, so I had to check that out, right. I had to follow up Helena’s lead.

  If Goto had been responsible in any way for her vanishing—and I didn’t know that he had—I wanted to know. Even if he hadn’t, I should have returned to work on the story about his liver transplant a long time ago. It was a diversion from the human-trafficking research but not completely off track. I knew I’d be putting myself at risk and probably pissing off Goto again, but I didn’t really care very much. I’d probably already done it anyway.

  As the Japanese would say, I’d already eaten the poison, might as well lick the plate.

  Yakuza Confessions

  I began making progress in figuring out how Goto had gotten into the United States. I had a clue and I’d developed a good source, someone who knew a lot and wanted to talk.

  It was a clear, cold day in December 2006 when I went to see Masaki Shibata, an ex-yakuza, at a very nice hospital in the middle of Tokyo. Shibata was a very intelligent man. He had also been friends with the Emperor of Loan Sharks. It was a small world, after all.

  I was completing the human-trafficking project, and I was doing other investigative work to keep money coming in. I worried about Helena. She’d completely disappeared.

  I was commuting back and forth between the United States and Japan. The kids seemed happy in their new home and were learning English really quickly.1* There were adjustment problems, the biggest being that the United States doesn’t have universal health insurance as Japan does. It was very hard when Beni came down with a high fever and I realized we couldn’t afford to take her to the emergency room unless it was absolutely necessary. In Japan, we would have gone in the middle of the night without thinking about it. I’d never had to contemplate the costs of medical care before in my life.

  Public health care in Japan can be bad, but most of the time it’s good and it’s better than nothing.

  However, here’s a strange thing about Japan: Almost any restaurant is spotless. The floors glow, the countertops are clean, the linen is a bright white. This doesn’t hold true for medical facilities. Most hospitals have a thin veneer of dust on the floor; the sheets have been washed, but stains remain. The windows look as if no one has cleaned them in decades. You have to take off your shoes and put on moldy slippers to tread through poorly lit halls with medical equipment and supplies filling the corridors.

  Shibata’s hospital was different. You could wear shoes. It was a clean, well-lit space. You might actually be able to eat off the dishes without fearing secondary infection.

  I didn’t sign the guest book. I didn’t want any evidence that I’d visited the guy or that I knew him.

  Shibata was a big man in his organized crime group, but he was no longer an organization man. When he’d been diagnosed with liver cancer, it flashed upon him that he’d led an evil life. You might wonder why the yakuza seem to get stricken with liver cancer. A lot of it has to do with the tattoos. Most of them got them when they were young and the needles used weren’t clean. Many of them have hepatitis C, and they drink a lot. That’s a pretty lethal combination. In addition to that, the traditional tattoos almost kill the sweat glands. The body can’t get rid of its poisons easily, and that’s also hard on the organs.

  Shibata knew he wasn’t going to get a liver transplant, and he decided to make his peace with the world, make amends where he could. He married a Malaysian woman who worked at one of his clubs and had a kid with her.

  Fortunately, Shibata wanted to talk to someone, wanted to balance out his sins. So a Buddhist priest introduced us. Tsumihoroboshi is the word for it. There were, of course, conditions on what he would tell me and what I could do with the information. He knew that upon his death, terrible things would be written about him in the press. I had to promise I’d tell his son that his father had had another side, that he had tried to be a better man. I was to give his son an unopened letter.

  Shibata looked pretty bad. People in the advanced stages of liver cancer have a terrible pallor. Yellowish. He wasn’t quite there yet.

  As the liver becomes less and less able to function, all the poisons in the body that it should be filtering out don’t leave. You essentially become toxic to yourself. Some people become violent, delirious.

  Before asking what you want to know as a reporter, it’s always good to chew the fat a bit. I mentioned that I’d walked by the Yaesu Fujiya Hotel on my way to come see him and been reminded of the Eiju Kim murder in 2002.

  He asked me if I wanted to know what had really happened. But first, I had to open the window. He wanted to smoke. I’d brought him an aluminum case of Lucky Strikes, his favorite brand, from duty free. A carton of ten. I had to stand on his bed to disconnect the smoke alarm.

  I remembered the Fujiya Hotel shooting vividly. All I had to do was look down at my feet. By again playing the idiot gaijin, a role that required no method acting, I had managed to get behind the yellow police tape and right up to the corpse. The blood on the ground practically carpeted the street, it was that rich and copious. I imagined I could see steam rising faintly from the puddle. The air smelled like aluminum foil
.

  Even with all the blood on his clothes, it was plain that the victim, Kim, dressed well. Armani, maybe, a black pin-striped number. I’m not fashion-conscious, but I know a good suit when I see one. With a nice herringbone-patterned shirt, dark gray. Tailored to fit, clearly.

  Kim was old school. I counted ten whole fingers, although the left pinkie looked suspicious. It might not have been original—it could have have been a toe taken to replace it in restorative surgery. If I took off his shoes, I would know the truth, but that would surely be pushing my luck.

  I snapped a couple of pictures before a cop in panic mode grabbed my arm, lifting me off my feet, and pulled me back behind the crime scene tape. As he was dragging me, I noticed my feet leaving a trail of blood, sort of slimy, like snail goo. I suppose one could have accused me of disrupting the integrity of the crime scene, but when someone is gunned down in front of a hotel near one of the largest train stations in the world, well, most of the damage has already been done. The shooter was in custody. I hadn’t felt terribly guilty.

  Shibata was still waiting while I replayed the scene in my head.

  “Well, were you there?”

  “Yes, I was at the scene. I saw the body.”

  Eiju Kim, real age unknown but probably late forties, a Japanese citizen of Korean ancestry who was head of the Osaka yakuza group Kyoyou-kai, which was part of the Yamaguchi-gumi family, got into a heated conversation with Naoto Kametani, the head of the Rokkorengo gang, also part of the Yamaguchi-gumi, in front of the Fujiya Hotel. The two of them were close friends.

  Kim, who was accompanied by Kenichi Takanuki, thirty, his underling and driver, broke off the conversation and briskly got into the backseat of a large black car parked next to them. Takanuki slid behind the wheel. Kametani was left standing next to the car.

  As the car was pulling into traffic, Kametani whipped out a handgun and sprayed the backseat with bullets, killing Kim instantly. The driver jumped out of the car and was shot, too. Kametani fled on foot but only got about two hundred feet before the cops, who were coincidentally hanging around, tackled him and arrested him for attempted murder. On the surface, a pretty straightforward homicide. Yet it was highly unusual: interfactional violence like that is rare.

  “You want to know the real story?”

  “Yeah, I’d love to.”

  “Okay.” And then he didn’t say anything. Shibata seemed lost in thought, and I reminded him that I would like to know the real story. He nodded.

  Shibata inhaled deeply and happily. He held the cigarette with his left hand between his thumb and index finger, making a kind of circle, with his pinkie standing up rather delicately. And then he talked.

  It was an incredible story. It involved slush funds in the Osaka prosecutor’s office, media suppression, and a colossal cover-up. Still, it didn’t make complete sense, kind of like conspiracy theories, which abound in Japan. I’d go into detail, but I want to live out the rest of my natural life. Still, I wanted to know more.

  “Where’s the proof?” I asked the wise man.

  “I am the fucking proof. It’s true because I say it’s true,” Shibata replied firmly, then stubbed his cigarette out on the windowsill. For a second, even with his pale and sunken face, I got a sense of the sheer force that had made him a wet-your-pants kind of enforcer in his day. His look was that intense.

  The room got very quiet. You could hear the cigarette sizzling out.

  “It still doesn’t make total sense to me.”

  “You’re the reporter, you figure it out.”

  “Ex-reporter.”

  “Yeah, yeah. It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s all history. Nobody gives a shit. But you didn’t ever think it was funny? You never wondered why Kametani never said a word about why he did it? You never wondered why he got twenty instead of life?”

  “Well, I assumed that if he’d killed a civilian, he would have gotten life.”

  “You sons of bitches. When yakuza kill yakuza, nobody gives a crap.”

  That gave me pause. “You know,” I said, “I said the same thing once to a cop in Saitama, and we made a bet. I ended up taking his entire family out for Korean barbecue, and they ordered wagyu!2* You want the story?”

  He nodded.

  It was a couple years back, when Sekiguchi was still in good health.

  On November 16, 1994, hostilities had boiled over between the Kokusui-kai and the Yamaguchi-gumi. The Kokusui-kai struck first, shooting and severely wounding two Yamaguchi-gumi soldiers who had made a visit to their office in Tokyo. The next day, the Yamaguchi-gumi retaliated, the gang war spreading across two prefectures—Saga and Yamanashi—then to Shinjuku in Tokyo, and then finally to Saitama Prefecture.

  I was expecting something to happen that day, and I wasn’t disappointed. I was passing time at the police press club, learning the fine points of mahjong from a senior reporter of the Tokyo Shinbun, when a public affairs officer ran in shouting about a shooting. A shooting of people, two people, not just office doors. I hitched a ride to the crime scene.

  It was a seven-floor condominium building in the heart of Konosu. The Kokusui-kai office had a sign on its door that read TOOUTANTEISHA (Eastern and European Private Investigations). It was one of three private detective agencies in the area that were fronts for Kokusui-kai offices; they even advertised in the yellow pages.

  Yakuza-looking thugs entered and left the office, shouting into their cell phones and generally ignoring the police, who were swarming into the area and roping off the entire first floor with yellow tape. You could see blood on the sidewalk but no bodies.

  I snapped as many pictures as I could. One yakuza, wearing oversized sunglasses and a white velour sweatsuit, glared at me while talking into his cell. He waved his hand violently as if to say, “Don’t fuckin’ take my picture.” I took it anyway.

  That did not please him. He stomped toward me, shouting obscenities, which I couldn’t understand because he was rolling his r’s and making that typical yakuza growl, which he must’ve learned from bad yakuza movies. Just as the Italian mafiosi look to Hollywood movies to model themselves, the Japanese yakuza do the same. In fact, the yakuza usually own the studios making yakuza movies, which means that sometimes in a yakuza flick, the extras playing yakuza are actually yakuza. Conversely, the scary-looking guys in front of me were definitely not actors.

  I pointed to my Yomiuri armband. “I’m a reporter. I have a right to take pictures.”

  The subtlety of my argument did not deter him, and he grabbed for my camera.

  I pulled it back beyond his reach, shaking my finger at him and going tsk-tsk. I dared to be so cocky because my favorite cop, Sekiguchi, had shown up on the scene. He was in black jeans, a navy blue sweater, and a long leather jacket. His hair was slicked back, and he had on leather gloves. He looked more like a yakuza than the yakuza.

  As Mr. White Sweatsuit got close to punching out my lights, Sekiguchi yelled the guy’s name and told him, “Haul your fat ass outta here, and stop using the goddamn phone.” The man retreated, still glaring at me.

  Sekiguchi walked over to survey the scene for bullets and whispered, “Jake, don’t push your luck. Don’t antagonize those guys. They have a poor sense of humor.” Then: “Drop by tonight.”

  I nodded. we had a rule: we never spoke to each other at a crime scene. I hung around trying for a few standard quotes. A bar hostess on the second floor told me, “I knew that those people down there weren’t really detectives, but I didn’t know they were yakuza. They were very quiet until today.”

  “Now that you know, are you frightened?” I asked, gently leading the witness.

  “Well,” she said, dragging on a Mild Seven cigarette, “not really. It’s like lightning. It never strikes twice, right?”

  A totally unusable comment.

  I was able to get a retired schoolteacher from the third floor to say something more appropriate: “I was always worried that something like this would happen, and now it has. I’m so f
rightened I want to move out. Why can’t the police do something about these kinds of dangerous people?”

  That would have been usable, but it had problematic content and had to be edited. Because if the police know where the yakuza offices are and the local citizens know where the yakuza offices are, why doesn’t the government shut them down? Well, yeah, why doesn’t it? But that’s a whole different can of worms. I think the final version of this comment was “I sure hope the police catch those people.”

  A housewife who lived next door added, “If one of those bullets had missed … I hate to think about it. It’s a good thing no one was hurt.” Now, that was more to the point, but it was factually incorrect, as two yakuza were now in critical condition. In the eyes of the public, two yakuza and only yakuza getting shot meant that “no one was hurt.”

  I filed my article, took a nap, and then headed out to see Sekiguchi.

  Sekiguchi arrived back about ten. I was already in the house, feet under the kotatsu next to Yuki-chan, the elder daughter, who’d sweetly roped me into helping her with her English homework. Chi-chan, the younger daughter, was watching a horrible musical on television and eating candied squid on a stick. Mrs. Sekiguchi was reading the newspaper. The house was so small that I could stretch out my arms and almost touch the walls. But it was cozy.

  Sekiguchi walked in, threw his jacket on the tatami, and immediately sat down with us on the floor, sticking his feet under the kotatsu.

  “Otsukare-sama [a standard line, on the order of “Tough job, you must be worn out”]. What’s going on with the investigation?” I said, wasting no time.

  “Well, the Kokusui guys aren’t cooperating. They’re not talking. But whoever the gunman is had a lot of balls.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at all the other shootings. A couple of gunshots into the door. What does that do? But this guy, the guy doing this job, he’s a goddamn kamikaze. He rings the doorbell, walks into the office, and says, ‘Who’s in charge?’ He doesn’t wait for an answer. He goes up to one of the Kokusui-kai mugs sitting there, raises his gun, and—bang bang—right into the chest and belly. Then he turns around and does the same thing to another mug. Then he walks out the door. He walks out the door. Then this eighteen-year-old punk, a yakuza wannabe, grabs the guy on the street, tries to go for the gun, which is in the gunman’s right hand. They struggle. No contest—the gunman knifes the kid in the stomach with his other hand. And then he’s outta there. The building manager hears all the noise, comes down the steps, puts the three wounded guys in his car, and drives them to the hospital. Cops are called. The CSI people are still there.”