Tokyo Vice Book Review

Tokyo Vice is a courageous book written by a very brave man*. It’s the autobiography of Jake Adelstein, an American who worked on the police beat at the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, and tells the story of how he fearlessly exposed Japan’s human trafficking problem and went head to head with one of Japan’s most notorious yakuza, exposing the details of a liver transplant that he got in the United States. As a result of articles that he wrote in the Yomiuri Shimbun and this book, he’s now living under police protection.
It’s a real page turner, filled with drama, pathos, and even a bit of action. It starts out with a meeting between Adelstein, a cop friend of his, and two members of the infamous Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest crime syndicate. The two yakuza threaten Adelstein’s life, telling him that if he publishes an article detailing their boss’s liver transplant in America, they’ll kill him. The rest of the book is what led up to this event, starting with the odd story of how he got hired at the Yomiuri Shimbun, his days as a reporter on the crime beat in Omiya and later Kabuki-cho, and later his involvement in the Lucy Blackman case and investigations of human trafficking in Japan.
Maybe you’ve read stories in the English dailies about a yakuza, Tadamasa Goto, who became a Buddhist priest a few years ago. Goto is the man whose liver transplant Adelstein exposed, and I was just riveted as I read about Adelstein’s confrontations with one of the country’s most vicious criminals. It seems extremely likely that the reason Goto has become a priest is due to Adelstein’s reporting.
The book is also an excellent source for people who are interested in Japan’s media and police. Some of the reporters and cops are nearly as immoral as the yakuza. You’ll probably be shocked to read about the details of their incompetence and insensitivity in their handling of human trafficking cases, how both groups resisted efforts to expose the human trafficking problem in Japan, and the horror stories about the way newspapers treat their reporters.
My only complaint about the book is a minor one. I find it hard to believe that a reporter who worked on the crime beat would not know words like “gokudo” (yakuza), “honban” (the euphemism for sex used in soaplands), or what a host club is. There are quite a few places where there are conversations in which police officers or other journalists explain things that Adelstein, as a journalist, would clearly have known. These seem to be there for the reader’s benefit rather than because they actually happened. In the end of the book he explains that he changed names and details to protect people, but the possibility that he has made up conversations leaves me with a vague suspicion that there are other things that have been invented, rather than just having their details changed. (Jake Adestein has written a response to this criticism in the comments. I’m now a bit conflicted about whether my criticism is valid, so I hope you’ll read his response).
Anyway, this is a great book, one of the best I’ve ever read about Japan. It’s not written by one of those people who jet-setted into Japan for a month or a year and thought that made them a Japan expert. There’s fascinating stuff on nearly every page and this book will give you a whole new perspective on the way the yakuza, media and police operate in Japan.

Adelstein’s excellent Japan Subculture Research Institute blog is also a great read.

*Possibly not as brave (and seemly delusional), though, as Benjamin Fulford, Japan’s foremost conspiracy nut, who protested outside the Yamaguchi gumi’s headquarters trying to convince them to shut down. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZROavuaxr4

Edo-Period Recycling

Edo-Tokyo Museum Diorama

I stumbled across this interesting article a while ago about how there was pretty much no garbage in Japan’s Edo Period because almost everything got recycled.
I translated it into English, but it’s a bit long, so if you’re like me and have the attention span of a three-year old from using the Internet too much, here’s the Reader’s Digest version:

Everyday life in Japan’s Edo Period would today be known as a recycling society. They didn’t just recycle to reduce garbage; they had a mentality of valuing things and completely using everything up. For those of us who live in Japan’s disposable society of today, there might be a lot of things we can learn from the Edo Period recycling mentality.
One type of recycler was the collector. Things were so valuable that people could make a living by collecting scraps and garbage. Collectors employed by public bathhouses went around looking for anything they could burn, even garbage, to save on expenses ,and paper buyers bought up used books and scrolls. Paper was so valuable that poor people were actually able to scrape out a living by going around looking for scraps of paper on the street. Scrap metal collectors would give candy to kids in exchange for old nails and other bits of scrap metal and there were even dealers who bought ashes from fires.
Even human excrement was valuable. One of the most bizarre recyclers in the Edo Period was the “night soil” collector, who bought human and animal excrement and sold it for fertilizer. (This isn’t in the article, but I’ve read it was so valuable there were even cases where criminals would steal it.)
There were thousands of used clothing shops, and Japanese clothing was ideal for recycling because kimono were cut straight in equal proportions with no waste, so even if it was old clothes or old rags, they were all standardized goods. From this point of view, they were completely different from Western clothes–if Western clothes are taken apart, they are all different sizes and have no value and cannot be recycled the way kimono were.
Repairers, the second main category of recyclers, would usually travel from house to house. You could get your knives sharpened, have someone resurface your mirror, ask them to put new teeth put in your clogs, or have your broken bowls glued, all without leaving the comfort of your own home.
The full article is after the jump.

Anti-yakuza Blimp

It says boryoku tsuihou (ban organized crime).

This photo was kindly submitted by “Henry.”

Expensive Things in Japan

I just finished reading a little book called Anata no Shiranai Nedan Jiten (Dictionary of Costs You Didn’t Know). It’s one of those little 500 yen books people buy to kill time while they’re commuting, and as the title suggests, is about how much things cost. Here are some of the surprising prices (in yen) from the book:

To cover every car on the Yamanote Line with ads from the same company: 14,300,000
To run an ad on the giant TV screen at Studio Alta for a week: 600,000
To open your own dental office: 40,000,000
To start up your own mobile ramen-selling truck: 1,500,000
Yearly unclaimed lottery winnings: 24,900,000,000
Amount paid to performers on NHK’s famous Kohaku Uta Gassen New Year’s program: 60,000
To get a big yakuza-style tattoo on your back: 75-150,000
To rent Tokyo Dome for half a day in the afternoon: 350,000
Estimated damage from an eruption of Mt. Fuji: 2,000,000,000,000
To have a chapel wedding at a top-class hotel: 3,700,000
Average amount paid in tax by a salariman over the course of his life: 46,000,000
To get an annual physical examination at a “ningen dokku” (click the link for a funny Danny Choo story about the poo examination) if the company wasn’t paying for it: 30-50,000
To buy a ten-character kaimyo (a Buddhist name given to people to use in the next world): 850,000
To attend a top-ranked private medical school for six years: 60,000,000