If I knew the Japanese word one uses for "two" when counting small, digital things, I'd use it here, or, Two notes on Tokyo Vice

Before I leave Jake Adelstein's Tokyo Vice behind, I have two more brief notes to share, little bits of insight into cops and yakuza:

1

The cops on The Wire seem to spend all their time drinking shitty beer

In the course of describing a meeting with an odd, shaven-headed cop known as Alien Cop, in a bar that Adelstein describes as "so dark that when I lit my cigarette it seemed as if I were setting off fireworks," he explains how to drink with a Japanese cop:

Rule number one of drinking with cops: you are permitted to order only (1) sake, (2) shochu, (3) beer, or (4) whiskey. Tiki-tiki drinks are not allowed. A dry martini may be acceptable since 007 drank them. Order a Blue Hawaii and you might as well pack your bags and start covering family affairs.

Fortunately, one of the few things I can say in Japanese is "I would like two beers, please," and I didn't do too badly getting martinis when were were in Tokyo, either . . . so maybe I should go meet some Japanese cops?

2
Even the yakuza are victims . . . of nostalgia!

Late in the book, Adelstein, looking for information, visits a yakuza in the hospital. The yakuza, who is dying of cancer, says,

Maybe I had pride in being a member of the organization once upon a time. But you get loser to the end you question things. You begin to wonder if everything you took for granted is so good. The organization I entered isn't the same as it was. When things become too big, they get out of hand, things go bad. A lot of the yakuza have no rules anymore, they don't respect ordinary citizens, they don't respect anything. They're involved in all kinds of really bad shit.

All of which may be true, but at the same time it makes me wonder: is there any group of people other than professional historians that doesn't unthinkingly believe that the good old days really existed?

"What are you?" or, Beware the tengu!

{Photos by rocketlass.}

One thing that surprised me and rocketlass and our traveling companions when we visited Japan last winter was how few obviously non-Japanese people we saw. Even in Tokyo, an absolutely enormous, internationally important and connected city, we would frequently be the only non-Asian faces in sight, even in huge crowds. Obviously, many of the Asians in the crowd could easily have been Korean, Chinese, etc., but even allowing for that, and for a more homogeneous base population, the contrast with major cities like London and New York was striking.

In the course of telling about his years as a crime reporter in Japan, Tokyo Vice, Jake Adelstein writes quite a bit about how people reacted the fact that he obviously was not Japanese, despite his job and his command of the language. The most amusing response comes when he meets the children of a cop who later becomes an important source, and, eventually, a friend. The two young girls start by asking, "What are you?", and it gets better from there:

"You're obviously not human."

"He might be human," her sister said.

I didn't know how to respond to this line of conversation. "Why do you think I'm not human?"

The little sister answered immediately. "You have pointed ears and a nose so big that you can't be human."

"Well, then," I asked, "what am I

Little Sister came closer and stared up at my face. "You have a big nose and pointed ears and big round eyes too. You are pretending to speak Japanese like a human being. You must be a tengu."

A tengu is a demon--but, the older sister points out, tengu have red skin rather than pink, which ultimately leads the girls to decide that their visitor is merely half-tengu, half-human.

All of which, I suppose, is better than being mistaken for a mujina.



{I don't think the statue above is actually of a tengu, though he does seem to be stomping on some sort of demon, whom he has defeated somehow by writing.}

"Do you randomly visit cops in the morning?"

{Domo-kun is not a yakuza. He's far too kawaii for that. Photo by rocketlass.}

On the recommendation of the ever-reliable Sarah Weinman, last weekend I read Jake Adelstein's new book, Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan (2009). It's got pretty much everything you want in true crime: danger; drama; appalling behavior; and a narrator who is easily obsessed, heedless of his own health and well-being, and prone to dangerous ethical compromises.

Adelstein, an American who went to college in Japan and stayed there as a reporter on the Yomiuri Shinbun, a prominent Japanese-language newspaper, offers a fascinating account of the seamier side of Japanese life. One great strength of the book is Adelstein's odd position: while he dives fully into the punishing three-deadlines-a-day, drinks-after-work, never-take-a-vacation life of a Japanese reporter, and thus comes as close as seems possible to being a part of and understanding this segment of Japanese life, at the same time he can't help but remain an outsider--which enables him to understand just which parts of Japan's treatment of issues of sex, gender, power, and crime will perplex, shock, or horrify American readers.

One of the least sordid, yet nonetheless most surprising aspects of the book for me was its depiction of the relationship between crime reporters and the police they cover. In order to cultivate police sources, reporters are expected to routinely visit cops at home--and bring gifts! Adelstein quotes at length from a memo one of his supervisors once sent to the paper's police reporters:

It's really sad that I have to write the ABCs of being a police reporter down for your losers. . . . If you just aimlessly visit cops at their homes during the evening, you won't get them to say anything. Anybody can get the addresses of detectives from their senpai [senior reporters] and go to the house, wait a couple of hours, and then, when they come home, butter them up and occasionally prime the pump with tickets to a Giants baseball game. . . . What are you doing to distinguish yourself from other reporters? Take a moment to reflect on your efforts.

Do you take care of the cop you want to crack? . . . Do you ask the cops to get food or something to drink with you? Do you make efforts to get the police to ride in the hired limousine with you? On a rainy day or when the snow falls, this is the perfect opportunity to send them from their house to the train station or vice versa.

Do you randomly visit cops in the morning? . . . If one of your cop buddies is sick, do you take the time to visit him in the afternoon? If you just go visit him in the evening, that's about the level of a first-year reporter for Yamagata [Hicksville] Television. If the wife or kids of the cops have a cold, buy some cold medicine, some orane juice, and take it to the house. . . .

Hanging out with your family and their family at the same time is the ultimate way to cultivate a source. Families that play together, stay together.

Have you ever taken your wife and kids with you on a Saturday and just stopped by "because you were in the neighborhood?"

What I find most stunning about this approach isn't the ethical questions it raises for both sides, or the demands it places on the reporter's time: it's the idea that the police would welcome it. It just seems insane that a cop, home from a long day at work, would want a relative stranger showing up at the house for a chat, no matter what gifts he might be bearing.

Clearly, between my preference for regular hours and for privacy in my home, I ought not to think of going into either reporting or policing in Japan. Which, given that my Japanese extends only so far as to apologize for my lack of Japanese, is probably for the best anyway.