Tokyo Noir: in and out of Japan's underworld
About this ebook
It’s 2008, and it’s been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organised crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about — for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy — himself.
And Adelstein has a different gig these days: due diligence work, or using his investigative skills to dig up information on entities whose bosses would prefer that some things stay hidden.
The underworld isn’t what it used to be. Underneath layers of paperwork, corporations are thinly veiled fronts for the yakuza. Pachinko parlours are a hidden battleground between disenfranchised Korean Japanese and North Korean extortion plots. TEPCO, the electric power corporation keeping the lights on for all of Tokyo, scrambles to hide its willful oversights that ultimately led to the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. And the Japanese government shows levels of corruption that make the yakuza look like philanthropists in comparison. All this is punctuated by personal tragedies no one could have seen coming.
In this ambitious and riveting work, Jake Adelstein explores what it’s like when you’re in too deep to distinguish the story you chase from the life you live.
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About the author
Jake Adelstein was a reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper, from 1993 to 2005, and from 2006 to 2007 was the chief investigator for a US State Department–sponsored study of human trafficking in Japan. He is also the public relations director for the Washington, D.C.–based Polaris Project Japan, which combats human trafficking and the exploitation of women and children in the sex trade. Adelstein has written for The Daily Beast/Newsweek, The Independent, andThe Guardian, and is a regular contributor to The Atlantic Wire. He has appeared on CNN, NPR, the BBC, and other media outlets as a commentator on yakuza-related news and Japan’s nuclear industry giant, TEPCO.
