Jewish vice

As a Jewish American covering crime for a major Japanese newspaper, perhaps it’s inevitable that Jake Adelstein would be accused of being a pawn in an international Jewish conspiracy. That’s the charge leveled at him after he revealed that several Japanese gangsters had traveled to the United States for liver transplants.

The author of the memoir "Tokyo Vice," Adelstein has been on book tour in the U.S. recently, which he talked about in a Q&A with the Japan Times.

Author Joshua "Jake" Adelstein supposes that if he’d stayed home in rural Missouri and had never come to Japan, he’d probably have become a small-town lawyer or a very happy detective on the local police force.

"I was always attracted to the law, probably because my father was the county coroner for many years — and still is now," he says.

But Adelstein has spent roughly half his life in Japan, first as a student at Sophia University in Tokyo and then as a reporter for the vernacular Yomiuri Shimbun, where he landed a job that put him in touch with what he describes as "the dark side of the rising sun."

Seated on tatami in his sparsely furnished home-cum-office, crammed with books, magazines and manga extolling the exploits of the yakuza (Japan’s homegrown organized-crime groups), Adelstein, who will turn 41 in March, projects an aura of nervous energy as he taps a clove-scented cigarette against the rim of an ashtray.

"I always thought about writing a memoir about my years as a reporter in Japan, because I knew I was getting a look at the underbelly of Japanese society that even many Japanese don’t get," he relates. "I kept all my notes, photos, articles, tape recordings, memos, rough drafts, related documents and diary entries from the time I started working."

Although he’d completed his first draft by September 2008, Adelstein’s Japan-based publisher dropped the project out of concerns over violent retaliation by certain individuals mentioned in the book. So he took his manuscript to New York.

"The editor who first looked at my manuscript, Timothy O’Connell . . . was the perfect person to read it," he says."I was very lucky that he liked it, and he worked with me for months to get it into shape and make it all come together."

Realizing it had a potential blockbuster on its hands, the U.S. publisher Pantheon bumped up the print run and, in mid-October, "Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan," was released to wide critical acclaim.