Tokyo Escorts: American becomes expert on Japanese organized crime
How does a Jewish kid from Columbia, Mo., wind up as one of the West’s leading experts on Japanese crime syndicates and author of the memoir “Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan”?
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Perhaps Adelstein’s status as a gaijin, or outsider, gave him the courage to pursue first his reporting and later his book in the face of both serious threats and bribery attempts from the subjects of his reportage. He noted that even though he’s been interviewed on “60 Minutes” and elsewhere since the book’s publication in November, “Tokyo Vice” has neither been published in Japan nor given any exposure on Japanese TV.
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In 2005, Adelstein was named chief investigator for a U.S. State Department-sponsored study of human trafficking (i.e., forced prostitution) in Japan. Now, he said, he’s working on another book, “The Last Yakuza,” a biography of a kingpin that “will tell the last 30 years of Yakuza history.”
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