Read Online Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein - Free Book Online Page A

waiting for your source to come home, hoping that he’d cough up a morsel of information in your brief chat with him. On a big case, your source might not come home for days. In 1993, contact was more difficult since most people didn’t have cell phones, meaning you had to rely on luck to catch them at work, at home, or somewhere in between.
    You had to get third-party verification that you had all the facts,
and
you had to convince your editor that it was safe to run a story with no official press release to hide behind. Sometimes you needed to visit the home of the suspect to confirm that he or she had been arrested, since in Japan arrest records are not publicly available. Often, when you were ready to write the story and gave notice to the chief of detectives, the police would immediately rush out a press release, reducing your scoop—and all your efforts—to nothing.
    But I did finally score. How? The old-fashioned way: blackmail.
    Every evening between the usual tedious typing of sports records, birth announcements, and obituaries and taking dinner orders for thesenior staff, I would get on my bicycle, pedal over to the Omiya police station, and hang out with the cops. Most of the time, if they weren’t busy, I would sit down and shoot the shit with them for a while. We’d drink green tea and discuss politics, past cases, or what was on the television. I’d bring doughnuts, which I don’t think were part of the typical diet of the cops in Japan, but they didn’t seem to mind. In fact, they might have liked them for that reason.
    One of my sources who was assigned to the railroads told me about a professional pickpocket they’d nabbed a few weeks back who had confessed to a supposedly huge number of cases. What caught my attention was that the pickpocket would “go to work” every day in suit and tie; he was a true professional. Variations of this story repeatedly show up in the Japanese news, but it sounded interesting to me then because I didn’t know any better.
    After triangulating the lead, I was ready to write the article. I had all the facts I needed—except for the number of crimes he’d confessed to, which the story was riding on. The railroad officials didn’t know. My only choice was to talk to someone high up in the Omiya police, since they were handling the case now.
    The chief of detectives was named Fuji. He was known as a great interrogator and a great cop but an unpleasant person to deal with if you were a reporter. He was tall and thin, with stereotypical thick glasses, and he always wore suits that were wrinkled and gray. His face had the proverbial five o’clock shadow by ten in the morning.
    I don’t think he liked or disliked me. He just considered me a nuisance, another pesky little reporter who would eventually be replaced by another rookie, preferably one who was Japanese. I decided to take the leap and ask him to let me write the story, but he would not budge.
    “If you think you know so much, go ahead, write the story. But I bet you don’t know how many pockets he picked before we caught him. Ten? One hundred? Two hundred?”
    “It’s over a hundred, then?”
    “You don’t know, do you?”
    “No.”
    “Well, then, I guess this isn’t your story. Why don’t you just wait a week, and you’ll get all the details.”
    “You mean you’ll give me the scoop?”
    “Nope,” he said. “We’ll announce the case in a week and you can ask all the questions you want.”
    “But then it won’t be a scoop.”
    “That’s not my problem. I just do the paperwork, the detectives do the investigation, and when we have all the facts together, we announce it. You write it up. Case closed.”
    He called over one of the policewomen and pointed at me. “Could you get Adelstein-san a cup of tea? He’s working very hard, and he looks dehydrated.” He left me sitting and sipping at his desk and went downstairs to talk to the vice captain, probably to warn him that I was nosing