Best Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter On The Police Beat In Japan Quotes by Jake Adelstein

"Either erase the story, or we’ll erase you. And maybe your family. But we’ll do them first, so you learn your lesson before you die."

"It’s never a smart idea to get on the bad side of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest organized crime group."

"The Japanese mafia. You can call them yakuza, but a lot of them like to call themselves gokudo, meaning literally 'the ultimate path.'"

"I didn’t have enough material to write the story. Hell, it wasn’t a story. Yet."

"Maybe there was a bright side to this whole problem. Maybe it was time to go home."

"Heroes are just people who have run out of choices."

"You’re not a coward if you do it. You have no cards to play."

"Sometimes you have to pull back to fight back. Don’t give up."

"The life of news is short. Miss the chance, and the story is dead or the scoop is gone."

"Don’t ever burn your sources. If you can’t protect your sources, no one will trust you."

"Never believe anyone. People lie, police lie, even your fellow reporters lie."

"It’s not about learning. It’s about unlearning."

"You learn to let go of what you want to be the truth and find out what is the truth, and you report it as it is, not as you wish it was."

"Let go of your preconceptions, dignity, and pride and get the job done. If you can do that, you can learn to be a great reporter."

"You have to be careful, or you will lose everything that is important to you and you will lose yourself."

"Simplify, cut down on things you don’t need, but be sure to leave something behind worth having."

"Saitama. A place considered so uncool by urban Japanese that it had spawned its own adjective, dasai, meaning ‘not hip, boring, unfashionable.’"

"The first year of life as a reporter in Japan is an elaborate hazing, punctuated by a little on-the-job training."

"Journalism is always about the results, not the effort."

"You’re a strange one. I thought you were clueless, but you actually seem to know what you’re doing. Then again, you can’t even match your own socks."

"My job is to gather the news, write it, and publish it as soon as possible for the good of the community."

"There’s a right way—a perfect way—to do everything."

"Apparently, not knowing history means never having to say you’re sorry."

"When land is scarce and housing is expensive, becoming a landlord is the high road to fortune and luxury."

"Improving one’s sex life, increasing one’s finances, how else are manuals integral to everyday Japanese life?"

"Police in Japan are organized in pyramidal fashion."

"I once heard the job of a police reporter characterized as being a 'male geisha.'"

"A snack bar is kind of a low-rent hostess club."

"The Japanese police are extremely adept at manipulating the press."

"The yakuza are considered a 'necessary evil' and a 'second police force' that kept the streets of Japan safe."

"The modern-day yakuza are innovative entrepreneurs; rather than a bunch of tattooed nine-fingered thugs in white suits wielding samurai swords, a more appropriate metaphor would be 'Goldman Sachs with guns.'"

"There certainly exists case after case that suggest that the authorities are unable to contain the yakuza and/or are afraid to even try."

"As the yakuza continue to evolve and get into more sophisticated crimes, the police have had a tough time keeping up."

"They have more money and more power than they ever had before, and the consolidation of the Yamaguchi-gumi has made it a huge force to be reckoned with."

"In many ways, the Yamaguchi-gumi is the LDP of organized crime, operating on the principle that 'Power is in numbers.'"

"No one is off limits anymore, not even journalists—or their children."

"It’s not how much you do that counts, it’s what you get done."

"Information is neither good nor evil; information is what information is."

"Knowing something and proving it are two different things."

"A man makes a promise, a man's gotta keep that promise."

"Trust me. If you’re going to take something with you, ice cream is good."

"You have to wait for information to go all the way up to the top before double-checking it. Otherwise, you burn your sources."

"I’ll give you an example. A couple months ago, Kennel and this customer were arguing over the price of a dog. The negotiations were going nowhere. So picture this: They are standing there in Kennel’s store. At their feet, tongue hanging from its mouth, is a pure-bred Alaskan malamute. The customer won’t budge. He tells Sekine he’s not going to pay the one and a half million yen the breeder wants; he asks once more to have a half million yen taken off the price. ‘You want a five hundred thousand yen discount?’ Sekine mutters, smiling as he strokes the dog in front of him. Then he picks up a pair of grooming scissors from his desk, cuts off the dog’s left ear in one snip, and tosses it at the feet of the customer. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘you win. I’ve taken it off.’ The guy paid the price and took the dog and left. Because I’m sure he was thinking, The next ear lying at my feet might not be the dog’s."

"He looked me in the eyes and pointed down at my feet. 'Your socks don’t match; do you know that?' he asked."

"This was the first time I realized that to protect your sources, you sometimes have to keep things from the people you work with. Later, I’d learn that sometimes you have to keep things from the people you love as well."

"He does. He does. He admitted to taking a box cutter to Sekine’s face but not to anything else. So after we were done writing out his confession and he signed it, I took him aside and said to him, ‘I’m done questioning you and I’m not rewriting your statement, but tell me straight: Did you do this because Takada ordered you to?’ And Shimizu said no. Completely denied it."

"You have to have faith in people sometimes, Jake. Sometimes you have to trust people who are untrustworthy. By trusting them, you make them trustworthy."

"‘Would you like to ask me anything?’ she said. ‘Your friend seems to be asking all the questions.’"

"‘Definitely natural causes,’ she said, then laughed hysterically. ‘We were fucking when he kicked the bucket.’ She wasn’t kidding. They’d been going at it heatedly, and in the middle of the act he’d had a heart attack."

"It’s the time you take when it seems unimportant that is the most important time of all."

"You have to plant the seeds when the ground is still half frozen to reap the spring harvest. Plant the seeds in spring."

""‘Isn’t that what all the sex clubs are doing?’ ‘Not quite.’ ‘Well, if the customers aren’t inserting the penis in the vagina, what are they doing with their penises, anyway?’"

"Kabukicho in the evening in 1999 looked like the Disneyland Festival of Lights Parade, except that the neon signs were advertising blow jobs instead of family vacations."

"You have to understand that the Prostitution Prevention Law here is really about protecting the prostitutes. You could call it the Prostitute Protection Law."

"Well, in 1958, prostitution as it used to be was banished. It used to be a licensed industry. The idea was to make sure that women couldn’t be forced into sexual servitude."

"Sure it would, but who the fuck do you think wrote the laws? Guys. Hell, in the 1950s probably half the Diet was frequenting Soapland."

"Our nurses will nurse your lower body back to health. These trained nurses will examine and explore every nook and cranny of your body and take your temperature, oral or anal, whichever you prefer."

"It forces people to search for new avenues of erotic pleasure. There’re a lot of ways to get your rocks off besides the standard screw."

"Don’t worry, Jake. I won’t even charge you today. It’s on the house."

"The promise of encounters, danger, adventure, and erotic fulfillment is readily available if you just know which door on which floor in which building to knock on."

"Underneath all that, however, is the stink of isolation."

"Intimacy is a commodity in Japan, and it rarely comes for free. It’s the same way in the United States. We just pay different people."

"Sources are things you can’t help but hoard for yourself."

"The use of narcotics to incapacitate mostly foreign women and rape them repeatedly is an extremely malevolent crime."

"The man believed to be responsible is Joji Obara, age 48, a company executive."

"Effort doesn’t count for shit. I appreciate it, but it’s the results that count."

"Enough alcohol and pheromones could make you forget that ultimately what you were researching was something tragic and sinister."

"In my heart of hearts, I’d like to think that Lucie was still alive, but I have to face the reality that this might not be the case."

"It’s not that the police have a bad attitude toward crimes against foreign women—it’s all women."

"Even if the victim is a prostitute, she’s still a victim. Prostitutes are entitled to say no."

"In a ghastly way, I’m kind of relieved. Not knowing whether she is alive or has been killed … is the hardest thing of all."

"Every now and then, you meet someone who nurtures you as a person."

"To survive in the shakaibu women have to put up with the same lousy hours as the men."

"The day was flat and quiet, and nothing of any particular importance was on the horizon."

"I assure you that I'm not a machine. I'm a human being; a non-Japanese human being."

"The only people working today are either foreigners or women. Or foreign women."

"She was not particularly pretty, but she was one of those women who mysteriously become more attractive the longer you know them."

"My motives were wrong, but my results were good."

"You are never allowed to do the same job for very long."

"I don’t know what it is about the department that makes people want to stay so much."

"It’s hard to keep in touch with people at the Yomiuri."

"I wished that a weekly magazine had called me."

"I don’t want to know. I think I have a copy backed up on a hard disk somewhere. I’m not going to look for it."

"I had set up a little information network of strippers, prostitutes, hostesses, touts, and street vendors."

"Sometimes, as a reporter, you forget the victim."

"It’s my job. I find information that nobody else has, and I serve the public’s right to know."

"Besides, you're a Jew. I'm sure you're used to getting blamed for everything."

"The reward for a scoop doesn’t match the penalty for getting a story wrong."

"People pay their respects to the dead in different ways."

"If you spend enough years as a crime reporter, you get callous."

"We all build psychic armor around ourselves to cope with emotions and maintain control and meet our multiple deadlines."

"What I have a problem with is women who don't want to be prostitutes being forced into it."

"Never confess. Confession is for the confessor. It makes you feel good; it ruins the lives of everyone else."

"Never underestimate the power of national humiliation to make the Japanese government get off its lazy ass."

"Self-righteous anger can really motivate you."

"The skinny, toothless six-year-old boy of a Thai sex worker... She wasn’t allowed to get dental care for her son, because the traffickers didn’t want the authorities to realize that they were both in Japan illegally."

"The Korean woman who had been brutally beaten by a customer, cigarettes stubbed out on her breasts... She felt that God had cursed her. I found it hard to disagree with that."

"It was like fighting yurei (ghosts and phantoms)."

"When lying is part of your job, you forget how love is supposed to work."

"Sometimes I’m surprised at how often I find myself right back where I started."