The life of Jake Adelstein is so remarkable that you could not have made it up. At just nineteen years old, Adelstein left his childhood home in Missouri and moved to Japan, where he soon became the first gaijin (foreigner) journalist at the most well-known newspaper in the country, the Yomiuri Shimbun.
Jake embraced Japanese culture while also penetrating its dark underbelly by writing groundbreaking stories on the Yakuza—what we might call the Japanese mafia. Adelstein’s intrepid reporting led to his first book, Tokyo Vice. This extraordinary piece of non-fiction eventually gained interest in Hollywood, and HBO MAX signed on to create a series with Ansel Elgort playing Jake and the great Michael Mann directing the first episode of the series. The cast was filled with such exemplary performers as Ken Watanabe (Oscar nominee for The Last Samurai), Rachel Keller (from Fargo), Rinko Kikuchi (Oscar nominee for Babel), and the newly emerging star Show Kasamatsu as a reluctant high-level member of a Yakuza family.
Jake also serves as an executive producer for the series. In this interview, Jake and I discuss his career, the show, and what it feels like to see your life play out on screen.
NOTE: SERIES-RELATED SPOILERS AHEAD
Jake Adelstein: It really bothers serious journalists when I tell them that I didn’t start out as someone who was like, ‘Journalism, this is my calling.’ I didn’t have a poster of All the President’s Men in my room. I was interested in investigating things. I was interested in law enforcement. I was interested in the prosecutor’s investigations. My father’s a medical examiner, and that has always interested me. I didn’t really think about investigative journalism per se. My interest in journalism in college was essentially the school newspaper, which was fun to run. It was just amusing. Then I joined the school newspaper at Sophia University (Tokyo) because I wanted to improve my Japanese. My whole reason for studying for the exams for the newspaper was because of the Japanese hiring system, which is a little strange in that you try to get hired way in advance, sort of in a backdoor deal, so that you can enjoy your last year of college without having to look for jobs.
I had a job lined up at Sony—I think it was called Sony Computer Music Entertainment at the time—but it’s basically what is now Sony Music Entertainment. But I thought at the time, okay, if I don’t motivate myself, then my written and spoken Japanese won’t improve, and it needs to improve. So, all my friends at the school newspaper, the Jōchi Shimbun, were studying for these examinations. They had study books, guide books, and they explained the system to me. And I was like oh, that’s a great goal. I’ll take these exams. This German/Japanese kid, Aki, his mother said, ‘Oh no, you’ll never pass those exams. No newspaper will ever hire a foreigner to do a job that Japanese could do.’ And I was like well, fuck that. Nobody tells me what to do. (Laughs). So it motivated me to study more, that offhand comment. I really didn’t expect to get hired as a journalist. The difference between the TV character and me is that I was much more ambivalent about it. It was only when they offered me the job that I thought, hell yes. This is a lot more interesting than working for Sony. In a sense, I’m getting paid to experience and explore Japanese society. Maybe that’ll make a good book someday, something worth writing about. So, I was very excited about it. Then maybe three or four years into the job was when I thought, yeah, investigative journalism matters. There are things that people don’t want you to write about. And when you write about it, you change the paradigm to make the society a better place. I wouldn’t say that I was naive, but it’s one thing to know that the world is full of people who lie to you. It’s another thing to be a reporter and experience that firsthand.
Awards Daily: In the series, Ansel’s Jake is shown missing an entire page on the exam. Did you really miss a whole page on the newspaper exam?
Jake Adelstein: Yes. I did miss an entire page. It was more like two questions, so it was kind of a half-page, I think. But, I have the original exam. I scored very well on the translation section, which was a big point. 40 points altogether. I missed one point on the translation from Japanese into English, which always shocked me. You’re telling me that I don’t have this in English a hundred percent correct? But yeah, I did miss the page, and then I was like, holy fuck. I’ve screwed the pooch. I almost left, but I stayed. So that part is very accurate.
Awards Daily: What first kindled your interest in Japanese culture? Where did that come from, growing up in Missouri?
Jake Adelstein: Well, that’s a story. In high school, I got into a fight in the classroom, and I won, which was great. (Laughs). But my science teacher—after basically giving the jock who started the fight a choice of either saying he got beat up by a skinny Jew or saying he tripped—said to me, Mr. Adelstein, you have an anger issue. Also, you probably have someone who’s going to be burning with revenge, and you don’t look like you could take care of yourself in a fair fight. And it wasn’t a fair fight. It was a total ambush. I mean, I completely ambushed him, because I couldn’t win. He strongly recommended that I take karate and channel my anger. It was implied that if I didn’t do that, he would rat me out and I’d get expelled. So, I started karate. My teacher, John Foley, had spent time in Okinawa, and he talked about the philosophical side of karate. We would meditate before classes, and I became sort of fascinated by that. From there, I became very interested in Japanese culture. Of course, later in life, I would learn that karate was more than likely created by the Okinawans to kill their Japanese oppressors. The breaking of boards is so that you can break armor. The nukite, which you don’t really see talked about very much because it’s not competitive, is basically so you can scoop in where the hole is made and puncture internal organs. The karate chop is for when the samurai turn their heads, to open the carotid artery, so you can kill with your bare hands. So anyway, the spiritual side of karate is definitely there, but it was interesting to learn much later in life that it was actually quite different from what you thought it was.
Awards Daily: How does the karate shown in Tokyo Vice and practiced by Ansel compare with your experience?
Jake Adelstein: I had been doing Karate for many years until I sort of trashed my knees, so I ended up moving to a different martial art in college, which was Wing Chun. I just happened to run into someone who was teaching Wing Chun who had learned it in Taiwan. It is completely a Chinese martial art, but it was much easier on my knees. In the TV show, the reason that Ansel was doing Aikido is because, when I was on the police beat from 2002 to maybe 2005, Larry Futa, who was the legal attache at the US Embassy wanted to learn Aikido. Basically, the FBI always has someone there in the embassy, and they call them the legal attache because they can’t function as a special agent, so they’re sent there to be a sort of conduit between Japanese and US law enforcement and anything that is an international investigation. So Futa wanted to learn the style of Aikido the police learned, but his Japanese wasn’t very good. I mean, he’s a Nisei, right? Obviously he didn’t really grow up in Japan. So one of the guys in public affairs came over to me and said, Adelstein, you did Aikido in college. I said yeah, for like three months. He said that’s fine, because Larry Futa wants to study Aikido with us, and you’re going to be his interpreter and training partner, and you are going to learn with us. It wasn’t like ‘would you like to?’ Or, ‘would you consider?’ It was like you are—this has been decided. Okay. And so I learned for years and I was never very good. Occasionally Larry wouldn’t show up, and it’d be just me and the cops. I’d wind up with some cop who had been really unfairly treated in a story by the newspaper, and I’d just get thrown around like a punching bag. I took Aikido for years and I only stopped because of my left shoulder. I’m not capable of doing the falls anymore without being sore for days or unable to write. So, I think my Aikido days are done.
Michael Mann is a stickler for method acting, or he appreciates the importance of it. So we had a long discussion about Aikido. I took Michael Mann to meet my Aikido instructor, who’s still on the police force, and still teaches sometimes to civilians. He watched the practice. We found Ansel an instructor in Yoshinkan Aikido, so that when you see him do those moves, he’s actually learning them. And his instructor was brutal with him, sometimes for good reason. He really did learn it, when you see him doing those moves in there. I don’t think there was much of him training in the second season, probably because when you start as a reporter, you don’t have the time, or maybe HBO was afraid that he would horribly injure himself and they’d have to stop filming, I don’t know—but he definitely did the prep in the first season and he was pretty good. He knew the basic stuff.
Awards Daily: As my favorite filmmaker, Mann is on the short list of people I’d love to interview in my lifetime. He directed the first episode of Tokyo Vice, and I’ve been very impressed by how the filmmakers who have followed him have really been able to do their own thing, but not lose that specific Michael Mann energy.
Jake Adelstein: He definitely set the pace. It was really appreciated. Not only did he insist that Ansel follow around reporters and actually do some reporting himself, but we had a very long interview with several police officers still on the beat about what it is like to be a cop dealing with the Yakuza. He was able to get a story out of one of the officers that even his colleagues didn’t know—about why he entered police work, and why he hated the Yakuza so much. It was really a breathtaking interview. I don’t know if Michael Mann remembers it, but at one point he asked me, as the interpreter, to ask if it is true that some cops get bought off by the Yakuza, and I said we’re not going to ask them that. And he’s like no, I want to know. And I’m like no, we’re not asking that. If you insist that I ask—I’m going to thank him for being here. We’re going to leave. It’s insulting to our hosts. So ask somebody else. I know other people we can ask, but we’re not going to ask these guys.
Awards Daily: When you made the decision to move to Japan, how confident were you that you were ready to make such a huge move?
Jake Adelstein: I’m not a believer in destiny or fate all that much, but I was walking across the campus at the University of Missouri when the “study in Japan” flyer literally hit me in the face. I can remember exactly where I was—near this fountain, contemplating if I should go to McDonald’s and get a Filet-O-Fish. I decided I would wait on the Filet-O-Fish, and I walked over to the international studies division and we had this long conversation in which they told me I couldn’t go to Japan to study, because I only had a year of Japanese and I had to have two years. After further conversation, what became apparent–this was during Japan’s bubble era where the yen was just killing the dollar–was that we had 20 students coming from Sophia University, and we had no one yet who was going there from the University of Missouri. I said well, you know, that’s not an exchange, that’s a fiasco. So, I said you should be grateful that I’m going.
Awards Daily: This show teaches you a lot about the Yakuza, but I think the wildest thing I learned is that there are fanzines. That just knocked me flat.
Jake Adelstein: Would you like to see a fanzine? (runs into the next room) So, this is an old one. Most of these were put out of business in 2018-2019, but you can see it’s really thick. On the cover is the number two of the Yamaguchi-gumi. Here you have an article about the lawyers protesting the existence of the Yamaguchi-gumi offices, demanding that they be made illegal. These are photos of them coming out of their monthly meeting. They’ve got the reporters there and here are the guys, with their names on there, coming out of the monthly meeting, talking to each other afterwards. Then there’s this sort of what went down at the monthly meeting, some interviews with people, comic book histories of the Yakuza. Ooh, this is about a Korean Mafia group that was later absorbed into the Yamaguchi-gumi. And then there are articles about sex clubs, and Bosozoku, and the latest arrests. Sometimes there are explanations of really complicated crimes that the Yakuza are involved in and how they were worked. There’s always a section on crimes by foreigners implying that, if you got rid of the Yakuza, Japan will be taken over by foreigners. People send in photos of their tattoos. There’s poetry, there’s stories, there’s biographies, there’s interviews.
Awards Daily: It’s like a crazy collage. You were the first American, and actually if I’m correct, the first non-Japanese reporter at your paper. I’m just curious, how were you initially received? I’m sure you stuck out a bit.
Jake Adelstein: First of all, it was weird enough that a weekly magazine asked the newspaper if they could write an article about my employment. It’s now defunct, but it was called Weekly Treasure, Shukan Hoseki. So I got written up in an article. They followed me around for a day, took a picture of me, a couple months into the job. That was useful for me because I would take a copy of the article and show it to people. Like look, I’m really a reporter. I’m not here to sell you newspapers. I actually work for the newspaper. Honestly, the first time I went into the Omiya police station, I was mistakenly looked at as an Iranian that escaped from one of the detention cells. I got thrown up against the wall and I was like hey, no, I’m a reporter. I belong here. The suit should have tipped them off. It was interesting because a lot of cops are sort of right-wingers and they’re not necessarily huge fans of Americans per se. The vice captain of the Omiya police station would refer to me lovingly in Japanese as ‘this goddamn American.’ But the media is a meritocracy. After a while, it doesn’t matter what your nationality is or what your sex or your gender is. Can you produce good stories on time?
The only exceptional treatment I got is that I would be allowed to take a longer vacation, because when I went home to see my family, obviously you lose time traveling. It’s not like going from Tokyo to Hokkaido, right? So they gave me a couple extra days, which was nice. I was also able to get off Hanukkah and Christmas, which meant that I would be working the new year which for Japanese is a big deal. They don’t want to work on the new year. They want to go home to see their families. Or they want to go to the Buddhist temple at midnight and see the Shinto shrine at the start of the day. It’s a big family affair. So I was always working New Year’s. Every year, people eat these rice cakes, mochi, as part of the New Year celebrations, and people always choke to death on them: usually old people, but sometimes young kids. So, for maybe 10 to 12 years, I ended up writing up the article about how many people choked on mochi to death this year. (Laughs). Even now, one of the people I’m working with on this podcast is going to H Mart to buy some mochi for kids, and I’m like absolutely do not. Do not buy mochi for your children, until they’re like five or six. They’re deadly, it’s death on a stick, don’t let them touch those things.
Awards Daily: There’s this part of Jake that has this indomitable drive of “I have to get my story and I’m not afraid to break rules to do that.” In the series, that’s shown as being problematic in a society where a certain level of propriety is expected. Were you that guy?
Jake Adelstein: Yes, but later in my career. When I first started I was just trying to survive. I’m in over my head. The problem with Japanese is that their written language is extremely difficult. It takes the kids six years to learn the first thousand and twenty-six kanji (one of three forms of Japanese script). I was pretty good in terms of reading and writing, but I had spent so much of my time working on that, that my ability to speak and listen was not very good. Even though I was on this job, I could almost say in my first year, I felt like a deaf-mute. I was like oh my God, please, please give me the press release written down so I can be sure that I’ve got the names right. Sometimes I would be wildly delaying an article, because I would be like ‘give me the press release because I am not sure until I see the written form that I’ve got things straight.’ In the show, Ansel was cocky from the beginning. I didn’t get cocky until four or five years in.
Awards Daily: At the point when you reached that level of cockiness, how many times did you think you were going to be fired? How often did you think you were walking up to the edge? In the show, you get the feeling every other episode that Jake might get fired.
Jake Adelstein: Most Japanese companies were employment for life. The only time I felt I might get fired–this is a great lost chapter of Tokyo Vice, I don’t even know where the manuscript is anymore–we had to cover high school baseball, which, on the police beat, is part of our job, which I really hate, because I don’t know anything about baseball. Everyone’s like, you’re an American and you don’t know anything about baseball and you can’t keep score? (Laughs). And I’m like you’re Japanese and your national sport is sumo. Would you like to tell me what happened in the sumo tournament? Can you explain blow by blow what move was used, and why this person won however many points? I don’t think so. We were doing high school baseball, and we’re supposed to keep score at the same time. In the very early matches, it’s a very short article, team X played team B. Team X made 10 home runs. Team B never got on their feet. The end. But as it gets longer, it gets more complicated. I would get things wrong, really wrong. I would say stole a base and they wouldn’t have stolen a base, or made a double when it was a single, and I was constantly getting yelled at. I really thought I was in trouble. It was almost like, if you can’t do high school baseball, what good are you as a reporter? We had this high school student, Takahashi, whose job was to take the film and bike it to the offices to be developed. I don’t think he was being paid anything, he was just part of the whole high school baseball coverage. So I was like hey, I don’t understand any of this crap, so I’ll give you a thousand yen a day to look over my articles before I send them. By the end of the season, he pushed me aside and just wrote the article. That saved my life, because I think I would have been fired. That’s the closest I got to being fired, really screamed at, people slamming the door screaming “It’s wrong! You have the wrong team winning!” (Laughs).
Awards Daily: That’s hysterical. You’re investigating the Yakuza, and baseball almost gets you fired. You could have used me. I used to keep score for Little League for a couple of years.
Jake Adelstein: You have the little square charts and you make little half circles and notches and things on there. I can remember the sheets and you had the team members and stuff. How am I supposed to interview people and keep score? (Laughs).
Awards Daily: One thing that the show does—and I’m curious how true to life this is—is to present the Yakuza as very embedded in the fabric of Japanese pop culture, like with the fanzines. But also, reporting, policing, and politics. There’s a certain deference as long as they stayed in their lane. Is that accurate?
Jake Adelstein: Oh, definitely. You have to consider the fact that prime ministers have been made and broken by the Yakuza. They determine who stays and who goes, because they also have a tremendous amount of money to blackmail people and other things. The Democratic Party of Japan, when they took over in 2009, actually had the support of the Yakuza. They were telling all their members, vote for these people, this is the new wave. I think when they tried to seriously consider putting criminal conspiracy laws on the books that would have gotten rid of the Yakuza, first the Inagawa-kai outed the minister of justice (Tanaka Keishu), basically went to the magazine and said we’ve been paying him off for years. Bam, his political career went away. Then the minister of finance was outed in another magazine, this time by the Yamaguchi-gumi. The Prime Minister at the time was near facing resignation with all this scandal involving The Democratic Party of Japan having Yakuza connections. They called a general election to get a vote of confidence, they were completely wiped out. So, there is a deference made to them, especially in this period of time. The show is set in 1999/2000, when the amount of political power they wielded was incredible, and it wasn’t necessarily a death blow to be associated with the Yakuza. They were a part of the fabric of society. It wasn’t so long ago that the Yamaguchi-gumi and the Ichiwa-kai were having a gang war and the newspapers reported on the death tally as if it were a sports event.
Awards Daily: I’m guessing if you’re a reporter and you’re trying to infiltrate the Yakuza, there’s going to be a point where you’re in danger. Were there moments where you thought ‘I’m a little too close to the flame?’
Jake Adelstein: In the first season, there’s the Yakuza boss who is having trouble because people aren’t drinking tea with him. That’s straight from my experience. I was very lucky and I never understood exactly how he got my name or why he came to me, but this boss in Sumiyoshi-kai, Kaneko Naoya, had that problem. Because he needed something from me, and I was able to give him what he needed, I had someone sort of explain to me the rules of engagement—and there are rules of engagement dealing with the Yakuza as a reporter. The rules are you can’t be friends to everybody. You have to understand that if they’re giving you information, they’re giving it to you because it does something good for them. Either they’re taking revenge, or someone refused to pay them off, or it’s hurting a rival within another organization, or within their own organization. Therefore, you don’t owe them anything, and actually they owe you. They give you a story, and you have to make it clear to them: I don’t want to know why you’re giving this to me, but if it’s true and I write it, I don’t owe you anything, you owe me. I am doing you a favor. You don’t have any credit with me. I don’t have any debts to you.
With the police, it’s the other way around. You could pass on information the Yakuza gave you to the police, you could not pass on information the police gave you to the Yakuza. It’s not a revolving door. If you follow those rules, you’re pretty safe. I realized early on though, around 1999, that if you report on things that have not been investigated by the police, and that results in an investigation, then they get angry with you. When I was writing about the collapse of Saitama Shogin which was a sort of savings and loan bank for Korean Japanese, and the fact that they had been looted by a Yakuza group and a lot of their bad debts were money borrowed from Yakuza, I started getting death threats and people coming to my house. That’s one of the reasons they pulled me up from Saitama right up to the national news department. The solution was: you’ve made some enemies here, and actually you’re doing a really great job as a reporter, so welcome to the big leagues.
Awards Daily: Basically promoted to be saved, to some degree.
Jake Adelstein: There have not been that many times I felt that I was in danger, but certainly the whole liver transplant story involving a high-level Yakuza leader, which is all written up in Tokyo Vice (and dramatized on the show) I realized wow, okay, I’ve stepped on a landmine here. I remember being called into the National Police Agency and going there and having this talk out in the hall with a cop, who I knew from Saitama had been sent to the National Police Agency. They were having coffee from one of those vending machines that puts it out in paper cups. He’s basically saying your problem is that until you write this, you’re a problem for this guy, for Goto Tadamasa, because if he wipes you out, maybe it never gets written. You’re the writer, so you need to write it. He didn’t say publish or perish, because he doesn’t know that phrase. He’s like you need to write it or you’re dead. Do what you do, stop pussyfooting around and get it out.
Awards Daily: You had to write a story that made you too big to kill.
Jake Adelstein: Then I’m a secondary problem. Anything that happens to me gets blamed on him, and sort of affirms what I wrote. He was right. Once I’d actually written it, suddenly he had a host of other problems once it got into the Washington Post and then the LA Times. This says something about the Japanese media that is sad. He was such a powerful boss and he was so feared, and everyone knew that he also had parts of the media working for him. He couldn’t kill you publicly. He could kill you socially by leaking out your most shameful secrets and having it written up in a magazine. He was also the footsoldier for Soka Gakkai, which is this religious cult in Japan that’s very powerful and had its own political party. He did their dirty work. So he’s a very powerful person. The whole thing about the liver transplant, which the Japanese could have verified but never did, is because all they would write is “according to the LA Times, these things happened.” They didn’t go to the National Police Agency. They didn’t do independent confirmation, because they didn’t want to anger him. As long as they can say ‘We’re just reporting what somebody else reported,’ they don’t have to take responsibility.
Awards Daily: I’m a great admirer of the series. The energy of it, the respect for the culture, the intelligence of it. The characters, whether it’s Katagiri, Samantha, Sato, or more minor characters—are any of these people composites? Or are they pretty much all based on an individual person?
Jake Adelstein: Katagiri San, and Ken Watananbe has talked about this in interviews, is modeled after Sekiguchi Chiaki-san, who was a cop in Saitama that I became very close to, who passed away from cancer in—I think the year was 2007. I’m still in touch with his family, which is really nice. It’s so weird to see his kids. You see them in the TV show, the whole bringing them ice cream thing. That’s taken from my life. It is really weird to see his daughters now. His kids are married, and one of them has kids herself. He’s definitely taken from him. The character Miyamoto is taken from a really good-hearted, but kind of corrupt, cop I knew when I was covering the fourth district, which is Kabukicho. I don’t think we really talk about it in the series, but what made him so powerful was that he worked in basically the accounting part of the police department, and he kept all this data on receipts that were falsified. The people are pooling investigating funds to wine and dine themselves or to wine and dine other top cops, or taking public funds and having a good time with it. He kept all those records, so he was kind of untouchable. They had to let him do whatever he wanted, because he was always like, you know, screw with me and I’ll take this to the press, and everybody knew. They used to call him the receipt master, because everybody knew he had the receipts. He copied everything meticulously, and he was very smart. Miyamoto is sort of based on that character. I think in the book I call him alien cop. Samantha (played by Rachel Keller) is a composite of various people that I knew.
Emi (Rinko Kikuchi) is a composite of Hayama-San, who was my boss in Shakaibu, and a couple of other reporters that I had known. I gave Rinko Kikuchi a book written by a female reporter, who had also been a captain on the police beat, to read to prepare for that role. I think her first name is Minami-san but I can’t remember her last name. She was working for Nippon Television. She was one of the first female captains on the police force. Of the people on the Nippon Television police crew, she was the one running the show. Emi is a composite of her and my boss in Shakaibu [the national news department], and a little bit of Mari Yamamoto, who is an associate producer on the show. Mari Yamamoto is an actor and a writer. Right now, she’s starring as Dr. Miura in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (Apple TV). I worked with her as a writer for years, writing for The Daily Beast, so it’s kind of like all of them put together.
Awards Daily: Okay, I have to ask you about Sato.
Jake Adelstein: Sato was a complete creation—you can ask (show creator) JT Rogers about this. Originally, JT was like, I want to have a Yakuza guy who sort of parallels your ascent. Weirdly enough, I do have a college classmate who ended up in the Yakuza, but that was after having a civilian job for a while and he was kind of recruited. Then there’s Saigo, who is the guy in The Last Yakuza. Sato is kind of a composite of those. I wasn’t keen on the idea of having these two parallel careers at first, that was JT’s idea, but I decided, okay, I will make this Sato character as believable as possible based on young and old Yakuza I’ve known. In exchange, I want my boss to be a woman, so there’s representation of females in here. We also have to remind people that Japan is a misogynist sexist country, where women and foreigners are basically on the low end of the totem pole. We’ve got so much Michael Mann machismo here. I want a strong female character who has her own license, who is based on real people and isn’t just there as a demographic, but is a person with their own story, their own agenda, who we can respect.
Awards Daily: It’s interesting that you say that, because Michael Mann’s films are very much about men in very difficult positions—and women do get very good roles in the films, but they’re never the main protagonist. If this story was about my life, I would look at this cast and go, man, did I get lucky to have my story be told by these actors.
Jake Adelstein: Oh, I definitely felt that way. I was very unhappy with our original casting director, for many reasons. I really pushed for Ko Iwagami, who ran Kaiju [a casting agency]. He is a relatively young guy who knows stage actors and struggling actors, and he had a very active role in the casting process. I feel like I made some contribution to the casting by getting the young blood, instead of getting a bunch of pop idols from Johnny’s that look like they’ve had cosmetic surgery—really rough characters. Character actors like Shun Sugata is great as Ishida. I can also say that Ishida is definitely modeled after “The Coach” [Kanazawa Nobuyuki] in The Last Yakuza. Not only is he modeled after him, I could put a picture of the two of them together and they look alike. This is JT’s idea, and my idea, we wanted this to be an ensemble show. We didn’t want this to be that Jake is the focus and the hero. We wanted each character to have their moment, to have their time, and to be fully developed, rounded people. I think we achieved that.
Awards Daily: You’re hitting on a point that I had asked JT about when I interviewed him for season one. Because it’s a true story, and it is your story, you have to have a gaijin at the center of the story on some level. But as the show develops, it becomes more and more of an ensemble show. Your character, to me, is the linchpin, but everybody else’s stories are of a similar level of significance. By broadening the show in the way that has been done by JT and all the folks that are involved, you get a much fuller sense of the culture and how things work than you would if you were to only see events through Ansel’s eyes.
Jake Adelstein: One of the things I like about the show, and that I push for, is that this show has many themes and many stories, but I always want people to know that Jake is a journalist. He has to produce stories. He doesn’t get to neglect his daily job and go off on these tangents. We need to see them in the room working on stories. We need to see them going through documents. We need to see the process. I don’t want a series of magical coincidences. Some, okay. But we need to have scenes like in season two where Tin Tin goes to the doctor’s office to confront him and get records. We need to show the mechanisms. The first season, you see going through the real estate deeds, going through the paperwork to find out who really owns the company. It doesn’t take that much time to show, but the emphasis is on showing how investigative journalism works, and also to show how the police work works. The scene where we’re recreating the crime scene where one of the brothers gets shot is based on how the Tokyo police work. This is how they would do these things, maybe not as elaborately as we do it in the warehouse there, but that’s part of police procedure. The things that you see are grounded in reality.
Alan Poul, who is an executive producer as well, did The Newsroom. So he has an understanding of the importance of journalism. That is a constant theme in this show, we’re journalists, there’s a meaning to what we’re doing, but you also see it from the police side. I was very careful, and this is one of the things me and JT would argue about, I said, you know, the Chihara-kai aren’t necessarily good guys. They are people following a bare minimum code of ethics, and they are coexisting with their community, but they’re sort of a low-key Yakuza. They collect protection money, and in return you get some sort of services from them. We can’t have them ripping people off and doing massive fraud. Maybe some financial scheming is fine. That’s okay.That’s just business. But there has to be a difference between the bad guys and the good guys. So we take a few moments to have Ishida explain the things they do and the things they don’t do. This is why Tozawa is bad. He has no rules, no lines he won’t cross. You make that distinction. The way we show these two different organized crime groups, the way we show the police, and the way we show the Yakuza is all very nuanced and it’s very real. As much as possible, the things that we draw upon were taken from real life. Even the ending of Tokyo Vice—which we probably don’t want to reveal to readers—if you read the chapter “For Whom the Chimes Toll” in The Last Yakuza, that’s where that inspiration comes from.
Awards Daily: In this season, we actually see Jake go back home, and there’s a lot of awkwardness and discomfort there, but there’s also a lot of love. I think some of the awkwardness is that they want him to stay there, in the US, and this version of Jake that I’m watching on television has this wanderlust where he really needs to be out there in the action. Does that parallel your own life?
Jake Adelstein: I love Columbia, Missouri. It’s a lovely town. I just went back there for a month. We’re doing a new podcast with Sony and Campside Media about a series of deaths that took place at the hospital where my father worked. It’s called Night Shift. My podcast partners—Shoko and Amy and myself—we all lived together in a little B&B in Columbia, Missouri for a month, interviewing my father and all these people who were at the VA hospital at the time. I was like, yeah, this is a lovely place, but I grew up there for 18 years. Amy and Shoko are also from small towns. When you’re there for so long, no matter how much you change, people are still locked into this idea of the person that you were. It’s almost like you fall back into the expectations, or you can’t escape them, so you can’t become the person that you want to be. You’re kind of trapped in this preconception of how you were seen. So, it’s good to leave home. My home is on the outskirts of Columbia, near McBain, Missouri, which is a town that barely exists because it’s been so decimated by flood over the years. There is a train that runs through there and around midnight you can hear the train whistle blow. I grew up with it my whole life and, almost like a cheesy movie, I would hear that train whistle and think—I would like to get on that train and see where it goes; far, far away from here. I would like to follow that train and leave this town and see the world beyond. I definitely had that wanderlust. Now, I’m 55. I have a house in Japan, so this is probably where I will spend the last years of my life. I’m very much more acclimated here than I am in the United States. But yeah, I definitely had wanderlust. At one point I had a prospect of going back and working in the United States, but no, I couldn’t do that.
Awards Daily: There can be a tendency for film and television about Tokyo, and Japan in general, to be very fetishistic. Tokyo Vice does show beautiful parts of Tokyo, but it also shows you the grungy and grimy side that any major city has, and the deals that have to be made for people to get ahead. Do you feel like it is, as much as it can be as a dramatization, an accurate depiction of the time period that it covers?
Jake Adelstein: Oh, yes. The newsroom is created from photos and, ironically, I’ve loaned some photos to someone who was putting together a children’s book of workplaces in Japan. It’s a really beautiful book called basically Workplace. It has a two page spread of what the workplace looks like. Everything is labeled in Furigana (*a phonetic notation that accompanies the traditional Japanese Kanji characters in the form of small symbols alongside or above the original character) so the children can read the Kanji. So it’s the kanji and then the reading. Then, there’s like a day in the life of a reporter. I had that book and we used that. Everything from Jake’s room to the newsroom and the police station are recreated based on photos and talks and discussions with people, so that it’s really grounded in reality. The grungy apartment he lives in—that’s what a low rent apartment looks like. The people aren’t living in western apartments. If you’re a rookie newspaper reporter or you’re studying for the exam, that’s where you live, this little apartment. You’re lucky if you have a shower. I lived in a Zen Buddhist temple for most of college. My last year, I was able to rent a little apartment, but it didn’t have a bath in it, so I’d have to go to the coin shower or to the sento to the public bath. It was kind of a constant thing in my mind: if I don’t get to the sento before it closes, I’m going to have to give myself a sponge bath when I get home. All those things help make the show realistic, especially the attention to detail. We have fake Yakuza magazines in the show, and, if you open those on set, there are actual articles in them. If you see a police file on the shelf, and you pull down the police file, there is a mock police report in it. I’m thinking, this is crazy, who is going to look at this? Someone was full of insanity to actually not just have a cover, but to have articles inside or to have a police report and you pull it out and there is an actual police report inside.
Awards Daily: I remember reading a story about when Oliver Stone was making The Doors. Marlboro cigarette packs were a slightly different color of red back in that time, and it’s probably on scene for like three seconds, but he wanted that old Marlboro red and had it reproduced. Of course he was powerful enough at the time to do it. What it probably does is allow the actors to really immerse themselves in the vibe.
Jake Adelstein: When the sets are realistic, you really feel like you’re in a police station. You walk in, you see a lot of stuff taking place, and it is like being in the police station. I got deja vu. I was like, whoa, this is really freaky. I’ve got a photo of myself sitting at one of the desks on the phone and I want the photo, because it’s like this is what it would be like at night, if you’re at the police station late and you had a friendly cop that would actually let you sit in there and talk to them for a while. I took photos of Yakuza offices and things to make it realistic, and we went through lots of those.
Awards Daily: When it came to getting this show made, how did the deal go down? Obviously, it’s a fascinating story. The book clearly had a ton of potential for filmmaking, but it’s hard to get anything off the ground.
Jake Adelstein: It was in development for years. JT wasn’t being paid on spec or anything. We came up with screenplays. Originally it was me, JT, and John Lesher as the main people trying to get this done. At one point, Ryan Gosling read the script and hated it, because it had been this very Hollywood version. I was sitting on a phone call with Lesher and Rogers, and Lesher was saying Ryan doesn’t really like the script. He kind of wants a grittier version, closer to the book. JT, do you think you could sort of rewrite it and make it closer to the book? I was sitting here like the class comedian, and I’m like if Ryan wants it that way, well, I guess that’s what we’ll have to do, thanks, John. He hangs up, and JT’s like, you motherfucker, Adelstein, you know that I’m going to have to rewrite the entire script from the ground up. I’m like, I’m sorry, JT. I like my book better than the very Hollywood version that we have now. So, that’s the division of labor. You’re the script writer and I’m the original writer, so good luck. At one point it was going to be made into a movie with Harry Potter/Daniel Radcliffe. Somebody made a terrible mistake in who they picked as their Japanese partner to finance it, and I have my theories on why they pulled out at the last minute, but that all fell apart. At one point, I actually got an offer from AMC, except they wanted to kick JT out and bring in their own writers, and I was like, no—can’t do that. He has suffered so long on this. I can’t do it. After I replied, “because of loyalty, friendship, and suffering,” I thought, god damn it, should I have done that? But no. JT’s either in it or I’m not going to go forward. In 2017, JT wins The Tony Award for Oslo, and suddenly he has providence. People are asking what he wants to do. He wanted to do
Tokyo Vice, the series. He’s already met Ken Watanabe on the London stage, and Ken is like, I love this part, love this book, I’m interested in doing it. There were two actors they were considering for the part of Jake, and one was Ansel. I was on Ansel’s side, because he was really enthusiastic. When I heard how enthusiastic he was, I said, maybe this other guy you’re thinking of is a better fit, but enthusiasm counts for a lot, and we’re going to need somebody who’s going to commit to learning Japanese. I’d rather have someone who’s dedicated and is going out of their way to get this part than someone who’s kind of like, eh, if I can find the time. So, JT’s on board, Ansel’s on board, Watanabe’s on board. They set up a bunch of meetings in LA. I wasn’t invited and didn’t want to go, because I felt like I probably shouldn’t be there for the pitch. I’m probably an obstruction. I think Ansel went with JT when they did the pitches to show how committed he was. I had a sort of hands-off policy in that. After making a couple pitch meetings, HBO said, great, we’ll take it. We’re not going to make a pilot, we’re just going to do the series. There were ups and downs and COVID and all these things, but that’s how it got made. The long and short of the process was: failed attempt to make a movie, I gave up on it, JT wins an award, he gets some gravitas, he secretly recruits Ken Watanabe, Ansel comes on board, they make a pitch, and there’s interest—especially because Ansel has like 10 million Instagram followers, and apparently this is how things are decided right now. I would never get published now, because I only have 10,000 Instagram followers. (Laughs). I actually have to look at these things now. Anyway, that was it. I don’t know at what point the production company Fifth Season, which used to be Endeavor, came on board, but at some point they did come on board and that was it. Then Lesher reached out to Michael Mann. He was kind enough to ask me what I thought about Michael Mann coming on, and I said that would be great—I completely stole the title of Tokyo Vice from Miami Vice. I admit, it’s not a homage, it’s a steal. I thought that having Michael Mann on board would add some gravitas to the whole project and would be appropriate.
Awards Daily: When I first heard about the show and Michael Mann’s involvement, I was beyond excited. And that was before I heard about Ken Watanabe’s casting. I was like, okay, no matter what, I’m watching this. I have to admit when I heard Ansel would be Jake, I questioned the choice. I wondered if he was going to be able to pull it off. It turned out that the big tall skinny guy just really knocked it out of the park. It reminds me of when I completely dismissed Mark Wahlberg, for a while actually, until I saw Boogie Nights. I think Ansel’s really just risen to the occasion, even though I wouldn’t have pictured him for this role.
Jake Adelstein: Ansel doesn’t look like me. He’s much taller than me. I hate his sheepy dog hair [laughs] but I’m not the female fan base we’re searching for. He has been so enthusiastic and so hardworking and so sincere. I really like Ansel, and I try to stay out of his way because I’ve told him from the beginning: you’re not playing me, you’re playing this character, and you do whatever you feel is right. But I know that he paid attention, and he has imitated some of my mannerisms: the way I eat with chopsticks, the way I smoke a cigarette. One thing that Ansel did, which was pretty funny, is he would show up with clove cigarettes, and he would offer them to me. I don’t know whether he was consciously doing this or unconsciously doing this, and I’d be like Ansel, I stopped smoking. He would say come on, have a puff. When we were watching the first early cuts of Tokyo Vice and it was the opening scene and he’s smoking a cigarette, I thought, oh my god, that is me.
I saw him in Baby Driver and I thought he had a sort of wry sense of humor and I thought this would be the perfect guy. Watching him suffer through Aikido, I was like, okay, Ansel is up for it. One time I got really pissed off at Ansel, because we toured this newspaper office and I told him to not make waves, not do anything crazy because we were guests at this newspaper building and we were going there undercover. We didn’t have permission. Ansel sort of stepped out of line and suddenly sat down at an empty desk and started fiddling with a keyboard. I sort of dragged him back and I was like no, Ansel, that’s really bad. So I asked his Aikido teacher to drill into him the importance of following directions. I went to see him after class and he could barely climb up the steps, but I was like, Ansel’s all right. I’m sure that Ansel will laugh about it now. Maybe he doesn’t know, but I was so pissed off that I had a conversation with his instructor and I said, you need to tell Ansel, you need to drill into his mind not only the importance of following instructions, but the importance of not putting dirt on the face of the person who is representing you. I would like you to drill that into him today any way that you feel that you can. And he’s like Jake, trust me. I’ve got this.
Awards Daily: How much story do you think is left of this variation of Tokyo Vice? Would you see four seasons? Five? Do you think you could stretch that far out and maintain the quality level?
Jake Adelstein: Here’s the thing. I mean, I was on with the police for twelve years. There are a ton of stories that we didn’t cover here. I’ve had thirty years on the job as a reporter in Japan now. I’m kind of throwing in the years I worked for the State Department in there, but I consider that a sort of journalistic endeavor. So, I think we could easily do ten seasons. People love the Sato character. I could see doing ten seasons without running out of material. There are lots of stories to tell. The question is, would the audience be patient with us if we dealt in some things that were not necessarily about crime? What if we had a season where the Yakuza are not a central part of the story? That’s quite possible.
Awards Daily: You know how everybody bitches about that third season of The Wire, where they have the Union stuff? It’s so fascinating to me that people didn’t like it. Why can’t you expand the world a little bit?
Jake Adelstein: I love the courage of doing a season that’s a little bit off what people expected. I liked the third season a lot, but I’m a supporter of unions. Sitting in JT’s little office in the back of his current home in Hastings-on-Hudson, where we were plotting out the main arcs of the story way before we even knew whether there would be a second season. We always agreed that we would come to a conclusion—that we wouldn’t end up like me waiting for the fourth season of Millennium that will never come.
Awards Daily: I always thought Mann was kind of cursed with television—other than Miami Vice, which had a good five season run. The show Luck he made about horse racing, I know part of the reason they stopped it was because of the risk to the horses, but when that show ends there’s a feeling of loss for the stories that could have come from those characters. If they chose to not renew Tokyo Vice, I honestly think that last shot of Katagiri is a wonderful way to end it. But at the same time, I want more, and I’m hopeful.
Jake Adelstein: I would love to see another season, but my feeling is, after seeing it, it’s okay. If there’s not a third season, we have a conclusion that it is open-ended but there’s no cliffhanger. You get a sense of completion. There’s a parasocial closure. What was nice about that last season, which me and JT batted around that last season, is that it’s a sort of homage to me taking my Zen Buddhist priest vows in 2017, but still having to grade up or get out by 2027. I have to move up in the hierarchy or I get kicked out. It was nice, because that little reference to Zen was sort of JT’s nod to me—like, I see that part of your life and I take it seriously, even though I am skeptical whether you can actually stay living a calm and peaceful life. For me, that was kind of a lovely treat when I read the script and how it works on the set, but it also is such a lovely return to sort of where we start early in the series. If we are allowed to do season three, it’ll definitely be a few years later. I don’t see a world where we pick up exactly where we left off. We still have issues of what Katagiri is going to do. Is he really going to retire? It’s pretty clear that Emi is not going to stay at Meicho, but that Jake has decided to stay. I’m very happy to see the character of Baku evolve from being an adversary to an ally. There’s a lot of questions. Where do we go forward with the same crew? What happens to Sato now that he’s actually “the man”?
Awards Daily: And the reluctant man, honestly. I hate to use a Godfather reference, but you know how Michael Corleone was reluctant at a certain point to take that position, but there was no one else who could do it. Sato also sort of takes the position because there’s no one else. Even in the ceremony, you can sense his reluctance.
Jake Adelstein: You could argue that the mark of a great leader is someone who doesn’t have a lust for power, but realizes that they are the best person for the job. I understand that actors are acting, but if you met Show in real life with his nerdy glasses on, you would never get that Sato vibe.
Awards Daily: When I interviewed Show Kasamatsu for the first season, I could not believe it was the same person onscreen as Sato. He had his hair flopped forward. He looked like he was in a boy band. He was the sweetest guy. On the show, he looks like he’s in his late twenties, possibly scraping thirty. When I interviewed him, he looked like he was seventeen. I was surprised when he bevame one of my most read interviews ever, because I did not know that in Japan, he’s a thing.
Jake Adelstein: The guy who plays Tozawa, Tanida, is the most jovial, laughing, friendly guy in person. No sense of menace, no long awkward silences. It’s just a joy to hang around him. I will say this: Ken Watanabe as Katagiri and Ken Watanabe as Ken Watanabe are pretty much the same. He’s just a great character. Shun Sugata is fierce on screen, he is terrifying, but in real life he is just the sweetest old guy. Everybody loves him. He got really sick between season one and season two and we thought that he might pass away. We were really worried, but I’m so glad he recovered. Kitano Takeshi, who has made so many great Yakuza films, once said that if you play a Yakuza and you’re walking down the street when you get off set and everyone’s afraid of you, you’re not a good actor. You’re just that person. But if nobody recognizes you once the lights are off and you’re out of character, that’s the mark of a good actor. I would say that’s true about all these people. Shun Sugata is not Ishida. Show is not Sato. The guy playing Tozawa is not Tozawa. They’re completely different off set, but when they’re in that role, wow.
Awards Daily: Do you feel good, like in an immensely proud kind of way, that this part of your life was told on film at this high a level of quality? Not that you don’t have other work that you are immensely proud of, but if this was like on the tombstone, so to speak—
Jake Adelstein: Oh! If the greatest achievement I had was this series, I would be more than satisfied. I am not overly ambitious. When Tokyo Vice came out, I was like, this may be the greatest book I’ve ever written, and I was fine with that. I am delighted that a couple of people said they like The Last Yakuza more than Tokyo Vice. That it’s a better book. I’m like, this is great. Have I surpassed myself? I never had any intention. So, if this was the crowning achievement of my career as a writer or a participant in a project, I’d be very happy. The three books I’ve written in my Tokyo Vice trilogy, which are Tokyo Vice, The Last Yakuza, and now Tokyo Noir coming out, which received great reviews in France–I don’t know how it will be received in English. I’m very happy with the Evaporated podcast we did, I think that was just a lovely, one-of-a-kind podcast with the perfect crew. And I’m very happy with this series. If there’s no season three, I’m okay with that. I am already working on developing this story, Operation Tropical Storm—which is on Kindle—into another TV series, and that may come to fruition, which would be great because that’s another crazy ass story. I’d probably be much more involved in the actual writing of it, so there you are.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Jake Adelstein’s latest book Tokyo Noir: In and Out of Japan’s Underworld is available now from Scribe Publications. The paperback release in the US will be on October 1st.
Author’s note:
While Tokyo Vice was not renewed by MAX, other networks are discussing a continuation of the show with the creators.