This 2010 book was made into a terrific 2022 HBO series.
The first foreigner to write for Japan’s biggest newspaper is the author Jake Edelstein from Missouri.
Here are some highlights from the book:
* “Can you work on the Sabbath?”
It wasn’t a problem.
“Can you eat sushi?”
Neither was that.
* Matsuzaka met me in the lobby of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters, a gigantic labyrinth of a building that towered over all the others in the government district. It was the nerve center of the Tokyo police force, which was comprised of roughly forty thousand people. He was going to hand me over to Ansei Inoue, a legendary journalist and the author of Thirty-three Years as a Police Reporter . Inoue was the police beat captain and was loved, feared, and envied within the Yomiuri empire. His claim to fame was proving that a university professor convicted of murdering his wife was innocent. He had not only exposed the missteps of the police machinery and the prosecution involved but also found the real murderer. The case became a classic example of how innocent people can be convicted when caught in the brutally efficient wheels of the Japanese justice system.
* It was still three years before the Aum Shinrikyo cult sprinkled sarin on the Tokyo subways, which had the effect of tightening security procedures all over the city.
* There were no foreign media representatives either; the mainstream Japanese media outlets have not protested this lack of foreign media and never will. When you’re part of a monopoly, it’s not in your best interest to break yourself up.
* Inoue and I walked over to the cluster of reporters; the book they were poring over was Sex , by Madonna, which had just been released, and the reporters (all of them male) were studying and commenting upon her breasts. Inoue made the introductions, then picked up the book and handed it to me: “Do you think this book is obscene?” It was the Japanese version, so a lot of the more graphic stuff (which meant genitals and pubic hair) had been obscured.
“No, not to me.”
“Well, if they had published this,” Inoue went on, pulling the unexpurgated American edition off the shelf, “the police would have raided the publisher and confiscated every copy. The producers of Santa Fe 1* barely escaped getting busted for showing a little pubic hair, but this stuff from America is damn close to porn. Maybe arty porn, but it’s porn. We would have had a story if the Japanese publishers hadn’t pussied out.”
“The police would arrest someone for this?”
“The Supreme Court determined in 1957 that anything that sexually excites the viewer for no good reason, that violates the sense of propriety of the normal citizen, that is shameful, and that violates the sexual-moral conceptions of the general public, is obscene. By being obscene, such works are illegal and their distribution is a crime.”
“Which means?”
“Well, to the cops it means no pubic hair. Or it used to.” Inoue snickered. “It’s an odd thing about this country. The police don’t mind if you get a blow job in the middle of the day or if the operators of sex clubs advertise their services right out in the open, but they get their shorts all twisted up about people looking at people having sex. Pubic hair is too close to the real thing. The moral of the story: do it, but don’t watch it.”
* That led us into a twenty-minute discussion of the differences between Japanese and U.S. porn. The reporters were shocked to learn that octopuses and other animals of the sea were rarely used to drape the genitals in American porn and that sex through panty hose wasn’t a popular theme. I was asked to bring back some videotapes on my next visit to America.
As we left the room, Inoue cautioned, “Don’t do it. Forget about bringing back any porn for those idiots. The last thing we need is for you to get seized at Customs. They’ll survive without it.”
* “Newspaper reporting isn’t rocket science,” he said. “The pattern is set. You remember the patterns and build from there. It’s like martial arts. You have kata [the form], which you memorize and repeat, and that’s how you learn the basic moves. It’s the same here. There are about three or four basic ways to write up a violent crime, so you have to be able to remember the style, fill in the blanks, and get the facts straight. The rest will come.”
Then he got more serious.
“There are eight rules of being a good reporter, Jake.
“One. Don’t ever burn your sources. If you can’t protect your sources, no one will trust you. All scoops are based on the understanding that you will protect the person who gave you the information. That’s the alpha and omega of reporting. Your source is your friend, your lover, your wife, and your soul. Betray your source, and you betray yourself. If you don’t protect your source, you’re not a journalist. You’re not even a man.
“Two. Finish a story as soon as possible. The life of news is short. Miss the chance, and the story is dead or the scoop is gone.
“Three. Never believe anyone. People lie, police lie, even your fellow reporters lie. Assume that you are being lied to, and proceed with caution.
“Four. Take any information you can get. People are good and bad. Information is not. Information is what it is, and it doesn’t matter who gives it to you or where you steal it. The quality, the truth of the information, is what’s important.
“Five. Remember and persist. Stories that people forget come back to haunt them. What may seem like an insignificant case can later turn into a major story. Keep paying attention to an unfolding investigation, and see where it goes. Don’t let the constant flow of new news let you forget about the unfinished news.
“Six. Triangulate your stories, especially if they aren’t an official announcement from the authorities. If you can verify information from three different sources, odds are good that the information is good.
“Seven. Write everything in a reverse pyramid. Editors cut from the bottom up. The important stuff goes on top, the trivial details go to the bottom. If you want your story to make it to the final edition, make it easy to cut.
“Eight. Never put your personal opinions into a story; let someone else do it for you. That’s why experts and commentators exist. Objectivity is a subjective thing.”
* Like any Yomiuri employee, he understood that for those who aspire to be investigative journalists, national news was the place to be. If getting there was hard, staying there was even harder. Within the paper it was said that national news reporters worked the longest, drank the most, got divorced most often, and died the earliest. I don’t know if those claims have ever been statistically validated, but almost all present and former national news reporters have a masochistic pride in their status.
* Matsuzaka cut me off with a wave of his hand. “It’s not about learning. It’s about unlearning. It’s about cutting off ties, cutting out things, getting rid of preconceptions, losing everything you thought you knew. That’s the first thing you’ll learn. If you want to be an excellent reporter, you have to amputate your past life. You have to let go of your pride, your free time, your hobbies, your preferences, and your opinions.
“If you have a girlfriend, she’ll be gone as soon as you’re not around, and you won’t be around a lot. You have to let go of your pride, because everything you think you know is wrong.
“You have to act friendly to people you won’t like politically, socially, and ethically. You have to pay deference to the senior reporters. You have to not judge people but learn to judge the value of the information they give you. You have to cut down on your sleeping hours, your exercise time, and your time to read books. Your life will boil down to reading the paper, drinking with your sources, watching the news, checking to see if you’ve been scooped, and meeting deadlines. You will be flooded with work that seems meaningless and stupid, but you’ll do it anyway.
“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. It’s an important job. Journalists are the one thing in this country that keeps the forces in power in check. They’re the final guardians of this fragile democracy we have in Japan.
“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.”
“Remember this. You have to be careful, or you will lose everything that is important to you and you will lose yourself. It’s a tough balancing act. Sometimes people end up losing everything for the job and gaining nothing from it. This company will take care of you as long as you are useful, and unless you commit a criminal act, you will never be fired. That’s great job security. However, as a reporter, you are an expendable commodity. When you have outlived your usefulness, you won’t be a reporter anymore. You’ll be doing something else. A reporter has a short half-life in this company. Enjoy it while it lasts. Simplify, cut down on things you don’t need, but be sure to leave something behind worth having.”
* The Japanese press is often characterized by the foreign media as a bunch of sycophantic lap-dog office workers, but this isn’t exactly the case.
* It says a great deal about the safety of the country that a murder, any murder, is national news. There are exceptions, however, and that’s when the victim is Chinese, a yakuza, a homeless person, or a nonwhite foreigner. Then the news value drops 50 percent.
* you had to convince your editor that it was safe to run a story with no official press release to hide behind.
* Everything in Japan, even theft, is an art. Even assault is an art—judo, aikido, and kendo, all of these are more than just learning to decimate your opponent, they’re about learning to master yourself.
* The end of the old year and the beginning of the new are monumentally important events in Japan. On New Year’s Eve, thousands of Japanese flock to Buddhist temples to hear the tolling of the bells called joya no kane . The temple’s big bronze bell is tolled 108 times, one for each cardinal sin in the Buddhist universe. It’s believed that hearing the bells purifies you of your sins and allows you to start the new year fresh and clean.
If at all possible, I go to the bell ringing each year, since it never hurts to be on the safe side. A few temples now have Web sites that let you ring the bell virtually, which I’ve tried; it’s not the same.
* The Japanese believe there’s a right way to live, to love, to induce female orgasm, to chop off your pinkie, to take off your shoes, to swing a bat, to write an article about homicide, to die—even to kill yourself. There’s a right way—a perfect way—to do everything.
The reverence for “the way”—the ideography is the tao of Chinese philosophy—is an integral part of Japanese society, a society that loves manuals, loves doing things by the book, literally. In ancient times, before the advent of mass-market publishing, manuals were written on scrolls. The people believed that kotodama —the soul or spirit of language—resided in every word; that in uttering a thought one gives life to it; that words hold a spiritual power. This belief gave the written and spoken language a near-mystical status and encouraged a reverence for the written word beyond that in the West.
* The number one–selling book was a manual for how to argue with Koreans (whether in Japan or South Korea—I can’t speak for North Korea) who don’t have nice things to say about Japan. Koreans keep moaning about the fact that Japan invaded Korea, enslaved their people, raped their women, forbade their language and culture, performed biological experiments on POWs, and kidnapped thousands of Koreans, shipping them off to Japan to work in sweatshops of industry. The thrust of the book is this: Tell those miserable Koreans to stop exaggerating and shut up.
* I once heard the job of a police reporter characterized as being a “male geisha.” That’s actually a fair approximation of what was necessary to get a story—at least for some of us. “Male prostitute” might also be another way of putting it, but I don’t think it accurately captures the subtleties of the task involved. Some heavy entertaining is involved, but there’s a little more foreplay than a quick getting off “up against the wall.” Personally, I prefer to gather my own data and bargain with the police rather than beg for a tidbit, but that was simply my style. I was just as guilty of being a male geisha as most of my peers, except sometimes I managed to put myself into a better bargaining position: on top.
* Do you take care of the cop you want to crack? Have you asked him his birthday, place of birth, family lineage, the birthdays of his wife and kids, his wedding anniversary, when his kids start school, whether they have found a job, what holidays or special events the family has coming up? Do you say proper greetings on those occasions or, even better, bring a present?
* Hanging out with your family and their family at the same time is the ultimate way to cultivate a source. Families that play together, stay together.
Have you ever taken your wife and kids with you on a Saturday and stopped by “because we were in the neighborhood”?
* If you think this system creates a very cop-friendly, biased reporting style, you are absolutely correct. The Japanese police are extremely adept at manipulating the press, and we were extremely willing to submit to this manipulation for the possibility of getting a scoop.
* For a reporter, dating is impossible. My budding relationship with my first serious Japanese girlfriend effectively ended with a phone call. Not from her but from Yamamoto, at nine in the evening. It was the first day I’d had off in three weeks, and I-chan and I were on my futon, catching up on some long-missed sex, when the phone rang. I had no choice but to dismount and pick up.
“Adelstein, we got a probable murder in Chichibu, and we need you to go to the scene. Get your ass down here in ten minutes. The car is running.”
I started pulling on my clothes, and I-chan pouted.
“I’m sorry, hon,” I said. “I’ve got to go to work.”
“You bastard! You’ve gone, but I haven’t gone yet.”
(If you thought that was a typo, let me explain: In Japan, the act of achieving orgasm is referred to not as “coming” but as “going.” This lends itself to the joke that Japanese-American couples have so much trouble communicating that they can’t tell whether they’re coming or going.)
* young Japanese were above what was known as 3K jobs: kitanai (dirty), kitsui (difficult), and kurushii (painful).
* The apartment was empty. A note from I-chan lay on the futon: “It’s over.”
Her stuff was gone. She’d made up the futon and washed the dishes in the sink, even cleaned out the bathtub and taken out the trash. It was the most considerate breakup I’d ever experienced.
* The order of birth is a big deal in Japan. I was chewed out many times for not checking whether a person named in an article was the oldest, second, or youngest son or daughter. Even when there is an only child involved, you refer to him or her as eldest daughter or eldest son. The eldest sibling in a family is automatically given deference, respect, and authority, and is often literally called eldest daughter (onē-san) or eldest son (onī-san) . I tried to explain this to my younger sisters in Missouri; their response: “In this country, you may be the eldest son, but you’re still just a geek.”
* The Soapland shops in Japan used to be called toruko, short for Turkish baths. This so offended one Turkish resident of Japan that he launched a campaign to get the name changed, which the Yomiuri reported on in the late sixties or seventies. I remember one particularly obnoxious editor from the Foreign Affairs Bureau showing me his article about it. Eventually, Japan gave in to international pressure and solved the problem by giving the sex shops a wholesome moniker. It sounds like good, clean fun. “Soapland.”
Incidentally, the Japanese term for blow-up sex dolls is “Dutch wife.” The Embassy of the Netherlands has yet to launch a formal protest or make counterassertions that “Dutch women are not frigid and thus we are outraged by the term ‘Dutch wife’ in the selling and use of inanimate sex dolls,” but when it does it’s my scoop.
* 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.
In the United States, we pay psychiatrists, therapists, counselors, and life coaches to listen to our problems, raise our self-esteem, pretend to like us, and give us good advice. Friends used to do those things for free, but friends have been known to retreat when the water gets too deep. Japanese tend to believe that going to a shrink is a sign of weakness and an admission of mental illness, so there’s still a tendency to avoid those types of paid friendships.
After covering the Kabukicho beat, I learned that when a Japanese man wants his ego—as opposed to his penis—stroked, when he wants to be fussed over or have someone listen to his problems, he doesn’t go home to his wife, he goes to a hostess club. A hostess club is not a sex club. A hostess club is not a pickup joint, a fuzokuten , or a singles bar. It is usually a small bar with several attractive women who will greet you warmly, sit down and chat with you on a sofa, sing karaoke with you, and act as if they were your lover or flirt with you as though they might want to be.
* It’s doubtful that an autopsy was performed—they rarely are, even for Japanese people who die under suspicious circumstances.
* sexual assault against women was always a low-priority crime for the police. The penalty for rape is so negligible (usually two years maximum) and the possibility of a suspended sentence for a first offender so great that it hardly seems like a felony at all.
Hostesses aren’t seen as victims by many of the police; they’re seen as victimizers, greedy, manipulative prostitutes. Especially the foreign hostesses.
* Rape kits are not a standard item at police stations, and very few officers know how to use them…
* Almost any restaurant is spotless. The floors glow, the countertops are clean, the linen is a bright white. This doesn’t hold true for medical facilities. Most hospitals have a thin veneer of dust on the floor; the sheets have been washed, but stains remain. The windows look as if no one has cleaned them in decades. You have to take off your shoes and put on moldy slippers to tread through poorly lit halls with medical equipment and supplies filling the corridors.
* There was something very strange happening at UCLA. [Yakuza were getting organ transplants.] I suspected that not only Goto but three other of his associates had received liver transplants at UCLA.
* gossip. What wasn’t reported was that in the list of front companies was Burning Productions, Japan’s largest and most powerful talent agency. Goto’s control over Burning Productions was a valuable tool in his suppression of unfavorable reporting. Any television station that crossed Goto risked being denied access to Japan’s top actresses, singers, and entertainers. This also meant that almost every newspaper affiliated with a television network, which is common in Japan, could also be indirectly threatened.
