Tokyo Noir : in and out of Japan’s underworld

The sequel to bestseller Tokyo Vice, now a major HBO drama, with a second season coming in 2024. It’s been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun.

The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organised-crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about — for the time being. Adelstein has a new gig these days: due-diligence work, or using his investigative skills to dig up information on entities whose bosses would prefer that some things stay hidden.

Underneath layers of paperwork, corporations are thinly veiled fronts for the yakuza.

Pachinko parlors are a hidden battleground between disenfranchised Japanese Koreans and North Korean extortion plots.

TEPCO, the electric power corporation keeping the lights on for all of Tokyo, scrambles to hide its willful oversights that ultimately led to the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. And the Japanese government shows levels of corruption that make gangsters look like philanthropists. In this riveting memoir, Jake Adelstein once again reveals Japan’s dark underworld, as he battles to keep himself in the light.