[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Jake Adelstein.

He, of course, is the intrepid reporter portrayed in the HBO series Tokyo Vice.

And you can read his journalism and books, also.

Jake, really exciting to meet you this way.

I know you're still live from Tokyo, Japan at 3:00 in the morning.

We really appreciate your patience with us, and are excited to chat.

Well, I am very excited to be here, too.

It could be the start of an early day or the end of a very long day.

It just depends on how the day has been going.

Still a bit of a night owl, so it's not so bad.

Jake, your reporting, that you can read online, books that you've authored and of course, you can see what it was like to be you, and what it's still like to be you, decades younger and through the accomplished career in journalism, you've had.

I use the word intrepid.

You've exposed corruption, in journalistic work that you've done, about the way that the government operates in Japan.

In your mind, has the corruption changed in the way that it manifests these years later?

Is it different in certain ways than it was you know, when you got started in reporting?

Yeah, I would say that, you know, I mean, an interesting thing about corruption is it's so endemic to Japanese politics and the government that I don't think many people are aware of it.

One of the things it's, you know, had a changed is the influence of Japan's organized crime groups, which are called the yakuza, which is a, big euphemism for about 23 different groups, each with their turf and their territory and their headquarters.

Their influence has seriously declined since I started as a reporter.

But they had a lot of power.

I don't think many people know this, but the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, which has basically ruled Japan since the 1950s, kind of like the Republican Party was founded by, former war criminals and, Kodama Yoshio, who was a yakuza fixer.

Someone involved in the war as a profiteer.

And so the very beginnings of the party that is essentially ruled Japan uninterrupted since the 1950s is yakuza money.

So when you have that there, you're going to have a lot of corruption and a lot of influence by the mob on the Japanese government on all levels.

I think Kitano Takeshi, who is, you know, known as a film director in the West, and known as a comedian here in Japan, once said that, you know, there are two powers in Japan.

There are the people that rule in public, the public face of Japan.

And then there are the people that rule in the shadows.

And most of those people you would classify as the yakuza.

And so there were, you know, times up until I would say even 2009, and maybe even 2012, where, you know, who was going to rule Japan was determined by yakuza influence, you know, what they would put out, who they could support, who they could put down.

But I think they eventually they overplayed their hand and now don't have much power at all.

Well, that seems like a radical transformation from '09 or '12 to the present.

How did that happen?

Oh, well, I feel like I should plug my book here, like [sings], here in Tokyo Noir, it goes into great detail.

As my friend Ben Dooley, formerly at the New York Times, said, the cash grab sequel to Tokyo Vice, which I wanted to put on the cover.

Essentially what happened is that, the biggest player has always been the Yamaguchi-gumi which was founded in 1915, in Kobe.

At one time they had 40,000 members.

You can see them here, adorning the cover of this yakuza fan magazine that sadly went out of business in 2017.

[laughs] Every issue is about 200 pages.

Here's the head of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Tsukasa Shinobu-san, notice I put the san on there because, you know, he's still pretty powerful, his number two on these magazines, which they used to sell everywhere.

I don't know any country in the world where the Mafia had their own monthly magazines.

You can keep track of who was rising up and rising down.

So the Yamaguchi-gumi was very, very powerful.

But they kind of overstepped themselves in a couple of ways.

One is in the year around, 2007, 2008.

You know, the Japanese police always had to kind of live and let live relationship with the yakuza.

Kind of like, okay, you're organized crime.

We know that you exist.

You have your offices, you have your business cards, you have your fan magazines.

When you step out of line, we shut you down.

But the head of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Kodo-kai.

Did something that really made the cops angry.

And that was they hired a private detective agency in Yokohama called the Galu agency, I like to use real names here, to get the phone numbers of all the cops in Aichi Prefecture who were investigating them.

And then they got those phone numbers, and they used that to gather personal information about the police officers.

And then as, they would be grabbed and interrogated for various crimes that yakuza are involved in extortion, blackmail, racketeering.

These thugs would sort of mentioned a detective like, hey, you know, detective, you know, Yamanaka-san, shouldn't you be home for your daughter's birthday?

Hint, hint, hint.

And, wow, that really made the police angry.

That made him so angry that they did something unprecedented.

They raided the yakuza offices, of the Kodo-kai.

in Aichi Prefecture without notification.

And that seems kind of funny.

And if you watch the TV show, you'll sort of see this happen.

It used to be when the police made a raid, there was kind of like they'd call in like, you know, when is a good day for you, you know, to be raided.

We're going to have the, you know, the press outside and we'll come in, we'll take out some boxes, we'll go through the motions.

No, let me know when it's a good time for you.

You don't have like any events or anything going on that day.

So they raided the offices and then they found photos of their, you know, their family members and, it was just decided, when the yakuza feel powerful enough that they can threaten police officers, that they've gone too far, Japan is not Mexico.

And that was a critical mistake.

And so the head of the National Police Agency, who was this career bureaucrat who no one thought had any guts, who no one expected to do much of anything.

This guy named Ando.

Ando, on September 30th, 2009, declared, like we are declaring war on the Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai.

We are going to remove them from the face of the earth.

He did not say, we are going to get rid of the yakuza.

We are going to get rid of organized crime, he said.

We are going to get rid of the leading faction of the biggest organized crime group, the Yamaguchi-gumi Kodo-kai, and we are going to do this because they are uppity, they threaten police officers.

They don't confess to the crimes when they're arrested.

They don't do the crime and do their time, and they are belligerent.

And this is why we are going to take them out and starting at that point, the National Police Agency under the nose of the diet in an almost kind of sort of legal coup d'etat, started working with police departments across Japan's 47 prefectures, prefecture being the equal of a state, and each prefecture put on the books an organized crime exclusionary ordinance, and an ordinance is very weak.

But what it did is it criminalized paying off the yakuza.

So if they were shaking you down, starting around 2009, and it took up two years for them to get this done.

I remember Tokyo and Okinawa were the last two prefectures to put one of these laws on the books.

I remember because it's the day I stopped smoking.

October 1st, 2011.

That made it a crime to associate with the yakuza.

It made it a crime to do business with them.

It made a crime to basically fraternize with them and that was the beginning of the end for them.

One more thing that happened was that there was a real estate company called Suruga Corporation listed on the Japanese stock exchange.

That made about, I don't know, I think in a good year they made $300 million.

But they made that because they paid $100 million to a yakuza front company, Koyo Jitsugyo, owned by the Yamaguchi-gumi, again, Goto-gumi, that terrorized people to leave their homes and their apartments so that they could consolidate the real estate packages and sell it off.

And when the Tokyo police decided to crack down on this company, this listed company, right?

It's not some, dodgy front company.

It's a company listed on Tokyo Stock Exchange with the former prosecutor on the board of directors and a former National Police Agency organized crime control director on the board.

When they busted them for what were basically violations of the lawyers law.

They found that actually, they could only arrest the yakuza, who had been terrorizing tenants and killing their cats and doing things to get them to leave their apartments.

But they couldn't touch a single person in the company because there was no crime in hiring yakuza to do your dirty work.

And that was one of the other things that basically created this impetus to like, okay, let's make the people who use the yakuza criminals as well.

And, that has been tremendously effective.

So it's all those things.

It sounds like it was not anti-corruption reform from a national government.

It was very much, as is depicted on the series, a grassroots movement, born out of individual leadership.

That made this kind of sweeping, anti-corruption, overhaul possible.

It wasn't, you refer to the ordinance, but it really didn't originate from the idea of anything legislative or parliamentary in any way.

It was the police's personal privacy being invaded.

It sounds somewhat comparable to what happened with the royals in the press, in the UK was, you know, there was an invasiveness that was the domino that led to more comprehensive anti-corruption implementation.

Yeah.

There was definitely a feeling amongst the general populace, right?

That we're tired of these guys.

We know that they're not the people that they pretend to be.

The mayor of Nagasaki was assassinated by a yakuza, a yakuza boss in like 2007.

Probably over the fact that they were trying to cut the yakuza out of public works because, you know, yakuza as groups, own companies.

They own construction companies, they own real estate companies.

And when the mayor of Nagasaki tried to cut them out of all public works projects, he was assassinated by, you know, "a lone wolf yakuza."

But everybody pretty much understood that there's a message here, right?

The Japanese mafia doesn't kill people very often, but they do it judiciously.

And I think that was another thing at a, you know, in public sentiment was like, oh, wow, you guys really are the bad guys.

Like, we know you've done things like in the past, but when you start killing politicians then we have an issue.

So you describe the advent of the Japanese mob.

And that criminal element is really taking hold in a prominent way soon after the war was over.

And I wonder if you investigated this at all.

But how does that relate to what was transpiring in Europe?

The Marshall Plan and the idea of, you know, when you think of Europe's new beginning post-World War II, you don't often associated with, you know, the rise of a mob in Germany.

I mean, maybe in Italy, it was already present and continued.

But how do those two things compare in the sense of American, at the time being concerned about, the building blocks and cultivation of a civil society and democratic rule?

And was Japan a different case study than the axis powers, namely Germany, in the way that that society recovered?

Well, that's a really excellent question.

So one of the things that had a sort of, you know, an unintentional backfire that sort of gave the yakuza a grouped, a away back into power was this, and the yakuza had always existed in Japan.

I mean, you could divide them into two types, sort of federations of gamblers and federations of street merchants.

But it didn't really matter after the Second World War, they came back.

And sometimes they served as sort of a local police force in areas where the police weren't omnipresent.

But when the occupation came, they declared third party nationals and third party national means basically the slave labor that Japan had brought into the country during the imperial Japanese days.

So, the Koreans, and the Taiwanese, and the Chinese workers, and they said, you know, basically, okay, Japanese police, you can't touch these people because you've been oppressing them for years.

They were given access to the US bases, and they started running the black markets because they had access to supplies that the Japanese couldn't.

And after years of just, you know, having the crap kicked out of them by their Japanese overlords, they were like, all right, like revenge time.

So they formed gangs and they formed the black markets and basically, you know, they were lawless and untouchable.

So the yakuza come back and they're like, okay, the police can't touch you, but we can.

So they created their own kind of, patrol squads and their own gangs, and they brought order and civility during this period of time when, you know, the "bad foreigners" and there were, you know, gangs of foreigners, couldn't touch anyone.

And actually, in the biography of the third generation leader of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Taoka Kazuo-san, he talks about this, he talks about, you know, this coming back after the war and this lawless period and the yakuza sort of serving as public enforcers and the police being very grateful.

As a matter of fact, in an earlier edition of the book, you can see him dressed as a police officer when they let him be the police chief for the day at one of the police stations that was so grateful to his calming presence during this period of turmoil.

So this went on for, you know, about a year or so and then the police are given power to, you know, enforce the law regardless of nationality.

And they were kind of like, okay, you guys did us a solid.

So as long as you keep to the traditional yakuza way, and traditionally Japanese organized crime has flourished for the reason that they have a bare minimum code of rules, and that is no theft, no stealing, no sexual assault, and for some of the groups, no dealing in drugs, no selling, no using, no buying.

And everything else is fine.

And so, you know, that basically gave the yakuza, free rein.

The cops were kind of like, okay, as long as you're not, you know, doing violent crimes, against ordinary civilians.

We don't care what you do.

And please keep the peace in your neighborhood.

Basically, they weren't touched until the 1960s when, Kodama Yoshio, who we've mentioned earlier, the guy who created the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, he sort of created a federation of yakuza, like all the different groups.

Have you ever seen the movie The Warriors?

I mean, like, I'm dating myself here.

No.

[laughs] It's a great sort of, gang film from the like, you know, 1980s or wherever in which, you know, Cyrus, I think is his name, basically gathers all the gangs of New York, you know, all over the city.

They meet in a big arena, and they're going to sort of take over New York.

And, you know, and it's like a very powerful force, right?

And so that was kind of Kodama Yoshio like, I'm going to unite all these yakuza groups.

You know, we have a sort of right wing ethos, even though many of the yakuza are actually, non-Japanese.

And they sent a letter to the Liberal Democratic Party basically saying the way you're running the country isn't good.

You need to change this and that.

And within that political party, there was one senator who had been a reporter for the Mainichi newspaper.

And he was like, hey, if the yakuza are giving us orders, we have a problem here.

Like we have a serious problem.

And that began the first crackdown, extensive police crackdown on the yakuza.

Also, the Olympics were supposed to be coming to Japan in, like, 1964.

I don't have a book in front of me.

I'm pretty sure that's when Japan held the Olympics.

And they're like, you know, this isn't a good look for us to look like we're being run by gangsters.

Well, it's so funny you mentioned the Olympics, because I was next going to ask you about the analog in Germany.

A film I have seen, two films I've seen Munich and more recently, September 5, September 5th.

You were mentioning the Olympics and preparedness for the Olympics, but that film demonstrates how ill prepared Germany was and how the ethos sort of wanting to, preserve a kind of pacifistic domestic tranquility space, backfired.

And I can only imagine if the yakuza, if they existed in Germany, then, if they might have been able to fortify the Olympic Village better in the wake of the attack on, the Israeli team.

But again, the analogy here to Germany and postwar, not feeling as though German gangs were taking hold through the country and countryside much differently for decades in Japan.

The Olympics for Japan were like a chance to put themselves on the world stage show that, you know, that we made tremendous progress after being destroyed by, you know, of losing this war.

They wanted to present their best face to the world so that, you know, definitely created an opportunity for, them to crack down on organized crime.

Japan has been lobbying to get the Olympics for years and years.

They finally got through in 2020.

I think, you know, one of the other reasons, you know, starting, 2009 and really heating up 2011 is, you know, it's an embarrassment to the Japanese government that they have, organized crime groups that you can look up on the internet, right?

You can go to the National Police Agency website and you can look up the headquarters of, you know, of the all the organized crime groups, the Inagawa-kai still has their offices across from, the Ritz-Carlton in Tokyo.

I actually the other day there must have been some Inagawa-kai meeting because I saw all these black Mercedes, that's the old school yakuza, and a bunch of, like, really high end, Toyota Lexuses, and a lot of cops around, you know, the usual guys with the crew cuts and some of them missing their fingers in the dark suits.

And I was like, okay, there's a big meeting in the office today, and that's why the cops are all out here.

The Sumiyoshi-kai, which is used to be the second largest group, has their offices in Ginza under the name Hama Enterprises.

And the Yamaguchi-gumi still has their fortress in Kobe, which is a city block.

Up until a couple of years ago, they had Halloween parties for the whole neighborhood.

There's a couple international schools there.

I know some kids who went there.

I used to sneak in with this Indian family that lived across the street, and I think after going a couple of times, they, realized that.

Oh, yes, you're that pesky reporter.

But they didn't seem to mind, I want to turn our conversation to corruption in the US.

And from your vantage point, as an expat or whatever you consider yourself, still an American born.

When you look at the United States government and the people in control of it, acting and speaking like gangsters themselves, independent of political ideology, the traditional idea of conservatism or liberalism, what do you make of it?

I mean, you know, it's not as if, Robert De Niro in Casino is, you know, is in control of the government behind the scenes.

It's that these, corporate actors, you know, namely Elon Musk, are basically the puppet masters of the new administration and, engaging in dialog over social media in a very gangster like fashion.

Oh, I mean, wow.

You know, I should probably mince my words because I'm going to have to go back to the United States sometime to see family.

I mean, I consider Donald Trump, and many others just to be a chinpira, he's like a lowlife yakuza, who has always used corruption and oppression to get whatever he wants.

And he surrounded himself with similar thugs.

It is a mobocracy.

I mean, everything that they do is designed to benefit themselves.

At least the yakuza have some pretense of trying to be a humanitarian organization that's taking care of the country and other people, but these people clearly are out for their own good.

But, you know, the head of the United States mobocracy is clearly Vladimir Putin.

I mean, Trump can't say a single word against him.

Can't criticize him, never has.

And this is a guy who's just one trash talking everyone in the world.

But the only person who won't trash talk is Putin?

I mean, it looks like, you know, that is the behavior of a yakuza underling dealing with their boss.

There's a saying in the yakuza world that when the boss says the passing crow is white, it's white.

And if, Vladimir Putin said the United States was a island in the South Pacific, Donald Trump would say we are an island in the South Pacific.

[laughs] Right.

So, is there any blueprint for resolving this?

You know, again, your story about Japan shows that really the momentum does not come from the top, and it can come from someone in a leadership capacity.

But Elizabeth Warren is someone who campaigned in 2020 on an anti-corruption agenda after the first Trump administration.

And clearly, the post-Watergate reforms in the United States, didn't hold up, when it came to, all the contemporary manifestations of corruption, that have been a bipartisan agenda.

If you look at, the Abramoff and Ney affair, someone like Menendez in New Jersey, and of course, epitomized in the failure of the US Supreme Court to accept the United States Constitution and the Emoluments Clause as valid, right?

They basically threw out case against the president and said, no, this is emoluments clause, it doesn't apply.

It's not relevant when expressly it says we as the American people need to ensure that the presiding incumbent, is not taking bribes from foreign governments, not taking payments from foreign governments.

And that's something that we never knew about Trump's first term.

And it's something we don't know about his second term, Trump and ally.

So, I mean, when you just look at the gargantuan nature of the corruption problem in the US right now, is there any blueprint you have for resolving it?

Rather than a blueprint, let's talk to something that's analogous.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, was the prime minister of Japan for the longest, of any prime minister in history.

And he was good friends with Donald Trump and what he did when he regained power, after losing power once, right?

He's another one of those guys was out in the wilderness after losing power for overstepping his boundaries because he was corrupt and he was incompetent.

And he is also a raving nationalist, like a Japan first, that comes from his grandfather, Kishi, who was a war criminal who became prime minister, who was heavily in bed with the yakuza.

Same kind of vibe there in DNA.

And when Abe regained power in 2012, he did things like, first of all, he doubled down on criticism of the media.

Then he created this department in the cabinet called the Department of Personnel.

And the Department of Personnel, had power over the top positions in each, you know, each ministry of Japan.

So if you wanted to rise to, like deputy minister, you needed to kiss Abe's *** and you needed to kiss it in a way that, you wouldn't be thrown off of the career path.

And that created an entire bureaucracy of people that did the dirty work without being asked.

The word in Japanese is that sontaku, to figure out what the boss wants.

And, you know, figuring out what the boss wants means that if, a right wing in nut case wanted to build a private school called Abe Elementary Memorial School, that you would give them a plot of land that's worth $10 million for $1 million, and you would get everyone to fake the paperwork.

Now that seems like a small crime, compared to things going on in the United States, but that was endemic in the Abe administration.

But then, of course, when you have all the bureaucrats scared and frightened and all your people in place at the top, then things don't function the way that they should, because even law enforcement stopped doing their job because they want to rise up in the bureaucracy as well.

And it was a tremendously effective power grab.

And one of the things that forced him out of power is he got so power hungry.

And so, so crazy about this, that I think it was around 2019.

He tried to appoint his personal sort of favorite top prosecutor to be essentially the attorney general of Japan.

But to do that, he had to change the law and allow the retirement age for prosecutors to be extended like a couple of years, because this guy was on the edge of retirement.

He'd already pushed the public a lot so that his party was losing power.

I mean, you could see that the support for his party was fading.

And some office lady basically said, in a tweet, like, I oppose the changing of the laws governing the age of prosecutors.

And then added the note that, you know, the Prime Minister shouldn't be able to choose who is the attorney general, based on the fact of who will be subservient to him.

And that went so viral over a weekend that they basically pulled back that legislation.

And then, when his, you know, pet didn't get picked, the next guy who came in, really began investigating the crimes committed by Shinzo Abe and his counterparts.

And he basically, I think, made a deal that he resigned, ostensibly because of his stomach problems.

And then they let him walk.

This happens in Japan all the time.

We're out of time, Jake.

But this is prescriptive, insofar as you know that gadfly can come from within, can be exposed by a whistleblower.

Can be then reported by Jake, who in Tokyo Vice, is "Adel-steen."

But in the real world is "Adelst-eye-n." "Aye-delst-eyen."

When is the next season of Tokyo Vice, a must watch for anybody?

There will never be another season of Tokyo Vice.

I am sorry.

It was too expensive.

But you can read Tokyo Noir, which is the book sequel to the book that the series is based on.

And never say never, because there's some of us hungry for it.

But in the meantime, read your book.

Where might they get it?

A local bookstore anywhere, where ever you want.

And you can also read The Last Yakuza.

Then you'll know who was the model for Sato and Ishida-san.

Jake, a pleasure being with you today, thanks for your time.

Thanks for having me.

[music] Please visit The Open Mind website at thirteen.org/openmind.

Download the podcast on Apple and Spotify.

And check us out on X, Instagram, and Facebook.

Continuing production of The Open Mind has been made possible by grants from Vital Projects Fund, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ploughshares Fund, Angelson Family Foundation, Robert and Kate Niehaus Foundation, Grateful American Foundation, and Draper Foundation.