Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan

Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice, has popped up in a couple of my favorite places to get news. His life story appeals to me as being both very entertaining and inspirational. He picked up and moved to Japan, living for three years in a Buddhist temple, then working as an English teacher and part time as a Swedish massage therapist, then eventually becoming a reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, credited as having the largest circulation in the world. At Yomiuri he worked as a crime reporter and his book reveals the depth of his knowledge on the Yakuza, or Japanese mafia.

His little interview on the Daily Show was my introduction to his work. The interview is a bit offbeat and has a few amusing bits. My favorite quote is "[Liver Damage] is the number one cause of death for yakuza.... other than being shot or beheaded."

One of my favorite newsy podcasts is NPR's Planet Money. Here Adelstein "talks about how the business of the yakuza groups has changed over time and how tighter government restrictions have pushed the Japanese mob into more "traditional" investments." You can listen to or download the podcast here. My favorite part of this one is the story of how the Yakuza hired actors to pose as Japanese bank execs in order to trick Lehman Brothers into loaning a front company $300 million. It's pretty golden. Fresh Air has another longer program with him as well as an excerpt from his book here.

And finally, Jake edits the blog www.japansubculture.com. A notable recent post here is entitled "Eating sushi off a naked girl: yay or yuck?"

I'll be putting his book on my Christmas list.

Reading is Funtastic

I don't know what it is, but going to new places always puts me in a reading mood. I feel especially adventurous when I am not only on a train to someplace cool, but I am reading a good book along the way. It just has a classic gentlemanly feel to it that I like, and its a much better use of time than yapping to someone else about nothing or staring out the window. When I first got to Ashikaga, I hit the books left by my predecessors with a voracity. Its was just a jumble of different stuff, but I read it so fast that I soon ran out of things to read.

Larger books stores, in the Tokyo area especially, usually have English sections. The stores stock about half classic titles and half contemporary. Unfortunately they come with a "we know there's nowhere else in town you can find English" price tag.

Recently I have been playing around with Google Book Search. They won't let you just sit and read whole books that are still under copyright, but there's plenty of good stuff that's free. It might be a good way to spend half an hour if you just sit in front of a computer during your lunch break anyway, as I sometimes do. One issue I'm having is that I can't figure out how to place a bookmark or save my place somehow. It looks like I have to scroll around to find where I stopped every time I start reading. Maybe someone can figure that out for me.

As for the train rides, I think a visit to the Ashikaga public library is in my future.