Every journalist has sat through their share of dry, stage-managed press conferences, hoping that among the sterile pre-vetted pronouncements there might be something to spark an editor’s interest, to hang a story on, or sometimes just one usable quote.

No such worries with Jake Adelstein in the house. During a Nov. 11 event at the FCCJ promoting his book Tokyo Vice, Adelstein, who did a12-year stint on the crime beat for the Yomiuri Shimbun, blazed through topics ranging from drug deaths, death threats, press freedom and grisly murders to yakuza influence at the highest levels.

His scoop of a lifetime – four senior yakuza getting liver transplants at UCLA hospital with FBI approval – is the one that brought both the threats, and also the offer of bribes. It was also the story that convinced a local publisher not to handle Tokyo Vice, fearing reprisals from the tattooed ones, a decision Adelstein described as “very rational.”

Adelstein says he was offered ¥30 million yen, later raised to ¥50 million, by a yakuza organization not to write the liver-transplant story. “I thought about it for the length of a clove cigarette – which takes quite a while to smoke – but I said no,” Adelstein says. “Because you don’t want to be owned by these guys,” before adding with a smile, “and my honor and dignity is worth at least a million (dollars).”

After reading a chapter – featuring a grisly murder – that hadn’t made the final cut into Tokyo Vice, Adelstein was inundated with questions, many of them, unsurprisingly, seeking his opinion on the yakuza and their current status in Japan.

The foreign takeover of Japan’s crime was dismissed as “a myth perpetrated by the yakuza so that everybody focuses on the evil foreigners, rather than the yakuza – they are very good at finding people to take the fall.”

Having been on the receiving end of threats in the past, and no doubt aware that journalists have been sued for identifying yakuza front companies, Adelstein is careful to cite appropriate sources for many of his more controversial statements. He still informs the Tokyo police when he’s in town and employs a senior ex-yakuza as a bodyguard.

Something that definitely falls into the controversial category is Adelstein’s claim that the Yamaguchi-gumi – Japan’s largest criminal organization – switching its traditional support for the LDP over to the DPJ about a year before the Democrats’ election victory. While somehow reminiscent of the Murdoch press in the U.K. shifting allegiance from the Conservatives to Labour (and recently back again) when either side emerged a likely winner, there may have been more to it than simply backing the winning horse, according to Adelstein. He quoted two Japanese weeklies – Asahi Geino and Shukan Jitsuwa – as reporting that the switch to the DPJ had been decided at top-level Yamaguchi-gumi meetings.

“I’ve heard the same thing from several yakuza, though nobody knows why. I’m treading on thin ice here, so I’ll say the speculation is that somebody in the DPJ promised not to put criminal-conspiracy laws on the books,” offered Adelstein.

“This would be disastrous for the yakuza: it would put a RICO law (the United States’ Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) on the books that would allow the government to seize their offices, their buildings, their companies, their assets. It essentially would put them out of business,” he continued. “There are certainly people in the DPJ that have very vocally opposed a criminal-conspiracy law being passed in Japan. I don’t think the DPJ is going to deal a death blow to yakuza.”

While some of the existing anti-yakuza laws have been strengthened with measures including making bosses partially responsible for the actions of underlings, other legal changes have actually made it easier for them to conduct business, Adelstein says.

The strengthened privacy laws, which courts have repeatedly used to hit magazine publishers with large damages, have made it more difficult to investigate and report on the numerous yakuza front companies and other shady connections.

According to Adelstein, “The odious privacy protection laws that were put on the books after former Prime Minister (Yoshiro) Mori got tired of people writing about his arrest record for prostitution and his interactions with yakuza bosses, have made it very hard to write controversial things here.”

The 2007 case of a Tokyo detective downloading porn and accidentally uploading a gigabyte of police files, including data on the Yamaguchi-gumi and Goto-gumi, was another example of the reluctance of the media to tackle yakuza issues, Adelstein says. The leaked files seemed to confirm what many suspected: that, among others, Burning Productions – one of Japan’s top talent agencies – was a yakuza front company. “I’m not saying Burning is a yakuza-run company,” Adelstein was at pains to point out, “I’m saying the leaked TMPD files had it listed as a front company.” Yet no mainstream media wrote the story.

“It’s one of the last taboos in Japan that no one will touch,” said Adelstein.

A lot of the financial deregulation that happened under the administration of Junichiro Koizumi also gave organized crime easier access to high finance, Adelstein believes: “The yakuza have traditionally been gamblers… the stock market represents a giant casino, and they would like to be the house.” He cited a National Police Agency (NPA) white paper that stated, “The yakuza are so embedded in finance and the stock exchange that they threaten to shake the very roots of the Japanese economy.”

But sections of the yakuza may have already overstepped the mark and initiated their own demise. The NPA has set up a special unit to dismantle the Kodo-kai, the leading faction of the Yamaguchi-gumi, because it was investigating detectives, taking their license-number plates and collecting photos of them and their families.

“In 2007, I was invited to speak in Seattle at an NPA-FBI organized-crime conference, and I pointed out that when the Aichi police went into Yamaguchi-gumi HQ they found pictures of their families thumb-tacked to the wall,” explained Adelstein.

“Of course the FBI guys were looking at the NPA guys like, ‘Why the hell aren’t you doing something about this?’ When you have organized crime collecting information about detectives, this probably went over the line of what was allowed in the tacit agreement between society and the yakuza,” said Adelstein.

If much of this seems like it belongs in a movie, some of it may end up in one. Jake says he’s had a few inquiries about adapting Tokyo Vice for the big screen, and confesses to having an agent currently handling negotiations. Adelstein says he’s insisting on having a hand in any screenplay, as well as assurances that “Tokyo doesn’t end up looking like Beijing.” ❶