Speaker 1: The Team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Bark. Hi, everyone,
Speaker 1: Welcome to episode three hundred and seventy five of The
Speaker 1: Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here tonight with our guest
Speaker 1: Jake Adelstein. He is the author of Tokyo Wece an
Speaker 1: American reporter on the police beat in Japan. This is
Speaker 1: a book I read way back in two thousand and nine.
Speaker 1: I feel old looking at the date on there this afternoon.
Speaker 1: He has also written The Last Yakuza Life and Death
Speaker 1: in the Japanese Underworld. This is probably the best. I mean,
Speaker 1: I would say it is the best English language book
Speaker 1: about the Yakuza. You guys should go and check this
Speaker 1: one out. And his follow up to Tokyo Wes Tokyo Noir,
Speaker 1: which kind of continues Jake's own story in Japan in
Speaker 1: and out of the out of Japan's Underworld. I hope
Speaker 1: you guys will check this one out also. So, Jake,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2: Hey, it's a pleasure to be on your show. I'm,
Speaker 2: you know, not as grizzled as your usual veterans, but
Speaker 2: I'll do my best.
Speaker 1: I should also mention Tokyovice has been turned into a
Speaker 1: television show with two seasons that people can go and
Speaker 1: check out. It's like loosely based on your book, but
Speaker 1: it's it's good to watch. It's fun to watch. It's
Speaker 1: a good show.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, thank you. Uh you know the person who
Speaker 2: was running the show was my high school buddy. Oh really,
Speaker 2: he went off to become a Yeah. Yeah, he went
Speaker 2: up to college and he became a very successful actor
Speaker 2: in New York and he wrote a lot of plays
Speaker 2: set in foreign countries, including Afghanistan and in Africa. And
Speaker 2: you know, he won a Tony Award, which I think
Speaker 2: is a big deal in the world of movies in
Speaker 2: theater for this play about about the Kalestonian peace talks
Speaker 2: and oglows and uh yeah, it's a great play. And
Speaker 2: they made it into a movie too. And I asked
Speaker 2: him to be the showrunner and HBO was like yes,
Speaker 2: And so it's great to work with your high school money.
Speaker 2: And he was very good about listening to what I
Speaker 2: had to say ninety percent of the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's super cool. That came together quite well. So
Speaker 1: I want to just start off asking you a bit
Speaker 1: about your own origin story, which kind of you tell
Speaker 1: in Tokyo. Wece. But I mean, as I recall, you
Speaker 1: grew up in the Midwest, Jewish dude from the Midwest,
Speaker 1: and you ended up working as a reporter in Tokyo.
Speaker 1: Uh well, in like the early to mid nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: Like tell us that whole trajectory from point A to
Speaker 1: point B, how that came about?
Speaker 2: Okay, Okay, yeah, it's uh it's it's you know, Columbia,
Speaker 2: there is an interesting place I went. I went back
Speaker 2: there two years ago to do a podcast about a
Speaker 2: serial killer in the hospital where my father worked. That
Speaker 2: is a whole other story in an entire podcast. So
Speaker 2: I grew up there. My father has always well has
Speaker 2: spent most of his time at the HARRYS. Trueman, but
Speaker 2: I'durm's Hospital where he's a pathologist. He was also the
Speaker 2: medical examiner. So I grew up listening to lots of
Speaker 2: stories about crime and murder and accidents, and that was
Speaker 2: kind of always dinner conversation. And in high school I
Speaker 2: got kind of picked on a little bit. I got
Speaker 2: in a fight with the school bully, and my teacher,
Speaker 2: instead of expelling me, told me I needed to take
Speaker 2: karate lessons to channel my anger. And from there I
Speaker 2: got interested in Japan. And so my first year since
Speaker 2: student at the University of Missouri, I noticed that they
Speaker 2: had an exchange program, and I thought, what a wonderful
Speaker 2: opportunity to go to Japan. And lucky for me, it
Speaker 2: was a time like when the Japanese economy was booming
Speaker 2: and Japan seemed very expensive. So we had no one
Speaker 2: going from the university. We had twenty people coming from
Speaker 2: Sophia University, which is the university where I was going
Speaker 2: to go as an exchange student, and they relaxed the
Speaker 2: rules and let me go after only a year of
Speaker 2: Japanese under my belt, and a couple of months after
Speaker 2: I got there, I ended up living in a zen
Speaker 2: Buddhist temple. It's that really weird story. I mean, there's
Speaker 2: kind of one coinstance after another, and I'm still friends
Speaker 2: with the chief priest. I mean, you know, and you
Speaker 2: read the book where now he's my end master, which
Speaker 2: is kind of a weird thing to say.
Speaker 1: And so from there, that's how you kind of got
Speaker 1: immersed in Japanese culture, in the Japanese language, and kind
Speaker 1: of continued from there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I was full immersion, right because
Speaker 2: you're in You're in the you know, living in this temple,
Speaker 2: I'm living surrounded by Japanese people, and I'm going to
Speaker 2: school all the time. And I thought, you know, if
Speaker 2: I'm going to really improve my Japanese, if I'm really
Speaker 2: going to get better before I graduated, I should do
Speaker 2: something that would force me to work hard. And so
Speaker 2: I decided to study for the newspaper entrance examinations, which
Speaker 2: are something in Japan that newstreamers do.
Speaker 1: They hire you my examination, and I got to ask,
Speaker 1: was this like a bit of like youthful hubris that
Speaker 1: you're like, I'm some white kid from the Midwest. I'm
Speaker 1: going to just jump right in and take the entrance
Speaker 1: exam for a prestigious Japanese newspaper.
Speaker 2: You know. It's it's a saying in Japanese that even
Speaker 2: a stupid person can do one thing right. And so,
Speaker 2: you know, I had some talent for Japanese and also
Speaker 2: I am you know, I hate to admit it's such
Speaker 2: a contrarian that once I decided to do it and
Speaker 2: people told me that it would never happen, I was
Speaker 2: just like, wow, We'll see. So that was that.
Speaker 1: So you went in, It took the test and got
Speaker 1: the job. I mean, did they know they were hiring
Speaker 1: an American when they blessed off on it?
Speaker 2: Like, you know, the minionship would used to be the world.
Speaker 2: So I just his paper. I mean it had eleven
Speaker 2: million readers a day at the time when everyone in
Speaker 2: Japan was reading a newspaper. Most of the readers are
Speaker 2: Japanese of course, right, and they wanted to internationalize themselves,
Speaker 2: and so you know, they had a the question the
Speaker 2: essay topic we have to write an essay was, you know, foreigners,
Speaker 2: kay Cokuchi. So I wrote this essay. It was like,
Speaker 2: if you're serious about an internationalized thing, and you really
Speaker 2: you know, and you know you're giving us the topic
Speaker 2: of foreigners, you should hire a foreigners so you have
Speaker 2: a different perspective on things. And they took me up
Speaker 2: on that. So to their credit, you know, they knew
Speaker 2: exactly what they were doing. They did have They did
Speaker 2: it just like in the TV shows. There's have some
Speaker 2: questions on whether me being nominally Jewish would be an
Speaker 2: obstacle to be.
Speaker 1: Working, but they didn't really care.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, I mean I mean, if I had
Speaker 2: been smart, I would say, you know, I should have
Speaker 2: said like, uh, you know, I, yeah, I have to
Speaker 2: have the Sabbath off because then I might have actually
Speaker 2: done some vacation time on the job, but I didn't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think they have rasha Shan as a
Speaker 1: national holiday in Japan.
Speaker 2: No, I mean, I don't. I don't think, you know,
Speaker 2: I'll tell you what, like you know I do. I'm
Speaker 2: not complaining. It's just how things are are in the
Speaker 2: pan as they used to be. So we had, as
Speaker 2: a newstry reporters, especially on the crime beat, we had
Speaker 2: like eighty hour weeks, ninety hour weeks sometimes depending on
Speaker 2: what was the news breaking. And you know, they would
Speaker 2: give you a calendar with your days marked off on it,
Speaker 2: and and you know, and you would almost never get
Speaker 2: those days off. And then as I rose up in
Speaker 2: the company, sometimes you would be on the night shift
Speaker 2: and you'd be following a formula to mark your labor hours.
Speaker 2: So I went once in the company, I hadn't I
Speaker 2: hadn't been like in the office for three days working
Speaker 2: on a story, manning the phones, and I marked myself
Speaker 2: into like in the middle of a vacation, because that's
Speaker 2: what the manual said.
Speaker 1: It's pretty crazy, as you become a reporter in Japan.
Speaker 1: I feel like this is kind of like where you
Speaker 1: get taken into the next level of the immersion, Like
Speaker 1: you start to interact with obviously the press, but also
Speaker 1: the police. You're kind of on the metro beat, right,
Speaker 1: so you're interacting with the police and eventually organized crime.
Speaker 1: You're starting to learn sort of like where the fault
Speaker 1: lines in society are, Like, like what was that like
Speaker 1: and what were you learning as a young guy working
Speaker 1: that job at the time.
Speaker 2: First of all, what was really different for me is
Speaker 2: I didn't drink. I mean, you know, I drink in college.
Speaker 2: I was like a straight edge punk and I'm living
Speaker 2: in this zen Buddhist temple where you know, you can
Speaker 2: drink it's an end Buddhist, but you're not supposed to
Speaker 2: get drunk. And the first thing I realized that you
Speaker 2: have to drink with the cops. If you don't drink
Speaker 2: with the cops, they don't take you seriously.
Speaker 1: And there's sort of like this interesting relationship between the
Speaker 1: police and the press and the criminals and the way
Speaker 1: you kind of like have to balance that as a
Speaker 1: reporter working in that environment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, because everybody has their part to play right.
Speaker 2: And you know, when you're first starting off to the cops,
Speaker 2: you're just a nuisance, right, You're you know, if they
Speaker 2: like you, maybe they'll feed you a story. And in
Speaker 2: the ACA is a you know, if they talk to
Speaker 2: you at all, it's when they realize that you might
Speaker 2: be able to write a story that would do damage
Speaker 2: to their enemies, so they might feed you a good story.
Speaker 2: I mean, that was a really weird thing that I
Speaker 2: realized is is that the rules of engagement as a journalist,
Speaker 2: especially covering organized crime, were like this. You could get
Speaker 2: information from the akaza and you could pass it on
Speaker 2: to the police, and that was okay. You just had
Speaker 2: to make sure that the akada were these these mafiosas
Speaker 2: understood that you understood that you were doing them a favor,
Speaker 2: and it wasn't the other way around. And then but
Speaker 2: you could never take information you got from the police
Speaker 2: and give it to the akaza. And so everyone has
Speaker 2: these kind of sort of rules and they're not written out,
Speaker 2: and you sort of warn them as you go along,
Speaker 2: and you don't want to screw up, and and and
Speaker 2: what makes being a police reporter in Japan really hard
Speaker 2: is the cops cannot go on the record because the
Speaker 2: Japan criminal because the japan Public service laws makes it
Speaker 2: a crime for a police officer to speak about something
Speaker 2: that's confidential. So if they get caught, they can get fired,
Speaker 2: they can even be prosecuted, which is why you have
Speaker 2: to have this intensive You and I are just drinking
Speaker 2: and we both got so drunk. No one remembers what
Speaker 2: happened last night, so of course you could have told
Speaker 2: me anything about a breaking case.
Speaker 1: And as I recall, there's also some interesting conventions with
Speaker 1: the newspaper and with the editors. Obviously they have journalistic standards,
Speaker 1: things have to be sourced properly, but there's also like, oh,
Speaker 1: do we really want to piss off the cops by
Speaker 1: publishing that? Do we want to really piss off the
Speaker 1: yakuza by publishing that. They have to balance some of
Speaker 1: these things as well.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the balance with the cops is really hard.
Speaker 2: You know. There was this one interesting case in which,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't know about the cops in the
Speaker 2: United States, but the cops in Japan are very jurisdictional, right,
Speaker 2: so everybody has their fiefdom. So if there's a homicide case,
Speaker 2: the homicide cops want to do it. Well, there was
Speaker 2: one case where they the homicide cases homicide cops took
Speaker 2: over case from the organized crime squad involving the murder
Speaker 2: of a low life journalist actually I mean one of
Speaker 2: our own in a sense, but basically he made his
Speaker 2: money by blackmailing people. He got paid by not writing articles.
Speaker 2: So this you know, yakuza kills him. The police started
Speaker 2: an investigation. First the organized crime cops do it. Then
Speaker 2: the homicide guys step in and they said, we're going
Speaker 2: to do We're going to do this. So the homicide
Speaker 2: cops send like low level rookies to arrest the guy.
Speaker 2: But the suspect has a gun, right because he's the yaka.
Speaker 2: Is only theaka that have guns in Japan unless so
Speaker 2: the cops, And so when the cops show up to
Speaker 2: rest him, not knowing what's going on, he pulls the
Speaker 2: gun on him and he holds the hostage in a
Speaker 2: car for a couple hours a stand off. He shoots
Speaker 2: himself on the head. He survives. It's a huge scandal,
Speaker 2: but it's just the whole thing is screwed up because
Speaker 2: the homicide guys had so much hubris that they wouldn't
Speaker 2: listen to the organized crime cops, and they didn't tell
Speaker 2: the rookies going to arrest him the possible danger that
Speaker 2: he had a gun. So I thought, this is a
Speaker 2: great story. Here's where police rivalry results in, you know,
Speaker 2: nearly a death and a hausted situation. It could have
Speaker 2: been avoided. And so I wrote up the article and
Speaker 2: I showed it to my boss, and what do you
Speaker 2: think happened? Said nope, no, no, He said, hold on,
Speaker 2: this is a great story. So he went to talk
Speaker 2: to the head of the investigative division, like the chiefs
Speaker 2: of the detectives, and they made a deal that we
Speaker 2: would have a scoop on any major crime story for
Speaker 2: the next six months, and in exchange, we would bury
Speaker 2: this story. We bury the story.
Speaker 1: I think those types of arrangements exist in the American press,
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I can't say that I miss it
Speaker 2: that much, But there was something kind of fun about
Speaker 2: going to going the evening rounds. You actually go to
Speaker 2: the cops houses and you drink with them, right and
Speaker 2: the organized kind guy. The guys were fun, I mean
Speaker 2: because they did crazy cases. They're dealing with these violent criminals,
Speaker 2: and they tended to be pretty nutty themselves. And because
Speaker 2: like as I told you, the pretense is right that
Speaker 2: this is just a friendly drink between buddies, right, so
Speaker 2: you cannot take notes, you know, you cannot take out
Speaker 2: a pen and paper. So you drink, you know, for
Speaker 2: a couple of hours. Maybe maybe you eat something too,
Speaker 2: and you always try and bring something with you. And
Speaker 2: then we had taxis that we could use a company
Speaker 2: cars because of course peopn't want to get arrested for
Speaker 2: drunk driving, so you'd have to write down everything as
Speaker 2: fast as you can before you pass out. Our loves
Speaker 2: is still in your head. I mean, it's great training
Speaker 2: for remembering conversations because you can't take notes. So there's
Speaker 2: one cop I really liked named Iso Bassan, and you
Speaker 2: know he's retired now so and he doesn't have a
Speaker 2: problem to mention his name. And when I go to
Speaker 2: easta Basons, the first thing he would say was like,
Speaker 2: would you like a beer? And that's very common advantage.
Speaker 2: You start with a beer, and then we would drink
Speaker 2: some Japanese sake and he was really into the sake
Speaker 2: soap he would tell me where it was from. And
Speaker 2: whether it was dry or whether it was sweet, and
Speaker 2: you know what its name was and why this was
Speaker 2: a good sake. And then after the sake, sometimes his
Speaker 2: wife would make his dinner and we would have some
Speaker 2: wine with the dinner, and if it was winter, he'd
Speaker 2: give me a shot of whiskey for the roape because
Speaker 2: it was cold outside. And so my notes from my
Speaker 2: visits to his house would always like start with very nice,
Speaker 2: you know, fine print and details, but by the third
Speaker 2: page office started trailing off as I'd pass out. That
Speaker 2: was kind of fun.
Speaker 1: And at this point you're like, you're young too. You're like,
Speaker 1: what like twenty five.
Speaker 2: Or something, Yeah, twenty five, twenty six.
Speaker 1: It's awesome. So let's there's a whole bunch of things
Speaker 1: that I want to get into with you, but maybe
Speaker 1: this would be the right place to sort of jump
Speaker 1: off and ask you about Sigo and how you met
Speaker 1: him and how how that kind of relationship came about
Speaker 1: for you.
Speaker 2: So I first met Sigol very early on, when I
Speaker 2: was doing this crazy story about uh dog breaders, shield
Speaker 2: killer and his wife who murdered a bunch of their
Speaker 2: customers who are I'm happy with and they killed Yaka
Speaker 2: the boss and his driver. Okay, so they killed the Yaka,
Speaker 2: the bost and his driver. We all knew that the
Speaker 2: police were investigating these guys, and we split up into
Speaker 2: teams to cover the people that were missing, people that
Speaker 2: had been killed by the bisecting again his name in
Speaker 2: the serial Killer. I got assigned to cover Endo Makoto
Speaker 2: and his driver Walkuisan and in the course of in
Speaker 2: the course of that investigation, I started dating and those
Speaker 2: mistresses and Sigo was in the same organized crime group,
Speaker 2: the Ena Galachai, and at one point, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: I think he actually came to her house or something.
Speaker 2: We had this sort of discussion of the fact that
Speaker 2: you know, wasn't appropriate for me to be with the
Speaker 2: his brothers and the organization's mistress, and I was like,
Speaker 2: you know, the guy is probably dead and I should
Speaker 2: be awarded. I should be rewarded for taking care of
Speaker 2: the mistress because there's no one to look after her.
Speaker 2: And he just thought that was a lot of Chuck's
Speaker 2: butun very fun. And then we just stayed in touch
Speaker 2: until about two thousand and eight, when I was put
Speaker 2: under police protection because I pissed off this yak as
Speaker 2: a boss and he was kicked out of his organization
Speaker 2: because he owed a bunch of money to them, And
Speaker 2: so I asked him, you know, would you be my
Speaker 2: bodyguard and my driver because I need both and he said.
Speaker 1: Yes, Well that's uh yeah, maybe before we jump off
Speaker 1: into the next thing, we should talk about that a
Speaker 1: little bit more. You're you're talking about go to.
Speaker 2: Correct Oh, yes, I'm talking about Boto.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so tell us about kind of like how you
Speaker 1: pissed that dude off and how that became an issue
Speaker 1: for you.
Speaker 2: Oh sure, So got Tamasa is kind of the Richard
Speaker 2: Branson of organized crime, Mike Richard Branson if he puts
Speaker 2: a homicidal, homicidal maniac. So you know a little bit
Speaker 2: of background for people who are not versus of thetof So.
Speaker 2: Japan has basically twenty crime families called collectively called the Yakuza,
Speaker 2: and the biggest of them all was the Yamaguchigumi, which
Speaker 2: at one time I had forty thousand members. They are
Speaker 2: they are public entities, meaning that you know, they have offices,
Speaker 2: they have business cards, they exist in the public. Actually,
Speaker 2: I've got a fan magazine around if you'd like me
Speaker 2: to pull it out. I could show it to you, Yeah,
Speaker 2: just to show you how crazy that is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, why not?
Speaker 2: Okay, hold on, I'll co grab it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Jake's talking about how they're these Yakuza families.
Speaker 1: They get writers and publishers to actually make fanzines like
Speaker 1: magazines extolling how great the Yakuza is and they're exploits
Speaker 1: and how honorable they are and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeh, So here we are. So this is
Speaker 2: a Yakaza fan magazine. It's really thick. This one is
Speaker 2: especially a shoot because it has an article analyzing the
Speaker 2: legislation that was put on the books around two thousand
Speaker 2: and between two thousand nine twenty eleven, which made it
Speaker 2: a crime to pay off the Akiza. So there's a
Speaker 2: big article here about and also criticizing the National Police
Speaker 2: Agency for interesting on the human rights in Yakuza by
Speaker 2: outlying some of their criminal activities. I mean, I laughed,
Speaker 2: because it's like, it's not like you're born in Yakaza.
Speaker 2: You do have some choice there. Who is the so
Speaker 2: this is? This is it?
Speaker 1: Who's the readership of magazines like this, Jake? Like you know,
Speaker 1: in America, of course, we have an interesting like crime
Speaker 1: films and crime dramas like that. These criminals are edgy
Speaker 1: outsiders on the peripheral of society. Is that kind of
Speaker 1: who reads these magazines?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, okay, so first of all, right, at the
Speaker 2: time when they're eighty thousand, because of in Japan, this
Speaker 2: is kind of like you know, car and Driver if
Speaker 2: you're in the automobile in the sty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a people are industry publication.
Speaker 2: Yes, so it's an industry publication, but also people reading
Speaker 2: it are the police read it? Right, the journalists read
Speaker 2: it and then you know, your your average sort of
Speaker 2: white collar worker and blue collar worker who dreams of
Speaker 2: being a tough guy of not you know, of having
Speaker 2: women in cars and lots of money and doing whatever
Speaker 2: they want. They read it too because it's exciting, right.
Speaker 2: People are interested in gangsters, like the same kind of
Speaker 2: people who love true crime. And there are probably some
Speaker 2: women readers who read it as well, so it's very
Speaker 2: male oriented.
Speaker 1: Okay, So back to Goto, So back to God.
Speaker 2: So go To is was the head of the AMA
Speaker 2: Give Me, which is the largest organized crime group which
Speaker 2: has been around nineteen fifteen, over one hundred years. He
Speaker 2: was head of their Tokyo Operations, and he was really ruthless,
Speaker 2: and he was a really good businessman at one point.
Speaker 2: At one time he was the largest individual shareholder of
Speaker 2: Japan Airlines. So I mean, think about that's a lot
Speaker 2: of money to have. But because he was ruthless, because
Speaker 2: he has no morals, he pissed off a lot of people.
Speaker 2: And he also didn't take very good care of himself.
Speaker 2: So he needed a liver transplant, and the best place
Speaker 2: to get a liver transplant is in the United States.
Speaker 2: And in order to get that liver transplant, because he
Speaker 2: was on a blacklist by the FBI, of course, the
Speaker 2: United States isn't going to let in a known criminal
Speaker 2: of his nature in. He made a deal with the
Speaker 2: FBI that they would provide him a visa to go
Speaker 2: into the United States and get a liver transplant at UCLA.
Speaker 2: UCLA found him a liver or the FBI didn't find him,
Speaker 2: didn't find a deliver, but he did that and he
Speaker 2: ratted out his buddies to get that deal. Or the
Speaker 2: FBI was kind of wanted intelligence about organized crime within
Speaker 2: the United States. The Japanese police and the National Police
Speaker 2: Agency would not cooperate with the FBI for reasons I've
Speaker 2: never understood. They wouldn't share their list of members with
Speaker 2: the FBI, and the FBI wanted that list.
Speaker 1: So go open kimono with the FEDS to get his liver.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. But he kind of screwed
Speaker 2: them too, because as soon as he got his liver,
Speaker 2: he you know, he checked out of the hospital. He
Speaker 2: only gave them about a fit to what he promised,
Speaker 2: So it wasn't a very good deal in terms of
Speaker 2: for the FEDS either. So you know what I did
Speaker 2: is that I had heard about this. I'd heard about
Speaker 2: the fact that he got a liver transplant while covering
Speaker 2: this huge story about a loan chark who made like
Speaker 2: over hundreds of millions of dollars with his coloff a
Speaker 2: loan sharking operation which included laundering money at the MGM
Speaker 2: Grand in Las Vegas. I mean, really like movie thriller
Speaker 2: kind of stuff. And on following that story for years,
Speaker 2: I heard that Goto had made a deal to get
Speaker 2: into the United States and get a liver transplant. It
Speaker 2: took me a long time to figure out that he
Speaker 2: made a deal with the FBI to do it, And
Speaker 2: so when I started to write about it. Someone routed
Speaker 2: me out to him, and you know, I was hearing
Speaker 2: murmurs that that he was very unhappy with what I
Speaker 2: was working on. And then the National Police Agency told
Speaker 2: me to come to the office and said, well, you know,
Speaker 2: you're under police protection. Apparently there's a contract out on
Speaker 2: you and you know what exactly are you up to?
Speaker 2: And so that was very awkward too, because it's kind
Speaker 2: of like, you know, I didn't really want to give
Speaker 2: up my sources, but they were quite aware of the
Speaker 2: fact that this deal had been made with the FBI
Speaker 2: and happy about it, so maybe they wanted this story
Speaker 2: out as well.
Speaker 1: Cigo kind of tipped you off, didn't the.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, Sigo is one of the people's like, you know,
Speaker 2: you you may be in some serious problems here, you know,
Speaker 2: that's a That's the weird thing about the underworld is
Speaker 2: it's like a giant junior high school where everybody knows
Speaker 2: each other, so you you get to hear things from
Speaker 2: other people, you know, even the other Well, this is
Speaker 2: kind of strange. I've always been strange to be so
Speaker 2: can you imagine like the Crips and the Bloods sending
Speaker 2: Christmas cards to each other, not really no, but in
Speaker 2: Japan that's totally the way that you have all these
Speaker 2: different organizations. You have the Sumiyo Skai, you have the amumi,
Speaker 2: and to some extent you can have you can be
Speaker 2: an in and you can be a blood brother with
Speaker 2: a member of someone in the Sumiokai. So you have
Speaker 2: these alliances that transcend organizations. So it comes very complicated.
Speaker 2: Who knows what? And one third of the akas are
Speaker 2: Korean Japanese, and because Koreans in Japan are subject to
Speaker 2: auto discrimination, so there's a substrata of people in the
Speaker 2: akasa groups who know each other as like, well, you're
Speaker 2: a fellow Korean, and even though we're in different organizations,
Speaker 2: we have this in common. And I was kind of
Speaker 2: like navigating that labyrinth of connections between the organizations to
Speaker 2: get information because it's reporter. Information is what you want, right,
Speaker 2: That's what gets you a scoop.
Speaker 1: So let's let's pick up the got story towards the
Speaker 1: end as we kind of jump forward in time, and
Speaker 1: I'd like to dive in a little bit deeper with
Speaker 1: you into the yakuza, and if you can tell us
Speaker 1: a little bit. You alluded to already a bit about
Speaker 1: the history of it. I think it's very very interesting
Speaker 1: in the last Kuza, how you explain that, you know,
Speaker 1: the yakuza in a lot of ways was born out
Speaker 1: of a segment of the Japanese population that was marginalized
Speaker 1: and they weren't allowed to work normal jobs. So like
Speaker 1: the kind of the system sort of created this underworld
Speaker 1: at the time.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, so you know, originally, you know, let's talk
Speaker 2: about let's go back to eighteen seventy stuff. There are
Speaker 2: two kinds of yakers that there were street merchants, and
Speaker 2: there were federations of gamers. But the Second World War comes,
Speaker 2: it ends disastrously for Japan and you have all these people. Sorry,
Speaker 2: my phone is making annoying noises. Actually that was funny.
Speaker 2: Was just telling me there's an Enegalachai meeting tomorrow. They
Speaker 2: have meet monthly meetings, and you can watch all the
Speaker 2: cars line up in front of their office and raponki
Speaker 2: across from Riz Carlton.
Speaker 1: Did they have someone that takes the minutes of the meeting.
Speaker 2: Yes, jes see, I'm just going to take some into
Speaker 2: the meetings. It's it's I mean, like I said, right,
Speaker 2: so it's very in your faith, right, So uh, they
Speaker 2: have a monthly meeting, it's usually the same day, and
Speaker 2: then you can sort of do yaka the watching. You
Speaker 2: can watch them come in their cars and see you.
Speaker 2: I think the Lexus is their favorite brand now, Eastern Mercedes,
Speaker 2: Benz and the cops are all lined up there, you know,
Speaker 2: watching them come in and out of the meetings. And
Speaker 2: sometimes there's still some reporters from the weekly magazines there
Speaker 2: to photograph the meetings. So that's always surreal. But back
Speaker 2: to your point. So World War two ends and you know,
Speaker 2: these guys come back from the war and it's total chaos. Right.
Speaker 2: The Japanese police force exists, but they have a limited
Speaker 2: ability to police things, especially what are called third party nationals.
Speaker 2: Third party nationals are people who were under the Imperial Japan,
Speaker 2: the Taiwanese and the Chinese and the Koreans technically Japanese citizens,
Speaker 2: but not really. So after the war ends and Japan
Speaker 2: starts rebuilding, these people don't fit in. Like if you're
Speaker 2: a Korean Japanese, even if you nationalize, you know, the
Speaker 2: jobs open to you are basically Korean barbecue rafel Leve
Speaker 2: Hotel owner, Pachinko parlor, pachinko Parlo being kind of like
Speaker 2: a gambling pinball machine place. And so the Akasa, though,
Speaker 2: we're a meritocracy, so if you could do the time,
Speaker 2: and you could do the crime, they would let you in.
Speaker 2: And there's a other weird outcast class in Japan called
Speaker 2: Barackomene are people who traditionally worked with leather where butchers
Speaker 2: dealt with animals because that was considered unclean to kill
Speaker 2: an animal. And the Akasa welcomed these people and didn't
Speaker 2: care what your ethnic background is or whether you were
Speaker 2: part of the Baracomine class, and that was one of
Speaker 2: the reasons that they did so well. And they also
Speaker 2: have this code. I wouldn't even call it a code
Speaker 2: of honor. It's a code of conduct which is certain
Speaker 2: things would get you kicked out of the ax especially
Speaker 2: in the early days, which is petty theft that'll get
Speaker 2: you kicked out. Robbery. Robbery is taking things with violence, right,
Speaker 2: you know, like mugging someone on the street, dealing and
Speaker 2: using drugs. Of course, sexual assault because you know that
Speaker 2: is not acceptable and that would get you kicked out.
Speaker 2: But everything else, extortion, racketeering, threatening people, that was all okay.
Speaker 2: You can do all those things.
Speaker 1: So what was it really a code or was it
Speaker 1: more like guidelines.
Speaker 2: It's a code, and you know every every faction has
Speaker 2: its own code and ethics, but the Inegalai especially right
Speaker 2: and then always like all these things, it depends on
Speaker 2: the Boston. You broke that code, they kicked you out.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that issues that the people
Speaker 2: had with God was that he killed civilians, and killing
Speaker 2: civilians with a big no no. Threatening journalists was a
Speaker 2: big no note because you know, Japan had some sort
Speaker 2: of social contract with the akasa and the police as well.
Speaker 2: It's like, okay, you know, you have these things that
Speaker 2: you do and you make your money that nobody else
Speaker 2: wants to do, and we're fine with that. But once
Speaker 2: you step out of those lines, then you're just common criminals.
Speaker 1: Let's get a couple things out of the way that
Speaker 1: are sort of like the visible things about the yakuza
Speaker 1: that people know about. Specifically, I want to talk about
Speaker 1: the tattoos and the sacrificial finger that gets authorized or
Speaker 1: offered as apology. What are the truth behind sort of
Speaker 1: these like the cultural mystique of the yakuza.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you know, I'm opening this up here to
Speaker 2: these guys. See this guy, this is the leader of them.
Speaker 2: Give me right here attending a attending a funeral for
Speaker 2: one of the founders of the organization. Oh, next to
Speaker 2: this is also a penis in large Manand they always
Speaker 2: have penis in large branants in these magazines.
Speaker 1: Who doesn't want one?
Speaker 2: Actually, I can tell you a funny story about the
Speaker 2: yacht of the Bosston about one of these operations went bad.
Speaker 2: Plate we'll move that later to the conversation. So, you know,
Speaker 2: discussA snobson is missing a finger and and and it's
Speaker 2: unclear why he's missing that finger, but I do know
Speaker 2: that it was an issue for the Amagumi when I
Speaker 2: wrote an article and I published a photo of him
Speaker 2: with the vice chairman of Japan's Olympic committee in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2: You know this is Japan, right, the vice chairman of
Speaker 2: Japan's Olympic committee photographed and clearly friends with the head
Speaker 2: of Japan's largest organized crime group. Was a minor issue,
Speaker 2: and that was a nice scoop for me. But before
Speaker 2: I published the article, I called up someone in the
Speaker 2: Amachigumi and said, like, basically, I'm writing this article. You
Speaker 2: know I'm not the only one that could write it
Speaker 2: as a professional courtesy. I'm letting you know. And the
Speaker 2: only thing that was said to me was could you
Speaker 2: crop the photo so that we don't see itscassa as
Speaker 2: missing as middle is a little picky there because he's
Speaker 2: very sensitive about it. I said, I can't do that,
Speaker 2: but I can't include a line in the article that
Speaker 2: your boss is honorable because I did so. First, we'll
Speaker 2: get to this the little the little finger thing. Uh.
Speaker 2: In a time when Japanese people use sorts, right, if
Speaker 2: you cut off this finger here, you weaken your sword drip.
Speaker 2: So it is a sign of appeasement. By offering up
Speaker 2: part of your finger to the person you wrong, you're
Speaker 2: showing that you are sorry, and you're weakening yourself, just
Speaker 2: like a dog shows its neck right in a dogfight,
Speaker 2: to say, like, if you want to take me out,
Speaker 2: take me out, you know, let me live. So when
Speaker 2: yaka the culture, there's two reasons you cut off your finger,
Speaker 2: and usually it's just the tip of your pinky, right,
Speaker 2: you know, because you know you don't want to cut
Speaker 2: off this much, this much If you screwed up and
Speaker 2: you're chopping off your finger, so that you can stay
Speaker 2: in the organization or make amends or not pay a debt.
Speaker 2: But you owe that is called a shinny UVII. That
Speaker 2: is a dead finger. But if you do it on
Speaker 2: behalf of so your brother or your your friend in
Speaker 2: the organization who is done something wrong. Maybe he's stolen
Speaker 2: money from the organization, maybe he's maybe he's cooperated too
Speaker 2: much with the cops, maybe he's fallen asleep on his
Speaker 2: job as a bodyguard. Anyways, screwed up. And you do
Speaker 2: that on behalf of him, then that is called an ecup,
Speaker 2: which is a living finger, and that is considered very
Speaker 2: honorable to sacrifice part of yourself, are getting a part
Speaker 2: of yourself or somebody else, That is an honorable thing.
Speaker 2: And even though if you and I look at someone's finger,
Speaker 2: all et is a missing finger right in the opposite
Speaker 2: world which I which is like you know, Tokyo Junior
Speaker 2: High School, everybody knows that that finger is either a
Speaker 2: dead finger or a living finger.
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Speaker 1: And it's also the idea is that it makes you
Speaker 1: more reliant on the organization, right, Like that's the part
Speaker 1: of the symbolism behind it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the part of the symbolizations. You've you've chopped
Speaker 2: with the finger. You're lying on the organization for your
Speaker 2: bread and butter because now you're weaker. But it's also
Speaker 2: a sign that you've been tolling for something. But it
Speaker 2: can also be a symbol of strength, right you know,
Speaker 2: it's painful to cut that off, so you show somebody
Speaker 2: your missing finger and it's like like, okay, this is
Speaker 2: someone who is enduring great pain to stay where they are,
Speaker 2: or enduring great pain on behalf of somebody else. And
Speaker 2: in the fifties and sixties it sort of became like
Speaker 2: a cool thing to chop off a finger, like people
Speaker 2: who look for excuses like Mike, you know, what can
Speaker 2: I do to justifying chopping on my face? Years so
Speaker 2: I looked like a tough guy. Uh. I don't know
Speaker 2: if I mentioned this in the book, but people don't
Speaker 2: like to say yakaz Jefpanes's polite society because it's you know,
Speaker 2: it scares people, right, it's you know, it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's not it's not said lightly. So often instead of
Speaker 2: saying yakaza, they do this, and that symbolizes a cut
Speaker 2: across the fai. So in the Akasa world, it used
Speaker 2: to be, especially in the days when you're having lots
Speaker 2: of gang wars, that instead of killing you, I would
Speaker 2: slash you across the face to show that I let you.
Speaker 2: And amongst the Akasa that sort of became kind of
Speaker 2: a cool thing. But it's like, wow, I've been in
Speaker 2: a deadly sight, which I survived. So some of them
Speaker 2: started doing it to themselves, so that became. That's still
Speaker 2: the mark of the well.
Speaker 1: Speaking of that, I mean, is that the same rationale
Speaker 1: behind the tattoos. It's sort of like showing your loyalty
Speaker 1: to the organization and that I'm this tough guy outsider
Speaker 1: in society.
Speaker 2: Because there's five there's maybe five reasons you do that.
Speaker 2: One is, I mean, I love these people said that
Speaker 2: their tattoos area is One reason that you what you do.
Speaker 2: The tattoos is because it shows that you are tough.
Speaker 2: Because the tattoos down the traditional Japanese way are incredibly painful.
Speaker 2: I mean there's lots of blood. They're done with kind
Speaker 2: of a an awl awl, like a sort of blood instrument,
Speaker 2: using sumi, which is kind of like charcoal. It's very painful.
Speaker 2: The skin is almost burnt sometimes, you know, it never
Speaker 2: returns to its tense, like you can't feel any warmth.
Speaker 2: It's like the skin is dead, like somebody's burned there
Speaker 2: in the evening. They call it mom, which literally means endurance.
Speaker 2: So a tattoo shows one that you have separated yourself
Speaker 2: from normal straight society, right, You've branded yourself I'm an outlaw.
Speaker 2: The other is I am tough. I have my toughness
Speaker 2: can be seen on my tattoo, the density of the
Speaker 2: tattoos on my skin. Sometimes the boss will pay for
Speaker 2: your tattoo, in which case you have to have the
Speaker 2: boss's name and the organization's emblem engrave on your chest.
Speaker 2: So that's like corporate branding taking and it's you know,
Speaker 2: to the ultimate level. Right, you are part of the
Speaker 2: Enangalachi for ever it's on your chest. And another thing
Speaker 2: is it shows you have money. It's like a rolex, right,
Speaker 2: the deeper the you know, the deeper the tattoo, the
Speaker 2: more colorful it is, the more finite it is, and
Speaker 2: the more of your body it covers, it shows that
Speaker 2: you have patience, endurance, and money. It takes hundreds of
Speaker 2: hours to get a full body tattoo, and all of
Speaker 2: those things make the tattoo very lower to the end.
Speaker 1: So that I guess the next thing before we go
Speaker 1: on to some stories and get back to Saigo, could
Speaker 1: you kind of like briefly outline sort of like the
Speaker 1: landscape and territory of the yakuza groups. I think you
Speaker 1: mentioned that there's about twenty of them. It's sort of
Speaker 1: like their territories.
Speaker 2: So the Yamaguchigumi, which is the largest one is is
Speaker 2: headquartered in Kobe, So Kobe is in western Japan, Kansai.
Speaker 2: They have like an entire city block and they have
Speaker 2: branches all over Japan. They're used to be an agreement.
Speaker 2: Up until two thousand and five, the Yamagumi couldn't open
Speaker 2: offices in Tokyo. Tokyo is off limits to them, and
Speaker 2: that was a very clear divide until two thousand and five.
Speaker 2: The inning Awa Kai is mostly western Japan, Tokyo, Saitama, Guma,
Speaker 2: Fukushima where the nuclear accident happened. They have power based
Speaker 2: there semi national, but not in Okinawa and not very
Speaker 2: powerful in Kshu. The sumiyos Kai, it's mostly located in
Speaker 2: Tokyo in surrounding areas. Ginza is their territory, so they
Speaker 2: get a lot of money and revenue from the hosts,
Speaker 2: clubs and clubs in the Ginsa area, which is a
Speaker 2: very rich area, and some of their mostly Tokyo based.
Speaker 2: The Matsuba Kai is sort of Yuma area. And then
Speaker 2: you have things like the Kudo Kai which is in Kshu,
Speaker 2: which is a very powerful, very violent group, actually the
Speaker 2: most violent of the actual groups. Is fudo kai. They're
Speaker 2: the guys that throw grenades into the bars of people
Speaker 2: that won't pay money. Most act of groups are a
Speaker 2: little better about cultivating good relationship with the public. If
Speaker 2: you throw grenades into a host as far that won't
Speaker 2: pay you money, the cops are going to come down
Speaker 2: you on. The people aren't going to look at you
Speaker 2: as benevolent out outlast.
Speaker 1: In your books, you kind of make the point that
Speaker 1: the yakuza do normally play a sort of stabilizing role
Speaker 1: in society rather than a disruptive one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, think about it this way. In a time
Speaker 2: when in a time when you know, the police were
Speaker 2: shorthanded yakas that basically keep street crime to a minimum
Speaker 2: in the areas that they control, and they control every
Speaker 2: and they controlled all of everybody paid protection money, and
Speaker 2: in return for that, no one was allowed to steal
Speaker 2: a person. No one was allowed to be robbing places
Speaker 2: in the neighborhood, because that's bad for business. You want
Speaker 2: people to go to the red light district and spend
Speaker 2: their money without worrying about getting mugged or whether we're
Speaker 2: worrying about getting robbed or having their credit cards stolen.
Speaker 2: So you know, some levels, even the police considered them
Speaker 2: anecessary evil because they limited their activities to certain certain activities,
Speaker 2: which were collecting money from construction companies, bid rigging, you know, racketeering, gambling,
Speaker 2: and you know, making pornography and other things that have
Speaker 2: always been on the sort of the outside of Japanese life.
Speaker 2: And you know, everybody paid the money, and that was
Speaker 2: kind of the revenue stream there. It's like you ran
Speaker 2: a bar, you paid the money. If you were building
Speaker 2: an apartment building in the neighborhood, you paid the money,
Speaker 2: and in return for that, they kept you know, a
Speaker 2: minimum of trouble out. And also at a time when
Speaker 2: there weren't enough lawyers in Japan. This is a very
Speaker 2: weird but truth true thing, and it needs to be
Speaker 2: very hard to pass the bar in Japan, so there
Speaker 2: was a shortage of lawyers. So if you had a
Speaker 2: civil dispute with someone, right, someone didn't pay you money,
Speaker 2: or someone cheated you on a construction job, it might
Speaker 2: take you years to get your case into court and
Speaker 2: win the court battle, in which case the court wouldn't
Speaker 2: necessarily enforce the settlement, but if you went to the Yakada,
Speaker 2: they would handle it. Immediately and they would give you
Speaker 2: half of what you were owned, which is better than none.
Speaker 2: So for a long time, the yakada played a huge
Speaker 2: role in start selling civil disputes, car accidents, damages to
Speaker 2: property was expensive and time consuming to go to a lawyer.
Speaker 2: You went to the local yakaza and they took care
Speaker 2: of it for you. So as the number of lawyers
Speaker 2: in Japan has increased, the number of yakuza had also decreased.
Speaker 2: I can't say whether there's a correlation, but one lawyer
Speaker 2: I know who specializes in dealing with the yaka, you know,
Speaker 2: he was always saying, yeah, you know, one of the
Speaker 2: reasons the acada declient is because there's more lawyers here,
Speaker 2: so their services aort I needed.
Speaker 1: Before we kind of get back to Sigo's story, one
Speaker 1: character in your books, especially the Last Akuza, is filled
Speaker 1: with colorful characters. The one that I got to mention
Speaker 1: and ask you about was this guy that you name
Speaker 1: in the book as Coach, which was Sigo's sort of
Speaker 1: mentor for a long time. And this guy is like
Speaker 1: the real Tokyo godfather, wears sunglasses, even indoors, chain smoking cigarettes,
Speaker 1: and you know, Lecturer and his boys the yakuza used
Speaker 1: to follow a code. You know, sounds like absolutely the
Speaker 1: kind of guy you'd want to have a few drinks with.
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, is a great guy. I mean he was
Speaker 2: a great guy. He's a really i mean right out
Speaker 2: of the movies. You know, before he was a yakuza,
Speaker 2: he was a baseball player in the Tumbull Fires. So
Speaker 2: he's got some really sort of force ethic to him
Speaker 2: and you know, keep a leek in the words he
Speaker 2: is passed. I mean, he was quite strict about that
Speaker 2: code of honor, you know, the one that was written
Speaker 2: on the wall of the office, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: Yakaza do not bother ordinary people. Yakuza do not steal,
Speaker 2: they do not rob, they do not engage in sexual assault,
Speaker 2: they do not engage in decency, they don't use drugs,
Speaker 2: they don't bother civilians.
Speaker 1: That quote in your book you you attribute to him,
Speaker 1: he says we're less than beggars, but better than thieves.
Speaker 1: And never forget that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, less than a beggar, better than the thief. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Kind of one of the things that's really interesting about
Speaker 2: You've seen the TV series, right, so students have got
Speaker 2: the plays kind of all it's not right. He's a
Speaker 2: really sweet guy in real life. The guy who's issued though, right,
Speaker 2: they're going with the crew cut and wear sunglasses sort of.
Speaker 2: They hear the leader of the Chihara Kai student Scotta,
Speaker 2: has been around so long and he's been in so
Speaker 2: many Akaza movies that he knew kind of how he
Speaker 2: knew the individual that he's essentially playing a TV version
Speaker 2: of which I thought was fascinating, and that was one
Speaker 2: of the reasons I think they was so good at
Speaker 2: the role. It was if you put two pictures of
Speaker 2: them together, they look similar. They have the same vibe.
Speaker 1: And the I mean what also in your book kind
Speaker 1: of strips some of the romanticism away from the yakuza
Speaker 1: is coach and other bosses in these organizations. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're part crime lord, but they're also like social worker
Speaker 1: to all of their underlings, trying to get them off
Speaker 1: of methamphetamine and all kinds of other shit.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean it's like people who join the
Speaker 2: akas are usually not very you know, socially adept people, right,
Speaker 2: and so there was a kind of rationale and the
Speaker 2: head of the amagu Scubbies as well as we take
Speaker 2: people who are misfits, and we give them some discipline
Speaker 2: and we give them some training so they're not running
Speaker 2: amok and would you rather have them, you know, discipline
Speaker 2: criminals and disorganized criminals running around. And there's some truth
Speaker 2: to that as well. What is said is that people
Speaker 2: like the coach in recent years and and also a
Speaker 2: result of increasingly harsh legislation, have sort of disappeared. So
Speaker 2: the age where you know, the ri yaka who said,
Speaker 2: we won't do this because it's unethical, we won't do
Speaker 2: this because it's against the code, those guys have all
Speaker 2: faded out because you know, it's so hard to make
Speaker 2: a living. And then Nagalakai, you know, a lot of
Speaker 2: the people who were ethical, who insisted on following the
Speaker 2: old code have been kicked out because it's all about
Speaker 2: the money, you know, honor and no nobility. And you
Speaker 2: know what they called Nino the way of chivalry that
Speaker 2: the as supposed to his spouse, that's just an obstacle
Speaker 2: to getting things stuff.
Speaker 1: Let's jump back into Sigo's story for a bit, because
Speaker 1: you have a totally crazy story about how he has
Speaker 1: to cut his finger off and you talk about how
Speaker 1: it's kind of like some of the stories around this
Speaker 1: this thing is bullshit, and a lot of guys find
Speaker 1: doctors to do it for them, but Sigo decides he's
Speaker 1: got to do it himself and it turns into like
Speaker 1: a four alarm shit show in his kitchen.
Speaker 2: Oh oh yeah, yeah, this is a great story. And
Speaker 2: you know, his his wife, Juko Son, you know, when
Speaker 2: I asked her about it, she's just so very matter
Speaker 2: of fact about it, like like oh yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: like like you know, like telling a funny story about
Speaker 2: like maybe your husband, you know, getting a bad haircut.
Speaker 2: But basically he doesn't know how to do it, and
Speaker 2: so he gets like a sashimi knife and puts it
Speaker 2: on there, and you know, he and his wife trying
Speaker 2: to do it and they're not very successful. And then they,
Speaker 2: you know, try and do it with the cutting board
Speaker 2: and that isn't very successful, and if you know, you
Speaker 2: have to turn over the finger to do it, and
Speaker 2: it's just a bloody buddy mess. And at one point,
Speaker 2: one of his henchmen, who used to be in the
Speaker 2: band with him, you know, as they're dealing with this,
Speaker 2: finally chopping off the finger and getting this new and
Speaker 2: wrapping it in you know, what are they going to do.
Speaker 2: And it's this very dark moment in the household where
Speaker 2: there's blood all you know, there's a I don't think
Speaker 2: there's actually she said there wasn't a lot of blood.
Speaker 2: But you've got this finger, you've got the cutting board,
Speaker 2: you've got to wrap it up in things. Is that
Speaker 2: he takes the finger and he puts it in his
Speaker 2: nose and sort of shakes his head around with it
Speaker 2: to make everybody laugh, which they do. That's just you know,
Speaker 2: it is. It is bizarre. But I guess if you're
Speaker 2: there at the moment, there is something very comical about
Speaker 2: how hard it is to chop boxer chap. I think
Speaker 2: they're actually books written to show you how to do
Speaker 2: it the right way.
Speaker 1: So Saigo has this like interesting trajectory through the Yakuza.
Speaker 1: He's a methamphetamine addict, comes in and out of it,
Speaker 1: falls off the wagon. Coach tries to reform him, and
Speaker 1: he ends up getting kicked out right because he owes
Speaker 1: he can't pay his union dues as it were.
Speaker 2: Right right right, Yeah, union news. That's a great, great word.
Speaker 2: I always say association dues, but union dus is a
Speaker 2: better word. Yes, he gets kicked out.
Speaker 1: You want to talk a little bit about like how
Speaker 1: that happens and like the rise and fall of Sago.
Speaker 2: Oh sure, sir. So most people enter the akaza, that's
Speaker 2: what they call sumikomi, meaning like they go to the
Speaker 2: Yakuza Boston, like make me a man, and then they
Speaker 2: live inside of the akuza office. Is so like one
Speaker 2: to two years. They're basically answering the phone. They're you know,
Speaker 2: washing the back of the boss. They're following him around.
Speaker 2: There is secretary, there's caddy. They're answering the phones, and
Speaker 2: they learned the trade by living in the establishment, and
Speaker 2: they're given kind of an allowance. But Sigo started as
Speaker 2: a basically a motorcycle gangster running a motorcycle gang created
Speaker 2: his own right wing group that sort of functioned as
Speaker 2: a group shaking down local merchants and asking them to
Speaker 2: pay money to join his right wing organization or buy
Speaker 2: the periodical that the right wing organization was putting out.
Speaker 2: And when he decided to join the Innigala Chai because
Speaker 2: he had a dispute with another gang boss, he you know,
Speaker 2: he was entered like at a high level, like the
Speaker 2: equivalent of going to West Point right instead of starting
Speaker 2: as a private and working your way up, you know,
Speaker 2: from a listed you know, he'd already established his own organization.
Speaker 2: They welcome him. So he came in at like a
Speaker 2: captain memo.
Speaker 1: And he kind of like set up. He ended up
Speaker 1: having his own office and everything. What was the nickname
Speaker 1: they gave to his little kingdom.
Speaker 2: Oh, oh, well, I mean he had the nickname Tsunami
Speaker 2: because he was so violent and unpredictable, like a tropical
Speaker 2: storm that you never knew was coming. So he had
Speaker 2: his own little uh, his own little his own little
Speaker 2: Kumi there, you know, Sygogumi. So his own area in
Speaker 2: church there that was he has property and everybody, you know, uh,
Speaker 2: everybody in that area of paint Machid. The city was
Speaker 2: where he had most of his most of his power base.
Speaker 2: And as he rose up to you know, as you
Speaker 2: were up to the ladder. You know, the Eni al
Speaker 2: Kai is a very bureaucratic organization, so everybody wants to
Speaker 2: rise to the top. And at one point they had
Speaker 2: ten thousand organizations. So he became like an executive director,
Speaker 2: which is a very high position, and he was doing,
Speaker 2: you know, pretty well in the organization until a violent
Speaker 2: shooting in his neighborhood involving another yakaz member really brought
Speaker 2: down the police hard on the whole organization where he lived,
Speaker 2: and money started to dry up as people just said
Speaker 2: they wouldn't pay protection money anymore. And one of the things,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the reasons you're you join the Yakaza, right,
Speaker 2: is it's like a franchise, so you're paying basically for
Speaker 2: the rights, like nope. So the amaguchigubi here right, the
Speaker 2: name the organization, the symbol of the organization. It gets
Speaker 2: you money, it gets you power. If you don't have
Speaker 2: that organization. Marty Eric McDonald's about the Golden arches, and
Speaker 2: that costs money, and that costs everywhere anywhere between one
Speaker 2: thousand dollars a month to twenty thousand dollars to stay
Speaker 2: on good terms. The higher you rise, the more money
Speaker 2: you have to pay. And he wasn't able to pay
Speaker 2: the money. And when you're not able to pay your dues,
Speaker 2: they kick you out. And also he didn't answer his
Speaker 2: phone for a couple of days as well, which is
Speaker 2: a real bad one in the acaza. What is it
Speaker 2: like in the military if you're like on duty and
Speaker 2: you are on vacation, you don't answer your phone, you
Speaker 2: get in big trouble.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you'd be in some trouble if you're on duty
Speaker 1: and not answering the phone.
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, what if you're on vacation, you still get
Speaker 2: in big trouble if you like, you know, you're on.
Speaker 1: Question and recovery, and probably not if you're on vacation.
Speaker 2: Now, okay, Well, this guy's active duty, right, so he
Speaker 2: basically disappeared from duty for like seven days that he's
Speaker 2: pissed off and they kicked him out, and he just
Speaker 2: had a kid, and now he's got no revenue. And meanwhile, like,
Speaker 2: I am under police protection, but I'm really tired of
Speaker 2: like not being a feeling like I can't leave the house.
Speaker 2: And so I heard that he's you know, that he's
Speaker 2: out of a job. And at the time, if you
Speaker 2: read Tokyo More, I'm doing these due diligence work, right,
Speaker 2: so I've got a nice steady stream of money doing
Speaker 2: these corporate investigations coming in. And I also realized that he,
Speaker 2: you know, doesn't like go too Tatamasa, that he's not
Speaker 2: a big fan of him, and I'm like, you know,
Speaker 2: this is probably synergy. So we have a meeting at
Speaker 2: my house and I basically say, look, you know, you
Speaker 2: don't have a job and I need protection and I
Speaker 2: and also you have a car. I don't have a
Speaker 2: driver's license. What do you say? And so sort of reluctantly,
Speaker 2: but also because he didn't have much of a choice,
Speaker 2: He's like, okay, I will be your bodyguard and I
Speaker 2: will be your driver. But I have one condition. And
Speaker 2: I'm like, what is that condition? He said, I want
Speaker 2: you to write a book about my life and about
Speaker 2: the actors of because I am proud of who I
Speaker 2: am and what we've done. I want my son to
Speaker 2: know who his father was when he grows up. And so,
Speaker 2: you know, I agree with him on the condition that
Speaker 2: I get to write the truth about the aakaza and
Speaker 2: not another book talking about how there are these noble outlaws,
Speaker 2: you know, fearless men fighting for you know, traditional Japan.
Speaker 2: And he was okay with that, and that was the
Speaker 2: start of that book, was hiring him as a as
Speaker 2: a bodyguarden. He wanted me to write this this story
Speaker 2: about about the actada and his life and you know,
Speaker 2: what are the akasa and there you know what he
Speaker 2: saw as their decline from being principal people to just
Speaker 2: money grubbing organization.
Speaker 1: And so, how did the situation between you and go
Speaker 1: to end up getting resolved?
Speaker 2: Oh, it ended up getting resolved like this. Uh. I
Speaker 2: wrote an article that came out of the Washington Post.
Speaker 2: Then another article came out in the Los Angeles Times,
Speaker 2: and then suddenly it became I became the least of
Speaker 2: his problems. And I think that someone way up in
Speaker 2: the organization told him Mike, at this point in time,
Speaker 2: considering the bad press that would that it would bring, you,
Speaker 2: do not harm this journalist. And also, because I'm not
Speaker 2: an idiot, when I was writing the articles for the
Speaker 2: Washington Post, I went to one of his rivals in
Speaker 2: the organization in the same Amaguchi gum. Right, because it's
Speaker 2: the amagu Me is factional, right. I don't know if
Speaker 2: people understand that, Like it's not like the army, and
Speaker 2: it's not like it's not like the navy. It is
Speaker 2: a group of organized crime groups under the umbrella the Amaguchigumi.
Speaker 2: But even within that organization there are conflicts between the factions.
Speaker 2: So they Aamaguchi Gumi, the tatguomi Me and the hana busagumi.
Speaker 2: They all may be fighting for the same territory and
Speaker 2: revenue streams, even though they're under the same umbrella. And
Speaker 2: amongst these yachta, the bosses, they don't all get along, right.
Speaker 2: So you've got you know, sixty or seventy organizations within
Speaker 2: the amakachu me. So I thought of the one yachta
Speaker 2: to the boss who really disliked God and probably would
Speaker 2: like his turf and territory. So I went to him
Speaker 2: and I asked him for a comment for the Washington
Speaker 2: Post article. First I had to go to a tenant,
Speaker 2: and then I spoke directly to the public big boss.
Speaker 2: And as we were speaking, I also felt that there
Speaker 2: was this kind of communication between it which was like,
Speaker 2: you know, as they say in the yaka the world,
Speaker 2: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And I
Speaker 2: was basically saying to him without saying it bluntly, is
Speaker 2: keep me alive and let me write my article and
Speaker 2: this will result in the downfall of your rival, and
Speaker 2: that church and Charryty is yours. And that seemed to
Speaker 2: have worked out very nicely because there was no contract
Speaker 2: on me after the Washington Post article came out, but
Speaker 2: the police still kept me under protection for another five
Speaker 2: years in total.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting how like got and also coach they
Speaker 1: have these like interesting deaths or like deaths and air
Speaker 1: quotes like you're never really sure did they die or
Speaker 1: did they just fade away? Where did they go?
Speaker 2: You know, Yakuza sometimes disappear, so the coach, you know,
Speaker 2: his death is shouted in the streamers like people aren't
Speaker 2: supposed to talk about it, and I think that's how
Speaker 2: he wanted it to be. Remember, go to Tamasa is
Speaker 2: famous for attacking this film director made me tell me Jusso,
Speaker 2: so you tell me Juso made this film in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety two called the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion and
Speaker 2: the Japanese titles meanable to All. And Godo's men attacked
Speaker 2: this director at his phone and they sliced open his
Speaker 2: face very slowly, so less stars. And a few years
Speaker 2: later in nineteen ninety nine, I think around nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 2: the director allegedly committed suicide by jumping from the top
Speaker 2: of a building just as he was making another film
Speaker 2: that had connections to Tokumi. But one of Godo's guys
Speaker 2: named Mikuni told me you know on the conditions, on
Speaker 2: the conditions that I couldn't tell his name unless ten
Speaker 2: years have gone by for the time he told me,
Speaker 2: he said, yeah, well you know that director. He told
Speaker 2: me it didn't kill himself. He was taken to a
Speaker 2: roof and they put a gun in his face and
Speaker 2: they told him you could either jump and you might live,
Speaker 2: or you can stay here. We'll go off your face
Speaker 2: and they'll definitely die. And I assumed that he could.
Speaker 2: He told me that because he was hoping that would
Speaker 2: be his insurance policy. But he's been missing now for
Speaker 2: five years and nobody knows where he is. I mean,
Speaker 2: easy yaka that you can find his name in the newspapers,
Speaker 2: you can find his name in the yakasavand magazines. But
Speaker 2: he's gone now. Is he in hiding? Is he in
Speaker 2: the bottom of a building in Tokyo, buried in the
Speaker 2: cement base when they're a foundation of the building. I
Speaker 2: don't know. But sometimes yaka that really do fade away,
Speaker 2: like where did this guy go? And there's a lot
Speaker 2: of them. I mean, there used to be eighty thousand
Speaker 2: yachta to Japan. Now there's nineteen thousand, Like, so where
Speaker 2: did those others sixty sixty one thousand Yakas I ad
Speaker 2: vantaged to do they find new jobs? Are they in prison?
Speaker 2: What are they doing now?
Speaker 1: A couple sidebars I'd like to talk about before moving on.
Speaker 1: One of them is the North Korean connection with the
Speaker 1: part Chenko parlors. M can tell us about that.
Speaker 2: Oh sure, yeah, gee. I don't know how many of
Speaker 2: you listeners understand what pachinko is, but a well try
Speaker 2: and explain it as simply as I can. So. Pachinko
Speaker 2: is kind of like a pinball machine that's vertical, So
Speaker 2: you put in the steel ball press a button, ball
Speaker 2: goes in. If the ball hits the right targets, it
Speaker 2: triggers like an avalanche and the machine spews out these
Speaker 2: steel balls. The steel balls you can then take to
Speaker 2: a gift counter. You can get a gift or you
Speaker 2: can get sort of an exchange card, and you can
Speaker 2: go outside of the patinko parlor to another place and
Speaker 2: get it turned into cash. So that is sort of
Speaker 2: legalized gambling in Japan. Pachinko was something that the Korean
Speaker 2: Japanese did after the war, and it was a big
Speaker 2: amusement thing. But it looked like the Japanese government was
Speaker 2: going to outlaw them all together. So, you know, most
Speaker 2: of the Japanese dollers quit, but the Koreans kept kept
Speaker 2: running the patinko parlors and the Patica powers are still
Speaker 2: a big part of the gambling landscape today, even though
Speaker 2: it's you know, semi legal gambling. But remember Korea splits
Speaker 2: into Korea, South Korea, North Korea, and the Koreans left
Speaker 2: in Japan have to choose an alliance going to a lion.
Speaker 2: You know, am I going to claim citizenship in North Korea?
Speaker 2: Am I going to change?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: Am I gonna claim citizenship at South Korea? And for
Speaker 2: those who have relatives in North Korea, the patinko parlors
Speaker 2: became indirectly North Korean revenue because if you have family
Speaker 2: members in North Korea and you're in Japan and you're
Speaker 2: living there and you're running Patica power, the North Korean
Speaker 2: associations will come to you and say, you know, your uncle,
Speaker 2: your sister, your brother, your cousin. You know they're going
Speaker 2: to starve to death unless you contribute some money to
Speaker 2: the homeland. And so for many years, pachinko industry has
Speaker 2: been one of the sources of North Korea's revenue.
Speaker 1: Does North Korea still make money by selling drugs and
Speaker 1: operating these parowers and so on in Japan?
Speaker 2: Yes, North Korea still has revenue coming. But as generations
Speaker 2: die off, right, you know you had You know, if
Speaker 2: you're a fourth generation Korean in Japan, you don't you
Speaker 2: don't know anybody who's still living in North Korea. You're
Speaker 2: you know, your your uncle, are you are, your grandfather
Speaker 2: or whoever is there. You know, maybe you've never met them.
Speaker 2: You have no idea who they are, so you don't
Speaker 2: feel compelled to pay, so that money keeps t windling.
Speaker 2: What North Korea is really making money now is is
Speaker 2: doing cracking, hacking cryptocurrency exchanges in Japan. I think they've
Speaker 2: done too now. I mean that it has been traced
Speaker 2: in North Korea. North Korea is really good at hacking,
Speaker 2: and they seem to be really good at hacking Japanese
Speaker 2: from the currency exchanges like bitcoin, d and man and
Speaker 2: there was another one just really recently. And I think
Speaker 2: North Korea, while it still makes math amphetamines, it's hard
Speaker 2: to get them into Japan. And they moved on to
Speaker 2: cyber crimes, which brings a lot more revenue.
Speaker 1: Another kind of subplot that you bring out in the
Speaker 1: book that I was surprised to read is about olmshun Rico,
Speaker 1: the cult in Japan that launched a I believe it
Speaker 1: was a saren nerve gas attack in the Japanese subway system,
Speaker 1: killed a couple people. You talk about how they had
Speaker 1: a secondary plot to use a helicopter as a dispersion
Speaker 1: device for another gas attack. Can you tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit about, you know, how you kind of uncovered
Speaker 1: that and reported on that.
Speaker 2: Oh sure. So almos Sinikio was this criminal organization and
Speaker 2: the cult that was an end of the world cult,
Speaker 2: apocalyptic cult, and they recruited people from universities and police
Speaker 2: and the laboratories, and they had this, you know, crazy
Speaker 2: view of the world. And they were also making meth
Speaker 2: amphetamine and wholesaling it to the to the aka, especially
Speaker 2: the Godo Gumi, because you have a bunch of chemists
Speaker 2: there right who can you know, can make a really
Speaker 2: good myth and meth brings in money. It's like it's
Speaker 2: the drug of choice in Japan. So they're producing the drugs,
Speaker 2: they're selling it to the akada. The conduit between the
Speaker 2: Yamagumi and the North Korea and North Korea was an
Speaker 2: ome sort of high free named Mudai. And you know,
Speaker 2: as the police are investigating home Chuinity kill and looking
Speaker 2: at what they're doing and getting a sense of these
Speaker 2: people are maybe producing nerve casts, they are going to
Speaker 2: plan a huge terrorist attack. Uh. One of the organized
Speaker 2: crime cops who was working on the connection between Mhini
Speaker 2: kill in and and the Akasa UH discovered that they
Speaker 2: had purchased a helicopter and that they and that they
Speaker 2: were planning to use it for something nefarious. Uh. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: I think that they managed to make sure that the
Speaker 2: that they were never put soidning gas on the helicopter.
Speaker 2: So the sidning gas attack ended with these paper bags
Speaker 2: full of siding gas being put on the subways all
Speaker 2: around Ibia, which are then poked with holes and uh
Speaker 2: and and it could have killed thousands of people. Fortunately
Speaker 2: they didn't do the helicopter and disperse it over Tokyo.
Speaker 2: I don't know how successful that would have been.
Speaker 1: It could have been disastrous, yeah, I mean if it
Speaker 1: was an aerosol dispersal, it would have been much greater casualties.
Speaker 2: I think, Yeah, they were not make good at making aerosol.
Speaker 2: We know, what I don't know if I remember I
Speaker 2: put in the book or not, is they also had
Speaker 2: a subdivision in New York City, and we're looking about
Speaker 2: spreading it in New York City with the helicopter as well.
Speaker 2: That was part of their plans because because Old Shinekio
Speaker 2: had this you know, this makes no sense, but Old
Speaker 2: Shinekio also had this incredible anti Semitic view that the
Speaker 2: Jews were controlling the world economy and that was one
Speaker 2: of their problems. And they were like, there's so many
Speaker 2: Jews in New York that we should spread sun gas
Speaker 2: there using a helicopter to you know, to change the
Speaker 2: new world order. So that was amongst the crazy things
Speaker 2: that they had planned. And they you know, they have
Speaker 2: purchased helicopters from Russia, so you know, if they hadn't
Speaker 2: been stopped early on, they might have tried it. I
Speaker 2: think we were lucky that we ended up with the
Speaker 2: smaller number of casualists that we had, But these guys
Speaker 2: were crazy. Have you remember the series Millennium with Frank
Speaker 2: with Lyles Hendrickson, Ye, The X Files. Yeah, okay, so
Speaker 2: there's there's one episode, maybe the second episode called Jehenna,
Speaker 2: which was modeled after O Machinikill where you have people,
Speaker 2: they're telemarketers working for this strange cult and there's a
Speaker 2: scene where someone is microwave to death. Well, OLM Schiniko
Speaker 2: did that. They built a giant microwave. One of their
Speaker 2: dissenters they put in the microwave and they like fried
Speaker 2: him a lot. Yeah, these guys were insane, and they
Speaker 2: were working hand in hand with organized crime. And when,
Speaker 2: you know, when it was revealed that Ome had planned,
Speaker 2: you know, had was responsible to the sating gas attacks,
Speaker 2: and that they had tied the Amagikumi, you know, that's
Speaker 2: not good for the public image of the group. Right.
Speaker 2: So Murai, who was ahead of the one of the
Speaker 2: executives of OLM Schinko, was coming out of a press
Speaker 2: conference and he was stabbed to death by this you know,
Speaker 2: so called right winger. And the right winger, of course,
Speaker 2: turned out to be a yakuza, a Korean yakaza. And
Speaker 2: you know, you know, he always claimed that, you know
Speaker 2: that he did it out of patriotic out of patriotic reasons.
Speaker 2: But when Joe, which is the name of the of
Speaker 2: the person who assassinated were I When he got out
Speaker 2: of jail after serving his time for killing this home
Speaker 2: leader who had connections to the go to Gumi. Guess
Speaker 2: who he went to work for.
Speaker 4: SHINRIKOA yeah, really killing Yeah, because he he killed the
Speaker 4: one person that could have fingered the Yakov involvement with
Speaker 4: abcinity kill on his reward when he got out of jail,
Speaker 4: was going to work for Godo hood by this point retired,
Speaker 4: but at least he took care of his own.
Speaker 1: You know something you touched on there that I think
Speaker 1: I'll ask you because it's something that has always baffled
Speaker 1: me personally. As you mentioned that amshin Rico had this
Speaker 1: sort of anti Semitic bent to them, and I've seen
Speaker 1: that a little bit with other like right wing groups
Speaker 1: in Japan. This is sort of anti Semitism, and that
Speaker 1: baffles me because what in the world do the Japanese
Speaker 1: people know about Jews. I mean, we're not talking about
Speaker 1: Israel and Palestine, we're not talking about Europe, we're not
Speaker 1: talking about America. Like there aren't any actual Jewish people
Speaker 1: other than you maybe in Japan. So like, where the
Speaker 1: hell does this notion come from?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, there is there is a Senate, there's
Speaker 2: one or two synagogues. I don't know, you know, I
Speaker 2: mean it's like, remember the Japanese were allied with with
Speaker 2: Germany at one point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, And so.
Speaker 2: I think there's always been this belief that, you know,
Speaker 2: first of all, there's a belief there's a weird respect
Speaker 2: for the Jews. There's a book called the Jews in
Speaker 2: the Japanese which points out the similarity between the Jews
Speaker 2: and the Japanese. So the one I had this kind of
Speaker 2: Japanese santasy world in which they admire like the way
Speaker 2: that this minority group is, you know, gained so much
Speaker 2: power or done so well financially, and there's so many
Speaker 2: sort of geniuses, or the way that they that they
Speaker 2: know that they consider the Jewish family structure very similar
Speaker 2: to a Japanese family structure. And that even you know,
Speaker 2: in this book postulating the Japanese or the Lost Tribe
Speaker 2: of Israel, all that crazy stuff, you know, it doesn't
Speaker 2: make any sense to me. So there's an admiration, and
Speaker 2: there's a fear, and and and one of the weirdest
Speaker 2: stories of World War two is that there was this
Speaker 2: idea that amongst the Japanese elite, some of the generals
Speaker 2: that they couldn't trust Germany because they weren't white, and
Speaker 2: at some point the Germans would turn on them. So
Speaker 2: they smuggled a bunch of Jews out of Shanghai into
Speaker 2: Kobe and gave them safe passage so that when when
Speaker 2: it came time to deal with Germany, that they would
Speaker 2: have Jewish power on their side. And that whole plan
Speaker 2: to smuggle them out of of you know, of German
Speaker 2: territories into Japan and Shanghai. It's called the Fugu plan
Speaker 2: because Fugu has you know, it's this poisonous blowfish, which
Speaker 2: if you handle properly, is a delicious delicacy. If you mishandled,
Speaker 2: can kill you. So, you know, the Japanese fascination our
Speaker 2: fear of Jews is never made any sense to me neither.
Speaker 2: But on my way on my way to the airport,
Speaker 2: there was a book like in the you know, best sellers,
Speaker 2: which was like, you know, how to succeed in business
Speaker 2: like the Jews, And I'm like, really, you're still putting
Speaker 2: this out in the book in five.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is as good a time as any to
Speaker 1: jump into. You've got to tell us the Japanese penis
Speaker 1: or the yakuza penis enlargement story that you told us
Speaker 1: about that went horribly wrong.
Speaker 2: Okay, So here we are. So here's your Yakaza van magazine, right,
Speaker 2: you know, always opens with pictures of the of the
Speaker 2: bosses going to meetings and stuff. I just got to
Speaker 2: show you that you that's that, that's important stuff. Right,
Speaker 2: this is the paparazzi part. Oh yeah, and there's always
Speaker 2: the penis enlargement stuff. So no Mura, who is the
Speaker 2: head of the kudo kai who I have met once.
Speaker 2: I think his name is. You know, in Japan, the
Speaker 2: last names are more important than your first names. He
Speaker 2: sees one of these fands, he decides to get a
Speaker 2: penis enlargement proced you're done. So he's getting done, and
Speaker 2: his nurse noticed that he's wincing, and she says to him,
Speaker 2: look at you with all those tattoos all of your
Speaker 2: body that are so painful to reproduced, and you can't
Speaker 2: take a little prick and she I set him and
Speaker 2: he's really really angry about it. So later his man
Speaker 2: attempt to kill her, and one of the reasons he
Speaker 2: was originally given a death sentence which I think was
Speaker 2: changed to life imprisonment on appeal was for the attention
Speaker 2: murder of this nurse. Oh my god, because he couldn't
Speaker 2: take it that he couldn't take the pain of the
Speaker 2: penis margin procedure.
Speaker 1: Uh, poor guy getting his pennis messed with.
Speaker 2: Ye Oh, yeah, get with. I mean it's kind of
Speaker 2: a low moment in Yakubai history. Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1: So let's let's talk about Tokyo Noir, your third book
Speaker 1: that kind of follows up on Tokyo Wece and continues
Speaker 1: sort of your own story and experiences in Japan. So
Speaker 1: you get brought into a State Department study on human
Speaker 1: trafficking in Japan. How does that sort of come about
Speaker 1: out of your work as a journalist.
Speaker 2: Well, when I was working for the Human Edition, both
Speaker 2: we covered human trafficking, and I noticed there was a
Speaker 2: huge discrepancy between the way the Japanese police were presenting,
Speaker 2: you know, their efforts to combat it and what was
Speaker 2: really happening. And so I had, you know, I knew
Speaker 2: people in the State Department, so I would pull aside
Speaker 2: stories that I worked on, or stories were the Japanese
Speaker 2: press that showed, you know, because Japan didn't have any
Speaker 2: real laws prohibiting human trafficking or punishing the traffickers would
Speaker 2: only punish the women. That you know that there was
Speaker 2: a huge failure to deal with this problem even addressed.
Speaker 2: It's a problem, and I think one of the last
Speaker 2: things I wrote at the newspaper before I left was
Speaker 2: the International Labor Organization did a huge study of human
Speaker 2: trafficking in Japan, which the Japanese government paid for, and
Speaker 2: their conclusion was that Japan wasn't dealing with the problems.
Speaker 2: They were punishing the victims immediately deporting them, and the
Speaker 2: traffickers knew that they could get away with it, and
Speaker 2: that Japan was turning a blind night of the problem
Speaker 2: and needed to put serious legislation down on the books.
Speaker 2: Here's the thing that the Japan government told the IOLL,
Speaker 2: you cannot release the report, but we paid for it,
Speaker 2: but you can't release it. So I got a copy
Speaker 2: of it and we ran an article on it on
Speaker 2: the front page of the paper summarizing the main points
Speaker 2: of it, at which point, since the cats out of
Speaker 2: the bag, then they released the report and I also
Speaker 2: got a copy of it to the State Department. So
Speaker 2: after I had left, the newspaper and was back in
Speaker 2: Missouri to go to law school. The US State Department,
Speaker 2: which was under George Bush, had decided that they really
Speaker 2: wanted to pressure Japan into deal with the human trafficking
Speaker 2: problem on a serious level, and the only way that
Speaker 2: was going to happen was is if they could shame
Speaker 2: Japan into doing it. So they decided to do an
Speaker 2: investigation into the methodology of human trafficking in Japan, and
Speaker 2: they wanted plausible deniability, so they farmed it out to
Speaker 2: a nonprofit organization called Charitood International, which then farmed it.
Speaker 5: Out to another company in the Virginia area that was,
Speaker 5: you know, staffed by a whole bunch of XCIA people
Speaker 5: and SA people and FBI people.
Speaker 2: And then they asked me to be the investigator on
Speaker 2: the grounds and I said yes because it seemed very important.
Speaker 2: It seemed like if you could actually dig up the
Speaker 2: material on who was, you know, who was allowing human
Speaker 2: trafficking to thrive in Japan, what legislators were blocking changes
Speaker 2: in the laws, who was profiting from it, what was
Speaker 2: the collusion between organized crime and immigration that that could
Speaker 2: have a positive impact on the world. And the other
Speaker 2: thing that I liked about the offer when it came
Speaker 2: to my way was that they told me I didn't
Speaker 2: have to submit expense reports. Is that they didn't want
Speaker 2: any receipts because they didn't want to know how I
Speaker 2: got the information.
Speaker 1: Ever, right there, Yeah, that's that's the most like CIA
Speaker 1: thing ever.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean it makes sense, right, I mean, even
Speaker 2: though I am talking, we don't want a state department, right,
Speaker 2: I'm working on this. I mean, even though I'm talking
Speaker 2: directly to to these people and they know that I'm
Speaker 2: working on it, you know, there's still this sort of
Speaker 2: you know, goes to the group, and it goes to
Speaker 2: the consulting company, goes to the nonprofit organization, to the
Speaker 2: state department. Sometimes that I you know, it went directly
Speaker 2: because you and I both know the fastest way to
Speaker 2: get information about criminal activity is to pay a criminal.
Speaker 2: And this is where knowing THEACASA is helpful because in
Speaker 2: this world in which these people consider themselves the good guys, right,
Speaker 2: what is the lowest to the low. There's pedophiles with
Speaker 2: child pornographers as human traffickers. So if you talk to
Speaker 2: someone who's a yakada of any moral fiber at all,
Speaker 2: and you say look, dude, I want to know who
Speaker 2: in who in your outfit is running these kind of operations,
Speaker 2: and uh, and I could pay you. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of people raise their hands. There's some people who are like,
Speaker 2: I don't need any money, Like you know, these these
Speaker 2: people are awful, you know, like prostitution is one thing,
Speaker 2: but enslaving someone not paying it for their sex work,
Speaker 2: that's just awful. That's slavery. So that was, you know,
Speaker 2: an interesting job to have. And it turns out that
Speaker 2: one of the people who was receiving money and political
Speaker 2: favors from basically a lobby of human traffickers was so
Speaker 2: one of the ways that women were being trafficked into
Speaker 2: Japan at the time was the use of an entertainment FISA, right,
Speaker 2: So they would men is allegedly as entertainers and they
Speaker 2: get there, their passports would be taken away and they
Speaker 2: would you know, be threatened, you know, like we know
Speaker 2: where your family is, You work, and you do this
Speaker 2: job and it wasn't a job that they were that
Speaker 2: they that they signed up for, and then at some
Speaker 2: point they would be sent back. So there was this
Speaker 2: group called the Zen gay Ran, which was an association
Speaker 2: of entertainment groups, and basically they were a human trafficking lobby.
Speaker 2: And this group was having their annual meeting at the
Speaker 2: headquarters of the Liberal Democratic Party, which is the ruling party.
Speaker 2: So it would be like the Republican Party or the
Speaker 2: Democrat Party having a convention of human traffickers at their headquarters.
Speaker 2: And one of the politicians they were particularly friendly with
Speaker 2: and giving donations to was Shinzo Abbe, who later became
Speaker 2: the Prime Minister of Japan twice. And these were the
Speaker 2: kind of things that I was giving the State Department
Speaker 2: in my reports them, you know, after I left the
Speaker 2: newspaper while working for while working for them on this project,
Speaker 2: and so you know, there were a couple other politicians
Speaker 2: who were definitely receiving money to turn the other way
Speaker 2: in block legislation that would stop which was a profitable industry.
Speaker 1: What was the outcome of this study that you were
Speaker 1: a part of, Like, did it actually force some reforms
Speaker 1: within the Japanese legal system? Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things that happened is
Speaker 2: that the zen Geren dissolved. Prime Minister Abbe orto Abe
Speaker 2: disassociated himself from the organization. So this human trafficking lobby
Speaker 2: dissolved itself. The Japanese police began really enforcing the laws
Speaker 2: and putting traffickers away on a big on a big scale,
Speaker 2: and I think that the sort of backdoor deal. And
Speaker 2: I'm not privy to what actually happens behind back doors
Speaker 2: on this, but my feeling was that the United States
Speaker 2: said to Japan, We're going to rank you as low
Speaker 2: as North Korea unless you get serious about this problem,
Speaker 2: and you also need to clean up the problems that
Speaker 2: are then Gooya immigration because there was definitely one immigration
Speaker 2: office in which the girls were being trafficked through, like
Speaker 2: you know, with you know, they they clearly made no
Speaker 2: attempts to screen the girls to see if they were
Speaker 2: really in Japan on entertainment visas, and the restrictions for
Speaker 2: entertainment visas became very severe. So, you know, by two
Speaker 2: thousand and nine, I feel like Japan as a destination
Speaker 2: place for human traffickers had really sort of fallen off
Speaker 2: the map. So yeah, I definitely think could came out
Speaker 2: of it. And sometimes, you know, in that time, when
Speaker 2: Japan cared about what the world thought of it, they
Speaker 2: didn't want to be shamed and didn't want to be
Speaker 2: listed as like, you know, next to North Korea in
Speaker 2: terms of how they dealt with human trafficking. So of
Speaker 2: the things that the Bush administration did, you know, their
Speaker 2: efforts to curb human trafficking and to get you know,
Speaker 2: at least Japan to think it seriously, you have to
Speaker 2: give them a padle in the back. Well done.
Speaker 1: Talk to us a little bit about getting involved in
Speaker 1: the world of private investigations and due diligence and how
Speaker 1: this is sort of a segue for you from journalism.
Speaker 2: Oh so, you know, while I'm working on this human
Speaker 2: trafficking study, Japan starts cracking down on the yakaza in
Speaker 2: the stock markets. The yakaza had moved so much into
Speaker 2: the financial markets that in a white paper put out
Speaker 2: at a national police agency around two thousand and sixty
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven, they pointed out that the axisa
Speaker 2: made these huge inroads into the financial world and said,
Speaker 2: you know, the incursion of organized crime aka the yakata
Speaker 2: into Japan's financial markets threatens the very foundations of our economy.
Speaker 2: And so they really began looking at the links of
Speaker 2: yakuza like setting up front companies and doing stock market manipulation,
Speaker 2: are being basically venture capitalist and creating companies like our
Speaker 2: powering companies like Goodwill Corporation, which was one of the
Speaker 2: largest labor dispatch companies in Japan. And they also decided
Speaker 2: that they weren't going to give foreign banks or foreign
Speaker 2: investment companies, you know, a free pass. So one of
Speaker 2: the things that happened around two thousand and four is
Speaker 2: they basically took away City banks private banking license because
Speaker 2: they were involved, you know, in handling act of the
Speaker 2: money and they had either either no one in compliance
Speaker 2: or they had people in compliance and they were still
Speaker 2: doing business. And so that was kind of a warning
Speaker 2: bell to all these investment companies that were in Japan,
Speaker 2: big banks like like Lehman Brothers and Gold and Sachs
Speaker 2: that they needed to get their shit together are the
Speaker 2: financial services the agency would come down on them and
Speaker 2: maybe take away their licenses. And so as all this
Speaker 2: happening with this one investment bank and then later another
Speaker 2: one reached out to me and said, like, you know,
Speaker 2: we hear that you are someone who is well versed
Speaker 2: in this world and that you could spot what is
Speaker 2: called a front company, meaning a company that is you know,
Speaker 2: illegitimate or is running a fraudulent operation, or sometimes there
Speaker 2: are companies that are actually successful but using yakaza like
Speaker 2: tactics like blackmail and insider trading or getting seed money
Speaker 2: from organized crime. And so I was like, sure, you know,
Speaker 2: it sounds interesting to me. It sounds like what I've
Speaker 2: been doing is a reporter for many years. And so
Speaker 2: I started taking on these jobs. And not only was
Speaker 2: it pay very lucrative, it's really interesting to sort of,
Speaker 2: you know, learn to spot what is a front company,
Speaker 2: learned to see what is a company that is really
Speaker 2: run by organized crime. And that sparked the gamut from
Speaker 2: you know, coffee shop chains to pride octopus ball places
Speaker 2: to massage powers and sometimes they were running accounting firms,
Speaker 2: database companies. Uh. There was even this firm called you
Speaker 2: You Betoma, which was kind of Japan's Classmates dot com
Speaker 2: and a yaka is a boss from the Kodoka. I
Speaker 2: took it over. So why do you think a boss
Speaker 2: would want a yaka? The boss would want to take
Speaker 2: over classically Japanese equivalent of Classmates dot com, extortion, blackmail, Yes,
Speaker 2: exactly right, I mean, you know you've got the site
Speaker 2: had three million users, three million people, you know, and
Speaker 2: you know how people tend to misbehave a high school unions.
Speaker 2: I'm not me, but you know other people, it's kind
Speaker 2: of it's such a fertile fertile there's probably communications going
Speaker 2: on between people and these websites that they should definitely
Speaker 2: not have, and and that was very attractive to the e.
Speaker 1: But you did dip your hands into journalism a few
Speaker 1: more times during this time period. There's a very interesting
Speaker 1: chapter in Tokyo Noir about the earthquake in Fukushima, the
Speaker 1: nuclear power you know, meltdown that took place, and the
Speaker 1: yakuza involvement both in the nuclear power industry but also
Speaker 1: in responding to the earthquake and the resulting tsunami. If
Speaker 1: you can tell us about that a bit.
Speaker 2: Sure, so you know, this was actually the very first
Speaker 2: start of Cliver wrote for The Daily Beast. The Yakiza
Speaker 2: claimed to be humanitary organizations, and it is true that
Speaker 2: in times of crisis like the COVID earthquake in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety five, that they're very quick to get to the
Speaker 2: scene of the of where the tragedy has taking place,
Speaker 2: and they have institutional awareness because unlike government agencies where
Speaker 2: people rotat out the same people have been there for years,
Speaker 2: so they know what to bring. They bring blankets, they
Speaker 2: bring food, they bring tents, sometimes they bring generators. They
Speaker 2: bring everything to the scene that people need. And when
Speaker 2: the Fukushima disaster happened, I was pretty sure that they
Speaker 2: would be very, very They would be the first responders
Speaker 2: because they know what is needed and they've got no
Speaker 2: red tape. So I was stranded in the United States
Speaker 2: when the nuclear accident and the meltdown and the tsunami hit,
Speaker 2: but I was in touch with people back in Japan,
Speaker 2: and so you know, I was asked him, what are
Speaker 2: you doing? And the Daily vis also contacted me and said,
Speaker 2: could you write something about what is happening in Fukushima,
Speaker 2: And I said, I can write you about what the
Speaker 2: Yakata are doing, which is interesting because they are going
Speaker 2: into dangerous areas with food and shelter and no protection,
Speaker 2: and so you know, I was like, well, you know,
Speaker 2: I don't don't think the Aakas are a positive force
Speaker 2: for Japan, but you have to give the devil as due.
Speaker 2: So they were certainly very active in going there and
Speaker 2: trying to bring peace and comfort to people in the
Speaker 2: time of need, and so but I also don't trust
Speaker 2: them because you know, they're yakuza. So I made them
Speaker 2: send me films and in you know, video of them
Speaker 2: up downloading supplies and receipts and other things so I
Speaker 2: could be comfortable with writing it. And we wrote it
Speaker 2: up for The Daily Beast, and that story went viral,
Speaker 2: and I think that also changed my relationship with some
Speaker 2: of the Akuza bosses as well in a very positive way.
Speaker 1: And I think you may point out in the book too,
Speaker 1: about how like one of the remaining sources of revenue
Speaker 1: for the Yakuza is the nuclear power industry or power
Speaker 1: industry in general.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a dirty what they call in Japan a
Speaker 2: sun ky job. It's Keith and Night, it's can it's crushi,
Speaker 2: so painful, dirty, dangerous. I guess in Japanese it's like
Speaker 2: three d's. I mean in English is like three d's.
Speaker 2: So the Ya because a labor dispatch has always been
Speaker 2: one of their businesses, and so the nuclear power plants
Speaker 2: are supplied by the workers that are supplied by the
Speaker 2: acas are they always have been because they can find
Speaker 2: homeless people, They can find people who want to disappear,
Speaker 2: They can find people who will work for cash who
Speaker 2: you know, who don't have ID or who don't want
Speaker 2: to be identified because they're on the lamp. And that
Speaker 2: has been a sort of symbiotic relationship.
Speaker 1: And the companies need this because there's like a radiological contamination,
Speaker 1: like these are legitimately dangerous jobs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a legitimately dangerous jobs. The amount of radiation
Speaker 2: someone can be exposed into a year is limited, and
Speaker 2: so you know, and there's very people who want to
Speaker 2: do that work. So the yakuza are basically where they're
Speaker 2: going to go. I mean these days in Japan, if
Speaker 2: you're in Akaza, you cannot join a sports club, you
Speaker 2: cannot go to a hotel, you can't get a golf course,
Speaker 2: you can't get a cell phone. But if you want
Speaker 2: to work in a nuclear power plant, door is open.
Speaker 2: And I've spoken to people at the National Police Agency
Speaker 2: like like you know, basically Japan's equivalent of the FBI,
Speaker 2: and ask them like why don't you do background checks?
Speaker 2: And and very honestly, these guys have told me, you know,
Speaker 2: of course we should do background checks because these guys
Speaker 2: are criminals and it's not a good idea to have them.
Speaker 2: Next two materials that could be used to build a
Speaker 2: dirty bomb or or do something nefarious. And if we
Speaker 2: do institutionalize them, you know, and if we and if
Speaker 2: someday we really do background checks on these people, that
Speaker 2: would be a good thing. And you know, what do
Speaker 2: you think would be the natural follow up to the
Speaker 2: question for that?
Speaker 1: I mean, so why aren't you doing it?
Speaker 2: Well? So you know the answer to that is, we're
Speaker 2: not doing it because if we do it, we won't
Speaker 2: have anyone to run the nuclear power plants.
Speaker 1: Right, so plants are not up the code to begin with.
Speaker 1: Is I mean, like you can't get normal union guys
Speaker 1: to come work this job because it's not safe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean a lot of the plants are closed down, right,
Speaker 2: and we closed down after that nuclear disaster, but you
Speaker 2: have to maintain them, right. Some of these plants are
Speaker 2: forty years old. They weren't designed to last this long.
Speaker 2: They keep extending the line for them. Recently, no one
Speaker 2: was looking. I think Japan extended the ability to keep
Speaker 2: a nuclear power plant running for another ten years or something,
Speaker 2: so you could have plants running for sixty years that
Speaker 2: they're not designed to do that. I mean, Fukushima is
Speaker 2: such a disaster that everyone thinks it's over, But if
Speaker 2: you don't pour water into that nuclear core, you will
Speaker 2: have nuclear fission again. Like every day they're pouring water
Speaker 2: into the nuclear reactor and Shima, they've retrieved almost none
Speaker 2: of the core materials yet, and if they stop pouring
Speaker 2: water into it, you get basically another nuclear reaction. And
Speaker 2: so every day japanque's pumping water into the Fukushimi reactor
Speaker 2: core and every day that polluted water goes out into
Speaker 2: the ocean. Probably we're for thirty forty years ago.
Speaker 1: One of the big scandals I think you point out
Speaker 1: in the book is that the Fukushimia, one of the
Speaker 1: reactors there, melted down before the tsunami came. So it's
Speaker 1: actually the earthquake that caused it to melt down, and
Speaker 1: then the tsunami came afterwards.
Speaker 2: Right right within the data that was collected by the
Speaker 2: scientist named Kimura showed that within one minute of the
Speaker 2: of the of the big of the giant Tohuku earth
Speaker 2: that there was no water going to the nuclear core
Speaker 2: because all the pipes burst. It's a forty year old reactor,
Speaker 2: you know, pipes were bursting everywhere, water was coming out everywhere.
Speaker 2: There was no. If you can't get the water to
Speaker 2: the to the reactor, it's going to overheat because all
Speaker 2: the pipes are gone, are cracked and but busted. And
Speaker 2: you know, all the data indicates that it was a
Speaker 2: nuclear and there was the earthquake itself which caused that
Speaker 2: nuclear accident and one of the reactors. The story that
Speaker 2: the TEPCO Total Electric Power Company has, you know, insisted
Speaker 2: on is that there was an earthquake, then the tsunami
Speaker 2: came in twenty twenty five minutes later, and then that
Speaker 2: water knocked out the electric goods and that's why you
Speaker 2: had a nuclear mouthout. That is true for some of
Speaker 2: the reactors. Reactor number one, it was the earthquake itself
Speaker 2: which destroyed the piping, the forty year old piping in
Speaker 2: this reactor, a reactor that they had been worn many
Speaker 2: times before, was shouldn't have been decommissioned. And and what's scary
Speaker 2: is that all of Japan's new, you know, safety regulations
Speaker 2: for nuclear actors are predicted on the idea that it
Speaker 2: was a tsunami that caused the nuclear actor, not the
Speaker 2: earthquake himself.
Speaker 1: So before moving on to some other things, I'd like
Speaker 1: to ask you to kind of close the loop on
Speaker 1: go too and Sigo and tell us ultimately, where did
Speaker 1: both of these guys end up? As far as we know.
Speaker 2: Well, Seigo passed away during the pandemic of COVID, which
Speaker 2: was which was sad. And I think, you know, uh,
Speaker 2: I think he had a heart attack.
Speaker 1: After he got back into he got back into another
Speaker 1: yakuza group, didn't.
Speaker 2: They Yeah, yeah, you know, they offered him. They basically
Speaker 2: came to him and said like, look, you know your organization,
Speaker 2: which you know, Watch was a huge organization, would have cratch.
Speaker 2: We were douced, like, we need someone who has institutional memory,
Speaker 2: and we need you to come back and we'll give
Speaker 2: you promotion and put you in a position where you're
Speaker 2: insulated from going to jail. And he and he took
Speaker 2: the offer, and you know, as someone who had left
Speaker 2: but then faced you know, the usual discrimination that all
Speaker 2: yaktas have faced even after they leave. I mean, I
Speaker 2: can't blame him, you know, I mean, honestly, if I
Speaker 2: was him, and I had a choice of being you know,
Speaker 2: the driver and bodyguard for me, versus being a yachta
Speaker 2: the boss and having someone open the door for me
Speaker 2: and drive me around being treated like a pig shot,
Speaker 2: I mean ethical considerations as hide I'd probably say yes.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, well, it was disappointed and we
Speaker 2: sort of had a falling out about it, but we
Speaker 2: made we mended, so we stayed in touch. And you know,
Speaker 2: I try and stay in touch with his son, you know,
Speaker 2: who's like all kids, he's really hard to get a
Speaker 2: hold of. But at least she's not his doing well good.
Speaker 2: And as for Godo, the last I heard with it,
Speaker 2: he is still still alive, getting a little senile. The
Speaker 2: United States listed him as a crime lord as late
Speaker 2: as twenty fifteen, even after he supposedly left the ACTUTA
Speaker 2: and become a Buddhist priest. But you know, we don't
Speaker 2: we don't interact, and you know, I can't say I
Speaker 2: wish him well, but at least he's not in my
Speaker 2: life anymore.
Speaker 1: And you've kind of mentioned a couple times through this
Speaker 1: interview about like where the Yakuza is today, what has
Speaker 1: been going on that all this legislation came in. And
Speaker 1: now if you're a member of the organization, you can't
Speaker 1: get an apartment, you can't get a cell phone, you
Speaker 1: can't buy a car. You know, people don't want to
Speaker 1: be like you're treated like a leper. What has what
Speaker 1: has the yakuza become today and where do you see
Speaker 1: it going in the future.
Speaker 2: It has become a a a traditional crime group that
Speaker 2: now will do anything it can to make money. The
Speaker 2: members still have to pay the association dues and they're
Speaker 2: increasingly turning to crime like fraud, robbery, theft, whatever it
Speaker 2: takes to make the money. Some of the groups still
Speaker 2: survive because they have a well disguised you know, racketeering
Speaker 2: going on. They're still getting payments under the table and
Speaker 2: providing the services that you know, yaka I have always
Speaker 2: provided protection of other things. I see them never completely
Speaker 2: fading out because if you completely get rid of the yakasa,
Speaker 2: there's so many cops who don't have a job, right,
Speaker 2: so they want to kind of keep them at this
Speaker 2: level of you know, of being powerless, but not completely
Speaker 2: fading away.
Speaker 1: The cops found a way to get paid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, you always have you
Speaker 2: need some kind of menace right to adjustify your.
Speaker 1: Existence, and so for you personally, I mean the sort
Speaker 1: of conclusion of Tokyo Noir, you become a Buddhist priest
Speaker 1: like how that came about? How did you become a
Speaker 1: holy man?
Speaker 2: Wow? I'm such a bad Buddhist priest, but I am
Speaker 2: keeping most of the precepts. Basically. You know, my landlord
Speaker 2: in college let me live in this Buddhist temple for
Speaker 2: you know, four or five years, and he has always
Speaker 2: been a supporter of what I've done and a good
Speaker 2: voice and good advice. He himself has in really bad
Speaker 2: health since last year, I mean, which is really sad.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 2: He had got diagnosed Arkinson's and very late stage Parkinson,
Speaker 2: so it's pretty severe. Anyway to a more cheerful story.
Speaker 2: Around twenty seventeen, I was working on a story about
Speaker 2: a young baker who had basically worked himself to death,
Speaker 2: and he was working for a very famous bakery. And
Speaker 2: I went to the funeral of the baker because his
Speaker 2: colleagues at work asked me to go. I was trying
Speaker 2: to write a story and it was a Soto's then
Speaker 2: Buddhist funeral, and I figured it would be really you
Speaker 2: know if to talk to the family so I complete
Speaker 2: the story. It would be great to have an introduction
Speaker 2: via the priest that officiated the funeral, So I went
Speaker 2: to see Joe Ginson, who is my zen master, and
Speaker 2: I explained the situation to him. I said, like, I'm
Speaker 2: working on this article about death by overwork. That's something
Speaker 2: that happens in Japan actually far too often. And I
Speaker 2: asked for an introduction to the priest who had officiated
Speaker 2: the funeral, and as we were talking catching up, he
Speaker 2: said to me in his Cravilie voice, like, you know,
Speaker 2: maybe it's time you stopped being a daredevil man whore
Speaker 2: and put your life in order and followed the noble
Speaker 2: path that you once were on when you were a student.
Speaker 2: And I was like, you know, maybe that's not a
Speaker 2: bad idea. And so we had this very long conversation
Speaker 2: and he basically said, like, you know, I don't have
Speaker 2: a disciple because I'm so cranky that no one can
Speaker 2: deal with me. And I don't have a son either,
Speaker 2: and you are the closest thing that I have, and
Speaker 2: it would be wonderful if you followed in my footsteps.
Speaker 2: And I said, after much discussion, I will think about it.
Speaker 2: And I said if I were to do this, like
Speaker 2: when would we do it? And he said you should
Speaker 2: pick a date that's significant to you. I said, well,
Speaker 2: we could do it on my birthday, which is March
Speaker 2: twenty eighth, and he would like, that's amazing that you
Speaker 2: know your birthday is Mark twenty eighth, And I said
Speaker 2: why and he said, because that's when I took my
Speaker 2: Buddhist priest vows. And I kind of gave him that
Speaker 2: look like, yeah, you like you're full of shit, but
Speaker 2: you know, I mean not in a sort of friendly,
Speaker 2: friendly way. And so he went up to his room
Speaker 2: and he pulled down this photo album of him when
Speaker 2: he was fifteen, and I looked at the year was
Speaker 2: the year show Off forty four, which in Western years,
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty nine, and I said, oh, like, wow, you
Speaker 2: became a Zen Buddhist priest on the day I was born.
Speaker 2: And he said, no, no, no, no, no, you were born
Speaker 2: on the day I became a Zen Buddhist priest. So
Speaker 2: it's karma, so you're meant to follow in my footsteps.
Speaker 2: And so I agreed. So so I took the vows
Speaker 2: and I'm still learning the ropes. This is very military,
Speaker 2: I guess. If you don't in my case, if I
Speaker 2: don't advance to the next level of spiritual development, if
Speaker 2: I don't rank up in the in my zend with
Speaker 2: just pretranking. By twenty twenty seven, I get kicked out
Speaker 2: either rank up or you are you lose. And next
Speaker 2: year I have this giant test in which I have
Speaker 2: to solve this metaphysical riddle and and and defend my
Speaker 2: thesis in front of what, in front of whoever wants
Speaker 2: to come to the temple. It's really hard, and so
Speaker 2: I'm learning to do that. And uh, you know, I
Speaker 2: can cook just vegetarian food. I can officiate some ceremonies.
Speaker 2: I'm very good at the one where you chase away
Speaker 2: hungry ghosts. So if you know someone who is plagued
Speaker 2: by hungry ghosts because there's someone in their life who
Speaker 2: hasn't moved on to the other world, I can handle that.
Speaker 2: I'm very good at that one.
Speaker 1: Do you do yakuza funerals? That's what I really need
Speaker 1: to know.
Speaker 2: No, No, I'm not doing it the funeral. I'm not
Speaker 2: doing funerals. I oh yeah, yeah, I ever see this interview.
Speaker 2: I'm not qualified to do a funeral yet, like you know,
Speaker 2: because I really don't want that business. But if it's
Speaker 2: something more like your boss died and you feel he's
Speaker 2: like he's haunting the office, like I can deal with that,
Speaker 2: but the actual funeral service now can't. Can't get them
Speaker 2: to the next life. That's not there all.
Speaker 1: Right, So tell us about where you are now in
Speaker 1: this new book that you have coming out.
Speaker 2: Oh well, thank you for letting me plug this. So
Speaker 2: this book, The Devil Takes Bitcoin is about covering the
Speaker 2: world's largest bitcoin exchange, which was in Tokyo and in
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen it collapsed with half a billion dollars with
Speaker 2: a bitcoin missing. And the CEO of this company was
Speaker 2: a French guy named Mark Carpalis. It's really unusual. French
Speaker 2: guy really loved loved Japan, loved cryptocurrency and basically what
Speaker 2: was the epicenter of the cryptocurrency world, Like, if you
Speaker 2: wanted bitcoin in twenty fourteen, mon Cox was the place
Speaker 2: to get it. But it's also just a chronicle of
Speaker 2: the history of bitcoin and how and how basically criminal
Speaker 2: activity made it what it was.
Speaker 1: It was an home by an enigmatic Japanese guy, wasn't
Speaker 1: it like the like this dude that we don't really
Speaker 1: know much about.
Speaker 2: Sukoshi Nakamoto allegedly right allegedly a Japanese dude. And that's
Speaker 2: when the book also gets into that because I didn't know,
Speaker 2: I didn't give a shit about bitcoin in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: I didn't even know what it was until this bitcoin
Speaker 2: you know exchange collapsed in Tokyo and it became like
Speaker 2: the center of the world news because the bitcoin prices plummeted.
Speaker 2: In the same year, Newsweek put out an article identifying,
Speaker 2: you know, Satoshinakamoto, the mythical, the mythological creator of this bitcoin.
Speaker 2: You know, this guy who created the cryptocurrency that's not
Speaker 2: worth billions of dollars. Newsweek identified him as this man
Speaker 2: named Dorian Satoshinakamoto living in California, and my editor at
Speaker 2: The Daily Beast, you know, called me up right, the
Speaker 2: editor chief called me up and said, if this is true,
Speaker 2: Newsweek has a tremendous scoop. But if it's not true,
Speaker 2: please kick their ass. And those two events sent me
Speaker 2: into four years of covering bitcoin. And it's such a
Speaker 2: crazy story. And what's fun about this book is it
Speaker 2: becomes a sort of personal memoir because not that I
Speaker 2: ever intended to be. Because as I was working on
Speaker 2: this story about this the theft of half a billion
Speaker 2: dollars worth of bitcoin, it turns out that there was
Speaker 2: someone else in the United States investigating this case who
Speaker 2: couldn't get any help from the Japanese police, and I
Speaker 2: was asked to smuggle the database of this exchange to
Speaker 2: the FBI in San Francisco. And that's one of the
Speaker 2: weird parts of the story which I did. I don't
Speaker 2: know if that's if that's a journalistically ethically okay thing
Speaker 2: to do, but you know, as I was working on
Speaker 2: the story and I began to think that maybe some
Speaker 2: of the people who accused were innocent, I felt like
Speaker 2: that was the right thing to do. It's such a
Speaker 2: fun book to write and also to read, because even
Speaker 2: if you don't know anything about bitcoin, you'll sort of
Speaker 2: be fascinated by how it evolved and how basically the
Speaker 2: Silk Road, which was an underground market where you could
Speaker 2: buy any any drug you wanted online, propelled it from
Speaker 2: nothing to a billion dollar current.
Speaker 1: And when does the book come out?
Speaker 2: Book comes out on October fourteenth.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we're like, we're like a week out now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, I'm happy to have a copy.
Speaker 2: This is it came out a little bit earlier in Australia.
Speaker 2: This is the who will cover actually lots of like
Speaker 2: the guy in the hoodie.
Speaker 1: So people can go find that on Amazon or wherever
Speaker 1: books are sold.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if you want to, if you want to
Speaker 2: send me a bitcoin, like one tiny bitcoin directly, I'll
Speaker 2: mail it to you.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: I think we have some viewer questions for you. We'll
Speaker 1: get into here. What do we got thee from Mark Corbin?
Speaker 3: We have How do the Chinese tryad stand upark culturally
Speaker 3: when compared to the Akuza?
Speaker 2: Interesting, Okay, way out of my level of expertise. There's
Speaker 2: a guy in the Canadian in the Royal Mounties who's
Speaker 2: much better at this stuff. The Trands have some of
Speaker 2: the same ritual of the acas I do of succession
Speaker 2: ceremonies that elaborate things that were that where relations are
Speaker 2: cemented with rituals invoking the gods. But that's about the
Speaker 2: only connection they have. The triads and the actors that
Speaker 2: don't work very well together, except for this one period
Speaker 2: of time when carmakers in Japan needed to ah, it's
Speaker 2: not what it's not listy and batteries. There's a part
Speaker 2: of the the electric vehicle. It's a rare metal that
Speaker 2: is needed to make like a prius and stuff. There
Speaker 2: was a time when there was a shortage of that,
Speaker 2: and the Triots and the actors that were working together
Speaker 2: to smuggle that material into Japan. That's the only case
Speaker 2: I know. I'm not an expert on the Triods unfortunately,
Speaker 2: but they're working wlationship with the minimal. All Right, we
Speaker 2: got a couple more.
Speaker 3: How did you feel about the show's portrayal of your character?
Speaker 3: In Ansel al Agort's performance.
Speaker 2: An Sol did a really wonderful job. I trained in
Speaker 2: Akito with the Tokyo Metrial and Police Department, and I
Speaker 2: was never any good. Let me, let me get inoscar.
Speaker 2: I've never been good at martial arts. I liked him,
Speaker 2: but I suck. And Ansel trained with the same school
Speaker 2: of Aikdo, and he was really good in a short time.
Speaker 2: He did a really good job of getting in character.
Speaker 2: His Japanese is amazing. The only thing I didn't like
Speaker 2: about the TV series portrayal of me is that there's
Speaker 2: a scene where I'm doing meth with Yaku's a fan
Speaker 2: magazine writer, and I would never do meth, at least
Speaker 2: not knowingly. It's really bad drug, which in general, I'm
Speaker 2: not If people want to do recreational drugs. I think
Speaker 2: that that's fine with them, but I don't want to
Speaker 2: do them.
Speaker 3: Got one more, how Willy, Who's a plan to maintain
Speaker 3: their relevancy in current Japan.
Speaker 2: I honestly think that they're beginning to try and portray
Speaker 2: themselves as like a cultural tradition, like a Japanese living treasure.
Speaker 2: So I know you should preserve us because we're part
Speaker 2: of the lore of Japan. Were part of what attracts
Speaker 2: people to be here, like the queen, like the queen
Speaker 2: in England. Yeah, like the Queen in England. Right, I mean,
Speaker 2: I you know, this isn't really answering the question. I
Speaker 2: have so much material on the Akasa, Like I have
Speaker 2: their phone directories, I have comic books I have, I have,
Speaker 2: you know, some of the embroidered outfits they have, like
Speaker 2: the sake bottles that they use for their ceremonies. Like
Speaker 2: I've got all this stuff that I've collected over the years,
Speaker 2: like in a warehouse in my second home in Kioto,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, what should I do with this because
Speaker 2: it's you know, thirty years of Yakaza fan magazines like
Speaker 2: like no, I mean, I guess kind of opening Yakasa
Speaker 2: Museum if Japan will let me.
Speaker 1: But Jake, is there anything else that I haven't brought
Speaker 1: up that you'd like to talk about before we get
Speaker 1: going tonight?
Speaker 2: Oh? I was gonna ask you, what is your tattoo?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, oh, I have I have a
Speaker 1: bunch of I have a bunch of weep tattoos. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is ghost in the Shell from Shiro, and so
Speaker 1: is this one and this one also, they're all from
Speaker 1: They're all Ghosts in the Shell.
Speaker 2: Oh. I love Ghosts in the Shell. That's such a great.
Speaker 2: That's such a It's my absolute favorite one. I've watched
Speaker 2: all seasons of it. Yeah, really bad one on Netflix.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, that was terrible. It was terrible. We're going
Speaker 1: to pretend that it didn't happen. But but standalone complex
Speaker 1: was great. The the film, the nineteen ninety four or
Speaker 1: five film awesome. Yeah. In the comic book the manga
Speaker 1: is also awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Innocence like the second one. I think Innocence is
Speaker 2: the film title in English is a little bit about
Speaker 2: human trafficking as well. I mean, yeah, that that series
Speaker 2: has done some really interesting topics and things. Oh, I
Speaker 2: guess the last thing that we didn't talk about, is that,
Speaker 2: you know, what separated the Jeopanese Jakuda from other mafia
Speaker 2: groups is you know, is that they're because of their
Speaker 2: public presence, they've always had more of a code of
Speaker 2: honor than other groups. And and you know, and mostly
Speaker 2: their sociopaths, but some of them might at least respect
Speaker 2: to living up to the ideals that they profess. It's like,
Speaker 2: you know, a tiny fraction of them, but that is
Speaker 2: something that I think is unique about about the Japanese mafia.
Speaker 2: And also some of them write really great poetry. I
Speaker 2: like the poetry and the Acuda fan magazine sections is
Speaker 2: really funny and sometimes quite poignant. Who would have guessed?
Speaker 1: So there's some redeemable values there, some redeemable virus. So, guys,
Speaker 1: I hope you will go and check out the books
Speaker 1: Tokyo Noirakuza and Tokyovice, and the new book coming out Jake.
Speaker 2: Is The Devil Takes a Bit Quiet awesome.
Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to reading it. It sounds awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I will make sure we get you a copy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: free of charge. It's very good.
Speaker 1: Thank you so, Jake, thanks for doing this interview and
Speaker 1: sharing your experiences with us. This has been awesome and
Speaker 1: having read your work, you know, back fifteen years or
Speaker 1: whatever it was, I mean, it's awesome for this doll
Speaker 1: come together and for everyone else out there. Thanks for
Speaker 1: joining us tonight and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you very much.
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