Heisei Japan Taboo Compendium 2008

Heisei Japan Taboo Compendium 2008 was an anthology of forbidden news stories that brought previously unpublished details about Japanese organized crime and liver transplants into print. Its chapter by Jake Adelstein and Tomohiko Suzuki named three other yakuza who had received transplants, examined unresolved questions about what UCLA knew, and became a focal point of pressure, retaliation concerns, and organizational consequences. Police later told Adelstein that the anthology’s publication had been the tipping point in Tadamasa Goto’s expulsion from the Yamaguchi-gumi, although the book’s reception and the consequences surrounding it were neither simple nor uncontested.

Commission and the difficulty of publication

Tomohiko Suzuki, a friend of Adelstein and a former editor of a yakuza fan magazine, approached him about contributing a chapter to an anthology of forbidden news stories for Takarajima Publishing House. Adelstein proposed that they write it together. The collaboration mattered in practical as well as editorial terms: a chapter about Goto and the Japanese underworld would expose Suzuki, too, to the Goto-gumi’s anger. Suzuki warned Adelstein that the project carried a serious risk, but agreed to proceed.

The chapter emerged from a broader struggle to get reporting about Goto into public circulation. Adelstein had written an article that, he said, no one would publish. Editors described it as too old, worried that the National Police Agency would be embarrassed if the account proved true, or doubted that the FBI would confirm it. A prospective publisher wanted a version that attacked the FBI; Adelstein rejected that approach because he did not believe the agency had been wrong to make the deal and did not want his collaborator Jim lampooned. Another senior editor said the publisher feared Goto’s lawyers, the cost of increased security, possible retaliation, and the loss of printing contracts connected to Soka Gakkai.

Adelstein also sent the article to the Yomiuri Shimbun before publication, but it ignored the submission, as did the other Japanese newspapers. He had already begun working with Los Angeles Times journalists John Glionna and Charles Ornstein. Their report appeared on the front page on May 31 and prompted Japanese outlets to cover the matter, often attributing it to the Los Angeles Times rather than independently verifying or pursuing it. The anthology took shape within this environment of selective circulation: information could become public, yet the institutions best placed to investigate or publish it could decline, defer, or shift responsibility.

The chapter’s disclosures

Published on August 9, the anthology included information that had not previously appeared in print: the names of three other yakuza who had received liver transplants. Adelstein identified Yoshiro Ogino, a boss in the Tokyo-based Matsuba-kai, as one recipient. He and Goto were blood brothers, and Ogino had allegedly donated $100,000 to UCLA after his surgery. Adelstein wrote that Hisatoshi Mio, a name supplied by Shibata, probably followed Ogino.

The third was Saburo Takeshita, whom Adelstein described as a financial operator for the Goto-gumi who ran twenty front companies and handled much of the group’s finances. The chapter also gave background that complicated any easy separation between financial expertise and criminal activity. In 1992, Takeshita and an accomplice were arrested by the Shizuoka Police Department after a debt-collection episode in which they threatened and assaulted a company owner; the man was hospitalized for several weeks. The book’s account placed the recipient’s business role and criminal record beside the transplant information rather than treating the names as an isolated list.

The chapter also distinguished what was alleged from what had been established. It had not been proven that UCLA or Dr. Busuttil knew that any of the patients had ties to the Japanese mafia when the transplants took place. UCLA and the doctor said they did not make moral judgments about patients and treated them according to medical need. As Adelstein noted, however, they had not explicitly denied knowing of the recipients’ yakuza ties, and they did not address what they knew or when they knew it. An investigation by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, conducted with UCLA, found no evidence of improper conduct. That finding did not settle the ethical dispute over the allocation of organs to foreign recipients with criminal records.

Unresolved questions and public response

Adelstein further reported that federal law-enforcement sources considered it possible that UCLA had unwittingly become involved in money laundering. Their explanation concerned the transfer of criminal proceeds from overseas to the United States; because yakuza income generally came from criminal activity, some payments to UCLA by at least one of the four Japanese recipients might have originated in illegal activity in Japan. The book did not present that possibility as a proven offense. Adelstein said that, to his knowledge, none of the men had been investigated for money laundering, and that any such inquiry would require cooperation from Japanese authorities. Whether UCLA knew of the recipients’ affiliations or of the possible source of payments remained unanswered.

The anthology drew a fierce reaction. Suzuki received threatening calls, while a yakuza fan magazine, Shukan Jitsuwa, portrayed Adelstein as a CIA agent, a pawn of the CIA and a supposed international conspiracy, or an ignorant American seeking publicity. These accusations reframed the reporting as either foreign manipulation or foolishness, rather than engaging with the chapter’s specific disclosures. The book received some notice, but its circulation was also restricted: Kodansha International withdrew it after commissioning a risk assessment whose conclusion was unfavorable.

Protection and organizational consequences

The danger around the project was not confined to editorial decisions. Around the time the anthology appeared, a blood brother of Teruo Mochizuki, who remained an organization man, stationed four cars in Adelstein’s neighborhood around the clock. The presence served as a warning to the Goto-gumi that Adelstein was under the protection of another crime group. Adelstein had not requested this arrangement and would have refused it had he been asked; nevertheless, he recognized that he owed the man for taking that risk on his behalf. The protection itself created an uncomfortable obligation, underscoring how a journalist confronting criminal power could become entangled in relationships he had not sought.

Around October 14, Goto was officially expelled from the Yamaguchi-gumi. The public explanation, as Adelstein recounted it, was that the country’s wealthiest and most influential yakuza had been removed for partying and neglecting his duties. Police gave Adelstein a different account: they said publication of Heisei Japan Taboo Compendium 2008 had been the tipping point. Their explanation linked the anthology to the disciplinary action without making it the sole documented cause. Several of Goto’s associates were also suspended, expelled, or banished for life, and the Goto-gumi split into two crime families. Goto was no longer a crime boss but an ex-crime boss.

The reversal brought Adelstein congratulatory calls from police officers, friends, reporters, and sources. On the following day, he received a call from a senior figure in the Yamaguchi-gumi, who thanked him for bringing matters to the organization’s attention and said they had been satisfactorily resolved. The call supplied a striking coda to the book’s passage from rejected reporting to a publication that, according to police, helped precipitate a major change in the underworld’s hierarchy.

Significance

The anthology’s story is also one of gatekeeping: the article was declined by publishers and newspapers for reasons that included age, verification, political embarrassment, legal exposure, security costs, and commercial ties; the resulting publication nonetheless exposed details that had not appeared before. Its circulation did not eliminate uncertainty. The investigation found no evidence of improper conduct at UCLA, while the questions about institutional knowledge and the source of payments remained unresolved. The book’s importance lies in holding those distinctions together: disclosure could alter the pressure surrounding powerful figures without proving every suspicion attached to the case.

Its effects were similarly double-edged. Publication brought threats to Suzuki, prompted the withdrawal of the book by Kodansha International, and coincided with protection that placed Adelstein in an unwanted position of indebtedness. At the same time, police identified the anthology as the tipping point in Goto’s expulsion, and the Goto-gumi fractured as Goto lost his leadership status. The book therefore became more than a container for forbidden information: its release entered the conflict it documented, while the reactions to it revealed how journalism, institutional caution, and organized-crime power could converge around the question of what was allowed to become public.