Year of the Dog

Year of the Dog is the name Jake Adelstein gives to the case-centered year that began with an assignment to investigate the disappearances surrounding Gen Sekine. Its decisive turn is the January arrest that closed the Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances case; the phrase also sits within a longer chronology in which dangerous reporting and its repercussions continued well beyond that case.

Beginning: An Assignment Becomes a Year

The year began when Yamamoto assigned reporters to investigate the missing people, giving Adelstein the two men most closely connected to his police beat: the yakuza Endo and Endo’s driver, Wakui. Both had disappeared. Adelstein was told to establish how Endo knew Sekine, when he had last been seen alive, what kind of person he was, and why he might have been killed. The task expanded into gathering photographs, comments, testimony, and whatever else might prove useful. Yamamoto’s instruction that Adelstein’s life would now be Endo’s life made the investigation a sustained commitment rather than a single story.

The early reporting brought a significant advantage and a cost. On February 19, the Yomiuri Shinbun published a four-column story about several missing dog lovers in Saitama and possible trouble over sales; other newspapers rushed to catch up, leaving the Yomiuri Shinbun with the lead. But publication alienated the police and likely alerted Sekine that he was under investigation. The disclosure could make him more cautious and give him greater reason to destroy evidence, turning the paper’s early scoop into a potential obstacle to the inquiry.

The Case Closes

The investigation’s decisive evidence emerged through a route the newspaper did not control. In late November, Takada tracked down Shima, who had changed his name and married, and passed the information to Sekiguchi. Sekiguchi relayed it to the Saitama police, who arrested Shima in December. Confronted with the existence of the tapes, Shima provided information that led police to a site in Gunma Prefecture. There they found enough of Kawasaki’s teeth to support the case. The search was conducted by a small team, without the Yomiuri Shinbun or the wider public knowing about it.

On January 5, after the New Year’s holidays, the Saitama police released Shima on bail and announced the arrest of Gen Sekine and his wife for the dismemberment of Akio Kawasaki. Sekine admitted almost everything within hours. The case had taken an agonizing year to close, though the account also suggests that the crimes reached back more than a decade. The Yomiuri Shinbun had led the public coverage, but it did not get the decisive scoop: the police had found the evidence and made the arrests in secret.

A Longer Chronology of Risk

The phrase Year of the Dog refers to the beginning and resolution of the Sekine investigation, not to all the later events in Adelstein’s reporting life. In November 2006, a reliable source inside Goto’s organization told him that the FBI had allowed Goto to enter the United States. The source supplied approximate dates and identified Jim Moynihan, the legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Japan, as the person who arranged it. Adelstein then assembled information from a large cache of data and from sources in the U.S. Justice Department, Japanese police, and the underworld. The evidence led him to reconstruct Goto’s urgent need for a liver transplant and the approach to the FBI in 2001.

As the Goto reporting developed, Adelstein was told that Goto had decided to have him killed if Goto were found guilty, a prospect the source described as especially grave given Goto’s condition. On March 5, 2008, Adelstein was placed under police protection. An FBI special agent accompanied him to the National Police Agency, while U.S. authorities arranged surveillance of his home in America. He refused to identify his source inside the Goto-gumi, despite being warned that this could make round-the-clock protection harder to justify.

Publication and Aftermath

Adelstein eventually decided to write the Goto story in English while preparing to return to Japan. He hoped to publish it through the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan newspaper, but an editorial memo accidentally sent to him dismissed the account as unbelievable. The rejection marked another delay between obtaining information and making it public; the article’s eventual publication in an anthology also carried consequences for its publisher, Kodansha International, which later withdrew the book after a risk assessment.

Around October 14, Goto was officially expelled from the Yamaguchi-gumi, and several associates were suspended, expelled, or permanently banished. The Goto-gumi split into two crime families, leaving Goto an ex–crime boss. Police told Adelstein that publication of Heisei Japan Taboo Compendium 2008 had been the tipping point, although the organization’s stated explanation was different. The episode extends the book’s chronology beyond the case-year named by Year of the Dog: reporting that began with a missing-person investigation eventually led into a separate struggle over what could be published, and at what personal and institutional cost.