Helena

Helena, an Australian English teacher and sex worker in Tokyo, became Jake Adelstein’s source and partner in investigating the exploitation of foreign women. She distinguished her own choice to do sex work from the coercion she saw around her, and she helped bring attention to a trafficking network. Her later disappearance, after she pursued a lead involving the Goto-gumi, remains unresolved: an interlocutor told Adelstein that she had been killed, but the book offers no independent confirmation. For Adelstein, she is at once a courageous collaborator, a friend he failed to protect, and a person whose absence never became certain enough to mourn without reservation.

Background and Work

Helena came to Japan from Australia in 2001. She taught English at Berlitz and began hostessing on the side; after a businessman paid her what he called travel expenses following an evening together, she gradually acquired private patrons. Seeking steadier income, she joined the Den of Delicious, an exclusive gentlemen’s club, while continuing to see private clients. She described her own work as voluntary and said the income was better than teaching. Her objection was to women who did not want to enter sex work being forced into it.

Through her work, Helena learned about two men supplying women to clubs: a Japanese operator called Slick and a Dutch-Israeli associate, Viktor. She said they recruited women overseas, often from poorer countries, and brought them to Japan, where costs and dependence on the operators left the women vulnerable to exploitation. Women who tried to leave, she reported, could find themselves threatened or unable to get help from authorities. Her account made her more than a witness to the nightlife economy: she understood how recruitment, debt, immigration status, and control over work could combine to trap people.

From Source to Investigative Partner

Helena first encountered Adelstein while he was reporting on Lucie Blackman. She later recalled having insulted him during that earlier reporting, before he had learned how to approach women working in the evening entertainment trade. When she contacted him again, a stripper had suggested he might help with women from Poland, Russia, and Estonia whom Helena believed were under duress. They met at a Starbucks in Tokyo Roppongi. Helena used a name that was not her real one, and Adelstein initially introduced himself as though they were meeting for the first time.

At that meeting she recounted her route into sex work and described the operators she believed were exploiting other women. Her account helped shape Adelstein’s investigation of the trafficking network. When the reporting advanced, he recognized that she had shown the courage to contact him and had worked harder on the first story than he had. He later regretted that her name had not appeared alongside his in the coverage. That omission matters to the way he remembers their collaboration: the reporting was not simply information he obtained from her, but work they pursued together, with Helena taking risks and contributing knowledge from inside the industry.

Adelstein later invited her to dinner in Nishi-Azabu as he prepared to investigate the people profiting from trafficking rather than follow the victims. He had heard that she had broken up with her fiancé and was feeling low; he wanted her help and also hoped to cheer her up. Their reunion retained the teasing familiarity of their earlier meetings. By then, the relationship had grown beyond a reporter’s contact with a source: Adelstein missed her, and she remained someone he trusted to investigate alongside him.

Investigation and Disappearance

In March, while Adelstein was at home in the United States, Helena called with a new lead. She believed the International Entertainment Association was a front for the Goto-gumi. Alarmed, Adelstein told her to stop investigating. The exchange escalated into an argument; he accused her of possibly being high, and she ended the call. He tried to reach her afterward, but she did not answer. A friend checked her apartment and found no one there. Concerned that contacting the regular police could expose her to arrest for sex work, Adelstein changed his travel plans and returned to Japan.

At Narita International Airport and afterward, his attempts to locate her led nowhere. Her workplace no longer had foreign women working there; her email stopped responding, her phone was dead, and her landlord said she had been away for several days. After a week, Adelstein found no forwarding address and learned that she had left her belongings behind. He also checked the English-teaching job where she had worked. With no explanation for her absence, he went back to work and pursued the lead she had given him about the International Entertainment Association.

Months later, he told Shibata that he was missing a friend named Helena and explained what he had asked her to investigate. Shibata reacted sharply when he heard about the Goto-gumi and the association. In 2007, before Shibata died, he gave Adelstein a name connected to the wider inquiry: Hisatoshi Mio, founder of the Mio-gumi and a backer of Kajiyama. Shibata provided no information about Helena. The lead widened Adelstein’s suspicions about the Goto case but did not answer what had happened to her.

Reported Fate and Lasting Absence

Later, an interlocutor confronted Adelstein about Helena and said she had been caught investigating the International Entertainment Association. According to this account, she was taken to an office in Ebisu, had Adelstein’s business card with her, and refused to talk in order to protect him. The man claimed that she had been assaulted and killed. This is a reported allegation, not a confirmed finding: the book supplies no independent verification of her death, and Helena’s fate remains uncertain.

The possibility that she had protected Adelstein sharpened his sense of responsibility. Among the business cards he spread across the floor while assessing who might be at risk was Helena’s, worn from being carried in his wallet and pockets: creased, faded, and frayed at the edges. He remembered that she had trusted him with her real name only after several meetings. When she finally gave him her card, she performed an elaborate parody of a formal bow and made a ribald joke about being a professional sex worker. The battered card held memories that a reporter’s diary could not, turning an ordinary piece of paper into a record of trust and lost time.

Adelstein remembered Helena as beautiful, caring, brave, and funny. She had money in the bank and had bought a home; he could imagine that she had chosen to leave Japan and begin again. He kept in touch with people who had known her and continued sending New Year’s greetings to her old email address, but the messages came back undeliverable. Sometimes he thought he saw her on the streets of Tokyo or heard her voice, only to realize that she was not there. Since March 2006, he wrote, he had not slept well; he dreamed of her as forgiving, angry, or simply wanting to be held. The unresolved ending is central to her place in the narrative: the evidence suggests a terrible fate, while the absence of confirmation leaves room for the hope that she escaped and made the new life she wanted.