Jake Adelstein and Sekiguchi’s investigative partnership

Jake Adelstein and Sekiguchi’s investigative partnership joined a reporter’s access to information with a detective’s knowledge of police procedure and yakuza networks. It was never a simple exchange of tips: Sekiguchi made the handling of information a test of Jake’s reliability, while Jake had to learn that protecting a source could mean withholding facts from colleagues and that a relationship required attention even when no case seemed to be moving. Their work contributed to the investigation of the Saitama dog-breeder murders, but its most lasting consequences were personal and professional lessons about trust, patience, and missed opportunities.

First Meeting and the Test of Trust

Their relationship began with the formal exchange of business cards. Jake accepted Sekiguchi’s card with both hands and bowed; Sekiguchi accepted Jake’s in the same manner, though less deeply. Each looked over the other’s card before putting it away. The elaborate etiquette made status visible, but the conversation that followed was disarmingly ordinary: Sekiguchi asked how a foreigner had been hired by the Yomiuri Shinbun, and Jake described his life in Japan, including his studies at Sophia University. The normality unsettled Jake precisely because the meeting concerned access to a police investigation.

After they had shared ice cream, Sekiguchi acknowledged that Jake had understood how to get through the door, then made the unresolved issue explicit: whether he could trust Jake, and whether he should. Jake answered that trust had to be mutual. Sekiguchi explained that he had no loyalty to the homicide squad, which was not his beat, but that someone on the case had given Jake’s name to his superior. He neither knew nor intended to ask who had done so. The opening between them therefore rested not on a disclosed informant but on a cautious agreement to deal with one another directly.

Sekiguchi also described the competing pressures inside an investigation. Police officers, he said, spent much of their time trying to keep reporters away, even as information leaked to favored journalists. Rather than offer Jake unrestricted access, he set a condition: some of what he knew came from the ground level and had not yet reached senior investigators. If Jake took those details to people at the top too soon to confirm them, they might trace the leak down the chain and expose the source. Jake needed to wait for information to travel upward before checking it. Sekiguchi called Jake’s handling of what followed a test of his reliability, turning source protection into the first working rule of their partnership.

Lessons in Confidentiality and Information-Gathering

Jake took that warning seriously enough to conceal what he had learned from Yamamoto, despite trusting his editor. He worried that the information might be passed up the chain prematurely and endanger Sekiguchi’s source. The choice marked a shift in Jake’s understanding of his work: protecting a source could require keeping information from someone on his own side. The episode also introduced a lasting complication in his professional life, since the habits of secrecy acquired for reporting could reach beyond the newsroom.

Their arrangement was reciprocal but not uncomplicated. When Jake later called Sekiguchi with information, Sekiguchi listened, thanked him, and ended the call without asking for details. At their next meeting, Sekiguchi said the tip had proved valuable. He explained that, about ten minutes after Jake’s call, Takada had contacted him while preparing to question Gen Sekine. Sekiguchi already knew enough to challenge Takada’s handling of the suspect. Although Takada offered him the chance to listen in, Sekiguchi declined, telling him not to kill Sekine and to report what he learned. Jake’s information thus helped Sekiguchi intervene without making him a participant in Takada’s private interrogation.

When Sekiguchi later asked how Jake had learned that Takada had seized Sekine, Jake initially protected the source. Sekiguchi recognized the reporter’s obligation not to disclose informants, but asked for an answer in confidence between them as men rather than as reporter and cop. The exchange reveals the partnership’s persistent tension: professional confidentiality helped make Jake useful, while personal trust demanded a different kind of candor. Sekiguchi also told him to keep seeing Kimiko and continue seeking information from her, while asking Jake to pass along what he found. Their cooperation therefore extended through Jake’s access to people beyond the police, even as the boundaries between reporting, private relationships, and information-gathering became difficult to keep separate.

Sekiguchi taught through example as well as warnings. When a yakuza was jailed, he visited the man’s family, checked on them, sometimes bought groceries or helped with house repairs, and kept the prisoner informed about home. He did not treat a criminal’s offense as a personal feud. That practical attention helped build a network: men returning from prison, whether or not they resumed organized crime, remained connected to Sekiguchi and sometimes passed him information. Jake recognized the method as patient relationship-building and resolved to emulate it.

At a July family barbecue, Sekiguchi made the same lesson concrete in a different way. As they ate skewered river fish and drank Coke on his porch, he advised Jake to plant seeds while the ground was still half frozen, rather than spending all his time on the case currently attracting attention. He urged him to spend time with other police officers, including those without good cases, who might welcome his company and later value information he could bring them. For Sekiguchi, useful sources were cultivated before they became useful. The advice widened Jake’s idea of investigative work from chasing urgent leads to maintaining relationships during quiet periods.

Cooperation in the Dog-Breeder Investigation

The partnership’s most consequential professional work concerned the disappearances connected to Gen Sekine and his associates. Jake’s reporting and source network helped reveal that Yasunobu Endo had allegedly been blackmailing Sekine and intended to strip him of his land, house, and kennel. When Jake called with a further tip, Sekiguchi acted quickly, and his intervention put him in a position to confront Takada before the interrogation began. But a promising lead did not immediately produce a case. A witness, Shima, fled when Takada and several men arrived while a police officer was watching his house. With Shima gone and Ryoji Arai in custody, the investigation stalled again.

Sekiguchi’s yakuza information network eventually supplied audio tapes connecting Arai, Sekine, and Shima. The recordings were difficult to hear and partly coded, but some statements were clear enough to guide investigators. Shima referred to an invisible body and said that it was in Gunma; he also described leaving Akio Kawasaki’s car at Tokyo Station and implied involvement in moving Kawasaki’s corpse. The tapes were not conclusive on their own. Their value was that they gave investigators material to use if Shima could be found and questioned.

In late November, Takada tracked down Shima, who had changed his name and married, and passed the information to Sekiguchi. Sekiguchi reported it to the Saitama Prefectural Police. After Shima was arrested in December and confronted with the tapes, he provided information that led police to a site in Gunma Prefecture, where they found enough of Kawasaki’s teeth to support their case. On January 5, after the New Year’s holidays, police announced the arrests of Sekine and his wife, Hiroko, for Kawasaki’s dismemberment. Sekine began admitting almost everything within hours. The investigation ended after a prolonged year of pursuit, although Jake did not get the scoop he had worked toward.

The Missed Call and Its Cost

Jake’s failure to learn of the arrests in time was not caused by a lack of access to the investigation so much as by a lapse in maintaining the relationship. Angry that the story had broken without him, he called Sekiguchi. A junior reporter then found Sekiguchi’s home number buried among office papers, alongside baby pictures, sports records, and clippings. The call had been made, but it had not reached Jake promptly.

Jake understood the deeper mistake as his own. He had not visited Sekiguchi during the holidays, had not kept tabs on a case when nothing appeared to be happening, and had never given Sekiguchi his home phone number. Sekiguchi had taken the risk of calling the office, but Jake had failed to create a dependable way for the call to reach him. Had he visited, he believed, he might have learned that the remains of Kawasaki had been found and secured the story. The missed scoop became a practical consequence of ignoring the very lesson Sekiguchi had taught: the quiet interval is part of the work, not time outside it.

The professional disappointment sits beside a more sobering limit to the investigation. Sekine and his wife were convicted of the murders of four people, while the true number of victims remained unknown. The partnership helped bring the case to a close without resolving its full scale. Jake’s regret over the missed story therefore does not erase the evidence the investigation produced, but it sharpens the distinction between knowing the case and being present when its decisive news arrives.

Friendship and Care

The relationship persisted beyond the investigation and beyond its professional exchanges. When Sekiguchi’s cancer had spread through his body and even intravenous morphine could not adequately control his pain, he continued working and resisted accepting anything of monetary value from Jake. After treatment at the Ariake Cancer Institute in Odaiba, Sekiguchi sometimes faced a long train journey back to Saitama Prefecture. Jake wanted him to rest nearby and arranged a hotel room at Grand Pacific Le Daiba, close to the hospital.

To make the gift acceptable, Jake told Sekiguchi that he worked for a company that owned the hotel and that the room was complimentary. He admitted that this was a lie, and believed Sekiguchi understood both the lie and Jake’s reason for telling it. The pretense let Sekiguchi preserve the public face of a working police officer who could not accept a gift, while allowing Jake to provide the care he wanted him to have. Their bond thus came to include a tactful reversal: the detective who had taught the reporter how to earn trust became someone the reporter tried to protect, using a socially legible fiction rather than direct insistence. The partnership’s final measure was not another tip or scoop, but the effort to give an ailing friend a place to rest.