Jake Adelstein—Gen Sekiguchi

The relationship between Jake Adelstein and Gen Sekiguchi is at once professional, intimate, and instructive: a reporter and a police investigator learn to trust one another, then become a source of guidance and care in each other’s lives. Sekiguchi opens doors to the world Adelstein is trying to understand, but never treats access as automatic. He tests the reporter’s judgment, protects him when his curiosity outruns caution, and becomes the person whose lessons remain present after his death.

First Encounters and the Test of Trust

Their connection begins amid the formalities of a meeting between men still measuring one another. Sekiguchi gives Adelstein his business card; Adelstein accepts it with both hands and bows, and the two exchange cards according to the careful ritual of assessing status and showing respect. The encounter is unnervingly ordinary: Sekiguchi asks how a foreigner came to work for Yomiuri Shinbun, and Adelstein recounts his life in Japan, including his time at Sophia University.

That calm surface does not mean Sekiguchi has decided to trust him. After Adelstein gets through the door by bringing ice cream, Sekiguchi listens closely to his background and acknowledges that the reporter’s approach worked. The remaining question, he tells him, is whether he can and should be trusted. He then asks how Adelstein learned his name. Their relationship therefore starts not with uncomplicated friendship, but with an explicit negotiation over access, motives, and confidence. Sekiguchi’s attention makes the opening possible; his skepticism defines its terms.

Shared Work and Protection in the Field

Trust takes shape through repeated encounters in which professional risk meets personal responsibility. While investigating Lucie Blackman’s disappearance, Adelstein recognizes that declaring himself a reporter will close off the foreign nightlife circles where he needs information. Many people there are working illegally and distrust both police and journalists. He adopts a false identity as an insurance investigator, makes a business card, obtains a second phone, and spends weekends in Tokyo Roppongi looking for someone who knows Lucie or the customer who took her to the seaside. That work belongs to Adelstein’s own investigation, but it shows the kind of reporting life Sekiguchi later has to caution and protect.

During a dangerous scene involving gunfire at a yakuza office, Adelstein argues that his press armband gives him a right to take photographs and pulls his camera out of a man’s reach. He dares to be cocky because Sekiguchi has arrived. Dressed in black jeans, a navy sweater, a long leather jacket, and gloves, Sekiguchi looks more like a yakuza than the men he confronts. He orders one man to leave, then privately warns Adelstein not to antagonize people with a poor sense of humor. The protection is practical, not sentimental: Sekiguchi intervenes, assesses the immediate danger, and makes clear that Adelstein’s professional access does not make him invulnerable. He tells him to come by that night.

The invitation leads from the public scene to the cramped warmth of Sekiguchi’s home. Adelstein arrives after filing his article and taking a nap. Sekiguchi’s family is there: his wife reads the newspaper, one daughter works on English homework with Adelstein, and another watches television while eating candied squid. The small house is cozy, and Sekiguchi joins them on the floor beneath the kotatsu. Their ease in this domestic setting contrasts with the danger and guardedness of their work. Adelstein is not merely a journalist receiving information; he has been welcomed into the investigator’s family space.

Investigation, Judgment, and Mutual Respect

Their conversations also expose differences in how they weigh crime and accountability. When Sekiguchi is assigned to interrogate Sugaya, a young man suspected of involvement in a gang conflict, he doubts Sugaya’s claim that he acted alone. Within the Yamaguchi-gumi, an attack on a rival followed by surrender could function as a route to promotion after prison; in other cases, an organization might use a proxy while the actual gunman escaped punishment. Sekiguchi needs to establish whether Sugaya was truly the shooter, and the surviving victims can provide eyewitness accounts.

Under a kotatsu while Sekiguchi’s wife prepares late-evening fried rice, Adelstein dismisses the stakes, reasoning that Sugaya will be convicted and released after a few years and that the public does not care when yakuza harm one another. Sekiguchi agrees that this indifference is a problem. The exchange shows that the two can disagree without ending the conversation: Adelstein voices a cynical judgment, while Sekiguchi remains committed to determining what happened and securing a proportionate prosecution.

Sekiguchi ultimately gets Sugaya prosecuted for attempted murder as well as violations of gun and firearms laws. He appeals to Sugaya’s sense of manly pride, and Sugaya is sentenced to ten years. Adelstein loses a bet and has to take the Sekiguchi family for yakiniku, spending 30,000 yen on the meal. The episode makes their rapport visible in action: work continues through argument, a bet turns professional disagreement into personal obligation, and the outcome gives Adelstein reason to respect the investigator’s persistence. Sekiguchi’s effectiveness is not a matter of intimidation alone; he knows how to reach a suspect and how to pursue charges beyond the narrowest account of the crime.

Care, Illness, and the Broken Promise

By the time Sekiguchi becomes seriously ill, the relationship has lasted nearly fourteen years. Adelstein tries to make the long journey for cancer treatment easier by arranging a hotel room near the hospital. Sekiguchi refuses gifts of monetary value from a reporter, particularly while he is still working as a police officer. Adelstein tells him that the hotel is owned by a company he works for and that the room has been comped. It is a lie, and Adelstein believes Sekiguchi understands that it is one. The pretense allows Sekiguchi to accept the rest he needs without abandoning the public image he must maintain; the kindness depends on both men tacitly accepting that cover.

Sekiguchi’s cancer spreads, and even intravenous morphine does not control his pain. For a time, he travels from his home in Saitama to the Ariake Cancer Institute in Odaiba for treatment, then returns by train, sometimes during rush hour. The hotel arrangement is a small accommodation against the strain of that journey, but also a concentrated example of what their bond has become: Adelstein wants to care for him, while Sekiguchi’s professional principles make receiving help difficult. The lie gives each man a way to preserve the other’s dignity.

After Shibata dies in 2007, Sekiguchi follows that autumn. Adelstein has suddenly lost both his principal yakuza source and his principal police source, and the prospects for his investigation of Goto look bleak. Sekiguchi is forty-eight. He dies at 3:45 in the afternoon on a rainy day toward the end of August, while Adelstein and his family are in Japan and due to return to the United States the next day. Sekiguchi’s wife calls with the news as Adelstein is eating Chinese food. He wants to cancel the flight and attend the funeral, but does not.

He does go to the family home that night with Sunao Adelstein, traveling through heavy rain in a taxi whose fare comes to almost $250. Sekiguchi’s body is on a futon in the living room, awaiting a Shinto funeral. Adelstein had promised to attend the funeral, wear a proper suit, and try to wear matching socks; he later describes failing to keep that promise as one of his few regrets. The night visit lets him pay his respects, but it cannot substitute for the commitment he had made. His regret gives the relationship’s ending its own weight: practical loyalty had defined their years together, yet at the final test Adelstein was absent from the funeral.

A Mentor Beyond His Death

Adelstein regards Sekiguchi as a second father and credits him with teaching him more about reporting, interrogation, honor, and trust than anyone else he knew. That education was not delivered only as advice. It came through Sekiguchi’s guarded first questions, his judgment in the field, the way he pursued Sugaya’s case, and the careful accommodation over the hotel room. Even at home, in the midst of illness, Sekiguchi’s insistence on professional boundaries required Adelstein to learn how care could be offered without forcing the recipient to surrender his principles.

At the house, Adelstein sees Sekiguchi’s face after the white cloth is removed. He thinks the familiar grin recalls the man who used to dangle scraps of information or make bad jokes when Adelstein lost a bet. This memory gathers the private and professional sides of the relationship in one expression: Sekiguchi could tease him, keep him waiting for information, and still be the mentor whose judgment Adelstein depended on.

Later, with his family in jeopardy and Helena still missing, Adelstein remembers Sekiguchi’s smile and imagines him advising that sometimes a person must pull back in order to fight back, and must ask what time it is. The advice does not resolve Adelstein’s danger or dictate a simple retreat. Instead, it gives him a way to think about timing and resistance at a moment when he feels that retreat may no longer be possible. Sekiguchi’s lasting influence lies in that combination of restraint and resolve: he taught Adelstein to pursue difficult truths, but also to recognize that courage without judgment can become needless exposure.