Japan is more than a backdrop in the book: it is the institutional terrain on which reporting, policing, and public policy meet. The same country that supplies the narrator with manuals, press clubs, and official directives also reveals the distance between written procedures and what authorities actually do.

Reporting and Police Access

A police reporter’s work in Japan begins with a narrow formal education. In 1993, Nakajima gave new reporters a manual, a beeper they were expected to keep on, and collections of sample articles covering subjects from homicide and arson to organized crime and purse snatching. They were told to learn the newspaper’s style within a week. That brief orientation marked both the beginning and the end of their formal training.

The manual could teach a reporter how to shape a story, but it could not explain how to gain access to the police. Press-club membership was restricted, and useful information depended on relationships that official instruction left unaddressed. A former supervisor’s memo warned that mechanically making the rounds or relying on the Yomiuri name would produce leaks from very few officers. The account thus presents police reporting as work conducted through both written routines and personal negotiation: the first provided a framework, while the second often determined what a reporter could actually learn.

Human Trafficking and the Gap Between Policy and Practice

The book’s account of Japan’s response to sexual violence against foreign women exposes a recurring gap between what official policy declared and what the system could—or would—do. When Joji Obara became a suspect in the disappearance of Lucie Blackman, police separately arrested him on October 12 for sexual assault. Their press release described assaults on foreign women who were lured on drives, given drugged drinks, and raped; officials noted that the method resembled the circumstances of Lucie’s disappearance. The cases raised a question extending beyond one suspect: how could repeated assaults continue for years without prompting an earlier intervention?

That institutional gap became concrete in November 2003, when Jake Adelstein received a call about women from Poland, Russia, and Estonia who were reportedly being forced to work without pay. A police contact proposed using one woman’s testimony to pursue immigration violations and shut down the business, but said she would first have to be arrested for working illegally on a tourist visa and deported. Adelstein pointed to a National Police Agency directive instructing police to make serious efforts against trafficking and to care for victims. The officer replied that no workable criteria existed for identifying trafficking victims; in practice, women classified as illegal workers were arrested and repatriated, leaving investigators without witnesses and making cases against traffickers difficult to build.

The same cycle appeared in accounts gathered from other women. Some could not identify their abusers or explain where they had been held, and language barriers made their testimony harder to use. When club owners were arrested, women were often deported for visa violations, removing potential witnesses before police could pursue other charges. Adelstein tried to persuade investigators to consider kidnapping, rape, and assault charges, but was told that evidence and usable testimony were lacking. The result was a system in which the victims’ immigration violations were readily actionable while the more serious violence against them remained difficult to prosecute.

Adelstein turned from individual cases toward the government’s responsibility. He obtained a copy of a scathing, Japanese-government-funded study by the International Labour Organisation that found Japan had failed to punish traffickers or care for victims; the government had ordered the report kept under wraps. The Yomiuri Shinbun published his investigation on its front page on November 19, 2004, followed by another article the next day. A source told him that the government’s planned response was revised substantially to strengthen victim protection after the reporting. He continued pursuing the traffickers as well: Viktor and Slick eventually went to jail, while Slick’s clubs were raided and his business closed. The sequence makes Japan’s institutional failure visible not as an absence of rules alone, but as a breakdown between written commitments, routine enforcement, and the protection of people exploited within the country.

Organized Crime, Violence, and Transplantation

The book also locates Japan’s institutional tensions in the intersection of organized crime, policing, and scarce medical resources. Interfactional yakuza violence was described as unusual, but it could erupt in public: in 1994, Eiju Kim, head of the Osaka group Kyoyou-kai, was shot dead outside the Fujiya Hotel by Naoto Kametani, a close friend and head of the Rokkorengo gang. Kim’s driver, Kenichi Takanuki, was also shot; police nearby arrested Kametani after he fled on foot. The episode sat within broader hostilities between the Kokusui-kai and the Yamaguchi-gumi, which had begun with a shooting in Tokyo and spread across several prefectures before reaching Saitama Prefecture.

Years later, an investigation into a building transfer brought Tadamasa Goto into focus alongside the unresolved killing of Kazuoki Nozaki. In May 2006, Goto and eight others were arrested on suspicion of falsely registering ownership of the twelve-story Shinjuku Building, partly owned by a Goto-gumi front company. The inquiry had begun more than a year earlier, after Nozaki, a partial owner and adviser to a building-management company, was stabbed to death on a Tokyo street in March 2005. The narrator understood the property-law arrest as an effort by police to connect Goto to Nozaki’s murder, though the account distinguishes that suspicion from a proven conviction.

The transplant story widened the same inquiry beyond Japan. After doctors at Showa University reportedly warned Goto in early 2001 that he would die without a liver transplant, he approached the FBI through Hoshi Hitoshi, a former political fixer. Goto offered information about Yamaguchi-gumi members, affiliated companies and financial institutions, as well as North Korean activity. In return, he sought a United States visa to receive a transplant at UCLA. The FBI pressured U.S. immigration authorities to grant the visa; Goto underwent surgery on July 5 and, according to the account, supplied only a fraction of the information promised before returning to Japan and ending contact with the FBI.

That exchange carried particular weight because Japan’s transplant system was stringent and donor organs were scarce; many people needing transplants left the country or died waiting. The narrator also suspected that Goto was not the only Japanese criminal to receive a liver at UCLA, and later investigated four Japanese patients with alleged yakuza ties. UCLA and Dr. Busuttil said they did not make moral judgments about patients and treated them according to medical need; neither improper conduct by the medical center nor staff was established by a federal investigation. At the same time, the narrator reported that law-enforcement sources saw a possibility that money paid for at least one transplant came from criminal proceeds in Japan. The evidence presented leaves both institutional knowledge and the source of funds unresolved, making the episode a question about transparency and cross-border accountability as well as medical access.

A Reporter Changed by What He Found

Before the trafficking investigation, Jake Adelstein had reported from Kabukicho and sought tips in Roppongi, and believed he understood the legal framework of Japan’s sex-for-money industry. He regarded sexual slavery as a myth promoted by outsiders who misunderstood Japanese sex culture. Speaking with women who had been exploited overturned that assumption and changed the work from an abstract question of law into a human crisis. Adelstein used his own pay to help some of the women, including arranging access to abortions and paying for airfare, despite recognizing that this involvement crossed the boundary of journalistic objectivity. He believed no woman should be forced to bear the child of a man who had raped her or bought her unwilling services. The reporting also altered his personal response to sex: over time he lost interest in it, while chronic fatigue compounded the strain. Japan’s institutional failures thus appear not only in rules that left victims exposed, but in the intimate costs of trying to assist people those rules failed to protect.