National Police Agency

The National Police Agency is presented as a national-level source of policy, police intelligence, and institutional authority, but not as a guarantee that protection will reach people in danger. In Jake Adelstein’s account, its human-trafficking directive collides with local enforcement practices that treat exploited foreign women as immigration offenders, while its confidential reporting on Tadamasa Goto supplies a different kind of power: information that can support investigation and personal protection. The agency’s significance lies in this contrast between what its documents prescribe, what officials know, and what institutions actually do.

Policy and the promise of protection

The National Police Agency directive on human trafficking becomes an important document in Adelstein’s attempt to secure help for foreign women working under exploitative conditions. He brings the directive to a Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department contact after learning that women from Poland, Russia, and Estonia were reportedly being compelled to work without pay. The document calls for serious efforts to close trafficking operations and care for victims. In practice, however, the officer tells him that a woman working illegally on a tourist visa would still be arrested and deported, even if her testimony could help investigators target the men controlling the business.

That response exposes a break between a national instruction and its implementation. The officer describes the lack of criteria for identifying trafficking victims as a practical obstacle: women are categorized as illegal workers, removed from the country, and therefore unavailable as witnesses in cases against traffickers. He treats declining to arrest a woman in those circumstances as a possible failure of duty. The directive’s promise of victim care thus meets an enforcement routine that makes immigration status decisive, narrowing the opportunity to build a criminal case against those exploiting the women.

The consequences extend beyond one proposed investigation. Adelstein believes he could help a group of women, but doing so through the officer’s proposed approach would require exposing sources, including Helena. He refuses to sacrifice them and provides the men’s telephone numbers instead. The episode leaves the directive intact on paper but shows how its practical effect is constrained by local rules, evidentiary demands, and the treatment of potential witnesses. The book presents the NPA’s policy as meaningful evidence of an official commitment, while showing that a policy alone does not secure safety or access to justice.

Public claims and the suppressed report

The agency also appears in public debate over Japan’s response to trafficking. At a symposium on human trafficking at the United Nations University, an NPA representative describes the country’s efforts in positive terms. Adelstein challenges that account by recounting the obstacles he encountered with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and arguing that the directive did not match the treatment of victims in practice. His criticism turns the agency’s official position into a testable claim: the existence of a policy is not the same as its effective application.

A separate investigation sharpens that challenge. The International Labour Organization had conducted a study, funded by the Japanese government, that found Japan had failed to punish traffickers or care for victims. The government ordered the report kept under wraps. Adelstein obtained a copy, and Yomiuri Shinbun published his report on the findings on November 19, 2004, followed by another article the next day. A source told him that the government had been preparing an action plan and that the reporting prompted substantial revisions intended to strengthen victim protection. The account does not attribute the suppression order or the revisions solely to the NPA; instead, it places the agency within a wider government response whose public claims and actual record were being contested.

The episode gives documents a central role in the agency’s story. The directive supplies a standard against which frontline conduct can be judged; the unpublished ILO study supplies evidence of a broader failure; and the newspaper articles carry that evidence into public view. The NPA’s representative speaks for the official account at the symposium, while the reporting forces attention back to the discrepancy between stated efforts and the experiences of women who were deported before cases could be built.

Intelligence on the Goto-gumi

In his investigation of the Goto-gumi, Adelstein obtains the NPA’s 2001 Confidential Report on the Goto-gumi, a secret document compiled with assistance from police organizations around Japan. A source gives him the report in exchange for services rendered. It describes an organization prepared to use extreme measures and to plan reprisals over extended periods, with roles divided among people conducting preliminary inspections, carrying out attacks, and keeping watch. According to the report, responsibility was obscured so that investigators could not readily identify who was in charge; vehicles with stolen plates from outside the relevant prefecture further complicated investigations.

The report also identifies intimidation of the mass media as a characteristic of the organization, including serious, persistent threats against people responsible for unfavorable coverage. That finding gives the NPA material particular importance to Adelstein: the document does not merely describe organized violence in general but records a threat to the circulation of information. The report supports his assessment of the risks surrounding his work, even as the source’s decision to provide it involves a personal exchange rather than a formal release.

The agency’s intelligence also reaches beyond the report. An NPA officer tells Adelstein that, in the year Tadamasa Goto went to UCLA for a liver transplant, the agency had tracked close to a million dollars moving through Goto’s casino accounts. The officer connects this information to Adelstein’s earlier reporting on Susumu Kajiyama’s case and urges him to publish, reasoning that public exposure could reduce the incentive to kill him. This is an officer’s account of what the NPA tracked, not a claim that the agency itself resolved the questions surrounding Goto’s finances or transplant.

Protection and institutional relationships

When threats against Adelstein intensify, the NPA becomes part of the institutional response. On March 5, 2008, an FBI special agent accompanies him to the agency, where they discuss protective measures. Adelstein is asked to identify his source inside the Goto-gumi, but refuses; he is warned that withholding the source could make it harder to justify round-the-clock police protection. He accepts the protection available rather than disclose the person who had helped him.

His dealings with NPA personnel are not limited to official meetings. An officer who knows him from his years in Saitama invites him to the agency cafeteria for coffee, where he offers information and warns Adelstein that returning home could expose his family and friends to danger. Later, an officer known as Alien Cop, transferred to the NPA and working in its Organized Crime Control Bureau, visits Adelstein’s home with other police acquaintances. These encounters show how professional contacts and personal trust accompany the formal machinery of protection, without erasing the tension between an institution’s duties and the reporter’s need to protect sources.

Significance in the narrative

The National Police Agency occupies several positions in the book’s account: it issues a directive whose promise falters at the point of enforcement, fields an official defense of the government’s record, compiles secret intelligence about the Goto-gumi, and participates in discussions about protecting a threatened journalist. These roles do not resolve into a simple portrait of either failure or effectiveness. The agency’s documents can expose the distance between policy and practice, while its personnel can supply information and assistance; yet the people most in need of protection may still be deported, and sensitive information may remain inaccessible until a source risks passing it on.

That tension links the trafficking investigation to Adelstein’s later work on organized crime. In both, information matters because institutions do not act on abstract knowledge alone: a directive must be applied, a report must escape secrecy, and a threat must be made public before it can alter the risks around a target. The NPA is therefore not merely a background authority. It is one of the contested channels through which facts become policy, evidence, or protection—and through which the limits of each are made visible.