Sometimes it is necessary to trust the untrustworthy

“Sometimes it is necessary to trust the untrustworthy” is a principle of provisional trust in Tokyo Vice, expressed when Sekiguchi explains why he left Sekine in Takada’s hands. Trust here is neither innocence nor certainty: it is a deliberate wager that a promise can constrain someone whose conduct gives reason for doubt.

Trust as a Deliberate Choice

When Jake asks whether Sekiguchi believed Takada, Sekiguchi says that sometimes a person must trust the untrustworthy, and that trust itself can make the recipient trustworthy. He had been told that Takada had taken Sekine for questioning, despite Sekine supposedly being off-limits. Sekiguchi declined Takada’s invitation to listen, but required him to promise not to kill Sekine and to report what he learned. He chose to leave Sekine with Takada because Takada had given his word; without that promise, Sekiguchi says, he would have called the Gyoda police to get Sekine out.

The account makes trust consequential rather than sentimental. Takada’s promise creates a boundary around his use of power, while Sekiguchi’s decision accepts a risk that the promise might fail. The principle does not establish that Takada is generally trustworthy, or erase the danger to Sekine. It describes a choice made in a particular situation, where reliance on a spoken commitment seemed preferable to immediate intervention.

Information, Judgment, and Risk

Elsewhere, the book shows the same need to act under uncertainty in the handling of information. After hearing Kaneko’s account of the yakuza economy, Jake repeats it to a source, who suspects that someone inside the organization may be trying to bring down a rival through a power struggle. The source’s response is a hypothesis, not confirmation: judgment has to proceed while the facts remain incomplete.

A separate warning gives that uncertainty a practical rule. Ground-level information may not yet be known by people higher in the police hierarchy; taking it to them too soon could prompt a search for the leak and burn the source. Jake is told to wait for information to travel upward before double-checking it. The advice complements Sekiguchi’s maxim without making trust equivalent to credulity: relying on people can be necessary, but timing and discretion matter because information itself can endanger the person who supplied it.

The Cost of Trust

The book’s note on source protection makes the stakes explicit. A Japanese police officer who leaks information to a reporter can face criminal prosecution and lose a job, while a yakuza who reveals organizational secrets or works with a journalist may risk his life. The threat is not abstract: the account notes that yakuza members once stabbed a journalist’s son after articles they disliked, attacking someone close to the writer rather than the writer himself.

Against that danger, “Sometimes you have to trust people who are untrustworthy” is not a promise that trust will be rewarded. It is a limited working ethic for relationships in which guarantees are scarce and the consequences of both reliance and refusal can be severe. Its companion thought—that trust can make a person act more trustworthily—leaves the outcome open: a promise may restrain, but it cannot remove the risks that made trust necessary in the first place.