Urawa is the Saitama city where Jake Adelstein began his reporting career at the Yomiuri Shinbun’s regional office. The assignment placed him in a busy, unpretentious bureau outside the capital and made the city the working base for his early coverage of organized crime, including the Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances. Urawa’s significance lies not in a single dramatic scene but in the daily labor it demanded: local reporting, repeated visits to police sources, and long hours that carried Adelstein from the bureau into an increasingly consequential investigation.

Setting and Assignment

The Yomiuri Shinbun assigned Adelstein to Urawa after he had joined the newspaper. His editor characterized the post as demanding, with a Spartan atmosphere and a heavy writing workload, but also as an opportunity to contribute to the national edition. Urawa was geographically close to Tokyo, yet the assignment was presented as a sharp change in professional world: once based there, Adelstein would be consumed by the work rather than enjoy the capital’s apparent proximity.

The city stood in Saitama Prefecture, a large region just beyond Tokyo that combined rural and suburban landscapes. Urawa itself was described as a vast bedroom city for workers commuting to the capital. Its reputation among urban Japanese was markedly unfashionable, a local image that made the transfer sound less like a metropolitan posting than an exile to the unglamorous edge of the city. That contrast shaped the meaning of the assignment: Urawa was near Tokyo on a map, but the work and setting made it feel remote from the national center.

The Regional Bureau

Adelstein reported to the Urawa office on the morning of April 15, 1993, at 8:30. The contrast with the pristine Chiba office was immediately apparent to the new recruits, who found the Urawa premises a comedown from the company’s polished image. The bureau occupied much of the second floor of an office building in a residential neighborhood. Its chief had a private office; the rest of the staff worked in an open room without cubicles or privacy.

The reception area offered three faux-leather sofas around a table crowded with newspapers, while magazines were piled beneath it. Dust, food particles, and insects had collected on the nicotine-coated window blinds. Two islands of desks organized the working floor: editors sat near the center, senior reporters occupied the back, and the four new reporters were placed in the middle, exposed to the room. A darkroom and a tatami room served practical newsroom needs. Night staff slept in the latter, which also had a bath and shower; editors could nap there, although the room was off limits to other reporters during the day. These details give Urawa’s bureau a material character quite unlike an abstract regional outpost: crowded, worn, hierarchical, and arranged around the work’s uneven privileges.

Daily Reporting and Police Sources

The Urawa beat demanded more than time at a desk. Adelstein’s routine came to include yomawari, reporters’ evening visits to police officers at home. A visit could be followed by a return to the bureau or press club to type up sports records and other assignments before he went home for a few hours’ sleep. The cycle made the office both a reporting base and a place to which the day’s unfinished work repeatedly returned.

Source-building was part of that routine. When Adelstein identified Sekiguchi as a possible police contact, his editor welcomed the lead but advised him to consider how to approach the officer, including learning about his family. Adelstein followed the guidance by bringing a large tub of chocolate ice cream to Sekiguchi’s home at seven in the evening. The visit began as a deliberately cultivated reporting relationship, not as an impersonal exchange of information. The evidence locates the bureau and the work within Urawa, while placing this particular meeting at the officer’s home; the distinction matters because the city’s importance is as the center of Adelstein’s beat, not as the asserted location of every encounter.

The Bureau and the Missing-Person Investigation

That reporting base became important when Yamamoto assigned the newspaper’s staff to investigate the missing dog lovers in Saitama. Adelstein was given the missing yakuza Endo and his driver Wakui as subjects because he covered the Saitama Organized Crime Control Bureau. The assignment required him to establish who the men were, how they knew Sekine, when they had last been seen alive, and what might explain their disappearance. The editor’s instruction made the reporting personal in its workload: Adelstein’s task was to reconstruct Endo’s life in detail, gathering photographs, comments, testimony, and anything else that might matter as the case developed.

The first Yomiuri Shinbun article appeared on the morning of February 19 under a four-column headline about several dog lovers missing in Saitama between April and August amid trouble over sales. Other newspapers hurried to catch up after publication, leaving the Yomiuri Shinbun with the lead on the case. Urawa thus functioned as more than the setting of Adelstein’s first assignment. It was the regional newsroom from which a local beat, built through police contacts and sustained daily work, opened onto a major investigation. The city’s modest office and its demanding routine stand in deliberate contrast to the national reach of the story that emerged from them.