Tokyo Vice (7 page)

It was still cold for April. I was thrilled to be out in the field, armed with my official
Yomiuri
business card and armband. The crime scene, though, proved to be elusive. The police had cordoned off a large area around the car with yellow tape that read KEEP OUT. The surrounding area was almost empty of human life. I dutifully walked around knocking on doors, trying to find someone who might have seen something. Most of the time people were stunned into silence, seeing my white face, and if they ever recovered, it was only to say, blankly, no.

The Face and Chappy weren’t having any luck either.

At a car parts factory, I introduced myself to an older employee as “Jake Adelstein from the
Yomiuri Shinbun.”
I got what was turning out to be the usual reception: “I don’t need any.”

“I’m not selling anything.”

“I already have a newspaper subscription.”

“I’m not selling newspapers. I’m a reporter for the
Yomiuri.”

“A reporter?”

“Yes, a reporter.” I handed him my business card.

“Hmmm.” He read the card over three times. “You’re a gaijin, right?”

“Yes. I’m a gaijin reporter working for the
Yomiuri.”

“So why are you here?”

•    •    •

This process was repeated endlessly, as everyone’s immediate assumption was that I was a newspaper boy. One middle-aged man who answered the door wearing a sweatsuit even complained about his morning paper not being delivered on time.

So I changed tactics. “Hello,” I began, “I’m a
reporter
for the
Yomiuri Shinbun
working on a story. Here is my card. I apologize for being a foreigner and taking your time, but I’d like to ask some questions.”

It sped up the process, but the results were still nada. The same for my colleagues, so we were sent to the company where the victim had worked, joining the mob of reporters from other media. When we got there, it was just after closing time and workers were filing out of the building. They must have been instructed not to speak to the press, because we were met with a wall of silence.

I strolled around back to see if I could improve my luck. I encountered a man in green overalls loading a truck. I greeted him, and he didn’t bat an eye at my non-Japanese face. Did he think anyone would have had reason to bump off his colleague? I asked.

“Well, he was having an affair with a coworker,” he said. “Everyone knew that. So I figure it could have been his wife or maybe the mistress. You want the name?”

Of course I wanted the name. I tried to write it down, but I sucked at writing Japanese names. There are so many variant readings and kanji for names that it’s often a nightmare even for Japanese.

He finally took the notepad out of my hands and wrote the name down for me. I thanked him profusely, but he just waved his hand.

“You didn’t hear it from me, and I never talked to you.”

“Understood.”

“Yoshiyama, the mistress, hasn’t been to work in a couple days. End of story.”

Could it be this easy? I called Yamamoto from a public phone. I was so excited that I was unintelligible. Yamamoto made me slow down and give him the information in detail. He told me to grab Yoshihara and work with him.

We started calling every Yoshiyama in the phone book. Yoshihara finally found the right Yoshiyama, but, according to her husband, she couldn’t come to the phone because she was talking to the police. Bingo!

Our next order was to make our way to the Nishi Iruma police station for the press conference. The local satellite-office reporter, Kanda, was already there, speaking to the vice captain. Freshman reporters from the
Asahi
and the Saitama local newspaper mulled around, but the largest cluster of people was near the coffee vending machine.

Kanda had already gotten his can of coffee. Kanda was a veteran reporter, diligent and aggressive. He wore steel-rimmed glasses that covered most of his face and had long, greasy, stringy bangs that hung over his glasses like a sheepdog’s. He called me over to the desk of the vice captain and introduced us. We exchanged pleasantries, and then Kanda pulled me over to the corner. He congratulated me on my work but warned me to keep my mouth shut at the press conference.

“If you ask anything important at a press conference, you ruin your own scoop. You ask only for details about things everybody already knows, not details about things you only half know. Just watch and listen.”

The press conference was held in a meeting room on the second floor. The television crews were pushing their way around, and people placed their tape recorders on the podium where the homicide chief would be speaking.

When he did speak, it was brief and straight from his notes: “It looks like the victim, Machida, was killed a few days ago, probably on the night he vanished. The long-bladed knife appears to have pierced the heart, killing him instantly. The official cause of death is loss of blood.

“The victim appears to have been killed in the car, judging from the blood splatter. We are talking to his friends and employers to develop any leads. We have officially set up a special investigation headquarters; we’ll come up with a name for it later tonight.

“That’s all we have for now. Questions?”

Hands did not immediately go up. The general consensus seemed to be not to ask real questions at the official press conference but to lob the zingers at the police after the conference, at their homes, or on their way out the door. Still, people felt obligated to ask something.

“According to your earlier reports, the wife found the body. How did she find it?”

“She was searching the area with a friend when she saw the family car. The body was in it.” I myself took that as a broad hint.

“When did the police receive notification that Machida was missing?”

“Two days after he’d gone missing.”

“Why did they wait so long?” It was an
Asahi
reporter, arching his eyebrows.

The detective didn’t take the bait. “Well, how long are you supposed to wait? If you don’t get home tonight before two in the morning, is your wife going to file a report with us?”

“My wife? Absolutely.”

That got some laughs. The rest of the conference was benign, and the group dispersed.

Eventually we headed back to Urawa and compared notes. When Yamamoto returned at around three in the morning from the police chief’s home, where he’d gone for information, he corroborated the the details we’d put together. The woman who had “helped” Mrs. Machida discover the body of her husband was the same Yoshiyama who had allegedly been having an affair with him. Naturally, the police considered her the main suspect.

The next day was fruitless, spent polling the neighborhood. We were able to confirm that the police were interrogating Yoshiyama but she was refusing to break. On the morning of the next day, though, she confessed to her husband, who called the Saitama police, who made the arrest just in time for us to make the evening edition with the news.

It went something like this:

It was not a particularly exciting case, one I’m sure has long passed from the memory of the police and even the reporters who covered the story. I did get some brownie points for getting a lead on the killer so early in the game. Of course, it was more luck than skill, but I learned an important lesson: journalism is always about the results, not the effort.

After a few months as a police beat reporter, I had become friends with several cops, but I still didn’t have a single, solitary scoop that I had dug up on my own.

Getting scoops was difficult. It involved getting wind of a breaking story, finding the detective in the lower ranks who was working the story, gaining his trust and the information he had, then running it up the food chain in such a way that the people at the top didn’t know you were culling data from the bottom.

You might spend hours waiting for your source to come home, hoping that he’d cough up a morsel of information in your brief chat with him. On a big case, your source might not come home for days. In 1993, contact was more difficult since most people didn’t have cell phones, meaning you had to rely on luck to catch them at work, at home, or somewhere in between.

You had to get third-party verification that you had all the facts,
and
you had to convince your editor that it was safe to run a story with no official press release to hide behind. Sometimes you needed to visit the home of the suspect to confirm that he or she had been arrested, since in Japan arrest records are not publicly available. Often, when you were ready to write the story and gave notice to the chief of detectives, the police would immediately rush out a press release, reducing your scoop—and all your efforts—to nothing.

But I did finally score. How? The old-fashioned way: blackmail.

Every evening between the usual tedious typing of sports records, birth announcements, and obituaries and taking dinner orders for the
senior staff, I would get on my bicycle, pedal over to the Omiya police station, and hang out with the cops. Most of the time, if they weren’t busy, I would sit down and shoot the shit with them for a while. We’d drink green tea and discuss politics, past cases, or what was on the television. I’d bring doughnuts, which I don’t think were part of the typical diet of the cops in Japan, but they didn’t seem to mind. In fact, they might have liked them for that reason.

One of my sources who was assigned to the railroads told me about a professional pickpocket they’d nabbed a few weeks back who had confessed to a supposedly huge number of cases. What caught my attention was that the pickpocket would “go to work” every day in suit and tie; he was a true professional. Variations of this story repeatedly show up in the Japanese news, but it sounded interesting to me then because I didn’t know any better.

After triangulating the lead, I was ready to write the article. I had all the facts I needed—except for the number of crimes he’d confessed to, which the story was riding on. The railroad officials didn’t know. My only choice was to talk to someone high up in the Omiya police, since they were handling the case now.

The chief of detectives was named Fuji. He was known as a great interrogator and a great cop but an unpleasant person to deal with if you were a reporter. He was tall and thin, with stereotypical thick glasses, and he always wore suits that were wrinkled and gray. His face had the proverbial five o’clock shadow by ten in the morning.

I don’t think he liked or disliked me. He just considered me a nuisance, another pesky little reporter who would eventually be replaced by another rookie, preferably one who was Japanese. I decided to take the leap and ask him to let me write the story, but he would not budge.

“If you think you know so much, go ahead, write the story. But I bet you don’t know how many pockets he picked before we caught him. Ten? One hundred? Two hundred?”

“It’s over a hundred, then?”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“No.”

“Well, then, I guess this isn’t your story. Why don’t you just wait a week, and you’ll get all the details.”

“You mean you’ll give me the scoop?”

“Nope,” he said. “We’ll announce the case in a week and you can ask all the questions you want.”

“But then it won’t be a scoop.”

“That’s not my problem. I just do the paperwork, the detectives do the investigation, and when we have all the facts together, we announce it. You write it up. Case closed.”

He called over one of the policewomen and pointed at me. “Could you get Adelstein-san a cup of tea? He’s working very hard, and he looks dehydrated.” He left me sitting and sipping at his desk and went downstairs to talk to the vice captain, probably to warn him that I was nosing around.

If I were a cop, I’d feel the same way about me. My scooping the story wouldn’t benefit him in any way. I didn’t have the position or authority to promise him good coverage of the story, nor did I have information to offer him that would make it a give-and-take deal. On the other hand, what harm could it do to give me the story? I was working hard. The story would make the police look good in the local community or, at the very least, not make them look bad.

I had a week before the announcement. The cops loved to make us wait. It was a constant tug-of-war. So I found myself once again whittling away the hours, drinking tea and watching television with the Omiya cops at nine that same evening. That was when I happened to notice a drawing posted on the bulletin board. It was a composite sketch of a thief who had been ripping off large electronics and clothing stores along a major highway of the city. The notice, sometimes called a
tehaisho
, went into great detail about his physical characteristics, his MO, and each store he’d robbed.

“Hey, do you mind if I take a picture of the police station?” I casually asked a cop whose mouth was full of jelly doughnut. “My dad’s a medical examiner in Missouri, and he’s really curious to see what a Japanese police station looks like.”

The guys were sufficiently impressed by my father’s quasi-police status to ask me about his work while they posed for pictures. I had them stand beside the bulletin board, and as I snapped away, I took a close-up of the composite sketch.