Tokyo Vice (21 page)

The Shinjuku police station was a ten-minute walk from Kabukicho, next to the Nishi Shinjuku station, close to an island of office buildings. It was fairly new and towered over the area. It was at least seven stories tall. A police officer with a long pole was always stationed in front of the police station, standing guard. I had to get past the guard to even enter the police station. I told him I was a reporter for the
Yomiuri
. He didn’t bat an eye. He looked at my ID and waved me in. I guess they were a little more used to dealing with foreigners in Tokyo, or at least at the Shinjuku police station.

Almost every district in Tokyo has one police station with a press club inside. The Shinjuku police station held the press club for the Fourth District. I took the elevator to one of the upper floors. The club was huge by most standards. It was a giant square room with a reporter’s desk from each newspaper/television outlet lined up against the wall, forming an L from the front to back. Next to the door was a closed-off tatami room, loaded with futons and completely dark unless you went in and turned on the light. A place to sleep. I felt in my bones that I was really going to like this assignment.

The tatami room would definitely come in handy. Sunao and I
were trying to have children, and come hell or high water, night or day, we were not missing her ovulation day. In a pinch, this room would do.

The current tenant of the desk I was about to occupy was snoring when I got there, leaning as far as possible on the low-backed desk chair, on the edge of teetering over, his arms dangling limply, his nose pointing at the sky, his messy hair sticking up. He was making gurgling sounds. His shirt was covered in rice cracker flakes; a half-open pack lay discarded at his feet. I’ll call him Crumbly.

The young female reporter from the
Asahi
sitting two seats away from him—Ms. Beanpole is how I’ve always thought of her—was curling up her lips in disgust at him when I walked in. She gave me a funny look, made eye contact, but didn’t say anything. I dropped my backpack filled with books, my camera, and my computer on top of Crumbly’s desk, casually. It made a loud thud when it hit. It startled Crumbly, who slid off his chair and landed near my foot.

“Sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.

Crumbly stood up, grabbing the rest of the rice crackers as he came to his feet.

“No problem. Just catching up on some sleep. So.”

“So.”

“So you’re taking over, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t have much information or wisdom to pass on to you. It’s not like I’ve been doing the Fourth District for long, and frankly, the district reporters are kept so busy doing odds and ends, we are barely here at all.”

“Inoue-san said the same thing. He said this year he’s going to encourage the district reporters to really cover their beats. It’ll be good prep work for being a police reporter at headquarters.”

He pulled a red notebook out of a pile of notebooks on the desk and said, “Yeah, well, I wish that it had been that way with me. Here’s the list of officers’ addresses I have. It’s not much.”

It wasn’t. The list hadn’t been updated in more than a year. If that was all he had, I would basically have to start from scratch, compiling my own list of police officers and where they lived to make the evening rounds. He handed me a collection of Fourth District police station announcements, newspaper clippings, a guidebook to Kabukicho, a plastic bag full of meishi. I noticed that there was a pile of discount tickets to sex shops in the trash basket next to the desk and an empty
box of condoms, but I couldn’t say if they were his and I didn’t want to ask.

I asked Crumbly what I should do to cover the area effectively.

He bit off half a rice cracker and offered me the other half. I took it.

While he chewed, crumbs blew through the air. Some of them caught in the breeze from the fan, then wafted to and hovered over Ms. Beanpole, who swatted at them like flies. Crumbly gave me his take on what it meant to be a district police reporter.

“Basically, Adelstein, you’re cannon fodder. The district police reporters are errand boys for the TMPD police reporters and the guys in the head office. All the big cases are done under the direction of TMPD headquarters, and anything that the local police do on their own is probably not newsworthy. You’re lucky if it even gets into the local edition, let alone the national edition. Nobody expects you to get a big scoop on this beat, and nobody gets too pissed off when you get your ass handed to you on a silver platter. Get to know a few cops, write a couple human interest stories, feed some intel to the real police reporters, and you’ll have done all right.”

“I thought Kabukicho was a hotbed of criminal activity.”

“It is. But that doesn’t make it newsworthy. People get killed or injured here all the time. But who cares if some Chink, yakuza thug, or whore gets whacked? The cops don’t, and the public doesn’t either. Nine times out of ten, no matter how much it looks like a murder, the Shinjuku police will write it up as a case of assault resulting in death—or manslaughter. Why? So they don’t have to launch a full-fledged investigation. They could find a Chinese skimmer
^2*
stabbed thirty-six times in the back on the streets of Kabukicho, and they’d call it an accidental death. Probably they wouldn’t announce it either.”

“So what is newsworthy here?”

“Anything involving someone famous or a civilian or a teenager. That’s about it. If yakuza start whacking each other and it looks like a gang war—maybe newsworthy.”

“I thought I was supposed to get to know the names and addresses and phone numbers of every major detective in the police station.”

“Ahhh, they tell you that, but it can’t be done. It’s not like the old days. In the old days, you’d go to the vice police chief and he’d give you
a list with the names and addresses of the head of each investigative division and the squad leader names as well. They won’t do that anymore. Especially not the Mole.”

“The Mole?”

“That’s the vice police chief here. He’s always squinting like he can’t stand being in the light. Spent his whole career in administration. He believes his job is to keep you from getting any information, including press releases. He’ll do everything possible to interfere with whatever story you want to work on. Totally worthless and hates reporters. Good luck.”

Ms. Beanpole snickered at that. I turned to her.

“Is that true?”

“Absolutely. Maybe he’ll be different with a foreigner. Who knows?”

He wasn’t. I asked The Mole when I could see the chief of police and make my formal greetings. Refused. I asked when I could speak with detectives from each section and was told, “Never.” The Mole’s answer to everything was always the same.

“I handle public relations. Anything you want to know, you ask me. Besides, the TMPD headquarters handles all the big stuff. Don’t bother the detectives.”

Fortunately for me, the chief of police had heard about me from Misawa, the most senior and most venerated police reporter at the
Yomiuri
, and while The Mole was busy brushing me off, the chief emerged from his office and invited me in. I ended up asking if it was all right to at least greet the head of each section, and the chief told The Mole to set it up. I could see The Mole cringe when he was given the order, but he did what he was told.

It wasn’t my charming personality alone that got the chief on my side.

I’d come prepared, of course. I knew the chief was a heavy smoker and I knew he liked Lucky Strikes, so I’d had a friend stock up at the duty free for me. They were packed in the hard-shell case rather than the soft pack, which was rare at the time, I was told. A carton of cigarettes could buy a lot of goodwill in Japan.

After exchanging business cards with about ten police officers under the watchful eye of The Mole, I headed back to the press club.

Beanpole was waiting. She introduced me to the reporters from Jiji, Kyodo, NHK, the
Mainichi
, and Nikkei. We made chitchat. I got the
usual twenty questions. I was a good sport. I explained how I’d gotten into the
Yomiuri
. Yes, I could eat sushi. Yes, I liked the cops. Yes, I could read and write Japanese.

I complained about The Mole. We all disliked him. In that sense, he did a lot to unify the club. There was nothing exciting on the news and no announcement scheduled for the day, so the first thing I did after lunch was pull out a futon, turn out the lights in the tatami room, and sleep. The Fourth District is Hell? Hah. It was the sixth realm, the Western Paradise—or so I thought as I was nodding off.

Paradise didn’t last long. At two in the afternoon, The Mole called from downstairs to let us know that the Shinjuku police would be announcing an arrest for violations of the Prostitution Prevention Law. The vice squad head, Shimozawa-san, would be giving us a lecture downstairs in the chief’s office. I called the TMPD club to let them know. We all hustled down to the room, and there was the chief behind his desk and the lead detective on the case standing in front of the desk with handouts. Another detective was sitting in the corner, taking notes. The press handouts didn’t have a lot written on them. It was always that way with the TMPD. The Saitama police press releases were like novels compared to the skimpy materials TMPD handed out.

Two days before, the Shinjuku police had arrested the owner and manager of a club in Kabukicho known as The Mature Hot Wives Party Palace for managing prostitutes. He had been running the establishment for more than a year and raked in close to $400,000. Shimozawa showed us all an advertisement for the club taken from
Tokyo Sports
, a popular newspaper sold at every train station in the city:

The ads showed several women in their late thirties, most of them with black bars across their eyes, partially obscuring their faces. Akimoto also had been advertising on the Internet and on mobile telephone Web sites. That was a big deal at the time: people using the Internet for criminal activities!

Another thing about the Web page that was ahead of its time was that if you printed out the home page and brought it with you, you got a discount of several thousand yen. The Web site was very professionally done. It had a full menu of services and options listed, but I couldn’t figure out what they meant.
Wakamesake? Shakuhachi?

Why would they offer sake with seaweed? And shakuhachi? Were they using wind instruments as dildos? Was I not getting something?

Shimozawa laid it all out for us but didn’t explain the menu.

“Unlike many sex clubs in Kabukicho, this place was openly providing
honban
. They had a staff of more than thirty women on call and ten on site at any given time. We suspect an organized crime presence in the background. Any questions?”

No one raised his or her hand. I did.

“What’s honban?” I asked.

Shimozawa looked surprised.

“You don’t know what honban is?”

“No.”

Beanpole giggled.

“That’s actual sexual intercourse. Insertion of the penis into the vagina,” he answered succinctly.

“Isn’t that what all the sex clubs are doing?”

“Not quite.”

“Well, if the customers aren’t inserting the penis in the vagina, what are they doing with their penises, anyway?”

Shimozawa laughed. “Have you ever covered the Crime Prevention Bureau before?”

“Not really.”

“So you don’t know how this works?”

“What works?”

“The whole sex industry.”

“Not really.”

“Well, you’d better read up.”

Nagoya-kun from Kyodo asked if there had been anyone famous there when they’d made the arrests and raided the club. There hadn’t been.

I had another question: “How many of the prostitutes were arrested?”

“None.”

“And the customers?”

“None.”

“Just the manager?”

“Just the manager.”

People were looking at me as if I were a total idiot. But it didn’t make any sense to me. Why did the cops bust only the manager of the club if there was an antiprostitution law on the books? I realized that I was in completely new territory now. I wanted to ask more, but I felt I was trying the patience of the cops, so I shut up, but there are limits. One of my favorite Japanese sayings goes along the lines: “To not know and to ask a question is a moment of embarrassment; to not know and not ask is a lifetime of shame.” I always thought it was better to look like an idiot and ask a lot of questions about new materials rather than fake it.

I asked another question: “This club marketed itself as being staffed by all married women, but how many of them were actually married?”

Shimozawa didn’t even need to look at his notes. “Good question. Only about a third of them were actually married to someone. Most of them were divorced or single.”

After the lecture, as I was packing up my computer, the detective sitting in the corner came up to me and introduced himself. I was later told that people referred to him as Alien Cop. He was a striking figure. About six feet two—tall for a Japanese guy—very thin, shaved head, and his eyes were jet black, almost all pupil and no white. He was dressed in a dark gray suit, navy blue tie, and a pair of black loafers.

“You don’t get this stuff, do you? Ever done the police beat before?”

“I covered the Organized Crime Control Bureau in Saitama.”

“OC stuff, huh? This is a different ball game.”

“I can see. I should study up.”

“Tokyo vice is a complicated thing. Books won’t tell you how it works. You can study the laws, of course, but what’s on the books and what’s enforced—different things.”

He gave me the card of a bar in Kabukicho.

“I get out of here at nine. Meet me at this bar. I’ll walk you through Kabukicho, explain the deal to you.”

I was grateful. It’s not often that a cop decides to take you under his wing. I agreed to meet him, quite happily.