Tokyo Vice (35 page)

Also pursuant to Kajiyama’s conviction, Japanese lending laws were revised to make the penalties for loan sharking much harsher, and a crystal-clear cap was set on interest rates that even legitimate consumer loan companies could charge. We can only hope that the Japanese are able to learn from their American counterparts and discover the joys of credit card debt. When that happens, we can look forward to the appearance of a Yamaguchi-gumi Visa or MasterCard. It’s the next logical step.

PART 3
Dusk

People pay their respects to the dead in different ways. I would have bought flowers to place on her grave, but the body hadn’t shown up anywhere yet. So instead I pulled a 10,000-yen note out of my wallet and gave it to Fujiwara-san at the Polaris Project Japan. Polaris runs a hotline for human trafficking victims in Tokyo, and the folks there do a good job trying to raise public awareness.

Fujiwara-san said that the number of phone calls to Polaris had gone up quite a bit in the last year, mostly from Korean and Eastern European women. She thanked me for the donation and asked if I knew a Russian speaker. I promised I’d try to find her one.

I think I can trace the beginnings of burning out as a reporter to the period where I started covering this very nasty side of the Japanese sex industry. I didn’t even realize it was burning me out until it was way too late.

If you spend enough years as a crime reporter, you get callous. It’s only natural. If you grieved for every victim or shared the pain of the family, you’d become a mental case. Murder, arson, armed robbery, family suicide, they all become routine. There’s a tendency to dehumanize the victims, sometimes to even be annoyed with them for ruining your day off or a planned vacation. It sounds horrible, and it is. But that’s how it works.

I thought I knew a lot about the “dark side” of Japan. I’d covered the Lucie Blackman case, investigated a serial killer, nearly touched a body
full of electricity, seen a man burn himself to death, and more. I thought I was pretty tough—in my own way.

I had become very cynical. And I had become a little cold, and, when a reporter starts to cool down, it’s very hard for him or her to ever warm up again. We all build psychic armor around ourselves to cope with emotions and maintain control and meet our multiple deadlines. We have to.

I had covered Kabukicho and hunted for tips in Roppongi. The girls at Maid Station had been very frank about how their whole operation worked. I was pretty conversant with the legalities of the sex-for-money industry in Japan. In fact, I thought the whole idea of sexual slavery was some urban myth created by puritanical bureaucrats in the West who didn’t understand Japan’s sex culture. But I was about to get a real lesson.

It was November 2003 when my cell phone rang.
“Moshi moshi,”
I said, picking up.

It was a foreign woman, no one I knew but someone who could speak fairly good Japanese. I listened for a bit but wasn’t making full sense of what she was saying. “Do you speak English?” I finally asked.

“Well, yes. You do too, obviously. I apologize for making you suffer through my deplorable Japanese.”

“Not a problem. It’s quite good. But since
eigo
is our native tongue, maybe it’d be better to use English,
ne?”

“A friend gave me your number. She’s a stripper at the Kama Sutra; she said you might be able to help.”

“Try me.”

“Well, at the place where I work, there are some new girls—from Poland, Russia, and Estonia—and they seem to be … under duress.”

“Hmm. What do you mean?”

“They’re being forced to work, and they’re not getting paid. They’re … like slaves.”

“Like what?”

“Slaves. That’s how I would describe it.”

“And what kind of work do you do?”

“I guess you could say I’m a prostitute,” she replied straightforwardly, without embarrassment. “Officially I’m an English teacher, but sleeping with men is how I earn my living.”

“And you’re doing this by choice?”

“Of course. But these new girls they’ve brought into the club … it’s not the same for them. They don’t want to be doing this. They got tricked—forced—into doing this. They’re always sobbing, they can’t leave the building during the day.”

“I see,” I said. It was a pathetic response, I knew, but I didn’t know what else to say and it afforded me time to process the situation. I asked my caller what she wanted me to do.

“You’re a newspaper reporter. Write a story. Find out what’s going on and expose the bastards. And help get those girls out of there.”

It seemed like a hell of a tall order coming from someone who’d just called me out of the blue. I was about to say I’d look into it when something about her voice went
ding
in my head. “You say your friend gave you my number. Have we met?”

There was a pause.

“Have we?” I asked again.

“Well, when you were working on the Lucie Blackman story, talking to working girls at the bar, I kind of insulted you to your face.”

Over time, I had learned the rules of engagement for getting information from strippers, dancers, and other females in the evening entertainment trade. Apparently this young woman had met me before I’d learned those rules. Perhaps I’d been rude, or just not that savvy. Either way, she had called me an asshole. I remembered that much.

Her name was Helena. That wasn’t her real name, of course, but it did suit her. We met at a Starbucks in Roppongi, on the second floor. She was dressed in a black skirt, a slim-cut black leather jacket over a lime green blouse, and knee-high black leather boots. I have to say, she looked good. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and the only makeup she appeared to have on was a ripe pomegranate–colored lipstick. She had a small mole over her upper lip.

I introduced myself as if we were meeting for the first time, giving her my meishi. She didn’t give me hers until later. We talked about the weather, we sipped our coffee, and then she told me her story.

Helena had come to Japan in 2001 from Australia. She started teaching English at Berlitz and doing a little hostessing on the side. One evening after class, she had drinks with one of her students, a businessman in his fifties, and ended up accompanying him to a love hotel. When they were done, he laid five 10,000-yen notes (about $500) on the bed and said it was for her “travel expenses.”

Helena gradually picked up more patrons and eventually, to ensure a steady income, took a job at an exclusive “gentlemen’s club” called the Den of Delicious. She kept her private clients, but during the day she would perform services for the walk-in trade.

“I’m a prostitute by choice. I like sex. The money is far better than I could make teaching English. I don’t have a problem with what I do. What I have a problem with is women who don’t want to be prostitutes being forced into it. I have a problem with the assholes making them do it.

“There are two guys running the show in Roppongi and supplying girls for the club in Shibuya where I work. One guy is Japanese—everyone calls him Slick—
^1*
and there’s a Dutch-Israeli guy named Viktor. They own five or six clubs; they recruit the women overseas, mostly in poor countries, through ads or brokers, and they bring them to Japan. They stick them in sex clubs, and they rip them off. The women are totally dependent on these bastards. So they end up like sex slaves.

“What I heard was that, initially, they’re promised more money than they can imagine, but when they get here, it’s a whole different story. They have to fuck to eat, because they don’t have any options. And then they’ve got all these costs that they were never told about that get subtracted from their earnings. Slick tells them that since they’re working illegally, they’ve got to work for him. Because he’s legit—if you can believe that. If they don’t want to work for him, that’s up to them, but they aren’t going to find work anywhere else in Roppongi. One girl I knew went to the police; she was threatened with being arrested herself. And then she ended up having to service the fucking cop.

“Viktor tells people he’s been here six years. He started with dancers and moved up to prostitution; he’s very proud of himself. He says he knows what kind of girls Japanese men like—blond and blue-eyed. Takes a lot to figure that out. Helps too if they’re helpless, because then they have no choice but to do what they’re told.

“Viktor likes to act like a nice guy—until it comes to money. Then he’s the fucking devil in disguise … Slick, he’s married and has a daughter.”

Helena’s story had the ring of truth. I didn’t see any reason for her to lie. I didn’t know, though. She was an observer, not a victim herself;
this was hearsay; maybe she had an ax to grind. I told her I’d have to speak with one of the girls directly.

That got her a little upset. “If these girls get caught talking to you, they could get in trouble. Real trouble. You understand that, right?”

I said I did. I said I’d be careful. So Helena promised she’d introduce me to one of the girls. And we parted ways.

I did some checking on my own.

Sekiguchi popped into my mind, but this wasn’t his beat. Then I thought of Alien Cop, who had done such a good job of showing me around Kabukicho. Alien Cop had since been transferred from the Shinjuku Police Department to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters, where he might be able to tap into some good information. He’d be a good source. But in order to get what I wanted, I’d have to pay for it. A night on the town, certainly. A bar or strip club employing foreign women, definitely. It wouldn’t be cheap, but by that point I had some connections.

I called up a lawyer acquaintance working for a company promoting mixed martial arts tournaments. These slugfests were like a cross between boxing, wrestling, and karate, and they were wildly popular. I talked him into coughing up two second-row seats, and I took them over to the manager of the Eighth Circle of Hell, a strip club, who agreed to comp me for the night.

I texted Alien, and we had a date.

Alien was still a decent, straightforward guy. We got caught up with our latest doings, and while a buxom redhead named Jasmine ground her curvaceous ass on his crotch and ran her fingers through his crew cut, I told him Helena’s story. Jasmine was content to sip the champagne Alien had bought. When I was done with the story, Alien frowned. He lifted Jasmine off his lap and told her, in fairly good English, “Please go get me some smokes, angel. I must talk to my friend now. Come back in five minutes.” Jasmine dutifully excused herself and was gone.

“You know,” Alien said, sucking on a cigarette and switching back to Japanese, “I’ll look into it. What your friend says is probably true. I see more women like that now, but there isn’t much I can do to help them. It bugs me.”

“It bugs you?”

“I like women in the business like that. I know my money is buying their attentions, but I like them anyway. It’s a game. But when a woman doesn’t want to be in the business, if she’s being forced to do it, then I don’t want to be with her. It’s not fun. It’s not a game then. Your friend is right: if they’re not getting paid, that’s not okay.”

He took a notepad out of his pocket and I gave him what I’d been able to find out: the location of Slick’s office and the real estate deed, which was under the name of J Enterprise.

Jasmine was taking more than five minutes to come back. While we waited, our conversation got personal.

“Jake, you ever sleep with any of these women at the clubs? They seem to like you. I can see that.”

“They like me because I don’t sleep with them. I don’t want to sleep with them. This makes me different from the usual customers.”

“Because you don’t like white women?”

“No, because it’s a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Because they give me information sometimes and you’re not supposed to sleep with your sources. I did before I was married but not now. I might bring home some horrible STD and give it to my wife, who would hate me and dump me.”

“Well, what if there was this hot girl who had some information you really wanted—but she’d give it to you only if you slept with her?”

“Yeah, I would sleep with a woman for good information. I’m a total information whore. What about you, Alien? You ever sleep with a source?”

“Of course. It’s like a fringe benefit. I’m not married; I don’t have kids.”

“So you think I’d be a slimeball if I did what you’re doing?”

“No. I just think you’re strange. Not a strange gaijin but a strange person. You have a code. You stick to it. It’s a weird code, but it’s a code. I admire that. And you’re a good guy. Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ll tell you something …”

“Tell me.”

“You’ll break your code sooner or later. Vice does it to you. Like the saying goes, lie down with dogs and get up with fleas. You’ll get fleas.”

“I’ll get a flea collar.”

“Hah. Won’t work. You’ll sleep with someone not just for money or information but because it seems like the thing to do. Like shaking
hands. It’s a slippery slope. And you won’t even feel guilty about it. It won’t occur to you that it isn’t right or out of the ordinary. The job screws you up. You should ask for another posting. You’re lucky you’re already married, at least. I could never get married.”