Jake Adelstein
Jake Adelstein | |
|---|---|
| Born | Joshua Lawrence Adelstein March 28, 1969 Columbia, Missouri, U.S. |
| Occupation | Investigative journalist, writer, editor, blogger |
| Genre | True crime, non-fiction, journalism |
| Notable works | Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan The Last Yakuza: A Life in the Japanese Underworld |
| Children | 2 |
| Website | |
| www.japansubculture.com | |
Joshua Lawrence "Jake" Adelstein (born March 28, 1969) is an American[1] journalist, crime writer, and blogger who has spent most of his career in Japan. He is the author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, which inspired the 2022 Max original streaming television series Tokyo Vice, starring Ansel Elgort as Adelstein.
Early life
[edit | edit source]Adelstein grew up in Columbia, Missouri and graduated from Rock Bridge High School.[2] As a teenager he volunteered at KOPN and co-hosted a punk music program on the air. In 1988, he moved to Japan at age 19 to study Japanese literature at Sophia University.[3]
Career
[edit | edit source]On April 15, 1993, Adelstein became the first non-Japanese staff writer at the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper in Urawa, Saitama, where he worked for 12 years.[4]
After leaving the Yomiuri, Adelstein published an exposé of how an alleged crime boss, Tadamasa Goto, made a deal with the FBI to gain entry to the United States for a liver transplant at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2009, Adelstein published a memoir about his career as a reporter in Japan, Tokyo Vice, in which he accused Goto of threatening to kill him over the story.[5] An April 2022 article by The Hollywood Reporter raised doubts about the veracity of the events described in the memoir and the many quotes he has attributed to anonymous sources in his journalism. According to the article, Adelstein initially offered to provide evidence that his anonymous sources existed, but then declined to do so.[6] In November 2022, Esquire reported that Adelstein had released via Twitter a folder of source materials which he claimed supported his versions of events.[7] In June 2023, a team of three European investigative journalists published an article in Belgian magazine Le Soir that also cast doubt on the content of his memoir, as well as his career at the Yoimiuri. The Japanese newspaper went on record for the first time about Adelstein in the article, stating that he was never part of the reporting teams for organized crime and had written only a very few articles about the yakuza during his time there. [1]
Adelstein was subsequently a reporter for a United States Department of State investigation into human trafficking in Japan,[8] and now writes for the Daily Beast,[9] Vice News, The Japan Times[10] and other publications. [11]
On April 19, 2011, Adelstein filed a lawsuit against National Geographic Television, which had hired him to help make a documentary about the yakuza, citing ethical problems with their behavior in Japan.[12][13] However, the court dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning the plaintiff is barred from bringing that claim in another court.[14]
Personal life
[edit | edit source]Adelstein is Jewish.[15][16][17][18][19] Jake was formerly married to Sunao Adelstein with two children; both of them live in Missouri after 2005 due to threats made by Goto towards them.[11] He now resides in Tokyo with his Brazilian partner.
Works
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- Operation Tropical Storm: How an FBI Jewish-Japanese Special Agent Snared a Yakuza Boss in Hawaii (Kindle Single). ASIN B00Z7DUV7W. June 7, 2015[20]
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- The Evaporated: Gone with the Gods. Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment. 2023.
- Witnessed: Night Shift. Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment. September 1, 2024.
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Interviews
[edit | edit source]- Tokyo Vice Goes on Sale October 14th
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- "How I escaped the Japanese gangsters who wanted to kill me": Jake Adelstein, The Times
- "Hard Lessons Learned from Tough People"—Jake Adelstein at TEDxKyoto 2012
References
[edit | edit source]- ^ Jake Adelstein, "Yakuza, strippers, drugs, an undercover Japanese-Jew FBI special agent? Pulp non-fiction.", Twitter, June 26, 2015. Archived March 5, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
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- ^ Hessler, Peter. "All Due Respect" Profile, The New Yorker, January 9, 2012.
- ^ Mark Willacy, "Exposing Japan's Insidious Underbelly", ABC News, October 20, 2009; accessed November 20, 2010.
- ^ Jake Adelstein, "This Mob Is Big in Japan", The Washington Post, May 11, 2008, Accessed November 20, 2010
- ^ THR Magazine, "Insiders Call B.S. on ‘Tokyo Vice’ Backstory", The Hollywood Reporter, April 29, 2022; accessed May 2, 2022.
- ^ Esquire, "The Gripping True Story Behind ‘Tokyo Vice’ and Jake Adelstein's Tussles With the Yakuza", Esquire, November 24, 2022; accessed December 27, 2023.
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- ^ Jake Adelstein hachette.co.uk
- ^ A Jewish journalist against the Yakuza with Jake Adelstein Naor Meningher and Eytan Weinstein, The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles (March 29, 2017)
- ^ ‘Tokyo Vice’ is a portrait of the reporter as a terrible coworker Irene Katz Connelly, The Forward (April 11, 2022)
- ^ Tokyo Vice TV review: An outsider Jew in Japan Josh Howie, The Jewish Chronicle (December 22, 2022)
- ^ An insight into the Japanese underworld Sharyn Kolieb, The Australian Jewish News (May 7, 2024)
- ^ 299_ James Stern –Yakuza Japanese Mob, Operation Tropical Storm
Further reading
[edit | edit source]- Hessler, Peter (9 January 2012). "All Due Respect". The New Yorker, Volume LXXXVII, No. 43, pp. 50–59.
- Book Break: Robert Whiting and Jake Adelstein - "Beyond Tokyo’s Vices and the Underworld", 16 March 2022, Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan via YouTube
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- Source materials used to write Tokyo Vice at box.com
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External links
[edit | edit source]- Japan Subculture Research Center Editor-in-chief Jake Adelstein
- Profile on Goodreads.com
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- 1969 births
- Living people
- 20th-century American Jews
- 20th-century American journalists
- 20th-century American male writers
- 20th-century American non-fiction writers
- 21st-century American Jews
- 21st-century American journalists
- 21st-century American male writers
- 21st-century American non-fiction writers
- American crime reporters
- American expatriates in Japan
- 20th-century American male journalists
- American male non-fiction writers
- American non-fiction crime writers
- Japanese-language writers
- Jewish American journalists
- Jewish American non-fiction writers
- Jews from Missouri
- Journalists from Missouri
- Organized crime in Japan
- Rock Bridge High School alumni
- Writers from Columbia, Missouri
- 21st-century American male journalists