Jake Adelstein

Joshua Lawrence "Jake" Adelstein (born March 28, 1969) is an American^[1] journalist, investigator, crime writer, consultant, 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. Considered one of the foremost experts on organized crime and social issues in Japan, Adelstein regularly appears as a commentator in the Japanese and international media.

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]

Graduating from Sophia University in Tokyo, Adelstein took the entrance exam to become a reporter, and 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.^[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]

From 2006 to 2007 Adelstein was the chief investigator for a United States Department of State investigation into human trafficking in Japan,^[8] and since 2011 has been writing for the Daily Beast,^[9] Vice News, The Japan Times^[10] and other publications, and also worked as special correspondent for The Los Angeles Times. He is a board member and advisor to the Lighthouse: Center for Human Trafficking Victims (formerly Polaris Project Japan).^[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]

Considered one of the foremost experts on organized crime in Japan, he works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the United States. He co-hosted and co-wrote the award-winning podcast about missing people in Japan, The Evaporated: Gone With the Gods in 2023.

In 2023 Adelstein also published his fourth book, The Last Yakuza, which Publishers Weekly describes as “a propulsive history of the yakuza… tracing the yakuza’s political influence in Japan, explaining how they bribed and blackmailed legislators into opposing bills that would have curbed their influence. Painstakingly reported and paced like a thriller, this is a must read for anyone interested in organised crime.”

On September 1, 2024, Sony Music and Campside Media released Witnessed: Night Shift, a true crime podcast in which Adelstein investigates a series of mysterious deaths that took place in the 1990s at the Veterans's Hospital in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. In its second week of release, as of September 12, Night Shift was ranked #4 in Apple's top charted podcasts.

Adelstein has appeared on CNN, NPR, the BBC, France 24, and other media outlets as a commentator on social issues in Japan, as well as its criminal justice system, politics, and nuclear industry giant, TEPCO.

Adelstein is Jewish^{[15][16][17][18][19]} and is originally from Columbia, Missouri. He was formerly married to Sunao Adelstein with whom he has 2 children; both of them have lived in Missouri after 2005 due to threats made by Goto towards them.^[11]Adelstein’s daughter is credited as a research and reporting assistant on his latest 2024 true crime podcast Night Shift. He now travels regularly between Japan and the US for business and to spend time with family.

• Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. New York City: Pantheon Books. 2009. ISBN 978-0-307-37879-8. OCLC 699874898.
• Operation Tropical Storm: How an FBI Jewish-Japanese Special Agent Snared a Yakuza Boss in Hawaii (Kindle Single) ASIN B00Z7DUV7W June 7, 2015^[20]
• Pay the Devil in Bitcoin: The Creation of a Cryptocurrency and How Half a Billion Dollars of It Vanished from Japan. New York City: Pantheon Books. 2017.
• The Last Yakuza: A Life in the Japanese Underworld. New York City: Pantheon Books. 2023.
• The Evaporated: Gone With the Gods. Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment. 2023.
• Witnessed: Night Shift. Campside Media and Sony Music. September 1, 2024.

• Tokyo Vice Goes on Sale October 14th
• Adelstein, Jake (April 12, 2022). "Tokyo Vice's Jake Adelstein: Everything You Wanted To Know (But Were Mildly Afraid To Ask)". Unseen Japan. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
• How I escaped the Japanese gangsters who wanted to kill me : Jake Adelstein thetimes.co.uk
• Hard Lessons Learned From Tough People Jake Adelstein at TEDxKyoto 2012

• 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
• "On the 'Tokyo Vice' beat with Jake Adelstein". Tokyo Reporter. October 27, 2009. Retrieved January 7, 2021.
• Source materials used to write Tokyo Vice at box.com
• "Tokyo Vice: The Book". Japan Subculture Research Center. May 13, 2022. Retrieved March 24, 2024.

• Japan Subculture Research Center Editor-in-chief Jake Adelstein
• Author Profile on Scribe Publications
• Author Profile on Amazon
• Profile on Goodreads.com