Is the Tokyo Vice TV Show Based on a True Story?
Tokyo Vice shows viewers the world of Japan's underground. Is the series, which tells the story of journalist Jake Adelstein, based on fact?
Tokyo Vice is the compelling story of an American journalist, Jake Adelstein, who became the first foreigner to work at the demanding Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun (renamed Meicho Shimbun in the series). The TV show is based on Adelstein’s real-life story documented in the book Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.
You can already watch season 2 of Tokyo Vice on Max. The production was directed by Michael Mann, and Jake Adelstein is played by Ansel Elgort (who replaced Daniel Radcliffe, the creators' first choice for the role).
The series takes a look at the story of how Adelstein worked on a publication to expose one of the most powerful bosses of the Japanese underworld, a member of the Yakuza. The journalist, writing for the Yomiuri Shimbun about violent crimes, came across the trail of the Japanese mafia and began to take a closer look at the subject, but when he managed to gather material on Goto Tadamasa, the newspaper he worked for wasn’t convinced to publish the story. So Adelstein left there, and published a report on Goto in the Washington Post in 2008, while a follow-up article was in the LA Times. Since then, Jake Adelstein has written several books and continues to write about the Japanese underworld for The Daily Beast, Vice and The Japan Times.
Is Tokyo Vice based on facts?
The answer seems very simple, but in reality it isn’t at all. Adelstein says that everything he wrote in Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan is true, and he shared the evidence on his Dropbox, a link to which he shared on Twitter. The Hollywood Reporter questioned the credibility of Adelstein's story in its material following the premiere of Tokyo Vice.
Philip Day, producer of the documentary Crime Lords of Tokyo, who met with Adelstein in 2010, had some doubts about the journalist's honesty after meeting him and years later said, “I don’t think half of that stuff in the book happened, it’s just in his imagination. It’s fiction”.
Naoki Tsujii, Adelstein's colleague at the Yomiuri Shimbun, who was acquainted with the journalist, said that "Japan is a country that works according to systems, so there are certainly things in the book that wouldn’t have happened the way they are written. There are definitely exaggerations”.
Adelstein, on the other hand, wrote in the book, „I have taken great pains to explain why events were altered to protect people who confided in me, especially from retaliation by organized crime”.
