Jake Adelstein

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• Jake Adelstein
• Brian Miller
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Book Reviews

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After studying at a Japanese university, a Midwestern martial-arts devotee named Jake Adelstein improved his language skills enough to land a lowly reporter's job at a major national daily. Initially sent out to the provinces ("the New Jersey of Japan") in 1993, he began apprenticing his craft. This meant endless hours gifting and schmoozing with cops in their homes, buying drinks for sources all night, then sleeping off the hangover the next morning on tatami mats in the back of the press room. Eventually he reached the criminal big time, Tokyo's notorious Roppongi district. Not bad for a first job out of college. But eventually, as Adelstein recounts in his new book, Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan (Pantheon, $26), the glamour wore off, and he grew disenchanted with that fabulously seedy milieu. Because the cops largely ignore brothels and hand-job parlors, he writes, there's an "indifference to and tacit approval of the exploitation of foreign women." That's now the subject of his writing and consulting. Meanwhile, the yakuza continue their expansion into banking, real estate, and Internet fraud. BRIAN MILLER
Thu., Oct. 22, 7 p.m., 2009