Joshua Lawrence "Jake" Adelstein (born March 28, 1969) is an AmericanJake Adelstein, "Yakuza, strippers, drugs, an undercover Japanese-Jew FBI special agent? Pulp non-fiction.", Twitter, June 26, 2015. 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 Adelstein grew up in Columbia, Missouri and graduated from Rock Bridge High School. 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 in English at Sophia University.Hessler, Peter. "All Due Respect" Profile, The New Yorker, January 9, 2012.
Career 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.Mark Willacy, "Exposing Japan's Insidious Underbelly", ABC News, October 20, 2009; accessed November 20, 2010.
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.Jake Adelstein, "This Mob Is Big in Japan", The Washington Post, May 11, 2008, Accessed November 20, 2010 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.THR Magazine, "Insiders Call B.S. on 'Tokyo Vice' Backstory", The Hollywood Reporter, April 29, 2022; accessed May 2, 2022. In November 2022, Esquire reported that Adelstein had released via Twitter a folder of source materials which he claimed supported his versions of events.Esquire, "The Gripping True Story Behind 'Tokyo Vice' and Jake Adelstein's Tussles With the Yakuza", Esquire, November 24, 2022; accessed December 27, 2023. 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. one of Japan's foremost yakuza experts, responded to followers questioning the credibility of Tokyo Vice, stating, "I don't trust it at all." He further questioned the very notion that Adelstein is treated as a yakuza expert in the United States.
Adelstein was subsequently a reporter for a United States Department of State investigation into human trafficking in Japan, and now writes for the Daily Beast, Vice News, The Japan Times and other publications.
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. However, the court dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning the plaintiff is barred from bringing that claim in another court.
Personal life Adelstein is Jewish.Jake Adelstein hachette.co.ukA 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) Jake was formerly married to Sunao Adelstein with two children; both of them live in Missouri due to threats made by Goto in 2005 towards them. As of January 2026 he now resides in Tokyo with his Brazilian girlfriend Jessy Nakamura.
Works
Operation Tropical Storm: How an FBI Jewish-Japanese Special Agent Snared a Yakuza Boss in Hawaii (Kindle Single). . June 7, 2015299_ James Stern –Yakuza Japanese Mob, Operation Tropical Storm
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.
Interviews Tokyo Vice Goes on Sale October 14th
"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
Further reading 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
Source materials used to write Tokyo Vice at box.com
External links Japan Subculture Research Center Editor-in-chief Jake Adelstein