Tokyo Noir (Spanish Edition) - by Jake Adelstein (Paperback)

About the Book

A darkly comic sequel to Tokyo Vice that is equal parts history lesson, true-crime exposé, and memoir. It's 2008, and it's been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organized crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about -- for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy -- himself. And Adelstein has a different gig these days: due diligence work, or using his investigative skills to dig up information on entities whose bosses would prefer that some things stay hidden. The underworld isn't what it used to be. Underneath layers of paperwork, corporations are thinly veiled fronts for the yakuza. Pachinko parlours are a hidden battleground between disenfranchised Korean Japanese and North Korean extortion plots. TEPCO, the electric power corporation keeping the lights on for all of Tokyo, scrambles to hide its willful oversights that ultimately led to the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. And the Japanese government shows levels of corruption that make the yakuza look like philanthropists in comparison. All this is punctuated by personal tragedies no one could have seen coming. In this ambitious and riveting work, Jake Adelstein explores what it's like when you're in too deep to distinguish the story you chase from the life you live.

About the Author

Between writing books, I'm currently editing www.japansubculture.com. I was born in Missouri and first went to Japan in 1988 as an exchange student at Sophia. I spent most of my time in college living in a Zen Buddhist temple in Tokyo, failing to obtain enlightenment or even a little, tiny satori. I became a reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest newspaper (circ. 10,000,000 daily) and was there from 1993 until close to the end of 2005, primarily as a crime reporter. I worked for a year on a human trafficking study of Japan sponsored by the US State Department from 2006-2007. Currently, I travel back and forth between Japan and the United States, writing both in English and Japanese for various publications under my own names and pen names. I do some consulting work on occasion. I'm also the temporary public relations representative for Polaris Project Japan, which combats human trafficking and other exploitation issues in Japan. I hope you enjoyed the book or at least got something out of it. If you're interested in the dark side of the sun--the problematic, interesting and strange aspects of Japanese society, please see our sporadically updated blog at www.japansubculture.com. I'm also hoping to add supplementary materials in Japanese and English that will be useful for people want to know more about crime in Japan and its other less talked about aspects.