Tokyo Vice (3 page)

I breezed through the first section and was done twenty minutes before everyone else. I sat there for some time, feeling quite proud of myself, until I nonchalantly flipped the exam over and noticed something that made my stomach lurch—there were also questions on
that
side of the page. I tried hard to finish, but I feared I’d blown the exam. When time was called, I turned in what I’d done (or not done). Furious at myself, I went back to my seat, prepared to forget the rest of the exam and go home.

I must have been sitting there blank-faced with shock when a
Yomiuri
man came up and tapped me on the shoulder. He had a Beatles bob, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and had a husky voice that didn’t match his stature or appearance. (I would later know him as Endo-san of the human resources department, and he would die of complications from throat cancer a few years later.)

“I couldn’t but help notice you among the applicants,” he said to me in Japanese. “Why are you taking this test?”

“Well, I thought if I did well on it, it might help if I wanted a job on the English-language
Daily Yomiuri.”

“I took a quick look at your test. You did really well on the first questions. What happened to the rest?”

“It’s very embarrassing. I didn’t realize there were questions on both sides of the page until it was too late.”

“Ahh. Let me make a note,” he said as he pulled a little organizer out of his jacket pocket and scribbled in it.

He turned to me again. “Don’t think about the
Daily Yomiuri
. It would be a waste. You should try for the real thing. You still have a chance to do well on this. You’re a Sophia student, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Thought so. Stick it out,” he said, patting me on the shoulder.

•    •    •

So there I sat, inner debate raging. Give up and go home, or stick with it? I got up out of my seat and tossed my backpack over my shoulder. As
I looked across the room, it seemed for a moment as if time had stopped. All the chatter faded out, people froze in midmovement, and I heard a high-pitched buzzing in my ears. In that instant, I knew that leaving or staying would be the biggest decision in my adult life. Somewhere in an alternative universe, I walked out. But not in this one.

I put my backpack on the table with a clunk and sat down. I pulled out my pencils, pulled in my chair, sat up straight, and got ready for round two. If I could attach a sound track to my life, I would have selected the James Bond theme right then. Admittedly, aligning one’s pencils doesn’t make for a great opening film montage, but it was the closest I’d ever come to heroic action.

The next section was foreign languages, and cleverly I picked English, where months spent doing boring translation and subtitling instructional kung fu videos paid off. Then I had to translate a passage on the Russian free economy from English into Japanese, followed by a brief passage on social progress in modern society from Japanese into English. I nailed both of them before the next ten-minute break.

Next was the essay. The theme was
gaikokujin
, or “foreigners,” and after the first-round curse, I was beginning to feel blessed. This topic was something every foreigner is regularly asked about and, at Sophia, to write essays about.

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

It turned out that although I had done abysmally on the Japanese-language section, I still ranked ninetieth out of one hundred applicants, meaning that my Japanese tested better than that of 10 percent of the Japanese applicants. I came in first in the foreign-language section—in both translating English into Japanese and translating Japanese into English. Actually, I lost points on the English translation, which doesn’t say much for my mastery of the English language. I got a C on my essay, more on content than on grammar. In total, on the first three parts of the test I had a score of 79 points out of a possible 100, making me fifty-ninth out of a hundred. Not glittering, but still I was called in for an interview. The only reason I can imagine was that someone cut me some slack for missing the back page of the Japanese-language test.

The first interview, held three weeks later, was blissfully brief. I had the chance to explain my screw-up, then was asked my expectations of the job and my willingness to work long hours. I stressed my willingness
to work hard. They quizzed me about my knowledge of the
Yomiuri
, and I mentioned the series on Thai prostitutes and how impressed I had been by the in-depth coverage—which scored brownie points with the metro reporters at the session.

I was told there would be two more interviews, and then I heard nothing for weeks.

Now I was nervous. What had begun as a totally off-the-wall challenge was now in the realm of possibility. Every day I came home early and waited for the phone to ring. I read the newspaper religiously. I ramped up my Japanese studies. If I get this job, I thought, how will I survive? I started watching television in the hopes of improving my listening comprehension.

But one day, the frustration of living in limbo became strong enough to shove me out the door and into a bad horror flick at a Kabu-kicho movie theater.

On my way home from the film, I spotted a funny-looking tarot fortune-telling machine at the entrance of an arcade. In my uncertain state of mind, I figured it couldn’t hurt to consult an expert.

I plunked 100 yen into the machine. The screen lit up and swirled around in a pink and green vortex. I picked the category “Jobs,” my choice of fortune teller, “Madame Tantra,” and plugged in my personal information. Madame Tantra, a very cute Japanese woman wearing a shawl, with a red mark on her forehead like a Hindu priestess, appeared on the screen in a blaze of smoke and had me pick my cards. I rolled the crystal ball–shaped mouse around and clicked on the stacks of cards laid out on the virtual table.

I was thrilled. It seemed so dead-on that I kept the printout. Fortified with the good graces of Fortune, I took the last train home and checked my answering machine. There was a call from the
Yomiuri
asking me to attend a second round of interviews.

The second round consisted of a panel of three people. Two of the judges seemed enthused, but the third looked at me as if I were a fly on his sashimi. I had the feeling that I was a controversial candidate. After a number of queries, one of them asked me the following question, with great seriousness.

“You’re Jewish, yes?”

“Yes, nominally.”

“A lot of people in Japan believe that the Jews control the world economy. What do you think about that?”

I quickly replied, “Do you think that if the Jews really did control the world economy I’d be applying for a job as a newspaper reporter here? I know what the first-year salary is like.”

I guess that was the right answer, because he chuckled and winked at me. There were no further questions.

I got up and was leaving when one of them stopped me. “Adelstein-san, there will be only one more round of interviews. If you are called in for that, you are pretty much in. We will be calling the final candidates on July 12. Be home. We won’t make more than one call.”

And so back to my small apartment on July 12, 1992, where I sat half in the refrigerator, one hand glued to the phone. My throat was parched, and I had the shakes. I felt as if I were waiting to get a last-minute date to prom night.

The call came at nine-thirty in the evening.

“Congratulations, Adelstein-san. You have been selected for the final round of interviews. Please come to the Yomiuri Building on July 31. Do you have any questions?”

I had none.

The last interview went very well. There were smiles all around and the atmosphere was very relaxed. There were no tough questions. One
panelist began asking me a very complicated question about Japanese politics, but his Osaka dialect was so thick I had no idea what he was saying. I just played like a psychiatrist and repeated parts of his last sentence, with vague comments, such as, “Well, that’s one way of looking at the problem.” He seemed to interpret my response as total agreement and I didn’t bother to disabuse him.

There were two final questions:

“Can you work on the Sabbath?”

It wasn’t a problem.

“Can you eat sushi?”

Neither was that.

And with that, Matsuzaka-san, one of the senior human resources people, who looked remarkably Jewish for a Japanese guy, slapped me on the back and said, “Congratulations. Consider yourself hired. The formal material will be sent to you in the mail.”

As he walked me out the door, he whispered conspiratorially in my ear, “I’m a Sophia graduate too. I heard good things about you from your teachers. It’s nice to have another Sophian on board.” Incredibly, my dumb luck had stayed with me throughout the whole process, even to the point of having a school connection on the hiring board.

I don’t know why the fates had been so kind, but I thought I should cover all the bases. On my way home, I stopped and added some coins to the pile in front of the Buddha in the gardens of the Nezu Museum.

I owed that Buddha some cash (borrowed subway fare) and I always liked to pay back my debts.

With six months to go before I was to start work, there was plenty of time for insecurities to grow. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had bitten off more than I could chew. I knew that I could handle the reading and writing parts of the job, but how would I handle interviewing people in Japanese?

The
Yomiuri
human resources guy in charge of recruits, the neo-Jewish Matsuzaka, was a little taken aback when I dropped into his office in October and asked for a preliminary internship so I could get a head start.

“I admire your desire to be prepared,” he said. “But the truth is that we’ve never had anyone wanting to work before officially beginning. You’re an unusual case, though, so I’ll see what I can do.” He took me to the third floor for a cup of coffee, handed me materials that are given to freshman reporters, and sent me on my way.

He called about two weeks later. He had arranged a mini-internship of about a week for me to spend in various offices. My first miniposting was to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (TMPD) press club.

Matsuzaka met me in the lobby of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters, a gigantic labyrinth of a building that towered over all the others in the government district. It was the nerve center of the Tokyo police force, which was comprised of roughly forty thousand people. He was going to hand me over to Ansei Inoue, a legendary journalist and the author of
Thirty-three Years as a Police Reporter
. Inoue was the police beat captain and was loved, feared, and envied within the
Yomiuri
empire. His claim to fame was proving that a university
professor convicted of murdering his wife was innocent. He had not only exposed the missteps of the police machinery and the prosecution involved but also found the real murderer. The case became a classic example of how innocent people can be convicted when caught in the brutally efficient wheels of the Japanese justice system.

Inoue was about five feet eight and thin, with long, unkempt hair swept to the side of his face. He was wearing a gray suit, black tie, and scuffed shoes. His eyes were hidden behind brown-tinted glasses, which made them seem dull, but when he saw who I was, they sparkled. He seemed quite amused by the situation.

“So you’re the gaijin I’ve been hearing about,” he said animatedly. “You speak Japanese, right?” He aimed the question more at Matsuzaka than at me, but I answered anyway.

“I speak Japanese. Writing it is another issue.”

Inoue laughed. “Well, you probably write it better than the people I have working for me. Let’s go upstairs.”

Technically, anyone visiting the TMPD without being a registered member of the press club or an actual employee or someone with security clearance was required to have a police escort before entering the building, but Inoue came and went as he pleased. It was still three years before the Aum Shinrikyo cult sprinkled sarin on the Tokyo subways, which had the effect of tightening security procedures all over the city.

In the elevator, Inoue gave me a breakdown of the police organization, but most of it went over my head. We got out at the ninth floor, which held the public affairs section of the TMPD and three press clubs: for the newspapers, television, and radio and local newspapers in the country. There was no space for the weekly or monthly magazines, which the police considered to be subversive scandal rags and kept off the official press club list.

There were no foreign media representatives either; the mainstream Japanese media outlets have not protested this lack of foreign media and never will. When you’re part of a monopoly, it’s not in your best interest to break yourself up.

Some reporters were hanging out playing cards on a battered desk in the open area near the kitchen. There was also a dank tatami room in the back where reporters could unroll futons and sleep off their hangovers while they waited for the next handout of news.

When Inoue and I walked into the
Yomiuri
section of the press club, which was essentially a cordoned-off rectangular room with a curtain
for a door, all the reporters were gathered around a desk, poring over a photo book. I looked around. The space hardly fit my notion of the press accommodations for the biggest newspaper in Japan: the walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves; newspapers and magazines were strewn across the couch and onto the floor; garbage cans overflowed with crumpled-up faxes, used containers of instant ramen, and beer cans. Each desk had a word processor. At the far end was a radiator/air conditioner, and on the deep windowsill there were six televisions and three video decks stacked high. All of the televisions were on. A CB radio tuned to the fire department frequency blared. In a bunk bed next to the “door,” someone slept, still in his shoes, the day’s morning edition covering his face.