Amazingly, an American named Jake Adelstein managed to become a beat reporter for Japan’s most popular Japanese-language daily newspaper. Even more astounding, he wrote investigative stories about organized crime in Japan.

Adelstein has just published a book about his experiences, Tokyo Vice and was interviewed last night on NPR’s Fresh Air. The book is now at #65 on Amazon and rising. Libraries that ordered it are showing holds as high as 7:1.

The book received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which called it “..equal parts cultural exposé, true crime, and hard-boiled noir.”

Adelstein also appeared on Sixty Minutes the week before last, as part of a story on the godfather of Japanese crime, Tadamasa Goto, who made a deal with the FBI to exchange information for a liver transplant (Goto got more out of the exchange than the FBI did).

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Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan Jake Adelstein Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Pantheon – (2009-10-13) ISBN / EAN: 0307378799 / 9780307378798

Audio and eBook downloadable from OverDrive.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 4:58 pm and is filed under 2009 - Fall, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.