Authors: Jake Adelstein
So those were the big ten sellers about three years ago: three involve sex, two involve life and death. Not bad for balance.
My second year on the job, I got a firsthand look at one of these manuals in action. A message came in on my beeper to call Takagi, the medical examiner for the Urawa homicide squad.
“Hey, Jake, you want to see something really weird?”
“Absolutely.”
“No pictures.”
“Okay.”
“No names either.”
“No names?”
“It’s a kid. Juvenile. So no names. You know the drill.”
He gave me the address and told me to get there fast. “The homicide guys aren’t here yet, but if they see your big-nosed gaijin face at the scene, we’re both going to be in deep shit.”
“Gotcha.”
Generally speaking, one rarely gets to visit a crime scene in Japan. The police radio broadcasts went digital early in the nineties, which made it impossible for us to listen to the police scanners. Unless you had someone in the communication department on your side, there was a several-hour delay between the time the police arrived at the scene and the time they informed the press that a crime had taken place. Usually by the time we got to a crime scene, the police had cordoned off a huge area with that familiar yellow tape.
I’m not sure why Takagi called me. It could have been my winning personality, or it could have been the tickets I’d gotten him to a Yomiuri Giants baseball game. It was probably the tickets.
Takagi and I had a good working relationship. He was assigned to the Violent Crime Division of the Urawa Police Department. He’d had a little medical training, which apparently qualified him to do simple, on-the-spot medical examiner work. He also had a voice as raspy as sandpaper from smoking Peace cigarettes at a machine-gun pace from morning until dusk.
I pulled up to the appointed soon-to-be-designated crime scene exactly fifteen minutes later. It was a five-story apartment building: a typical nondescript condominium complex, clothes hanging out to dry on the balconies. Takagi greeted me perfunctorily and took me up to
the fourth floor. He led me down the hall and opened the metal door of the apartment at issue.
I was met with a faint salty smell and what I can only describe as the aroma of hot dogs combined with burned chocolate chip cookies. The living room was packed with boxes, as if someone had just moved in or was in the process of moving out.
Takagi led me to the back bedroom, which looked as if it belonged to an adolescent male: posters on the wall of Japanese teen idols with bad teeth,
manga
stacked up in the corner, instant ramen packs on the floor. The kid was lying on the top of a bunk bed, facing the wall, his naked back toward us.
I don’t know what I was thinking, but I was about to tap the kid on his shoulder when Takagi stuck out his foot and tripped me.
“What the—?”
“You’re not paying attention, Jake-san. You almost got yourself killed. You can read Japanese. Take a look, you idiot.”
With his arm on my shoulder, he led me closer to the kid, and upon closer inspection I saw, attached to the kid’s back, a piece of paper with small writing that said, “Do not touch me, please. Imminent danger of electrocution.” I leaned over and saw wires taped to his chest and nipples that ran along the wall and down directly to the electrical outlet.
My mouth must have been hanging wide open. Takagi laughed at my shock. “You have to be careful, Jake-san.”
“What happened?”
“This happened,” Takagi said, picking up a book from the desk next the bed. It was
The Perfect Manual of Suicide
. “He’d studied up on electrocution, followed the instructions perfectly. Here, I’ll hold it, you read it. Just keep your hands off it.”
According to the manual, electrocution was painless, pretty much. Only a prick of pain when the first shock hits, but immediately you stop breathing, your heart short-circuits, and in seconds you’ll be dead. A clean death. There is very little damage to the body, so it’s possible to hold an open-casket funeral. The author pointed out that very few people actually choose to kill themselves this way, but self-electrocution is cheap and painless and fast; if you want to die, it deserves reevaluation.
“You should write about this,” Takagi said to me. “We aren’t going to announce the kid’s suicide, but I think this book should be written up. It is an evil book. Parents should know about it, and if they see this book in their kid’s room, they should be worried. It doesn’t just aid suicide, it encourages it.”
“Why’d he kill himself?”
“His family just moved here from Osaka. Maybe someone made fun of his accent. Maybe he didn’t want to move. Who knows? He didn’t leave a note—just the warning label on his back.”
“That was thoughtful, actually.”
“It’s a damn shame. But that warning
was
thoughtful—and polite too. He even said ‘please.’ And he did it without making some horrible mess. I’ve seen a lot of teen suicides, and some kids have absolutely no consideration for their family.”
I wrote the article that day. I had some reservations about writing it. In a way, I felt as if I were promoting the book, but making more people aware of its insidious nature was probably a good thing.
Aside from killing oneself, improving one’s sex life, or increasing one’s finances, how else are manuals integral to everyday Japanese life? Well, remember, the first thing I was handed when I started as a police reporter was a manual:
A Day in the Life of the Police Reporter
.
The police reporter manual is a riveting read, to be sure, but allow me to sketch out the Japanese police system in simple, de facto terms. The way the Japanese police system is supposed to be and the way it really works are two different things.
Police in Japan are organized in pyramidal fashion. At the top is the National Public Security Council, which is under the prime minister’s cabinet. Under the National Public Security Council is the National Police Agency.
The NPA is a political and administrative bureaucracy that does no investigation on its own but may coordinate investigations crossing prefectural lines. It gives general guidance to all police organizations in Japan. Think of the FBI with all of the bureaucracy and none of the investigative powers, and you have a good sense of what the National Police Agency is like. Many who rise to the top of the NPA signed up after passing a national exam and had little or no real police experience before being put on the career fast track.
Below the NPA are the forty-seven prefectural police bureaus that investigate crimes in their region. The most prestigious of these is the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, which functions a little like the FBI in that it often takes on cases more national than local in nature.
Each prefectural police department governs local police stations and neighborhood outposts called
koban
. The NPA appoints its own
bureaucrats to high administrative posts in local police headquarters, ensuring the NPA’s grasp on power while also ensuring that no one who knows the turf and is truly competent to run a large police organization is actually ever appointed to the job. The local police do all the nitty-gritty police work, investigations, and traffic control.
Each police station usually consists of the following divisions: violent crime, fraud, white-collar crime, traffic, juvenile crime, crime prevention, and lifestyle crime (including vice), plus an organized crime control division. Drugs, credit card fraud, and the flesh trade fall under organized crime (or anti–organized crime, I should say) in some prefectures, but the turf has not yet been delineated clearly.
In most major cases, the detectives from police headquarters take charge and the detectives at the local police station function as subordinates, doing the footwork, driving the limousine for the chief of homicide, buying
bento
box lunches for the senior detectives, and generally functioning at the whim and will of the
honbu
(headquarters). When the TMPD works a joint investigation with other prefectural police, the TMPD functions like the honbu and expects everyone else to function like low-ranking police station minions.
Even within a news organization covering the police beat, there is a hierarchy. In Tokyo, the TMPD press club reporters handle the headquarters detectives and announcements; the district reporters handle assigned areas of Tokyo.
As a cub police reporter, your job is to make friends with low-level detectives and pick up an interesting case before headquarters gets its teeth into it. If you’re really good, you can get a scoop from the bottom of the food chain. This usually means getting knowledge of an arrest before it’s officially announced.
The police make regular announcements of cases, written out in short press releases, which the reporter is expected to augment by asking questions over the telephone or by actually going to the crime scene himself.
Each major case is announced in advance, and a lecture is given in addition to a flimsy press release. This takes place in what is called a press club, which is housed in the actual building of each prefectural police headquarters. Large police stations may also have a pressroom.
But, of course, not any old reporter has entrance to these press clubs.
What you won’t see in a reporter’s manual is how to get along with the cops, which is probably the most important thing on the police beat. I once heard the job of a police reporter characterized as being a “male geisha.” That’s actually a fair approximation of what was necessary to get a story—at least for some of us. “Male prostitute” might also be another way of putting it, but I don’t think it accurately captures the subtleties of the task involved. Some heavy entertaining is involved, but there’s a little more foreplay than a quick getting off “up against the wall.” Personally, I prefer to gather my own data and bargain with the police rather than beg for a tidbit, but that was simply my style. I was just as guilty of being a male geisha as most of my peers, except sometimes I managed to put myself into a better bargaining position: on top.
The following is a memo that a former supervisor once wrote to us reporters on the police beat. It offers great insight into the amount of schmoozing and massaging involved in our job. I will say that the guy who wrote it is an excellent reporter who is willing to do real work to get a story rather than rely on the kindness of cops he’d done favors for. Be that as it may, the man is also a brownnoser without equal.
A Memo to Whom It May Concern:
It’s really sad that I have to write the ABCs of being a police reporter down for you losers. It may have been ten years since I was last on the crime beat, but let me say this: The TMPD Club team is capable of making great war plans but not winning the battle. Don’t take this as advice from your boss, but take it as advice from your elder and a senior reporter—the job is harder than you think it is. If you just mechanically make the rounds or get by on the
Yomiuri
name, only one or two cops out of ten will leak anything to you. Maybe.
If you just aimlessly visit cops at their homes during the evening, you won’t get them to say anything. Anybody can get the addresses of detectives from their senpai [senior reporters] and go to the house, wait a couple of hours, and, when they come home, butter them up and occasionally prime the pump with tickets to a Giants baseball game. If it were just a matter of doing that over and over, even a first-year reporter at Jiji Press could do it.
I’m aware that each person on the beat tries to shore up the sections he/she is in charge of. I know that you are figuring out which cop is worth bringing into the fold, but the issue is
what
are you doing to get that cop to be a source? What are you doing to distinguish yourself from other reporters? Take a moment to reflect on your efforts.
Do you take care of the cop you want to crack? Have you asked him his birthday, place of birth, family lineage, the birthdays of his wife and kids, his wedding anniversary, when his kids start school, whether they have found a job, what holidays or special events the family has coming up? Do you say proper greetings on those occasions or, even better, bring a present?
Do you take small gifts when you call on the cops in the evening? If you take them tickets to the Yomiuri Giants game, they won’t be impressed. “Oh, he’s a reporter for the
Yomiuri
newspaper, so he probably gets them for free” is what they’ll be thinking. Go to Daimaru in Tokyo station or someplace like that and buy a regional food or drink from the area where you were born. Then tell your cop buddy, “I had someone back home send this.” Or “I brought this back from a trip for you.” Those kinds of lies are very effective. And timing is important. If you take him a warm meat pastry or a hot sweet-bean pastry on a cold day, all the better. If the cop doesn’t come home, give it to his wife or girlfriend or mistress. Tell her, “Here, if it gets cold it doesn’t taste good.” This at least gets her to open the front door, and that’s always an important first step.
Do you ask the cops to get food or something to drink with you? Do you make efforts to get the police to ride in the hired limousine with you? On a rainy day or when the snow falls, this is the perfect opportunity to send them from their house to the train station or vice versa.
Do you randomly visit cops in the morning? Do you take copies of the
Yomiuri
to cops who don’t subscribe to the
Yomiuri?
Even if you just spend 100 yen [about a dollar] to give the guy a can of coffee or a sports drink, that’s enough to set you apart from the pack.
If one of your cop buddies is sick, do you take the time to
visit him in the afternoon? If you just go visit him in the evening, that’s about the level of a first-year reporter for Yamagata [Hickville] Television. If the wife or kids of the cops have a cold, buy some cold medicine, some orange juice, and take it to the house.
When you have the night shift, do you always let your cop buddy know that “Hey, I’m up all night at the office, so if anything interesting goes on, give me a buzz”? If your pal is on the night shift at the head office, take him a snack and bullshit for a while. Instead of complaining that you can’t get through to the police when a new case breaks, make an effort to get in good with the public affairs guys so you are the first one to catch the story.
If you just complain, “The cops really favor the television reporters,” nothing will change. That’s the kind of whining you hear from first-year reporters at the Yamagata newspaper or even a part-time chick employed at the Akita office. If all you do is complain, you could have ten years on the police beat and still not win against the TV reporters. If you don’t know your cop’s birthday, use the branch offices, senior reporters, even employees at the local ward office to find out. Public utility companies also know the names and phone numbers of cops and where they have moved to recently.
Are you making use of the association of people from your prefecture (such as the Saitama Prefecture Native Association)? Even if you are a Tokyoite, join the prefectural association of where you were first assigned as a reporter. Use your police connections from when you were at a regional office to meet Tokyo cops who attended the police academy at the same time as your sources did.
Hanging out with your family and their family at the same time is the ultimate way to cultivate a source. Families that play together, stay together.
Have you ever taken your wife and kids with you on a Saturday and stopped by “because we were in the neighborhood”?
Do you get your sources to introduce their
kohai
[younger officer friends and protégés] to you? If you know a cop who’s
going to retire this year, shamelessly become friends and get him to introduce his remaining buddies.