Authors: Jake Adelstein
Jun Yoshihara was twenty-two, two years younger than I, and looked like a pop idol. He was a graduate of Waseda University’s commerce department. (This is rare; though many Waseda grads enter the mass media, usually they’re from the journalism department.) He was tall, in good shape from playing soccer, and so pasty-faced that he looked Caucasian. For a short time we called him The Face, and that’s how I still think of him.
Naoki Tsuji, “Frenchie,” was twenty-five, also a graduate of Waseda, also not from the journalism department but from French literature. Of the four of us, he was the most intelligent. He was also always immaculately coiffed, wore tailored suits, and was constantly reading some obscure Japanese novel or French masterpiece. He radiated sensitivity and good breeding.
Of course, everything I’ve just described made him a terrible match for the
Yomiuri
and was probably why he became the subject of harassment by the older reporters, who found his very existence to be annoying. It’s likely that he would have flourished at the
Asahi
, but you never really know. In many ways it was like a cum laude of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism taking a job
at The Washington Times
. Today he is a successful writer, with four novels to his name.
Yasushi Kouchi was nicknamed “Chappy,” though I can’t remember
why. He was twenty-four and had a degree in international relations from Tsukuba University. He was prematurely balding, which made him look older than he was, and had an extremely round face, making him appear Chinese (from a Japanese perspective). He was one of the most dependable people I have ever known, and his quick thinking saved me a number of times.
We were an odd crew: The Face, Chappy, the Frenchman, and the Gaijin. But from day one we covered one another’s asses. There’s not much more you can ask or expect from your friends or colleagues at any workplace. And in my case, I found myself relying on their good graces very, very soon, when a minor incident could have ended my career prematurely.
It was the night before we were to report to the office for our first official day on the job. A welcome party was held at a local
izakaya
pub, and even though I had a horrendous cold, I showed up. It would have been worse if I hadn’t.
The whole staff was there: Hara, the station chief with the physique of a sumo wrestler, a laugh that was deep and jolly, an Italian suit, and a Rolex. He had a punch perm of sorts, glasses perched precariously on the nub of his nose, and hair that curled around his ears, making him look vaguely Hasidic.
Ono, a reporter on loan to the Urawa office, was head of the team of prefectural police reporters, which made him the direct supervisor of us recruits. He was built like a smaller version of Hara, with eyes that looked as if they were slits cut into a pumpkin. Ono took great pride in being a shakaibu reporter, and within five minutes he had made it clear that he was not just an ordinary regional reporter; he wasn’t going to be stuck here in the boonies forever.
Hayashi and Saito, the two editors. The latter had a regional dialect so thick you thought he was missing some teeth; he could be very supportive when sober. The former was short and sensitive about it, and famous for being a hard-driving, hard-drinking tyrant. Luckily for us, he was a happy drunk most of the time.
Shimizu, the computer keyboarder, who had a mustache, yellow teeth, and no hair on the top of his head; apparently an indispensable fixture of the office.
Yamamoto, number two to Ono on the police beat and the man who would prove to be my mentor and sometimes tormenter. Yamamoto
was my university
senpaí
—that is, senior to my sophomore. His features looked almost Mongolian, and for some reason he reminded me of a porcupine. Then there was Nakajima, his sidekick, who was hair-challenged, like Chappy, and had a long Ichabod Crane face. He’d been a science major in college and fit the classic image of the classic scientist: cold, analytical, dry. Unlike the classic image of the classic scientist, however, he was dressed better than anyone else.
Finally Hojo, the bureau photographer, whose nose was so red, with so many broken blood vessels, he could have been Irish. By virtue of his seniority, he could say anything to anyone without fear of incrimination, and this night he did.
We rookies were made to stand at the table in the back of the pub and introduce ourselves. Ono was the first to fill our cups with sake, and we then spent the rest of the night filling his in the Japanese way, saying
kanpai
(“cheers”) with every pour. The inferiors pour the sake of the superiors. Occasionally the superiors reciprocate.
Ono and Hara told war stories, and I, in my cold-ridden, befuddled state, tried to keep track of the conversation as best I could. Even on a good day, my listening skills were still wanting, but I didn’t want anyone to know that. Hara raised his glass for a toast.
The sake wasn’t helping my congestion, though. In the middle of Hara’s toast, a giant sneeze suddenly made its way through my passages and exploded before I could raise my hands to cover up. Out of my nose flew a giant ball of snot, slicing through the air with a whoosh, winging The Face and Chappy before splattering its target—the unsuspecting Hara, my first boss and holder of my future.
There was a sudden, horrific silence, which seemed to last forever.
Then Chappy whacked me on the head with a newspaper. “Jake, you are such a barbarian!” he howled. Yoshihara bonked me too. That broke the ice, and everybody laughed, including Hara, who wiped his glasses with the
oshibori
napkin The Face quickly handed him. I bowed profusely in apology. Hojo joined the lineup, hitting me right in the head with his wet oshibori. “Do you know how to use this, idiot?” he said.
What could have been a terribly awkward situation had turned into a joke in a matter of seconds. Even Ono was amused.
“Omae,”
he began, using the second rudest form of “you” in Japanese, “you are one ballsy gaijin. Omae, I’ve never seen anyone do that before and live to tell the tale.”
I continued to bow and apologize, but Ono just swept his hand
through the air as if it was already nothing. He poured more sake in my cup and told me to drink up.
Shimizu dragged us all to his favorite hostess club afterward, and I passed out listening to Ono belting out some karaoke. Then someone put me into a car and sent me home.
My new apartment was a small flat above a traditional tea and confectionary shop, a five-minute bicycle ride from the Urawa office. In 1993, many places would still not rent to foreigners, but the company had found it for me and signed on as my guarantor. The wonderful thing about the flat was the shower/bath unit that came with it. In my five years as a college student in Japan, I had never lived in an apartment with its own bath; I had to go to either the public bath or the coin shower down the street. Five minutes of hot water for 100 yen in the coin shower, 300 yen for the public bath.
As I soaked my aching body in my very own
furo
that night, praying that the hangover would be mild, I felt great! I’d really moved up in the world. I had a job, had survived a potentially fatal sneeze, and had my own bathtub. What more could a man possibly want?
The next day, April 15, 1993, at 8:30 in the morning, I showed up at the Urawa office of the
Yomiuri Shinbun
and sat down in the lobby along with the rest of the new guys. Compared to the pristine Chiba office, this was, to put it subtly, a bit of a comedown. Chappy breathed deeply and said, “This is a rat hole. I was hoping for something a little snazzier.” Frenchie said, “Sure doesn’t look like the typical newspaper office in the company pamphlet.” The Face said he’d heard of worse.
The office consumed most of the second floor of an office building in a residential neighborhood. The bureau chief had his own office with a door. The rest of the office was all open space, no cubicles, no privacy. The reception area near the window wasn’t the most welcoming place. There were three faux leather sofas surrounding one long table overflowing with newspapers, hiding the reams of magazines piled underneath. The blinds over the window were covered with a nicotine glaze that, like flypaper, had trapped everything from dust to particles of food to, oh yeah, insects.
There were two large islands of desks. The two editors had the desks near the middle of the room. The senior reporters had the three desks in the back and the luxury of a sofa jammed against the wall. There was
a darkroom and, next to it, a tatami-mat room where the night staffers slept. (It came complete with a shower/bath and a desk stuffed with porn in the lower drawers.) The editors would take naps there, but it was off limits to the other reporters while the sun shone. As for the four new guys, their desks were in the middle of the room, where they were most vulnerable.
Almost every desk had a multibutton phone but no computer (too early in history for that). There was a modified network station where stories were typed in and sent to the head office for final review. We sent our stories over the phones to the terminal, and Shimizu retyped and formatted them. It was pretty inefficient.
Ono showed up around nine, bleary-eyed and cranky, appearing to have slept in the suit he had been wearing the night before. He stood in front of the reception table and glared at us.
“Who the hell told you you could sit down here!” he yelled.
We immediately stood up.
He laughed and told us to sit down. Nakajima then handed us a copy of the police reporter manual, version 1.1, titled
A Day in the Life of the Police Reporter;
a beeper, which would forever be clasped to our hips and which had to always be on; and, finally, a set of documents—collections of articles under such categories as Robbery, Homicide, Assault, Arson, Drugs, Organized Crime, Bid Rigging, Traffic Accidents, and Purse Snatching. Yes, purse snatching. In 1993, serial purse snatching was still enough of a newsworthy item to merit its own reporting style; sometimes, apparently, it was good enough to command the lead story for the local edition.
“These are examples of the types of stories you will be covering as police reporters,” Nakajima explained. “Study the articles and remember the style. I’ll expect you to know it within a week. You have everything you need now to write an article. Now it’s about getting to work.”
That was the beginning and the end of our formal training as police reporters.
The next item on the agenda was an explanation of our daily duties other than reporting. When we came to the office in the evening, for example, we were expected to take dinner orders from the senior staff. And when we ended up on the night shift, we were required to update the scrapbooks.
The scrapbook rules were incredibly complicated. There were instructions on where to write the date of an article, how to write which
edition of the paper it came from, where to file, where to multiple-file, and how to note national editions and front-page articles. The manual for handling the scrapbook was considerably longer than the one for covering the police beat.
We were also introduced to other duties, including writing mini-biographies for a section known as “The Little King of Our House” in the free local paper distributed by the
Yomiuri
as a civic service. Essentially, these were birth announcements. And so that we had the broadest exposure to all manner of news, we were expected to write up the results of local sports events, compile statistics, and report weather forecasts. Each of these, needless to say, required a different style of recording and writing and inputting.
We were then given a calendar for the month, indicating when and who had early duty, late duty, overnight duty, and sports coverage. Some of the senior staff had little squares with diagonal lines noted for certain days. I asked what they were.
“Vacation days,” answered Nakajima.
“But there’re no such diagonal lines for us,” I said.
“That’s because you have no vacation days,” he said.
Around 1 P.M., we were getting an intensive course in typing sports records into the computer when there was a call from the police press club. A man had been found stabbed to death in a station wagon in Tsurugashima. The Saitama prefectural police had made the announcement, and it looked as if they were going to set up a Homicide Special Investigation Unit.
Ono was visibly excited. “All right, punks, grab your notepads. Take your cameras, and let’s go.” Murder was always big news in Saitama, just as it is anywhere in Japan. It says a great deal about the safety of the country that a murder, any murder, is national news. There are exceptions, however, and that’s when the victim is Chinese, a yakuza, a homeless person, or a nonwhite foreigner. Then the news value drops 50 percent.
Ono explained the protocol. “We’re going to do
kikikomi
[crime scene and related interviews] at the site of the murder and at the company of the deceased. Your job is to find out anything about him—who he was, when he was last seen, who might have wanted to kill him—and to get a photo. And bring back a head shot; I don’t care where you
get it from, just get it. If you find anything interesting, call it in to the reporter in the police press club or the Urawa office. Now go.”
We went. New employees were forbidden from driving a car for the first six months, so two of us went with Yamamoto and other reporters, and two of us grabbed a taxi from a company that had a contract with the
Yomiuri
.
Tsurugashima was a long way from Urawa. The Nishi Irima police were handling the initial investigation. Investigative Division One (homicide, violent crimes) from the SPP headquarters was dispatching the division chief. When I arrived at the crime scene, Yamamoto brought me up to speed:
Around 11 P.M. the night before, Ryu Machida, aged forty-one, had been found dead by his wife in a station wagon parked in the middle of a heavy industrial area. He was lying in the backseat, stabbed in the left breast. He had apparently bled to death. Machida had last been seen three days earlier, when he had gone to work. He hadn’t returned home, and his family had filed a missing persons report with the local police, asking for a formal search for him on the fourteenth.