‘Tokyo Vice’ Finds Its Better Half

Those who found the pilot season of Tokyo Vice diverting, and maybe learned a thing or two about debt and blight in modern Japan, will enjoy more of the same in the second season. It’s no masterpiece, but judging from the early episodes of this new run, the writers and producers appear to have learned from their mistakes. The series has matured. The question now is how much further Tokyo Vice, a show about investigative journalists, is willing to go in its exploration of the inner workings of a fascinating society and culture.

Jake Adelstein, a character based on a Missourian who lived and worked as a reporter in Japan for many years, is back out on the streets, exploring a noir underworld of sleaze, predatory lenders, murder plots, and collusion among mobsters, dealers, businesspeople, and powerful politicians.

I criticized the first season for abandoning all credibility by making Adelstein an action hero in the later episodes. Some journalists, ironically, had raised questions about the veracity of its subject’s supposed exploits in the course of trying to expose false narratives. So it seems fair to say that the series already had its share of credibility problems without making Adelstein into James Bond and asking us to believe he could hold his own against several martial arts fighters at a time.

So far, the new season is mostly free from such fancies. Better still, it explores the moral gray areas of working as a journalist and trying to break stories and publish truths that will have serious consequences for real people.

One of the big scoops Adelstein chases on his city beat for the Meicho Shimbun involves a crew of motorcycle thieves. In the hope of gaining their trust, he takes them out to dinner, and things get to the point where the ringleader is willing to let him tag along on a hunt for a bike to steal. Here is where matters get quite complicated ethically. Adelstein agrees to help the ring do its work by acting as a lookout and even goes so far as to distract a young couple while the theft is underway. He then gets on the bike and sits behind the ringleader as the couple watch them escape.

This sequence breathes life into the familiar, vexing question of How far would you go for a story? It reminded this writer of Bill Buford’s acclaimed 1990 book Among the Thugs, in which Buford documented the misadventures he had while researching and traveling with a number of the United Kingdom’s most vicious and violent soccer hooligans. By his own admission, Buford got so caught up in the thugs’ activities and lifestyle, ostensibly for the highest journalistic ends, that he began to ape their most appalling traits and behavior. In a deeply harrowing scene, Buford runs down a flight of steps, pushes his way past an elderly couple, and then at the bottom turns back and abuses them with some of the vilest words in any language.

In Tokyo Vice, we don’t see Jake Adelstein do anything quite so awful, but he does abet thieves in the act of committing a serious offense. A later scene—mild spoiler alert—further illustrates the moral limbo in which reporters with a tangential yet very real connection to criminal behavior operate. The ringleader of the motorcycle gang ends up in jail, and, when Adelstein comes to visit him and chat from opposite sides of bulletproof glass, asks why only one of them got a conviction for a crime they both pulled off. Then, at a glitzy party with lots of fine food and wine, a well-dressed woman praises Adelstein for having broken important stories for his newspaper.

It may be just an HBO Max show, but you could teach a course on the moral and ethical issues that Tokyo Vice raises in these scenes, and never resolve any of them to the satisfaction of your students or yourself.

So in its second season, Tokyo Vice has found its better half. But the series has further to go if it aspires to be more than another mediocre streaming time-filler. In their examination of the relations among powerful institutions in Japan, and the unpredictable and sometimes illegal ways in which those relations play out, the writers would do well to develop some of the themes they have raised and consider how media corporations in modern Japan behave, in a real sense, like the mafia.

The concentration of power and influence in the hands of a few newspaper conglomerates, and their active stifling of competition, has been an issue in Japan going back many decades before the birth of anyone involved with Tokyo Vice. In his 1935 book Secrets of Japan, the Indian writer Chaman Lal documents how such publications as the Osaka Mainichi and the Osaka Asahi came to dominate the newspaper market through their monopolization of what were then the most efficient means of distribution.

“These newspapers have their army of aeroplanes and hundreds of pigeons who carry messages, photo films etc. from one corner of the country to the other,” Lal writes.

Lal goes on to give an account of how the most powerful newspapers underwent joint stock organization, with a coterie of the wealthiest businessmen holding nearly all the shares. By including local supplements for various cities and regions, the big newspapers snuffed out their struggling competitors in those localities, rather like mafia families from New York or Philly muscling in on punier rackets in other cities and towns.

The newspaper that employs Jake Adelstein in Tokyo Vice, the Meicho Shimbun, is reportedly closely based on the corporate titan that the real Adelstein worked for: the Yomiuri Shimbun.

If it was hard for the tiny, locally owned newspapers of Japan to compete with the big ones in the age when planes and carrier pigeons did the work of distribution, just think of how effortlessly the titans can extend their dominance today. The publishers of the Yomiuri Shimbun also happen to own Japan’s biggest English-language newspaper. They have freely made use of the digital revolution to sell an iPad and iPhone app for their journal through the Apple Store. If you are a small-town print newspaper running on a shoestring, just you try to compete.

So, to what degree does Adelstein’s paper monopolize, and dictate the content of, media coverage in Japan, and how does it behave toward competitors and toward its own employees and readers? These are sensitive and contentious issues in Japan today, but we will have to see whether Tokyo Vice has the guts to ask. Time will tell whether a series that purports to be about investigative journalism can live up to the finest traditions of its ostensible subject.