Each year, approximately one murder is committed for every two hundred thousand people.
All due respect driver#
Adelstein says he needs a car and a nine-fingered driver in order to avoid the subway, where a hit man might shove him in front of a train. He employs a bodyguard who doubles as a chauffeur, an ex-yakuza who cut off his pinkie finger years ago as a gesture of apology to a gang superior. For a while, he dyed his hair bright red, claiming that this disguise would foil would-be assassins.
He’s in his early forties, and he wears a trenchcoat and a porkpie hat, and he chain-smokes clove cigarettes from Indonesia. Adelstein does little to dismiss such rumors, apart from maintaining an image so flamboyant that it would shame any actual agency man. Others react with suspicion a number of people in Japan claim that his journalism is a front for C.I.A. They dismiss him as a crank, a paranoid foreigner who talks obsessively about death threats from the gangsters known as yakuza. Some people in town have trouble taking Adelstein seriously. Japanese police protection means that the cops make daily visits to Adelstein’s home, where they leave yellow notes that say, “There was nothing out of the ordinary.” The notes feature the Tokyo police mascot, Pipo-kun, a smiling cartoon figure with big mouse ears and an antenna jutting out of its forehead. One of the foremost experts on Japanese organized crime is Jake Adelstein, who grew up on a farm in Missouri, worked as the only American on the crime beat for Japan’s largest newspaper, and currently lives in central Tokyo under police protection.
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