The Team House - Inside the Yakuza | Jake Adelstein | Ep. 375

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

Investigative journalist Jake Adelstein details his career covering the Japanese criminal underworld, from his early days reporting in Tokyo to the high-stakes confrontation with Yakuza boss Goto Tadamasa that forced him into police protection. The interview thoroughly examines the Yakuza's culture, including the history behind their tattoos and the ritual of the sacrificial finger, and discusses the decline of the crime syndicate in modern Japan. Later, the conversation covers Adelstein's unique projects, such as investigating human trafficking and the Fukushima disaster, before revealing his path to becoming a Zen Buddhist priest. Finally, he introduces his latest book, The Devil Takes Bitcoin, which chronicles the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange collapse.Jake's new book:https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Takes-Bitcoin-Cryptocurrency-Connection-ebook/dp/B0FL8QSK2Y?ref_=ast_author_mpbAll of Jake's books:https://www.amazon.com/stores/Jake-Adelstein/author/B002D68IJE?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=trueToday's Sponsors:Perfect Jean ⬇️https://theperfectjean.nyc/house15for 15% offGhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 Start02:38 Adelstein's origin story as a reporter in Tokyo.08:37 The unique dynamic between police, press, and Yakuza.18:31 Becoming a target of Yakuza boss Goto Tadamasa.26:49 Deep dive into Yakuza history and their code of conduct.31:30 Yakuza cultural symbols: tattoos and the sacrificial finger.50:13 Continuation of Saigo's story and the messy finger-cutting incident.1:11:19 Japanese anti-Semitism and the Om Shinrikyo cult.1:18:52 Work on the U.S. State Department human trafficking study.1:35:43 Reporting on the Fukushima disaster and Yakuza in the nuclear industry.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

The Team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 375 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here tonight with our guest, Jake Adelstein. He is the author of Tokyo Vice, an American reporter on the police beat in Japan. This is a book I read way back in 2009. I feel old looking at the date on there this afternoon. he has also written The Last Yakuza, Life and Death in the Japanese Underworld.

This is probably the best, I mean, I would say it is the best English language book about the Yakuza. You guys should go and check this one out. And his follow-up to Tokyo Vice, Tokyo Noir, which kind of continues Jake's own story in Japan, in and out of Japan's underworld. I hope you guys will check this one out also. So Jake, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. Hey, it's a pleasure to be on your show. I'm, you know, not as grizzles as your usual veterans, but I'll do my best.

Hey, I should also mention Tokyo Vice has been turned into a television show with two seasons that people can go and check out. It's like loosely based on your book, but it's good to watch. It's a good show. Oh, yeah, thank you. You know, the person who is running the show was my high school. school buddy. Oh, really? He went off to become a, yeah, yeah.

He went off to college and he became a very successful actor in New York. And he wrote a lot of plays set in foreign countries, including Afghanistan and Africa. And, you know, he won a Tony Award, which I think is a big deal in the world of movies and theater for this play about the Palestinian peace talks in Oslo, called Oslo. called Oslo. Oslo. And yeah, it's a great play, and they made it into a movie, too. And I asked him to be the showrunner, and HBO was like, yes.

And so it's great to work with your high school buddy. And he was very good about listening to what I had to say 90% of the time. Yeah, that's super cool. That came together quite well. So I want to just start off asking you a bit about your own origin story, which kind of you tell in Tokyo Vice, but I mean, as I recall, you grew up in the Midwest, Jewish dude from the Midwest, and you ended up working as a reporter in Tokyo in like the early to mid-1990s. Tell us that whole trajectory from point A to point B how that came about.

Okay, okay. Yeah, it's, you know, Columbia, Missouri is an interesting place. I went back there two years ago to do a podcast about a serial killer in the hospital. where my father worked. That is a whole other story in an entire podcast. So I grew up there. My father has always, well, has spent most of his time at the Harriest Truman Brendon's Hospital where he's a pathologist.

There's also the medical examiner. So I grew up listening to lots of stories about crime and murder and accidents. And that was kind of always a dinner conversation. And in high school, I got kind of. picked on a little bit. I got in a fight with the school bully and my teacher instead of expelling me told me I need to take karate lessons to channel my anger and from there I got interested in Japan. So my first year as a student at the University of Missouri I noticed that they had an exchange program and I thought what a wonderful opportunity to go to Japan and

And lucky for me, it was a time like when the Japanese economy was booming and Japan seemed very expensive. So we had no one going from the university. We had 20 people coming from Sofia University, which is the university where I was going to go as an exchange student. And they relaxed the rules and let me go after only a year of Japanese under my belt. And a couple months after I got there, I ended up living in a sense. Zen Buddhist temple is not really weird story. I mean, there's kind of one coincidence after another. And I'm still friends with the chief priest.

I mean, you know, and you read the book where now he's my Zen master, which is kind of a weird thing to say. And so from there, that's how you kind of got immersed in Japanese culture and the Japanese language and kind of continued from there? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was full immersion, right? Because you're in, you're in the, you know, I'm living in this temple. I'm living surrounded by Japanese people, and I'm going to school all the time.

And I thought, you know, if I'm going to really improve my Japanese, if I'm really going to get better before I graduate, that I should do something that would force me to work hard. And so I decided to study for the newspaper entrance examinations, which are something in Japan that newsrooms do. They hire you by examination. And I got to ask, was this like a bit of like youthful hubris? that you're like, I'm some white kid from the Midwest.

I'm going to just jump right in and take the entrance exam for a prestigious Japanese newspaper. You know, there's a saying in Japanese that even a stupid person can do one thing right. So, you know, I had some talent for Japanese. And also, I am, you know, I hate to admit it's such a contrarian that once I decided to do it and people told me, That it would never happen.

I was just like, well, I'll see. So that was that. So you went in, it took the test and got the job. I mean, did they know they were hiring an American when they blessed off on it? You know, the Omiti Shibu used to be the world's largest newspaper. I mean, it had 11 million readers a day at the time when everyone in Japan was reading a newspaper. Most of the readers are Japanese, of course, right? And they wanted to internationalize themselves.

And so, you know, they had a, the question, the essay topic, we have to write an essay was, you know, foreigners, Guy Kokoichi. So I wrote this essay. It was like, if you're serious about internationalizing and you really, you know, you're giving us the topic of foreigners, you should hire a foreigner. So you have a different perspective on things. And they took me up on that. So to their credit, you know, they knew exactly what they were doing. They did have, they did it just like in the TV series. They didn't have some questions on whether me being nominally Jewish would be an obstacle to be working.

But they didn't really care. No, no, no. I mean, if I had been smart, I would say, you know, I shouldn't have said like, you know, yeah, I have to have the Sabbath off because then I might have actually gotten some vacation time on the job. But I didn't. Yeah, I don't think they have Rosh Hashanah as a national holiday in Japan. No, I mean, I don't think, you know, I'll tell you what, like, you know, I'm not, I'm not complaining. It's just how things are in the pan as they used to be. So we had, as newsreeport, especially on the crime beat, we had like 80-hour weeks, 90-hour weeks sometimes, depending on what was the newsbreaking.

And, you know, they would give you a calendar with your days marked off on it. And, you know, and you would almost never get those days off. And then as I rose up in the company, sometimes you'd be on the night shift and you'd be following the formula to mark your labor hours. So I went to once in the company. I had been like in the office for three days working on a story, manning the phones. And I marked myself in like in the middle of a vacation because that's what the manual said. It's pretty crazy. As you become a reporter in Japan, I feel like this is kind of like where you get taken into the next level of the immersion.

like you start to interact with obviously the press, but also the police, you're kind of on the metro beat, right? So you're interacting with the police and eventually organized crime. You're starting to learn sort of like where the fault lines in society are. Like, what was that like

and what were you learning as a young guy working that job at the time? First of all, what was really different for me is that I didn't drink. I mean, you know, I didn't drink in college. I was like a straight edge punk And I'm living in this Zen Buddhist temple where, you know, you can drink. It's as in Buddhist, but you're not supposed to get drunk.

And the first thing I realized that you have to drink with the cops. If you don't drink with the cops, they don't take you serious. And there's sort of like this interesting relationship between the police and the press and the criminals and the way you kind of like have to balance that as a reporter working in that environment. Yeah, I mean, because everybody. has their part to play, right? And, you know, when you're first starting off to the cops, you're just a nuisance, right? You're, you know, if they like you, maybe they'll feed you a story.

And in the yakuza, you know, if they talk to you at all, it's when they realize that you might be able to write a story that would do damage to their enemies. So they might feed you a good story. I mean, that was a really weird thing that I realized is as the rules of engagement as a journalist, especially covering organized crime were like this. You could get information from the yakuza and you could pass it on to the police. And that was okay. You just had to make sure that the yakuza

were these these mafiosas understood, that you understood that you were doing them a favor and it wasn't the other way around. And then, but you could never take information you got from the police and give it to the yakuza. And so everyone has these kind of sort of rules and they're not written out, and you sort of warn them as you'll go along.

And you don't want to screw up. And what makes being a police reporter in Japan really hard is the cops cannot go on the record. Because the Japan criminal, because the Japan public service law makes it a crime for a police officer to speak about something that's confidential. So if they get caught, they can get fired. They can even be prosecuted. Which is why you have to have this pretense of you and I are just drinking. both got so drunk, no one remembers what happened last night. So of course, you couldn't have told me anything about a breaking case. And as I recall, there's also some interesting conventions with the

newspaper and with the editors. Obviously, they have journalistic standards. Things have to be sourced properly. But there's also like, oh, do we really want to piss off the cops by publishing that? Do we want to really piss off the Yakuza by publishing that? They have to balance some of these things as well. Oh, yeah. The balance with the cops is really hard. You know, there was this one interesting case in which, you know, I don't know about the cops in the United States, but the cops in Japan are very jurisdictional, right?

So everybody has their feftom. So if there's a homicide case, the homicide cops want to do it. Well, there was one case where the homicide cases, homicide cops took over a case from the organized crime squad involving. the murder of a low-life journalist, actually. I mean, one of our own in a sense, but basically he made his money by blackmailing people. You got paid by not writing articles.

So this, you know, Yakuza kills him. The police started an investigation. First to organize crime cops do it, then the homicide guys step in and say, we're going to do this. So the homicide cops send like low-level rookies to arrest the guy. But the suspect has a gun, right? Because he's a yakkas, only the,

they have guns in Japan unless so the cops. And so when the cops show up to arrest him, not knowing what's going on, he pulls a gun on him and he holds them hostage in a car for a couple hours since a standoff and shoots himself in the head. He survives. It's a huge scandal. But it's just the whole thing is screwed up because the homicide guys had so much hubris that they wouldn't listen to the organized crime cops. And they didn't tell the rookies going to arrest him the possible danger that he had a gun. So I thought this is a great story. Here's where police rivalry results in, you know,

nearly a death and a hostage situation that could have been avoided. And so I wrote up the article and I showed it to my boss and what do you think happened? He said, nope. No, no. He said, hold on. This is a great story. So he went to talk to the head of the investigative division, like the chief of the detectives. And they made a deal that we would have a scoop on any major crime story for the next.

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Yeah. I mean, you know, I can't say that I miss it that much, but there was something kind of fun about going to going the evening around. So you actually go to the cop's houses and you drink with them, right? And the organized crime guys were fun. I mean, because they did crazy cases. They're dealing with these violent criminals. And they tended to be pretty nutty themselves.

And because, like, as I told you, the pretense is, right, that this is just a friendly drink between buddies, right? So you cannot take notes. You cannot take out of pen and paper. So you drink, you know, for a couple hours maybe. Maybe you eat something to. And you always try and bring something with you. And then we had taxis that we could use,

like company cars because, of course, we don't want to get arrested for drunk driving. So you'd have to write down everything as fast as you can before you pass out. or while it's still in your head. I mean, it's a great training for remembering conversations because you can't take notes. So there's one cup I really like named Isobesan. And, you know, he's retired now,

and he doesn't have a problem with mentioning his name. And when I go to Isamaisana, the first thing you would say was like, would you like a beer? And that's a very common in Japan as you start with a beer. And then we would do drinks of Japanese sake. He was really into sake. So he would tell me where it was from and whether it was dry or whether it was sweet and, you know, what its name was and why this was a good sake. And then after the sake, sometimes his wife would make us dinner and we would have some wine with the dinner.

And if it was winter, he'd give me a shot of whiskey for the road because it was cold outside. And so my notes from my visits to his house would always like start when very nice, you know, fine print and details. but by the third page you're off and sort of trailing off as I pass out. But that was kind of fine. And at this point, you're young, too. You're like, what, like 25 or something? Yeah, 25, 26.

It's awesome. So let's, um, there's a whole bunch of things that I want to get into with you. But maybe this would be the right place to sort of jump off and ask you about Saigo. and how you met him and how that kind of relationship came about for you. So I first met Seigo very early on when I was doing this crazy story about dog breeder serial killer and his wife who murdered a bunch of their customers who were unhappy with. And they killed a Yakuza boss and his driver. Okay, so they killed the yak of the Bostonist driver.

We all knew that the police were investigating this guy said we split up into teams to cover the people that were missing, people that had been killed by the Psi Knie again, his name in the serial killer. I got assigned to cover Endo Makoto and his driver, Wakui-san. And in the course of that investigation, I started dating, and those mistress. And Saigo was in the same organized crime group, the Inagalakai. And at one point, I think he actually came to her house or something.

We had a sort of discussion in the fact that, you know, wasn't appropriate for me to be with his brothers and the organization's mistress. And I was like, you know, the guy is probably dead. And I should be rewarded, I should be rewarded for taking care of the mistress because there's no one to look after her. And he just thought that was a lot of chutzpun, very funny. And then we just stayed in touch until about 2008. When I was put under police protection because I pissed off this yaku's boss.

And he was kicked out of his organization because he owed a bunch of money to them. And so I asked him, you know, would you be my bodyguard and my driver because I need both? and he said yes well that's yeah maybe before we we jump off into the next thing we should talk about that a little bit more you're talking about go to correct

oh yes I'm talking about yeah so tell us about kind of like how you pissed that dude off and how that became an issue for you oh sure so goto talamasa is kind of the Richard Branson of organized crime

like Richard Branson of if he but it's a homicidal maniac. So, you know, a little bit of background for people who are not versed at all. So Japan has basically 20 crime families collectively called the Yaksa. And the biggest of them all was the Yamaguchi-Gumi, which at one time had 40,000 members. They are public entities, meaning that, you know, they have offices. have business cards. They exist in the public.

Actually, I've got a fan magazine around. If you'd like me to pull it out, I could show it to you. Yeah. Just to show you how crazy that is. Yeah, why not? Okay, hold on just again. I'll go grab it. Yeah, so Jake's talking about how these Yakuza families,

they get writers and publishers to actually make fanzines, like magazines extolling how great the Yakuza is and their exploits and how honorable they are and all this kind of stuff. Oh, yeah. So here we are. So this is the Yakuza fan magazine. It's really thick. This one is a special issue because it has an article analyzing the legislation that was put on the books around 2000 and between 2009, 2011,

which made it a crime to pay off the Yakuza. So there's a big article here about and also criticizing the National Police Agency for infringing on the human rights of Yakuza by outlawing some of their criminal activities. I mean, I laugh because it's like, it's not like you're born a Yakuza. You do have some choice there. Who is the readers? So this is it. Who's the readership of magazines like this, Jake? Like, you know, in America, of course, we have an interesting, like, crime films and crime dramas, like, that these criminals are edgy outsiders on the peripheral of society. Is that, you know, kind of who reads these magazines? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so first of all, right, at a time when there are 80,000 yaku is in Japan.

This is kind of like, you know, car and driver if you're in the automobile industry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's like a true industry publication. Yes. So it's an industry publication, but also people reading it are the police read it, right? The journalist read it. And then, you know, your average sort of white-collar worker and blue-collar worker who dreams of being like a tough guy of not, you know, of having women and cars and lots of money and doing whatever they want, they read it too because it's exciting, right? People are interested in gangsters, like the same kind of people who love true crime.

And there are probably some women readers who read it as well. So it's very male-oriented. Okay, so back to Goto. So back to Goto. So Goto is. was the head of the Yamaguchi, which is the largest organized crime group, which has been around 1915, over 100 years. He was head of their Tokyo operations. And he was really ruthless and he was a really good businessman. At one time, at one time, he was the largest individual shareholder of Japan Airlines.

So, I mean, think about that, that's a lot of money to have. But because he was ruthless, because he was, He has no morals. He pissed off a lot of people. And he also didn't take very good care of himself. So he needed a liver transplant. And the best place to get a liver transplant is in the United States. And in order to get that liver transplant, because he was on a blacklist by the FBI,

of course, the United States isn't going to let in a known criminal of his nature. And he made a deal with the FBI that they would provide him a visa to go into the United States and get a liver transplant at UCLA. UCLA found him a liver. The FBI didn't find him a liver, but he did that and he ratted out his buddies to get that deal. The FBI was kind of wanted intelligence about organized crime within the United States. The Japanese police and the national police agency would not cooperate with the FBI for reasons I've never understood. They wouldn't share their list of members with the FBI, and the FBI wanted that list. So Goetho had to go open kimono with the feds to get his liver.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. But he kind of screwed them too because as soon as he got his liver, he checked out of the hospital. He only gave them about a fit to what he promised. So it wasn't a very good deal on terms of for the feds either. So, you know, what I did is that I had heard about this, I'd heard about the fact that he got a liver transplant while covering this huge story about a loan shark who made like over hundreds of millions of dollars

with this Kaloffa loan sharking operation, which included laundering money at the MTM Grand in Las Vegas. I mean, really like movie thriller kind of stuff. And on flowing that story for years, I heard that Koto had made a deal to get into the United States and get a liver transplant. It took me a long time to figure out that he made a deal with the FBI to do it. And so when I started to write about it, someone ran out to him. And, you know, I was hearing murmurs that he was very unhappy with what I was working on.

And then the National Police Agency told me to come to the office and said, well, you know, you're under police protection. Apparently there's a contract out on you. And, you know, what exactly are you up to? And so that was very awkward too because it's kind of like, you know, I didn't really want to give up my sources. But they were quite aware of the fact that this deal had been made with the FBI and they weren't happy about it. So maybe they wanted this story out as well. Seigo kind of tipped you off, didn't they? Yeah.

Well, Seigo was one of the people. It's like, you know, you may be in some serious problems here. You know, that's the weird thing about the underworld. It's like a giant junior high school where everybody knows each other. So you get to hear things from other people, you know. Even the other, well, this is kind of strange. It's always been strange to me. So can you imagine like the Crips in the Bloods, sending Christmas cards to each other?

Not really, no. But in Japan, that's totally the way it is. You have all these different organizations. You have the Inagawa Kai. You have the Sumiyosha, Qai. You have the Amengu Kumi. And to some extent, You can be an Inagawakai, and you can be a blood brother with a member of someone in the Sumio Shkai.

So you have these alliances that transcend organizations. So it becomes very complicated. Who knows what? And one third of the Yakuz are Korean-Japanese. And because Koreans in Japan are subject to auto-discrimination. So there's a substrata of people in the Yakuza groups who know each other. It's like, well, you're a fellow Korean. and even though we're in different organizations,

we have this in common. And I was kind of like to navigating that labyrinth of connections between the organizations to get information because it's important. Information is what you want, right? That's what gets you a scoop. So let's pick up the Goto story towards the end

as we kind of jump forward in time. And I'd like to dive in a little bit deeper with you into the yakuza. And if you can tell us a little bit, you alluded to already a bit about the history of it. I think it's very, very interesting in the last yakuza,

how you explained that, you know, the yakuza in a lot of ways was born out of a segment of the Japanese population, though, was marginalized, and they weren't allowed to work normal jobs. So like the kind of, the system sort of created this underworld at the time.

Oh, yeah. So, you know, originally, you know, let's talk about, let's go back to 1870 and stuff. There are two kinds of yakuza. There were street merchants and there were federations of gamers. But the Second World War comes and ends disastrously for Japan. And you have all these people, sorry, my phone is making annoying noises. Actually, that was funny. It was just telling me there's an Inagawa Kai meeting tomorrow.

So they have monthly meetings and you can watch all the cars line up in front of their office in Rapongi across the rich Carlton. Do they have someone that takes the minutes of the meeting? Yes, yes, they have someone to take some minutes of the meetings. I mean, like I said, right, so it's very in your face, right? So they have a monthly meeting. It's usually the same day. And then you can sort of do yakuas and watch and you can watch them come in their cars and see, you know, I think. I think the Lexus is their favorite brand now at East Street, Mercedes-Benz, and the cops are all lined up there, you know, watching them come in and out of the meetings.

And sometimes there's still some reporters from the weekly magazines there to photograph the meetings. So that's always surreal. But back to your point. So World War II ends, and, you know, these guys come back from the war. And it's total chaos, right? The Japanese police force exists, but they have a limited ability to police things. especially what are called third-party nationals. Third-party nationals are people who were under Imperial Japan,

the Taiwanese and the Chinese and the Koreans, technically Japanese citizens, but not really. So after the war ends and Japan starts rebuilding, these people don't fit in. Like if you're a Korean-Japanese, even if you nationalize, you know, the jobs open to you are basically Korean barbecue, to brothel, love hotel owner, Pachinko Parlor. Pachinko Parlor being kind of like a gambling pinball machine place.

And so the Yacazza, though, were a meritocracy. So if you could do the time and you could do the crime, they would let you in. And there's a other weird outcast class in Japan called the Burakabin. Nubarakamine are people who traditionally worked with leather, where butchers felt with animals, because that was considered unclean to kill an animal. And the yaku's are welcome to these people and didn't care what your ethnic background is

or whether you were part of the barakamine class, and that was one of the reasons that they did so well. And they also have this code. I wouldn't even call it a code of honor. It's a code of conduct, which is certain things would get you kicked out of the oxen, especially in the early days, which is petty theft, that'll get you kicked out. Robbery. Robbery is taking things with violence, right?

You know, like mugging someone on the street. Dealing and using drugs. Of course, sexual assault because, you know, that is not acceptable. And that would get you kicked out. But everything else, extortion, racketeering. threatening people. That was all okay. You could do all those things. So, but was it really a code or was it more like guidelines? It's a code. And, you know, every, every faction has its own code and ethics, but the

Inegalaki, especially, right? And it always, like all these things, it depends on the boss. You broke that code. They kicked you out. And one of the things of issues that the people had with Godot was and he killed civilians, and killing civilians was a big no-no. Threatening journalists was a big no-no. Because, you know, Japan has a sort of social contract with the Yakuza. And the police as well, like, okay, you know, you have these things that you do. You make your money that nobody else wants to do. And we're fine with that.

But once you step out of those lines, then you're just common criminals. Let's get a couple things out of the way that are sort of like the visible things about the Yakuza that people know about. Specifically, I want to talk about the tattoos and the sacrificial finger that gets authorized or offered as apology. What are the truth behind sort of these like the cultural mystique of the Yakuza?

Okay. So, you know, I'm opening this up here to these guys. See, this guy, this is the leader of the, I'm going to get you give me right here. attending a attending a funeral for one of the founders of the organization. Oh,

next to this is also a penis and large menads. They always have penis and large menads in these magazines. Who doesn't want one? Actually, I can tell you a funny story about the yakuza boss. You've got one of these operations that went badly. We'll move that later to the conversation. So, you know, Discuss a Shinobosan is missing a finger.

And it's unclear why he's missing that finger. But I do know that it was an issue for the Ahmadinekiumi when I wrote an article and I published a photo of him with the Vice Chairman of Japan's Olympic Committee in 2015. This is Japan, right? The Vice Chairman of Japan's Olympic Committee photographed and clearly friends with the head of Japan's largest organized crime. group was a minor issue and that was a nice scoop for me but before I published the article I called up someone in the Amigigigumi and said like basically I'm writing this article you know I'm not the only one that could write it as a professional courtesy I'm letting you know and the only thing that was said to me was could you crop the photo so that we don't see it's got said as son is missing his

middle of his little pinky there because he's very sensitive about it I said I can't do that, but I can't include a line in the article that your boss is an honorable yakuza's which I did. So first we'll get to this, the little finger thing. In a time when Japanese people use swords, right? If you cut off this finger here, you weaken your sword grip. So it is a sign of appeasement by offering up part of your finger to the person you wrong. You're showing that you are sorry and you're weakening yourself, just like a dog.

goes its neck, right? In a dog fight to say like, if you want to take me out, take me out, you know, let me live. So in Yakuza culture, there's two reasons you cut off your finger. And usually it's just the tip of your pinky, right? You know, because, you know, you don't want to cut off this much, this much. If you screwed up and you're chopping off your finger so that you can stay in the organization or make amends, or not pay it. a debt that you owe. That is called a shinie ubi. That is a dead finger. But if you do it on behalf of, say, your brother or your friend in the organization who is done something wrong, maybe he's stolen money from the organization, maybe he's cooperated too much with the cops,

maybe he's fallen asleep on his job as a bodyguard, anyway, he's screwed up. And you do that on behalf of him, then that is called an EQUB, which is a living finger, and that is considered very honorable. To sacrifice part of yourself, me, are giving a part of yourself or somebody else. That is an honorable thing. And even though if you and I look at someone's finger, all you see is a missing finger, right, in the Yakuza world, which is like, you know, Tokyo Junior High School, everybody knows that that finger is either a dead finger or a living finger.

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But it can also be a symbol of strength, right? You know, it's painful to cut that off. So you show somebody your missing finger and it's like, like, okay, this is someone who has endured great pain to stay where they are or endured great pain on behalf of somebody else. And in the 50s and 60s, it sort of became like a cool thing to chop off a finger. Like people who look for excuses like, you know, what can I do to justify? chopping on my fingers so I look like a tough guy. I don't know if I mentioned this in the book, but people don't like to say yakuza in Japanese polite society

because it scares people, right? You know, it's not said lightly. So often instead of saying yakuza, they do this. And that symbolizes a cut across the faith. So in the yakuza world, it used to be, especially in the days when you're having lots of gang wars, that instead of killing you, I would slash you across the face to show that I let you live.

And amongst the actresses, that sort of became kind of a cool thing. It's like, wow, I've been in a deadly fight, which I survived. So some of them started doing it to themselves. So that became, that's still the mark of the act. Speaking of that, I mean, is that the same rationale behind the tattoos? It's sort of like showing your loyalty to the, the organization and that I'm this tough guy outsider in society.

Because there's five, there's maybe five reasons you do that. One is, I mean, I love these people send in their tattoos here he is. One reason that you, what you do the tattoos is because it shows that you are tough. Because the tattoos done the traditional Japanese way are incredibly painful. I mean, there's lots of blood. They're done with kind of an awl, a sort of blunt instrument using sumi, which is kind of like charcoal. It's very painful. The skin is almost burnt. Sometimes, you know, it never returns to its sense. Like you can't feel any warmth. It's like the skin is dead. Like somebody's burned there.

In the Inawaka, they call that gaman, which literally means endurance. So a tattoo shows one, that you have separated yourself from normal straight society, right? You've branded yourself. I'm an outlaw. The other is, I am tough. I have, my toughness can be seen on my tattoo, the density of the tattoos on my skin. Sometimes the boss will pay for your tattoo, in which case you have to have the boss's name and the organization's emblem engraved on your chest.

So that's like corporate banding taking at its, you know, to the ultimate level, right? You are part of the Inegalaki forever. It's on your chest. And another thing is it shows you that money. It's like a Rolex, right? The deeper the, you know, the deeper the tattoo, the more colorful it is, the more finite it is and the more of your body it covers. It shows that you have patience, endurance, and money. It takes hundreds of hours to get a full body tattoo.

And all of those things make the tattoo very alluring to the act. So I guess the next thing, before we go on to some stories and get back to. Asaigo, could you kind of like briefly outline sort of like the landscape and territory of the Yakuza groups? I think you mentioned that there's about 20 of them and sort of like their territories. So the Yamaguchi-Gumi, which is the largest one, is, is headquartered in Kobe. So Kobe is in western Japan, Kansai. They have like an entire city block. and they have branches all over Japan.

There used to be an agreement up until 2005. The Yamaguchi-Gumi couldn't open offices in Tokyo. Tokyo was off-limits to them. And that was a very clear divide until 2005. The Inagawa Kai is mostly Western Japan, Tokyo, Saitama, Guma, Fukushima, where the nuclear accident happened, they have power base there. semi-national but not in Okinawa and not very powerful in Kyushu. The Sumiyoshkai is mostly located in Tokyo and surrounding areas.

Ginza is their territory, so they got a lot of money and revenues from the hostess clubs and clubs in the Ginza area, which is a very rich area. And some of their mostly Tokyo-based. The Matsubakai is sort of Yuma area. And then you have things like the kudokai, which is in Kusu, which is a very powerful, very violent group. Actually, the most violent of the active groups is kudokai. They're the guys that throw grenades into the bars of people that won't pay money. Most of the groups are a little better about cultivating good relations with the public.

If you throw grenades into a hostess bar that won't pay you money, the cops are going to come down you on. The people aren't going to look at you as benevolent outfalls. In your books, you kind of make the point that the Yakuza do normally play a sort of stabilizing role in society rather than a disruptive one. Yeah. Well, think about it this way. In a time when, in a time when, you know, the police were short-handed, the Yakuza basically keep street crime to a minimum in the areas that they control and they control every, and they controlled all of Tokyo. Everybody paid protection money. And in return for that, no one was allowed to steal a purse. No one was allowed to be robbing places in the neighborhood because that's bad for business. You want people to go to the Red Light District and spend their money without worrying about

getting mugged or without worrying about being robbed or having their credit cards stolen. So, you know, in some levels, even the police consider them a necessary evil because they limited of their activities to certain activities which were collecting money from construction companies, bid rigging, you know, racketeering, gambling, and, you know, making pornography and other things that have always been on the sort of the outside of Japanese life. And, you know, everybody paid the money. And that was kind of the revenue stream there. It's like you ran a bar, you paid the money. If you were building an apartment building in the neighborhood, you paid the money. And in return for that, they kept, you know, a minimum of trouble out. And also at a time when there

weren't enough lawyers in Japan, this is a very weird but true thing. And it used to be very hard to pass the bar in Japan. So there was a shortage of lawyers. So if you had a civil dispute with someone, right, someone didn't pay you money or someone cheated you on a construction job, It might take you years to get your case to the court and win the court battle, in which case the court wouldn't necessarily enforce the settlement. But if you went to the Yakutah, they would handle it immediately and they would give you half of what you were owed, which is better than none. So for a long time, the Yakuza played a huge role in settling civil disputes, car accidents, damages to property, was accepted. expensive and time consuming to go to a lawyer, you went to the local Yakuza and they took care of it for you. So as the number of lawyers in Japan has increased, the number of Yakuza has also decreased.

I can't say whether there's a correlation, but one lawyer I know who specializes in dealing with Yakuza, he was always saying, yeah, one of the reasons the Yakuza has declined is because there's more lawyers here, so their services are not needed. before we kind of get back to Saigo's story, one character in your books, especially the last Yakuza is filled with colorful characters. The one that I got to mention and ask you about was this guy that you name in the book as coach, which was Saigo's sort of mentor for a long time. And this guy is like the real Tokyo Godfather, wears sunglasses even indoors, chain smoking cigarettes, and, you know, lecturing his boys, the Yakuza's.

used to follow a code, you know, sounds like absolutely the kind of guy you'd want to have a few drinks with. Oh, Kanazawa Lvinawiyushat. Yes, Kananahasan is a great guy. I mean, he was a great guy. He was a really, I mean, right out of the movies. You know, before he was a yakuza,

he was a baseball player and the Tombo Flyers. So he's got some really sort of sports ethic to him. And, you know, he believed in in the words he is best. I mean, he was quite strict about, that code of honor you know the one that was written on the wall of the of the office which is you know yakuza do not bother ordinary people yakuza do not steal they do not rob they do not engage in sexual assault they do not engage in decency they don't use drugs they don't bother

civilians with that quote in your book you you attribute to him he says we're less than beggars but better than thieves and never forget that yeah yeah less than the beggar better than thief. Yeah, Kanazawa, one of the things that's really interesting about, you've seen the TV series, right? So, Shun Segaka plays Kanazawa Sa, right? He's a really sweet guy in real life. The guy who's Ishida, right? They're going with the crew cut and wear sunglasses, sort of the leader of the Chihara Kai.

Shunzada has been around so long and he's been in so many Yakuza movies that he knew Kanazawa a noble UK. He knew the individual that he's essentially playing a TV version of, which I thought was fascinating. And that was one of the reasons I think he was so good at the role. It was, if you put two pictures of them together, they look similar. They have the same buy. I mean, what also

in your book kind of strips some of the romanticism away from the Yakuza is coach and other bosses in these organizations. I mean, yeah, they're part crime lord, but they're also like social worker to all of their underlings, trying to get them off of methamphetamine and all kinds of other shit. Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's like people who join the yakuza are usually not very, you know, socially adept people, right? And so there was a kind of rationale. And the head of the Amengu Kumi said it as well as we take people who are misfits and we give them some discipline and we give them some training. so they're not running amok. And wouldn't you rather have them, you know, disciplined criminals and disorganized criminals running around? And there's some truth to that as well. What is sad is that people like the coach in recent years

and also a result of increasingly harsh legislation have sort of disappeared. So the age where, you know, there were Yaka who said, we won't do this because it's unethical. We won't do this because it's against the code. those guys have all faded out because, you know, it's so hard to make a living. And in the Nihagawa Kai, you know, a lot of the people who were ethical who insisted on falling the old code have been kicked out because it's all about the honor and, you know, honor and nobility and, you know, what they called Ninkjodo, the way of chivalry that the Yaks are supposed to espouse. That's just an obstacle to getting things done.

let's jump back into Saigo's story for a bit because you have a totally crazy story about how he has to cut his finger off and you talk about how it's kind of like some of the stories around this this thing is bullshit and a lot of guys find doctors to do it for them

but Saigo decides he's got to do it himself and it turns into like a four alarm shit show in his kitchen oh oh yeah yeah this is a great story and you know know his wife yucosan you know when i asked her about it she's just so very matter of fact about it like like

oh yeah you know like you know like telling a funny story about like maybe your husband you know uh getting a bad haircut but but basically he doesn't know how to do it and so he gets like a sashimi knife and uh and puts it on there and you know he and his wife try to do it and they're not very successful and then they you know try and do it with a cutting board and that isn't very successful and you know you have to turn over the finger to do it and it's just a bloody bloody mess and at one point one of his henchmen who used to be in a band with him you know as they're dealing with this finally chopping off the finger and getting the snoo and wrapping it in you know what are they going to do and it's this very dark moment in the household where there's blood all you know there's a I don't think there's actually she said there wasn't a lot of blood but you've got this finger you've got the cutting board you've got to wrap it up and things he says that he takes the finger and he puts it in his nose and sort of shakes his head around with it to make everybody laugh which they do um that's just you know it is it is bizarre um but i guess if you're there at the moment there is something very comical about how hard it is to chop off your finger um i think that

they're actually books written that show you how to do it the right way. So Saigo has this like interesting trajectory through the Yakuza. He's a methamphetamine addict comes in and out of it, falls off the wagon. Coach tries to reform him. And he ends up getting kicked out, right? Because he owes, he can't pay his union dues, as it were. Right, right, right, yeah. Union dues.

That's a great, a great word. I always say association dues, but union dues is a better word. Yes. It gets kicked out. You want to talk a little bit about like how that happens and like the rise and fall of Saigo? Oh, sure, sure. So most people enter the yakuza as what they call sumikomi, meaning like they go to the yakuza and they're like, make me a man.

And then they live inside of the yakuza offices for like one to two years. They're basically answering the phone. They're, you know, washing the back of the boss. They're following them around. There is secretary. There's caddy. They're answering the phones. And they learn the trade by living in the establishment and a given kind of an allowance.

But Saigo started as basically a motorcycle gangster running a motorcycle gang, created his own right-wing group that sort of functioned as a Yakuza group, shaking down local merchants and asking them to pay money to join his. his right wing organization or by the periodical that the right wing organization was putting out. And when he decided to join the Inagalakai because he had a dispute with another gang boss, he, you know, he was entered like at a high level. Like the Yakk is equivalent of going to West Point, right? Instead of starting as a private and working way up, you know, from enlisted, you know,

he'd already established his own organization. They welcomed him. So he came in at like a captain level. And he kind of like set up, he ended up having his own office and everything. What was the nickname they gave to his little kingdom? Oh, oh, well, I mean, he had the nickname tsunami because he was so violent and unpredictable, like a tropical storm that you never knew was coming. So he had his own little, his own little, his own little, his own little kumi there, you know,

Saigogumi. So his own area and turf there that was his property and everybody, you know, everybody, you know, everybody. in that area paid. Machita City was where he had most of his, most of his power base. And as he rose up to, you know, as he were up to ladder, you know, the Indigoaki is a very

bureaucratic organization. So everybody wants to rise to the top. And at one point they had 10,000 organizations. So he became like an executive director, which is a very high position. And he was doing, you know, pretty well in the organization until a violent shooting

in his neighborhood involving another yakuza member really brought down the police hard on the whole organization where he lived and money started to dry up as people just said they wouldn't pay protection money anymore and one of the things you know one of the reasons you're you join the yakuza right is it's like a franchise so you're paying basically for the rights like no so you like the amyguchi you give me here, right? The name, the organization, the symbol of the organization, it gets you money. It gets you power. If you don't have that organization market, you like McDonald's about the golden arches. And that costs money and that cost anywhere, anywhere between $1,000 a month to $20,000 a month to stay on good terms.

The higher you rise, the more money you have to pay. And he wasn't able to pay the money. and when you're not able to pay your dues, they kick you out. And also, he didn't answer his phone for a couple days as well, which is a real bad one in the yakuza. What is it like in the military? If you're like on duty and you are on vacation, you don't answer your phone, you get in big trouble.

Yeah, you'd be in some trouble if you're on duty and not answering the phone, yes. Okay. What if you're on vacation? Would you still get in big trouble if you're on Western recovery and? probably not if you're on vacation though okay well this guy's active duty right so he basically disappeared from duty for like seven days because he's pissed off and uh they kicked him out and and he

just had a kid um and now he's got no revenue and and meanwhile like i am under police protection but i'm really tired of like not being of feeling like i can't leave the house and so i heard that he's, you know, that he's out of a job. And at the time, if you read Tokyo lore, I'm doing these due diligence work, right? So I've got a nice, steady stream of money doing these corporate investigations coming in. And I also realized that he, you know, doesn't like Godototatamasa, that he's not a big fan of him. And I'm like, you know, this is probably synergy. So we have a meeting at my house and I basically say, look, you know, you don't have a job. And I need protection. And also you have a car, I don't have a driver's license.

What do you say? And so sort of reluctantly, but also because he didn't have much of a choice, he's like, okay, I will be your bodyguard and I will be your driver. But I have one condition. And I'm like, what is that condition? He said, I want you to write a book about my life and about the acchism because I am proud of who I am and what we've done. I want my son to know who his father was.

when he grows up. And so, you know, I agree with him on the condition that I get to write the truth about the Yakuza and not in another book talking about how there are these noble outlaws, you know, fearless men fighting for, you know, traditional Japan and he was okay with that. And that was the start of that book, was hiring him as a body garden.

He wanted me to write this story about the Yakuza and his life. and, you know, what are the yakuza? And what he saw as their decline from being principal people to just money-grubbing organization. And so how did the situation between you and Goto end up getting resolved? Oh, it ended up getting resolved like this. I wrote an article, it came out in the Washington Post. Then another article came out in the Los Angeles Times.

And then suddenly it became, I became the least of his problems. And I think that someone way up and the organization told him, Mike, at this point in time, considering the bad press that it would bring you, do not harm this journalist. And also, because I'm not an idiot, when I was writing the articles for the Washington Post, I went to one of his rivals in the organization in the same Yamaguchi to me, right because this is the amygichsum is factional right i don't know if people understand that like it's not like the army and it's not like it's not like the navy um it is a group of organized

crime groups under the umbrella of the amyguchi gum but even within that organization there are conflicts between the faction so the amyguchi gummi the takumi and um the hanabusugumi me, they all may be fighting for the same territory and, and, and, uh, revenue streams, even though they're under the same umbrella. Um, and amongst these yakuza bosses, they don't all get along, right? So you've got, you know, 60 or 70 organizations within the Yama, that you can meet. So I thought of the one Yakuza boss who really just like Godo and probably would like his turf and territory. So I went to him and I asked him for a comment for the Washington Post article. First I had to go to a tenant and then I spoke directly to the big boss.

And as we were speaking, I also felt that there was this kind of communication between us, which was like, you know, as they say in the yuck of the world, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And I was basically saying to him without saying it bluntly is keep me alive and let me write my article. And this will result in the downfall of your rival and that turf and territory is yours. and that seemed to have worked out very nicely because there wasn't a contract on me after the Washington Post article came out. But the police still kept me under protection for another five years in total. And it's interesting how like Goto and also coach, they have these like interesting deaths or like deaths in air quotes. Like you're never really sure did they die or did they just fade away? where did they go?

You know, Yakuza sometimes disappear. So the coach, you know, his death is shot in the mystery and was like people aren't supposed to talk about it and I think that's how he wanted it to be. Remember, Goro Tadamasa is famous for attacking this film director, named Itami Juzzo. So Itami Juzzo made this film in 1992 called The Gentle Art of,

Japanese extortion. The Japanese title is Minbo, the Olauna. And Godot's men attacked this director at his fault, and they sliced open his face very slowly, so it left scars. Then a few years later in 1999, I think around 1999, the director allegedly committed suicide by jumping from the top of a building, just as he was making another film that had connection to Gotogumi. But one of Godot's guys' name,

named Mikuni told me, you know, on the conditions of, on the conditions that I couldn't tell his name unless 10 years we've gone by from the time he told me. He said, yeah, well, you know, that director, he told me didn't kill himself. He was taken to a roof and they put a gun in his face and they told him you can either jump and you might live or you can stay here and blow off your face,

no, definitely die. And I assume that Mikuni told me me that because he was hoping that would be his insurance policy, but he's been missing now for five years and nobody knows where he is. I mean, he's a Yakkata. You can find his name in the newspapers. You can find his name in the Yakkazan magazines, but he's gone. Now, is he in hiding? Is he in the bottom of a building in Tokyo buried in the cement base when they're a foundation of the building? I don't know. But sometimes Yakkaza really do fade away. Like, where did this guy go? And there's a lot of them.

I mean, there used to be 80,000 yakuza. Japan now there's 19,000. So where do those other 60-61,000 yakazza advantage to? Do they find new jobs? Are they in prison? What are they doing now? A couple sidebars I'd like to talk about before moving on. One of them is the North Korean connection with the Parchenko parlors.

You tell us about that? Oh, sure. Yeah. I don't know how many of you listeners understand what Pachinko is, but I'll try and explain it as simply as I can. So Pachinko is kind of like a pinball machine that's vertical. So you put in a steel ball, press a button. The ball goes in. If the ball hits the right targets, it triggers like an avalanche,

and the machine spews out these steel balls. The steel balls, you can then take to, a gift counter, you can get a gift, or you can get sort of an exchange card and you can go outside of the Pachinko parlor to another place and get it turned into cash. So that is sort of legalized gambling in Japan. Pachinko was something that the Korean-Japanese did after the war, and it was a big amusement thing. But it looked like the Japanese government was going to outlaw them all together. So, you know, most of the Japanese owners quit, but the Koreans kept running the particular parlors. And the particular parlors are still a big part of the gambling landscape today, even though it's, you know, semi-legal gambling.

But remember, Korea splits into Korea, South Korea and North Korea. And the Koreans left in Japan have to choose an alliance. Am I going to ally, you know, am I going to play citizenship with North Korea? I'm going to change, are we going to claim citizenship by South Korea? And for those who have relatives in North Korea, the Pachinko Parlor's became indirectly North Korean revenue because if you have family members in North Korea and you're in Japan and you're living there and you're running Pachinko Parlor,

the North Korean associations will come to you and say, your uncle, your sister, your brother, your cousin, you know, they're going to starve to death unless you, contributes to money to the homeland. And so for many years, Pichinko industry has been one of the sources of North Korea's revenue. Does North Korea still make money by selling drugs

and operating these parlorers and so on in Japan? Yes. North Korea still has revenue coming. But as generations die off, right? You know, you had, you know, if you're a fourth generation, Korean and Japan, you don't know anybody who's still living in North Korea.

your uncle or your grandfather or whoever is there, maybe you've never met them, you have no idea who they are. So you don't feel compelled to pay. So that money keeps to win. What North Korea is really making money now is doing cracking, hacking cryptocurrency exchanges in Japan. I think they've done too now. I mean, that has been traced to North Korea.

North Korea is really good at hacking. And they seem to be really good at hacking. Japanese cryptocurrency exchanges like Bitcoin DMM. And there was another one just really recently. And I think North Korea, while it still makes methamphetamines, it's hard to get them into Japan. And they moved on to cybercrimes, which brings a lot more revenue. Another kind of subplot that you bring out in the book that I was surprised to read

is about Omshon Rico, the cult in Japan that launched a, I believe it was a sarin nerve gas attack in the Japanese subway system, killed a couple people. You talk about how they had a secondary plot to use a helicopter as a dispersion device for another gas attack. Can you tell us a little bit about how you kind of uncovered that and reported on that? Oh, sure. So, Omishiniko. was this criminal organization

and a cult that was an end of the world cult an apocalyptic cult and they recruited people from you know universities and police and laboratories and they had this you know crazy view of the world and they were also making methamphetamine and wholesaling it to the to the Akuta,

especially the Bodhugumi because you have a bunch of chemists there right who can you know can make a really good meth and meth brings in money. It's like it's the drug of choice in Japan. So they're producing the drugs. They're selling it to the yakuza. The conduit between the Yama Ghiumi and North Korea was an Om, sort of high priest named Muraai.

And, you know, as the police are investigating Om Shinniko and looking at what they're doing and getting a sense of these people are maybe producing nerve gas and are going to plan a huge terrorist attack, One of the organized crime cops who was working on the connection between Om Shinniko and the Yakuza discovered that they had purchased a helicopter and that they were planning to use it for something nefarious. And fortunately, I think that they managed to make sure that they were never put sardine gas on the helicopter. So the sarding gas attack ended with these paper bags full of siding gas being put on the subways all around Hibia, which would then poke with holes. And it could have killed thousands of people. Fortunately, they didn't do the helicopter and dispersed over Tokyo. I don't know how successful that would have been, but it could have been disasters.

Yeah, I mean, if it was an aerosol dispersal, it would have been much greater casualties, I think. yeah they were not make good at making aerosol you know what i don't know if i remember i've put it in the book or not is they also um had a subdivision in new york city and we're looking about spreading it uh in new york city with the helicopter as well um that was part of their plans holy shit because because om shinnikyo had this you know this makes no sense but om shenikio also had this incredible anti-semitic views that the Jews were controlling the world economy. And that was one of their problems. And they were like, there's so many Jews in New York

that we should spread sun, gas there, using a helicopter to change the new world order. So that was amongst the crazy things that they had planned. And they had, you know, they had purchased helicopters from Russia. So, you know, if they hadn't been stopped early on, they might have tried it. I think we were lucky that we ended up with the smaller number of casualists that we had. But these guys were crazy.

Do you remember the series Millennium with Frank, with Lance Hendrickson? Yeah, I remember. Yeah. Okay. So there's one episode, maybe the second episode called Gehenna, which was modeled after Om Shunichia, where you have people, their telemarketers working for this strange cult. And there's a scene where someone is microwave to death. well, Om Shinnikyo did that. They built a giant microwave.

One of their dissenters, they put in the microwave and they fried them a lot. Holy shit. Yeah. These guys were insane and they were working hand in hand with organized crime. And when, you know, when it was revealed that Ome had planned, you know, was responsible to Saudi gas attacks and that they had ties to the Amengu Kumi. you know that's not a good for the public image of the group right so murai who's the head of the one of the executives of almshiniko was coming out of a press conference and he was stabbed to death by this you know so-called right winger and the right winger of course turned out to be a yakuza a

korean yakuza and you know you know he always claimed that uh you know he always claimed that uh you know that he did it out of patriotic, out of patriotic reasons, but when Joe, which is the name of the person who assassinated were right, when he got out of jail after serving his time for killing this own leader who had connections to the Kodogumi, guess who he went to work for? Shinrico.

Kodotatamaasa. Yeah. Oh, really? Killing, yeah, because he, he killed the one person that could have fingered the Yaakov of involvement with Om Shinrikyo and his reward. when he got out of jail was going to work for Godot, who by this point retired, but at least he took care of his own. You know, something you touched on there that I think I'll ask you because it's something that has always baffled me personally, as you mentioned that Omshan Rico had this

sort of anti-Semitic bet to them. And I've seen that a little bit with other like right-wing groups in Japan, this sort of anti-Semitism. And that baffles me because what in the world do the Japanese people know about Jews. I mean, we're not talking about Israel and Palestine. We're not talking about Europe. We're not talking about America. Like, there aren't any actual Jewish people other than you maybe in Japan. So, like, where the hell does this notion come from? Well, you know, there is a Senate. There's like one or two synagogues. I don't know. You know, I mean, it's like, remember, the Japanese were allied with, with Germany at one point. I get, yeah, okay.

And so I think there's always been this belief that, you know, first of all, there's a belief, there's a weird respect for the Jews. There's a book called the Jews and the Japanese, which points up the similarity between the Jews and the Japanese. So the one hand, there's this kind of Japanese fantasy world in which they admire, like, the way that this minority group is, you know, gained so much power or done so well financially. and there's so many sort of geniuses or the way that they consider the Jewish family structure very similar to a Japanese family structure and there's even

this book postulating the Japanese or the lost tribe of Israel all that's crazy stuff you know I doesn't make any sense to me so there's an admiration and there's a fear and and one of the weirdest stories of World War II is that there was this idea that amongst the Japanese elite, some of the generals, that they couldn't trust Germany because they weren't white.

And at some point the Germans would turn on them. So they smuggled a bunch of Jews out of Shanghai into Kobe and gave them safe passage so that when it came time to deal with Germany, that they would have Jewish power on their side. And that whole plan to smuggle them out of, of, you know, of German territories into Japan and Shanghai was called the Fugu plan because Fugu, as you know, is this poisonous blowfish, which if you handle properly is a delicious delicacy, but if you mishandle, can kill you. So, you know, the Japanese fascination, our fear of Jews is never. made any sense to me me neither but uh on my way i'm on way to the airport there was a book like in the you know bestsellers which was like you know how to succeed in business like the jews and i'm like really you're still putting this out in the book in 2025 okay this is as good a time as i need to

jump into you got to tell us the japanese penis or the yakuza penis enlargement story that uh you told us about that went horribly wrong okay So here we are. So here's your Yakutza van magazine, right? You know, always opens with pictures of the, of the bosses going to meetings and stuff. I just got to show you that, you know, that's that's important stuff, right? This is the paparazzi part. Oh, yeah.

And there's always the penis enlargement stuff. So Nomura, who is the head of the kudokai, who I had met once. I think his name is Nomura Satoshi. You know, in Japan, the last names are more important. important than your first names. He sees one of these ants. He decides to get a penis enlargement procedure done. So he's getting done. And his nurse noticed that he's wincing. And she says to him, look at you with all those tattoos, all of your body that are so painful to be reproduced. And you can't take a little prick. And she laughs at him. And he's really, really angry about it.

So later, his men attempt to kill her. And one of the reasons he was originally given a death sentence, which I think was changed to life imprisonment on appeal, was for the attempted murder of this nurse. Oh, my God. Because he couldn't take the pain of the penis larger and procedure. Oh, poor guy, getting his penis messed with. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Getting his penis messed with.

I mean, it's kind of. A low moment in Yaquazi history. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so let's talk about Tokyo noir, your third book. That kind of follows up on Tokyo Vice and continues sort of your own story

and experiences in Japan. So you get brought into a State Department study on human trafficking in Japan. How does that sort of, of come about out of your work as a journalist? Well, when I was working for the human shimbun, we covered human trafficking. And I noticed there was a huge discrepancy between the way the Japanese police were presenting, you know, their efforts to combat it and what was really happening.

And so I had, you know, I knew people in the State Department. So I would pull aside stories that I worked on or stories where the Japanese press that showed because Japan didn't have any real laws prohibiting human trafficking or punishing the traffickers, but only punish the women that there was a huge failure to deal with this problem, even addressed it as a problem. And I think one of the last things I wrote at the newspaper before I left was the International Labor Organization did a huge study of human trafficking in Japan, which the Japanese government paid for. And their conclusion was that Japan wasn't dealing with the problems.

They were punishing the victims, immediately deporting them, and the traffickers knew that they could get away with it, and that Japan was turning a blind eye to the problem and needed to put serious legislation down on the books. Here's the thing. The Japanese government told the IOL, you cannot release the report. We paid for it, but you can't release it. So I got a copy of it and we ran a article on it on the front page of the paper, summarizing the main points of it, at which point, since the cat's out of the bag, then they released the report.

And I also got a copy of it to the State Department. So after I had left the newspaper and was back in Missouri, I'm ready to go to law school. The U.S. State Department, which was under George Bush, had decided that they really wanted to pressure Japan into dealing with the huge. human trafficking problem on a serious level. And the only way that was going to happen was if they could shame Japan into doing it. So they decided to do an investigation into the methodology of human trafficking in Japan.

And they wanted plausible reliability. So they farmed it out to a nonprofit organization called Charitope International, which then farmed it out to another company in the Virginia area that was, you know, staffed by a whole bunch of X-CIA people and NSA people and FBI people. And then they asked me to be the investigator on the grounds. And I said yes, because it seemed very important. It seemed like if you could actually dig up the material on who was, you know, who was allowing human trafficking to thrive in Japan,

what legislators were blocking changes in the laws, who was profiting from it, what was the collusion between organized crime and immigration that that could have a positive impact on the world. And the other thing that I liked about the offer when it came to my way was that they told me, I didn't have to submit expense reports that they didn't want any receipts because they didn't want to know how I got the information. That's the most CIA thing ever right there. Yeah? That's the most like CIA thing ever.

Well, I mean, it makes sense, right? I mean, even though I am talking to people in the State Department, right? I'm working on this. I mean, even though I'm talking directly to these people and they know that I'm working on it, you know, there's still this sort of, you know, goes to the group, goes to the consulting company, goes to the nonprofit organization, goes to the State Department. Sometimes, you know, it went directly. Because you and I both, though, the fastest way to get information about criminal activity is to pay a criminal.

And this is where knowing the accusa is helpful because in this world in which these people consider themselves the good guys, right? What is the lowest of the low? There's pedophiles with child pornographers and human traffickers. So if you talk to someone who's a yakuza of any moral fiber at all and you say, look, dude, I want to know who in your outfit is running these kind of operations and I could pay you. There's a lot of people raise their hands. There's some people who are like, I don't need any money.

Like, you know, these people are awful. you know like prostitution is one thing but enslaving someone not paying them for their sex work that's just awful that's slavery um so that was you know an interesting job to have and it turns out that one of the people who was receiving money and political favors from basically a lobby of human traffickers was so one of the ways that women were being trafficking into japan at the time was the use of an entertainment visa right so they would come in as allegedly as entertainers and they get there, their passports would be taken away. And they would, you know, be threatened, you know, like we know where your family is. You work and you do this job and it wasn't a job that they were that they signed up for.

And then at some point they would be sent back. So there was this group called the Zen Geyeran, which was an association of entertainment groups. And basically they were a human trafficking lobby. And this group was having their annual meeting at the headquarters of the Liberal Democratic Party, which is the ruling party. So it would be like the Republican Party or the Democrat Party having a convention of human traffickers at their headquarters. And one of the politicians they were particularly friendly with and giving donations to was Shinzo Abe, who later became the Prime Minister of Japan twice. and these were the kind of things that I was giving the State Department in my reports to them, you know, after I left the newspaper while working for them on this project.

And so, you know, there were a couple other politicians who were definitely receiving money to turn the other way and block legislation that would stop, which was a profitable industry. What was the outcome of this study that you were a part of? Like, did it actually force some reforms within the Japanese legal system? Oh, yeah, yeah. One of the things that happened is that the Zen Geyeran dissolved. Prime Minister Abbe or Shinto Abe disassociated himself from the organization. So this human trafficking lobby dissolved itself.

The Japanese police began really enforcing the laws and putting traffickers away on a big scale. And I think that the sort of backdoor deal, and I'm not privy to what actually happens behind backer doors on this. But my feeling was that the United States said to Japan, we're going to rank you as low as North Korea unless you get serious about this problem. And you also need to clean up the problems that are in the Nagoya immigration because there was definitely one immigration office in which the girls were being trafficked through like, you know, which, you know, they clearly made no attempts to screen the girls to see if they were really in Japan on entertaining their visas. And the restrictions for entertainment visas became very severe.

So, you know, by 2009, I feel like Japan as a destination place for human traffickers had really sort of fallen off the map. So, yeah, I definitely think good came out of it. And sometimes, you know, in that time when Japan cared about what the world thought of it, they didn't want to be shamed and didn't want to be listed as like, you know, next to North Korea in terms of how they dealt with human trafficking. So of the things that the Bush administration did, their efforts to curb human trafficking and to get, you know, at least Japan to think seriously, you have to give them a pat out in the back. Well done, Japan.

Talk to us a little bit about getting involved in the world of private investigations and due diligence and how this is sort of a segue for you from journalism. Oh, so, you know, while I'm working on this human trafficking study, Japan starts cracking down on the Yakuza in the stock markets. The Yakuza had moved so much into the financial markets that in a white paper put up at a national police agency around 2006 or 2007. They pointed out that the Yakuza had made these huge inroads into the financial world and said, you know, the incursion of organized crime, aka the Yakuza, into Japan's financial markets, threatens the very foundations of our economy.

And so they really began looking at the links of Yakuzo, like setting up front companies and doing stock market manipulation are being basically venture capitalist and creating companies like are powering companies like Goodwill Corporation, which was one of the largest labor dispatch companies in Japan. And they also decided that they weren't going to give foreign banks or foreign investment companies, you know, a free pass. So one of the things that happened around 2004 is they basically took away city banks private banking license because they were involved, you know, in handling the equity of money. And they had either no one in compliance or they had people in compliance and they were still doing business. And so that was kind of a warning bell to all these investment companies that were in Japan. Big banks like Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs that they needed to get their shit together or the, part of the financial services agency would come down on them, maybe take away their lines. And so as all this is happening, this one investment bank and then later another one reached out to me and said,

like, you know, we hear that you are someone who is well versed in this world and that you could spot what is called a front company, meaning a company that is, you know, illegitimate or is running a fraudulent operation. Sometimes there are companies that are actually successful, but using yakuza-like tactics. like blackmail and insider trading are getting seed money from organized crime. And so I was like, sure, you know, it sounds interesting to me. It sounds like what I've been doing is a reporter for many years. And so I started taking on these jobs.

And not only was a pay very lucrative, it was really interesting to sort of, you know, learn to spot what is a front company. Learn to see what is a company that is really run by organized crime. And that sparked the gamut from, you know, coffee shop chains to fried octopus places to massage parlors. And sometimes they were running accounting firms. Database companies. There was even this firm called Ubitoma, which was kind of Japan's classmates.com. And a yakuza boss from the Kodokai took it over.

So why do you think a boss would want a yakuzzi would want to take over the Japanese equipment? with one of classmates.com. Extortion, blackmail. Yes, exactly, right? I mean, you know, you've got, the site had three million users, three million users. It's like they're, they're Facebook. People, you know,

and you know how people tend to misbehave at high score unions. I'm not me, but, you know, other people. It's kind of, it's such a fertile, fertile, there's probably communications going on between people on these websites that they should definitely not have. And that was very attractive to the act. But you did dip your hands into journalism a few more times during this time period. There's a very interesting chapter in Tokyo Noir about the earthquake in Fukushima, the nuclear power meltdown that took place.

And the Yakuza involvement, both in the nuclear power industry, but also in responding to the earthquake and the resulting tsunami, if you can tell us about that a bit. Sure. So, you know, this was actually the very first article I wrote for The Daily Beast. The Yak is a claim to be humanitarian organizations. And it is true that in times of crisis like the Kobe earthquake in 1995, that they're very quick to get to the scene of where the tragedy is taking place. And they have institutional awareness because unlike government agencies where people rotate out, The same people have been there for years.

So they know what to bring. They bring blankets. They bring food. They bring tents. Sometimes they bring generators. They bring everything to the scene that people need. And when the Fukushima disaster happened, I was pretty sure that they would be very, very, they would be the first responders because they know what is needed and they've got no red tape.

So I was stranded in the United States when the nuclear. accident and the meltdown and the tsunami hit. But I was in touch with people back in Japan. And so, you know, I was asking, what are you doing? And the Daily Beast also contacted me and said, could you write something about what is happening in Fukushima? And I said, I can write you about what the Yakut are doing, which is interesting because they are going into dangerous areas with food and shelter and no protection.

And so, you know, I was like, well, you know, I don't think the yakuas are a positive force for Japan, but you have to give the devil us due. So they were certainly very active in going there and trying to bring peace and comfort to people in the time of need. And so, but I also don't trust them because, you know, they're yakuza. So I made them send me films and, you know, video of them downloading supplies. and receipts and other things so I could be comfortable with writing it and we wrote it up for The Daily Beast and that story went viral.

And I think that also changed my relationship with some of the Yakuza bosses as well in a very positive place. And I think you may point out in the book too about how one of the remaining sources of revenue for the Yakuza is the nuclear power industry. or power industry in general. Yeah, it's a dirty, what they call in Japan, a sankei job.

It's kitanai, it's khan, it's khan, it's kharushi. So painful, dirty, dangerous. I guess in Japanese, it's like 3Ds. I mean, in English, it's like 3Ds. So the yakuza labor dispatch has always been one of their businesses. And so the nuclear power plants are supplied by, the workers there are supplied by the yakuza. that they always have been because they can find homeless people. They can find people who want to disappear.

They can find people who will work for cash, who, you know, who don't have ID or who don't want to be identified because they're on the lamp. And that has been a sort of symbiotic relationship. And the companies need this because there's like a radiological contamination, like these are legitimately dangerous jobs? Yeah. There's a legitimately dangerous jobs. the amount of radiation someone can be exposed into a year is limited.

And so, you know, and there's very people who want to do that work. So the Yakuza are basically where they're going to go. I mean, these days in Japan, if you're Yakuza, you cannot join a sports club, you cannot go to a hotel. You can't get a golf course. You can't get a cell phone. But if you want to work in a nuclear power plant, door is open. And I've spoken to people.

the national police agency like like you know basically japan's equivalent of the fbi and and ask them like why don't you do background checks and and very honestly these guys have told me you know of course we should do background checks because these guys are criminals and it's not a good idea to have them next to materials that could be used to build a dirty bomb or do something nefarious and and if we do institutionalize them you know and if we and if someday we really do background check on these people, that would be a good thing. And, you know, what do you think would be the natural follow-up to the question to that? I mean, so why aren't you doing it?

Well, so, you know, the answer to that is we're not doing it because if we do it, we won't have anyone to run the nuclear power plants. Right. So these plants are not up to code to begin with? is I mean like you can't get normal union guys to come work this job because it's not safe yeah I mean a lot of the plants are closed down right then closed down after that nuclear disaster but you have to maintain them right some of these plants are 40 years old they weren't designed to last this long they keep extending the life of them recently while no one was looking I think

japan extended the the the ability to keep a nuclear power plant running for another 10 years or something so you could have plants running for 60 years, that they're not designed to do that. I mean, Fukushima is such a disaster that everyone thinks it's over, but if you don't pour water into that nuclear core, you will have nuclear efficient again. Like every day they're pouring water into the nuclear reactor and Shima. They retrieved almost none of the core materials yet. And if they stop pouring water into it, you get basically another nuclear reaction. And so every day, Japan keeps pumping water into the Fukushima reactor.

core and every day that polluted water goes out into the ocean probably we were for 30 or 40 years ago one of the big scandals i think you point out in the book is that the fukushima uh one of the reactors there melted down before the tsunami came so it was actually the earthquake that caused it to melt down and then the tsunami came afterwards right right within within the data that was collected by this by the scientist named kimura um showed that within one minute of the giant tohoku earthquake, that there was no water going to the nuclear core because all the pipes burst. It's a 40-year-old reactor.

You know, pipes were bursting everywhere. Water was coming out everywhere. There was no, if you can't get the water to the reactor, it's going to overheat because all the pipes are gone and are cracked and busted. And, you know, all the data indicates that it was a nuclear, there was the earthquake itself, which caused that nuclear accident and one of the reactors. The story that the TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power Company, has, you know, insisted on is that there was an earthquake, then a tsunami came in 20, 25 minutes later, and then that water

knocked out the electric grid, and that's why you had a nuclear meltout. that is true for some of the reactors. The reactor number one, it was the earthquake itself, which destroyed the piping, the 40-year-old piping in this reactor. A reactor that they had been warned many times before should have been decommissioned. And what's scary is that all of Japan's new safety regulations for nuclear reactors are predicted on the idea that it was a tsunami that caused the nuclear reactor, not the earthquake itself.

So before moving on to some other things, I'd like to ask you to kind of close the loop on Goto and Saigo. And tell us ultimately, where did both of these guys end up as far as we know? Well, Saigo passed away during the pandemic of COVID, which was sad. And I think, you know, I think he had a heart attack. after he got back into he got back into another yakuza group didn't they yeah yeah you know they offered him

they basically came to him and said like look you know your organization which you know once was a huge organization but gradually reduced like we need someone who has institutional memory and we need you to come back and we'll give you promotion and put you in a position where you're insulated

from going to jail and he and he took the offer And, you know, as someone who had left but then faced, you know, the usual discrimination that all yakuza face even after they leave, I mean, I can't blame him. You know, I mean, honestly, if I was him and I had a choice of being, you know, the driver and bodyguard for me versus being a yaku boss and having someone open the door for me and drive me around being treated like a big shot, I mean, ethical considerations aside, I'd probably say yes. I mean, you know, well, it was disappointed and we sort of had a falling out about it, but we made, we mended. We stayed in touch. And, you know, I try and stay in touch with his son, you know, who's like all kids who's really hard to get a hold of. But at least his son is doing well.

Good. And as for Godo, the last I heard, he is still. still alive, getting a little senile. The United States listed him as a crime lord as late as 2015, even after he supposedly left the yakuza and become a Buddhist priest. But, you know, we don't, we don't interact and, you know, I can't say wish him well, but at least he's not in my life anymore. And you've kind of mentioned a couple times through this interview about like where the yakuza

is today what has been going on that all this legislation came in and now if you're a member of the organization, you can't get an apartment, you can't get a cell phone, you can't buy a car, you know, people don't want to be, you're treated like a leper.

What has the Yakuza become today and where do you see it going in the future? It has become a traditional crime group that now will do anything it can to make money. The members still have to pay the association dues. They're increasingly turning to crime like fraud, robbery, theft,

whatever it takes to make the money. Some of the groups still survive because they have a well-discuized, you know, racketeering going on. They're still getting payments under the table and providing the services that, you know, Yakuza have always provided protection and other things. I see them never completely fading out because if you completely get rid of the Yakuza, there's so many cops who don't have a job, right?

So they want to kind of keep them at this level of, you know, of being powerless but not completely fading away. The cops found a way to get paid. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, you always have, you need some kind of menace. right to justify your existence. And so for you personally, I mean, the sort of conclusion of Tokyo Noir, you become a Buddhist priest. Tell us how that came about. How did you become a holy man? Wow, I'm such a bad Buddhist priest, but I am keeping most of the precepts. Basically, you know, my landlord in college let me live in this Zen Buddhist Temple for, you know,

four or five years and he has always been a supporter of what I've done and a good voice and good advice. He himself has a really bad health since last year, I mean, which is really sad. He had diagnosed with Parkinson's and very late stage Parkinson's, so it's pretty severe. Anyway, to more cheerful story, around 2017, I was working on a story about, a young baker who had basically worked himself to death and he was working for a very famous bakery. And I went to the funeral of the baker because his colleagues at work asked me to go. I was trying to write a story and it was a Soto Zen Buddhist funeral. And I figured it would be really, you know, to talk to the family so I could complete the story,

it would be great to have an introduction via the priest that officiated the funeral. So I went to see Jogen San, who is my Zen master. and I explained the situation to him. I said, like, I'm working on this article about death by overwork. That's something that happens in Japan actually far too often. And I asked for an introduction to the priest who had officiated the funeral. And as we were talking and catching up, he said to me in his gravely voice, like, you know, maybe it's time you stopped being a daredevil man whore and put your life in order and followed the noble path.

that you once were on when you were a student. And I was like, you know, maybe that's not a bad idea. And so we had this very long conversation. And he basically said, like, you know, I don't have a disciple because I'm so cranky that no one can deal with me. And I don't have a son either. And you are the closest thing that I have. And it would be wonderful if you followed in my footsteps.

And I said, after much discussion, I will think about it. And I said, if I were to do this, like, when would we do it? And he said, you should pick a date that's significant to you. He said, well, we could do it on my birthday, which is March 28th. And he was like, that's amazing that, you know, your birthday is March 28th. And I said, why? And he said, because that's when I took my Buddhist priest vows.

And I kind of gave him that look like, yeah, you're full of shit. But, you know, like, I mean, in a sort of friendly, friendly way. And so he went up to his room and he pulled down this photo album of him when he was 15. And I looked at the year, it was the year Shoa 44, which in Western years, 1969. And I said, oh, like, wow, you became a Zen Buddhist priest on the day I was born. And he said, no, no, no, no, no. You were born on the day I became a Zen Buddhist priest. So it's karma. So you're meant to follow in my foot. stuff. And so I agreed. So, so I took the vows and I'm still learning the ropes. This is very military, I guess. If you don't, in my case, if I don't advance to the next level of spiritual development, if I don't rank up in the, in my Zen Buddhist preach ranking by 2027, I get kicked out. You either rank up or you are you lose. And next year, I have this giant test in which I have to solve this metaphysical. physical riddle and and and defend my thesis in front of who ever wants to come to the temple. Really hard.

And so I'm learning to do that and, you know, I can cook Buddhist vegetarian food. I can officiate some ceremonies. I'm very good at the one where you chase away hungry ghost. So if you know someone who is plagued by hungry ghost because there's someone in their life who hasn't moved on to the other world, I can handle that. I'm very good at that one. Do you do Yakuza funerals? That's what I really need to know. No, no, I'm not doing Yakuza funerals.

I'm not doing Yakuza Funerals. Oh, yeah, yeah. Whoever see this interview? I'm not qualified to do a funeral yet. Like, you know, because I really don't want that business. But if it's something more like your boss died and you feel he's like he's haunting the office, like I can deal with that. But the actual funeral service, no.

Can't get them to the next slide. That's not there. All right. So tell us about where you are now in this new book that you have coming out. Oh, wow. Thank you for wanting me to plug this. So this book, The Devil Takes Bitcoin, is about covering the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, which was in Tokyo.

And in 2014, it collapsed with half a billion dollars with the Bitcoin missing. And the CEO of this company was a French guy named Mark Carpález. It's really unusual French guy. He really loved Japan, loved cryptocurrency, and basically created what was the epicenter of cryptocurrency world. Like if you wanted Bitcoin in 2014, Mount Cox was the place to get it. But it's also just a chronicle of the history of Bitcoin and how basically criminal activity. made it what it was.

It was invented by an enigmatic Japanese guy, wasn't it? Like this dude that we don't really know much about. Satoshi Nakamoto, allegedly, right? Allegedly a Japanese dude. And that's when the book also gets into that. Because I didn't give a shit about Bitcoin in 2014. I didn't even know what it was until this Bitcoin exchange collapsed in Tokyo. and it became like the center of the world news because the Bitcoin prices plummeted.

And the same year, Newsweek put out an article identifying, you know, Satoshi Nakamoto, the mythical, the mythological creator of this Bitcoin, you know, this guy who created the cryptocurrency that's not worth billions of dollars. Newsweek identified him as this man named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto living in California. and my editor at The Daily Beast, you know, called me up, right? The editor-in-chief called me up and said, if this is true, Newsweek has a tremendous scoop, but if it's not true, please kick their ass. And those two events sent me into four years of covering Bitcoin.

And it's such a crazy story. And what's fun about this book is it becomes a sort of personal memoir, not that I ever intended to be because as I was working on this story about this the theft of half a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, it turns out that there was someone else in the United States investigating this case who couldn't get any help from the Japanese police. And I was asked to smuggle the database of this exchange to the FBI in San Francisco. And that's one of the weird parts of the story, which I did. I don't know if that's a journalistically ethically okay thing to do. But as I was working on the story and I began to think that maybe some of the people

accused were innocent, I felt like that was the right thing to do. It's such a fun book to write and also to read because even if you don't know anything about Bitcoin, you'll sort of be fascinated by how it evolved and how basically the Silk Road, which was an underground market where you could buy any drug. you wanted online propelled it from nothing to a billion dollar current. And when does the book come out? Book comes out on October 14th. Okay.

So we're like a week out now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, I'm happy to have a copy. It came out a little bit earlier in Australia. This is the cooler cover, actually. Awesome. Like the guy in the hoodie. So people can go find that on Amazon or wherever books are sold?

Yeah, and if you want to send me a Bitcoin, like one tiny Bitcoin directly, I'll mail it to you. I think we have some viewer questions for you. We'll get into here. What do we got, Dee? From Mark Corbyn, we have, how did the Chinese try at stand apart culturally when compared to the Akusa? Interesting. Okay. Way out of my level of expertise is a guy in the Canadian.

in the Royal Mounties, who's much better at this stuff. The triads have some of the same ritual for the yakuza do, of succession ceremonies, that elaborate things that were, relationships are cemented with rituals invoking the gods, but that's about the only connection they have. The triads and the yakuza don't work very well together, except for this one period of time when,

car makers in Japan needed to, it's not lithium batteries. There's a part of the electric vehicle. It's a rare metal that is needed to make like a Prius and stuff. There was a time when there was a shortage of that and the Triads and the Yakkazzo were working together to smuggle that material in Japan.

That's the only case I know. I'm not an expert on the triads, unfortunately. But they're working with shit with the ethics, minimal. All right. We got a couple more. How did you feel about the show's portrayal of your character and Ansel Eligort's performance? Ansel did a really wonderful job. I trained in Aikido with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.

And I was never any good. Let me get into clear. I've never been good at martial arts. I liked him, but I suck. And Anzel trained with the same school of Aikido. and he was really good in a short time. He did a really good job of getting in character. His Japanese is amazing.

The only thing I didn't like about the TV series portrayal of me is that there's a scene where I'm doing meth with a Yaku's a fan magazine writer, and I would never do meth, at least not knowingly. It's really bad drug. In general, I'm not, I, if people want to do recreational drugs, I think that that's fine with them, but I don't want to do them. Got one more.

How will the Yakuza plan to maintain their relevancy in current Japan? I honestly think that they're beginning to try and portray themselves as like a cultural tradition, like a Japanese living treasure. So you should preserve us because we're part of the lore of Japan. We're part of what attracts people to be here. Like the queen is the best thing. Like the queen in England. Yeah, like the queen in England, right? I mean, I, you know, this isn't really answering the question.

I have so much material on the yakuza. Like, I have their phone directories. I have comic books. I have, I have, you know, some of the embroidered outfits they have, like the sake bottle that they use for their ceremonies. Like, I've got all this stuff that I've collected over the years, like in a warehouse in my second home in Kyoto. And I'm like, what should I do with this? Because it's, you know, 30 years of Yakuza fan magazines? Like, like, no.

I mean, I guess I'm going to open a Yakuza museum if Japan will let me. Jake, is there anything else that I haven't brought up that you'd like to talk about before we get going tonight? Oh, I was going to ask you. What is your tattoo? I mean, you know, I have a bunch of, I have a bunch of weeb tattoos. This is Ghost in the Shell from Masamunei Shiro. and so is this one and this one also. They're all ghost in the shell.

I love ghost in the shell. That's such a great. It's my absolute favorite one. I've watched all seasons of it. Yeah. It's a really bad one on Netflix. Oh, yes. That was terrible. It was terrible. We're going to pretend that it didn't happen.

But standalone complex was great. The film, the 1994 film, awesome. Yeah. in the comic book, the manga is also awesome. Yeah, Innocence, like the second one, I think Innocence is the film title in English, is a little bit about human trafficking as well.

I mean, that series has done some really interesting topics and things. Oh, I guess the last thing that we didn't talk about is that, you know, what separated the Japanese jacuzzi from other mafia groups is that because of their public presence, they've always had more of a code of honor than other groups. And, you know, mostly their sociopaths, but some of them I at least respect to living up to the ideals that they profess. It's like, you know, a tiny fraction of them.

But, you know, that is something that I think is unique about, about the Japanese mafia. And also, some of them write really great poetry. I like the poetry in the Akusa fan magazine section. It's really funny and sometimes quite poignant. Who would have guessed? So there's some redeemable values there. Some redeemable values.

So, guys, I hope you'll go and check out the books, Tokyo Noir, the last Yakuza and Tokyo Vice. And the new book coming out, Jake, is... The Devil Takes Bitcoin. Awesome. I'm looking forward to reading it. It sounds awesome. Yeah, I will make sure we get you a copy.

Free to charge. It's a very least good. Thank you. So, Jake, thanks for doing this interview and sharing your experiences with us. This has been awesome. And haven't read your work back 15 years or whatever it was. I mean, it's awesome for this to all come together. And for everyone else out there, thanks for joining us tonight.

And we'll see you next time. Yeah. you very much. Hey guys, I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Team House podcast, the Aiz On podcast, and the Highside News Outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox and you're going to get the most current podcasts on Aizon and the Team House and whatever's topical or current on the high side. So it's another way for us to get the information out. to you as social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really know what you're going

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