With All Due Respect 憚りながら on Adelstein

フォロー

Cat in the Blue Sky
@catbsky

反日詐欺師ライター・エーデルスタインの半生
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/09/all-due-respect …

友人が書いた記事。日本留学、読売勤務、結婚、離婚、ヤクザとの関係など興味深い。
CIAに関する噂、情報を取る為に女性警官と寝た話、外国人の不正VISA取得に協力した話など、エセ臭さも満点

反日かどうか、詐欺師かどうかわからないが、面白い記事ではある。


もっとも、嘘つき、

some reporters told me that he was a liar

という評判は、記者の間でないわけではないらしい。

女たらし、といのは意外であった。女性記者の熱烈ファンがいるのも納得がいく。



Profiles JANUARY 9, 2012 ISSUE

All Due Respect
An American reporter takes on the yakuza.

BY PETER HESSLER

At the Yomiuri, Adelstein started investigating Goto. He had been making progress when one of his sources, a foreign prostitute, disappeared. Adelstein was convinced that she had been murdered, and soon he became obsessed with the case. He was married to a Japanese journalist named Sunao, and they had two small children. But Adelstein rarely made it home before midnight, because Japanese crime reporters are expected to smoke and drink heavily with cops and other contacts. Sometimes he was threatened by yakuza; once he was badly beaten and suffered damage to his knee and spine. Like many people with Marfan syndrome, he took daily medication for his heart, and there were signs that his life style was becoming self-destructive. He had always had a tendency to dramatize his health problems—this was part of his image—but now he seemed to be growing into the role of the troubled crime reporter.

Years later, both Adelstein and his wife said that this period destroyed their marriage. It also finished his career at the Yomiuri. After a certain point, he says, the paper balked at publishing more stories about Goto, and Adelstein quit. To this day, nobody at the paper will speak on the record about him; some reporters told me that he was a liar, while others said that the Yomiuri had been frustrated by his obsession. A couple of people alleged that he worked for the C.I.A. Staff from competing papers seemed more likely to praise his work, and a number of people indicated that the Japanese media tended to shy away from stories that would anger powerful yakuza figures like Goto. They also said that people at the Yomiuri were angry about Adelstein’s departure because it violated traditional corporate loyalty.








Adelstein broke the story in May of 2008, first in the Washington Post and then with details that he gave to reporters at the Los Angeles Times. Jim Stern, a retired head of the F.B.I.’s Asian criminal-enterprise unit, confirmed the deal, although he told the L.A. Times, “I don’t think Goto gave the bureau anything of significance.” (Stern was not involved in the deal.) According to Adelstein’s Japanese police sources, the U.C.L.A. Medical Center received donations in excess of a million dollars from yakuza. An investigation at U.C.L.A. found no wrongdoing, and the medical center reported only two hundred thousand dollars in donations, although it acknowledged other signs of giri—for example, one yakuza gave his doctor a case of wine, a watch, and ten thousand dollars.




During the spring, I visited Adelstein in Tokyo, and the first thing he told me was that a week earlier he had been given a diagnosis of liver cancer.




He had known Adelstein for more than fifteen years. When I asked how they had first met, he told the story casually, as if these were the details of an everyday personal encounter. In 1993, an associate of Mochizuki’s was blackmailing the criminal owner of a pet store, so the owner murdered the yakuza, and, according to rumor, carved up the body and fed it to his dogs. Adelstein, who was single at the time, covered the story and interviewed the dead yakuza’s meth-head girlfriend; almost immediately, they began sleeping together. One day, Mochizuki went to the girlfriend’s house to pay his condolences, and Adelstein answered the door, postcoital.




Adelstein has published a book about his adventures on the police beat, “Tokyo Vice,” and is working on two more. A few years ago, he researched human trafficking for the U.S. State Department, and now he serves as a board member for the Polaris Project Japan, a nonprofit that combats the sex trade




Adelstein follows his strict rules of reciprocity and protection of sources, but otherwise he is willing to do nearly anything to get a story. He said that once, after his marriage had fallen apart, a lonely female cop offered access to a file on Goto if he slept with her, so he did. In the red-light district, he relies on foreign strippers for information, and on a few occasions when they have run into visa problems he has introduced them to gay salarymen who need wives in order to rise at their conservative Japanese companies.



She said that her husband had changed after his research took him deep into the criminal underworld. “He was beaten by somebody, so he was wary. He was not goofy Jake anymore,” she said. “He would use words the yakuza way.” She continued, “It has to do with the facial expression, the way they speak. When he got angry, he was like this. We argued once and he said, ‘Omae niwa kankeine! Kono Bakayaro!’ I thought, Oh, he knows bad Japanese now.”




She said that at one time she had hoped he would find a different career, but now she realized that it would never happen. Some of Adelstein’s friends and family told me that he was addicted to the excitement, while others mentioned that he was too attached to the character that he had created. But beneath the chaotic personal life there was also something deeply moralistic about his outlook. He seemed to have more faith in giri than he did in any system of justice, and he could respect even a criminal as long as the man kept his word. “He expects people to be fair and honest,” his father told me.




Stories tended to tumble out of Adelstein, full of crazy yakuza details, and today he told a new one. He said that during his period of obsessive research he had conducted an affair with one of Goto’s mistresses. The gangster reportedly kept more than a dozen women in Tokyo and other cities, and Adelstein slept with one who gave him useful information. Eventually, he helped her escape Goto by introducing her to a gay salaryman who needed a wife and was about to be posted overseas. He said that the couple still shared an address in Europe. I asked what the mistress was like.


“We had this lovely conversation once in bed,” Adelstein said. “She said, ‘Do you love me?’ I said, ‘No, but I like you.’ She said, ‘I like you, too. You’re a lot of fun.’ Then she said, ‘Are you sleeping with me to get information about Goto?’ I said, ‘Pretty much. What about you?’ She said, ‘Well, I hate the motherfucker and every time I sleep with you it’s like I’m stabbing him in the face.’