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Tokyo Noir
Jake Adelstein
A darkly comic sequel to Tokyo Vice that is equal parts history lesson, true-crime exposé, and memoir.It's 2008, and it's been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organised crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about — for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy — himself.And Adelstein has a different gig these days: due diligence work, or using his investigative skills to dig up information on entities whose bosses would prefer that some things stay hidden.The underworld isn't what it used to be. Underneath layers of paperwork, corporations are thinly veiled fronts for the yakuza....
The Last Yakuza
Jake Adelstein
The Last Yakuza tells the history of the yakuza like it's never been told before.
Makoto Saigo is half-American and half-Japanese in small-town Japan with a set of talents limited to playing guitar and picking fights. With rock stardom off the table, he turns toward the only place where you can start from the bottom and move up through sheer merit, loyalty, and brute force - the yakuza.
Saigo, nicknamed "The Tsunami", quickly realises that even within the organisation, opinions are as varied as they come, and a clash of philosophies can quickly become deadly. One screw-up can cost you your life, or at least a finger.
The internal politics of the yakuza are dizzyingly complex, and between the ever-shifting web of alliances and the encroaching hand of the law that pushes them further and further underground, Saigo finds himself in the middle of a defining decades-long battle that will determine the future of the yakuza.
Written with the insight of an expert on Japanese organised crime and the compassion of a longtime friend, investigative journalist Jake Adelstein presents a sprawling biography of a yakuza, through postwar desperation, to bubble-era optimism, to the present. Including a cast of memorable yakuza bosses - The Coach, The Buddha, and more - this is a story about the rise and fall of a man, a country, and a dishonest but sometimes honourable way of life on the brink of being lost.




