It’s Not About Learning—It’s About Unlearning

With six months to go before I was to start work, there was plenty of time for insecurities to grow. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had bitten off more than I could chew. I knew that I could handle the reading and writing parts of the job, but how would I handle interviewing people in Japanese?

The Yomiuri human resources guy in charge of recruits, the neo-Jewish Matsuzaka, was a little taken aback when I dropped into his office in October and asked for a preliminary internship so I could get a head start.

“I admire your desire to be prepared,” he said. “But the truth is that we’ve never had anyone wanting to work before officially beginning. You’re an unusual case, though, so I’ll see what I can do.” He took me to the third floor for a cup of coffee, handed me materials that are given to freshman reporters, and sent me on my way.

He called about two weeks later. He had arranged a mini-internship of about a week for me to spend in various offices. My first miniposting was to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (TMPD) press club.

Matsuzaka met me in the lobby of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police headquarters, a gigantic labyrinth of a building that towered over all the others in the government district. It was the nerve center of the Tokyo police force, which was comprised of roughly forty thousand people. He was going to hand me over to Ansei Inoue, a legendary journalist and the author of Thirty-three Years as a Police Reporter. Inoue was the police beat captain and was loved, feared, and envied within the Yomiuri empire. His claim to fame was proving that a university professor convicted of murdering his wife was innocent. He had not only exposed the missteps of the police machinery and the prosecution involved but also found the real murderer. The case became a classic example of how innocent people can be convicted when caught in the brutally efficient wheels of the Japanese justice system.

Inoue was about five feet eight and thin, with long, unkempt hair swept to the side of his face. He was wearing a gray suit, black tie, and scuffed shoes. His eyes were hidden behind brown-tinted glasses, which made them seem dull, but when he saw who I was, they sparkled. He seemed quite amused by the situation.

“So you’re the gaijin I’ve been hearing about,” he said animatedly. “You speak Japanese, right?” He aimed the question more at Matsuzaka than at me, but I answered anyway.

“I speak Japanese. Writing it is another issue.”

Inoue laughed. “Well, you probably write it better than the people I have working for me. Let’s go upstairs.”

Technically, anyone visiting the TMPD without being a registered member of the press club or an actual employee or someone with security clearance was required to have a police escort before entering the building, but Inoue came and went as he pleased. It was still three years before the Aum Shinrikyo cult sprinkled sarin on the Tokyo subways, which had the effect of tightening security procedures all over the city.

In the elevator, Inoue gave me a breakdown of the police organization, but most of it went over my head. We got out at the ninth floor, which held the public affairs section of the TMPD and three press clubs: for the newspapers, television, and radio and local newspapers in the country. There was no space for the weekly or monthly magazines, which the police considered to be subversive scandal rags and kept off the official press club list.

There were no foreign media representatives either; the mainstream Japanese media outlets have not protested this lack of foreign media and never will. When you’re part of a monopoly, it’s not in your best interest to break yourself up.

Some reporters were hanging out playing cards on a battered desk in the open area near the kitchen. There was also a dank tatami room in the back where reporters could unroll futons and sleep off their hangovers while they waited for the next handout of news.

When Inoue and I walked into the Yomiuri section of the press club, which was essentially a cordoned-off rectangular room with a curtain for a door, all the reporters were gathered around a desk, poring over a photo book. I looked around. The space hardly fit my notion of the press accommodations for the biggest newspaper in Japan: the walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves; newspapers and magazines were strewn across the couch and onto the floor; garbage cans overflowed with crumpled-up faxes, used containers of instant ramen, and beer cans. Each desk had a word processor. At the far end was a radiator/air conditioner, and on the deep windowsill there were six televisions and three video decks stacked high. All of the televisions were on. A CB radio tuned to the fire department frequency blared. In a bunk bed next to the “door,” someone slept, still in his shoes, the day’s morning edition covering his face.

Inoue and I walked over to the cluster of reporters; the book they were poring over was Sex, by Madonna, which had just been released, and the reporters (all of them male) were studying and commenting upon her breasts. Inoue made the introductions, then picked up the book and handed it to me: “Do you think this book is obscene?” It was the Japanese version, so a lot of the more graphic stuff (which meant genitals and pubic hair) had been obscured.

“No, not to me.”

“Well, if they had published this,” Inoue went on, pulling the unexpurgated American edition off the shelf, “the police would have raided the publisher and confiscated every copy. The producers of Santa Fe^1* barely escaped getting busted for showing a little pubic hair, but this stuff from America is damn close to porn. Maybe arty porn, but it’s porn. We would have had a story if the Japanese publishers hadn’t pussied out.”

“The police would arrest someone for this?”

“The Supreme Court determined in 1957 that anything that sexually excites the viewer for no good reason, that violates the sense of propriety of the normal citizen, that is shameful, and that violates the sexual-moral conceptions of the general public, is obscene. By being obscene, such works are illegal and their distribution is a crime.”

“Which means?”

“Well, to the cops it means no pubic hair. Or it used to.” Inoue snickered. “It’s an odd thing about this country. The police don’t mind if you get a blow job in the middle of the day or if the operators of sex clubs advertise their services right out in the open, but they get their shorts all twisted up about people looking at people having sex. Pubic hair is too close to the real thing. The moral of the story: do it, but don’t watch it.”

“Is it legal to sell this stuff in the United States?” one reporter asked me.

That led us into a twenty-minute discussion of the differences between Japanese and U.S. porn. The reporters were shocked to learn that octopuses and other animals of the sea were rarely used to drape the genitals in American porn and that sex through panty hose wasn’t a popular theme. I was asked to bring back some videotapes on my next visit to America.

As we left the room, Inoue cautioned, “Don’t do it. Forget about bringing back any porn for those idiots. The last thing we need is for you to get seized at Customs. They’ll survive without it.”

He took me up to the coffee shop, ordered some green tea, and asked what I wanted to do at the Yomiuri.

“Well,” I said, “I’m interested in investigative journalism and the side of Japan I don’t know much about. The seamy side. The underworld.” I told him that my father was a country coroner and that crime and the police beat had always interested me.

He recommended I shoot for shakaibu, the national news section, which was responsible for the police beat. Inoue put it this way: “It’s the soul of the newspaper. Everything else is just flesh on the bones. Real journalism, journalism that can change the world, that’s what we do.”

I asked him for some advice as a reporter, and he was silent for a while. He smelled a little of sake when he began to speak, and I later learned he’d been drinking until five that morning. It was only nine now, and I don’t think he would’ve spoken as frankly if he’d been completely sober.

“Newspaper reporting isn’t rocket science,” he said. “The pattern is set. You remember the patterns and build from there. It’s like martial arts. You have kata [the form], which you memorize and repeat, and that’s how you learn the basic moves. It’s the same here. There are about three or four basic ways to write up a violent crime, so you have to be able to remember the style, fill in the blanks, and get the facts straight. The rest will come.”

Then he got more serious.

“There are eight rules of being a good reporter, Jake.

“One. Don’t ever burn your sources. If you can’t protect your sources, no one will trust you. All scoops are based on the understanding that you will protect the person who gave you the information. That’s the alpha and omega of reporting. Your source is your friend, your lover, your wife, and your soul. Betray your source, and you betray yourself. If you don’t protect your source, you’re not a journalist. You’re not even a man.

“Two. Finish a story as soon as possible. The life of news is short. Miss the chance, and the story is dead or the scoop is gone.

“Three. Never believe anyone. People lie, police lie, even your fellow reporters lie. Assume that you are being lied to, and proceed with caution.

“Four. Take any information you can get. People are good and bad. Information is not. Information is what it is, and it doesn’t matter who gives it to you or where you steal it. The quality, the truth of the information, is what’s important.

“Five. Remember and persist. Stories that people forget come back to haunt them. What may seem like an insignificant case can later turn into a major story. Keep paying attention to an unfolding investigation, and see where it goes. Don’t let the constant flow of new news let you forget about the unfinished news.

“Six. Triangulate your stories, especially if they aren’t an official announcement from the authorities. If you can verify information from three different sources, odds are good that the information is good.

“Seven. Write everything in a reverse pyramid. Editors cut from the bottom up. The important stuff goes on top, the trivial details go to the bottom. If you want your story to make it to the final edition, make it easy to cut.

“Eight. Never put your personal opinions into a story; let someone else do it for you. That’s why experts and commentators exist. Objectivity is a subjective thing.

“And that’s it.”

It was shockingly frank advice from a man who had a reputation for being, well, sneaky. After all, Inoue had needed to play some serious hardball politics to make it to his position. He’d been a regional hire as opposed to a national hire. In the old days, regional hires were basically second-class citizens, flitting from local office to local office without ever spending more than a few years at the head office—which kept them from covering major news events and making a career in Tokyo. Inoue had bucked the system, somehow managing to push his way into national news and make a home in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police club.

Like any Yomiuri employee, he understood that for those who aspire to be investigative journalists, national news was the place to be. If getting there was hard, staying there was even harder. Within the paper it was said that national news reporters worked the longest, drank the most, got divorced most often, and died the earliest. I don’t know if those claims have ever been statistically validated, but almost all present and former national news reporters have a masochistic pride in their status.

After three days at the TMPD, I was sent to the Chiba office to spend two days working with other reporters. The Chiba bureau chief was a former national news reporter and a former TMPD beat captain; his name was Kaneko. The office was clean and modern, with two islands of desks, several fax machines mounted on shelves, and everything filed neatly in bookshelves in chronological order. It was Venus to the Mars of the TMPD press club.

Kaneko gave me a warm reception. He was especially interested in my Jewish background. We sat down on facing sofas in the corner of the office while he grilled me, finally getting to the question he really wanted answered: “Do you speak Hebrew?”

I didn’t.

He seemed disappointed, so I asked him why he was interested.

“Well, I notice a lot of Israelis selling watches, jewelry, and brand-name goods—fake ones, of course—on the streets near the station,” he said. “And I think they’ve got to be paying protection money to the yakuza.”

I didn’t really know much about the yakuza at this point. I knew they were gangsters and that they could be violent. But other than that I was oblivious—which, of course, would change.

He offered me a cigarette while he expounded. I accepted it, lit up, and tried not to cough.

“So, you being a gaijin,” he went on, “maybe you could talk to them, find out. It would be interesting to see how much of a cut the yakuza are getting and how the deals are being worked out. What do you think?”

I said I’d be delighted—but it wouldn’t be in Hebrew.

Kaneko called over a reporter named Hatsugai and assigned him as my editor. I was given a pen, a notepad, and a tape recorder and sent out the door within thirty minutes of arriving at the office.

The street sellers were everywhere, especially near the station. Most of them appeared to be Israelis on a pan-Asian trip, selling items they had picked up in Nepal or Tibet. Some of them had fake brand-name watches and handbags they’d purchased in Thailand. I sat down at a Mister Donut across from one of the vendors and started my surveillance.

After two days and numerous doughnuts, I saw two Japanese men with white pants, loud print shirts, and tightly permed hair walking toward an Israeli vendor. They were clearly thugs. One of them was tall with a wide forehead, but he let the short guy lead the way. I left the doughnut shop and strolled casually by the scene.

They flanked both sides of his table, and I heard the short thug say four or five words to the Israeli; one of them was shohadai, a word I’d never come across before. Muttering in Hebrew, the vendor pulled out a wad of cash from his table drawer and handed it over. The short yakuza handed it to the tall yakuza, who brazenly counted it in wide-open sight before pocketing it and leaving the vendor to his sales.

I walked over to the Israeli and looked through his jewelry, clucking my head in sympathy. “I didn’t know you had to pay rent to open up a street shop,” I said.

The Israeli whipped back his ponytail and looked at me, a little suspiciously. After a moment he relaxed, pegging me as a fellow foreigner. “You do if you don’t want the cops or those guys on your ass. They get thirty to thirty-five percent of whatever I make.”

“Well, how do they know what you make?”

“They know,” he said. “They look at what’s out on the stand and what’s not there when they come back. You can’t bullshit them.”

“Why don’t you go to the police?”

“You must be fresh off the boat, brother. I’m on a tourist visa, so if I go to the police, I go to jail. The yakuza know it, and I know it. That’s the cost of doing business here. No choice.”

“Bummer,” I said. “I was thinking of doing this myself. Teaching English sucks.”

“It’s not bad money,” he said. “Maybe one hundred thousand yen [about a thousand U.S. dollars] on the weekend. It’s good business here but better in Yokohama, I hear.”

I offered him some doughnuts and hung around listening to his adventures in Thailand. About thirty minutes later another Israeli showed up in a van with his Japanese girlfriend and started unloading merchandise.

Vendor number one introduced me. Vendor number two was named Easy, and he wasted no time complaining about the gangsters in a thick Israeli accent: “The fookers! I hate them. The more we make, the more they take. I want to give them nothing. But Keiko,” he said, pointing at his girlfriend, “she says that would be bad news.”

Keiko nodded. Asking first if I spoke Japanese, she proceeded to chat: “Do you know the Sumiyoshi-kai?”

Even I had heard of the Sumiyoshi-kai. They were one of the largest yakuza factions operating in Tokyo and generally not to be messed with. Clearly he was doing the only thing he could to maintain his business.

As we went on talking, Easy started to look annoyed, so I stopped with the nihongo (Japanese) and spoke in English about the weather with the two vendors, then made my way back to the office.

When I told him what I had learned, Kaneko did not hide his pleasure, and I was pleased for it in turn.

“What does shohadai mean?” I asked.

“It’s slang for ‘rent.’ Basho means ‘place,’ and dai means ‘money.’ Instead of ‘bashodai,’ the yakuza say ‘shobadai.’ They like to twist words around so that straight citizens don’t understand them. It’s standard lingo—a term used to shake down street merchants.”

Then Kaneko told me, “Write the article.”

Right away, I was being led into deep water. The angle was that yakuza were preying on foreign street vendors who couldn’t complain to the police and that this was a new form of revenue for organized crime. I tried my best, but I suspect I did a lousy job. I didn’t know much about the anti–organized crime legislation that was new to the country, and I didn’t have any police connections to add depth to the story. It was like Journalism 102.

Hatsugai looked over the article. “Not bad,” he said politely. “It’s a good starting point. I’ll talk to the Chiba police and see what they think. We’ll put it together and try for the local edition.”

When I came in the next Monday, Kaneko greeted me excitedly. “Adelstein,” he said, “great news! It’s a slow news day, so your article is going to make the national edition. The evening news!”

He assured me that for a regional bureau reporter, getting a “scoop” to run in the national edition was a major accomplishment. He was almost as excited as I suddenly was.

The headline read, “Organized Crime Targeting Non-Japanese Street Vendors. Yakuza Find New Way to Squeeze Out ‘Rent’ by Taking Advantage of Illegal Workers (Who Can’t Seek Police Protection).” Somehow there was enough of a universal element to warrant it being national news, at least that day. No byline, of course—rarely did even a seasoned reporter get one, so who was I to complain?

All in all, it was a respectable piece of journalism, and Inoue called to congratulate me the same morning. I’d made the national edition with a scoop, and I wasn’t even an official hire!

Feeling a bit more self-confident, I decided to take some time off to travel before entering the salaryman life. The Yomiuri had a system that allowed new hires to take an interest-free loan from the company and travel overseas before starting work. It was a benevolent perk and one that effectively made you an indentured servant, but I took advantage of it to plan a few months in Hong Kong to study the Chinese martial art wing chun, which had been an interest of mine for a long time. But soon the Yomiuri called with bad news: it hadn’t been able to take care of my visa. I was told to come back and take care of it immediately. If I didn’t, my job would be all but lost.

The old immigration office was literally three minutes away from the main office of the Yomiuri. It was a poorly lit, crumbly old building, and the first two floors were always teeming with disgruntled foreigners. I had received a postcard to show up for an interview and had to wait more than an hour. While waiting, I auditioned as a human jungle gym for two little half-Filipino, half-Japanese toddlers who were running amok in the waiting area while their mother and her manager argued with a clerk about her visa. The youngest kid, about five, was hanging from my nose by his fingers when I got called in. I pried his fingers out and walked to the room in the back.

My interviewer was an old bureaucrat with lots of gold teeth and gray hair slicked over to the side with some kind of pomade. He wanted to conduct the interview in English, and I humored him.

“You will work for The Daily Yomiuri^2* from next April?”

“No, I’ll work for the Yomiuri Yomiuri from this April.”

“Yomiuri Yomiuri?”

“Yes, Yomiuri Yomiuri. The one that’s in Japanese.”

“You are photographer, then.”

“No, I will be a reporter.”

“Reporter? You write in Japanese?”

“Yes, that’s why it’s the Yomiuri Yomiuri, not the Daily Yomiuri.”

“Yomiuri Yomiuri?”

“Yes.”

“If you write in Japanese, is that international work or local work?”

“I don’t know. You’re the immigration guy.”

“Oh. You have contract?”

“No contract. I’ll be a regular employee. Seisha-in.”^†

“Seisha-in? And you are not Japanese?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Then you need a contract.”

“I don’t have a contract. I’m a seisha-in. Seisha-in don’t get contracts; they get hired for life.”

He scratched his head and inhaled air through his teeth. “I think you should go get contract. You get contract and then come back.”

“When?”

“When you have contract.”

“Well, who do I talk to then?”

That perturbed him. He seemed to realize that he might actually have to take personal responsibility for my visa application. I could see his eyes darting up to the left as he tried to think of someone else to hand me over to before, reluctantly, giving me his card.

“You can call me.”

I walked out of Immigration very confused and a little pissed. I’d earned the Japanese dream—full employee status in a huge corporation. I didn’t want some contract hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles. I wanted the works: the lifetime employment, the company health plan, the prestigious business card, a never-ending job, and a better visa.

I went to the Yomiuri reception desk at headquarters and asked for someone in human resources. One of the section’s bigwigs personally came down to meet me. I explained the situation and why I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of having a “contract” with the company. I expected him to mutter something bureaucratic like “Well, it just can’t be helped” and to be put in limbo while I waited for a contract to be hastily drawn up.

Instead, without even blinking, he looked at me and said, “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. We have hired you as a regular employee, and that is your status. None of your colleagues is being given a contract, and you should not be treated any differently.”

He took the immigration guy’s business card from me and told me to go home. “I’ll handle this,” he said.

The next morning, as I was eating a bowl of Morinaga chocolate flakes, I got a call from Immigration. The young woman on the phone asked me if two in the afternoon would be a convenient time to come by to finish up the paperwork. I was a little taken aback. In more than five years of living in Japan, I never had Immigration ask me about “my convenience.” I didn’t push my luck. Yes, two would be fine.

When I showed up that afternoon and walked into the waiting room, I was immediately escorted to Mr. Gold Teeth’s office. He stood up when I entered.

“My apologies for the confusion. Yours is an unusual case. Did you bring your passport?”

I handed it to him. He came back in five minutes with a three-year visa allowing me to work under the international affairs and humanities category of employment. Wishing me good luck, he nervously hustled me out the door.

I don’t know whether it took a threatening phone call or was just a matter of procedure, but I was impressed. It was my first encounter with the power behind the Yomiuri.

That April 1, all sixty rookies were sworn in as Yomiuri employees at a ceremony conducted at company headquarters. The president of the company spoke; our names were read out; pictures were taken. I’d already met many of the newbies at preemployment events, including a softball game we had played at Tokyo Dome, the home of the Yomiuri Giants.

After the ceremony, Matsuzaka, the Sophia graduate who had lobbied for my hiring, took me out for drinks. At this point in my career, I still didn’t drink alcohol. We went to a little shot bar in Ginza, John Coltrane on the loudspeakers buried in the ceiling, marble tables and jiggers lined up so shiny that the low lights sparkled off them. It was a classy place and not the usual dive that Yomiuri reporters tend to gravitate to.

I ordered a Coke and began spouting about how much I was looking forward to being assigned to an office and “learning the trade.”

Matsuzaka cut me off with a wave of his hand. “It’s not about learning. It’s about unlearning. It’s about cutting off ties, cutting out things, getting rid of preconceptions, losing everything you thought you knew. That’s the first thing you’ll learn. If you want to be an excellent reporter, you have to amputate your past life. You have to let go of your pride, your free time, your hobbies, your preferences, and your opinions.

“If you have a girlfriend, she’ll be gone as soon as you’re not around, and you won’t be around a lot. You have to let go of your pride, because everything you think you know is wrong.

“You have to act friendly to people you won’t like politically, socially, and ethically. You have to pay deference to the senior reporters. You have to not judge people but learn to judge the value of the information they give you. You have to cut down on your sleeping hours, your exercise time, and your time to read books. Your life will boil down to reading the paper, drinking with your sources, watching the news, checking to see if you’ve been scooped, and meeting deadlines. You will be flooded with work that seems meaningless and stupid, but you’ll do it anyway.

“You learn to let go of what you want to be the truth and find out what is the truth, and you report it as it is, not as you wish it was. It’s an important job. Journalists are the one thing in this country that keeps the forces in power in check. They’re the final guardians of this fragile democracy we have in Japan.

“Let go of your preconceptions, dignity, and pride and get the job done. If you can do that, you can learn to be a great reporter.”

He said it all without pausing in a very quiet, even-paced monologue. It was clear to me that he’d been thinking about this a long time.

But he wasn’t finished.

“Remember this. You have to be careful, or you will lose everything that is important to you and you will lose yourself. It’s a tough balancing act. Sometimes people end up losing everything for the job and gaining nothing from it. This company will take care of you as long as you are useful, and unless you commit a criminal act, you will never be fired. That’s great job security. However, as a reporter, you are an expendable commodity. When you have outlived your usefulness, you won’t be a reporter anymore. You’ll be doing something else. A reporter has a short half-life in this company. Enjoy it while it lasts. Simplify, cut down on things you don’t need, but be sure to leave something behind worth having.”

After that, he abruptly changed the subject to baseball—a sport, despite my American heritage, that I knew nothing about.

It wasn’t the first time I would be surprised by how serious Yomiuri people were about the calling of journalism. The Japanese press is often characterized by the foreign media as a bunch of sycophantic lap-dog office workers, but this isn’t exactly the case.

I was still taking in Matsuzaka’s words while pretending to understand the finer points of America’s pastime, when we were joined by a young female reporter whose hiring he had also supported a few years ago. She was upset because she’d come up from a regional office only to be assigned to do layout for a few months. Matsuzaka explained to her that it was part of the process everyone had to go through before getting on the reporter roster in the big leagues. It was an initiation ritual.

Then he sent us both home in the same hired car. The Yomiuri has its own fleet of cars used to escort reporters to interviews, press conferences, and sometimes their homes. As I was getting into the car, Matsuzaka tapped me on the shoulder.

“Jake, you’re going to be assigned to the Urawa office,” he said. “It’s a tough gig. The office has a Spartan atmosphere, and it’s in the heart of Saitama. It’s a good thing because you’ll have chances to write for the national edition and you will be doing a lot of writing. You will be extremely busy.”

“Urawa? Really? Is that close to Tokyo?”

“Very close. But once you’re there, Tokyo will be on the other side of the planet. Urawa keeps its people very busy, but remember what I told you. Don’t quit. We have high hopes for you.”

•    •    •

While we rode home, I told Matsuzaka’s protégé that I’d been assigned to Urawa. Her response was “Goshushosama desu.” It’s the phrase used at funerals to express your condolences.

Saitama is a large, half-rural, half-suburban prefecture just outside Tokyo, and Urawa is a giant bedroom city from which tired workers commute to the capital.

Saitama. A place considered so uncool by urban Japanese that it had spawned its own adjective, dasai, meaning “not hip, boring, unfashionable.”

In other words, I’d been assigned to the New Jersey of Japan.