NOTE ON SOURCES AND SOURCE PROTECTION

One thing I have wrestled with in writing this book is how to do it in a way that would not endanger my sources and/or adversely affect the people involved. In Japan, a police officer leaking any information to a reporter can be criminally prosecuted; it can certainly cost him his job. It doesn’t happen often, but that’s not much consolation to the cop, prosecutor, or NPA bureaucrat who loses his job because I didn’t protect his identity. For a yakuza, revealing organizational secrets or working with someone like myself can cost him his life.

I’m certainly not the first journalist or the first person in Japan to be threatened by yakuza. If they were just threats, it wouldn’t be so bad. The problem, of course, is that yakuza sometimes live up to those threats. The respected yakuza journalist Mizoguchi Atsushi had the unpleasant experience of Yamaguchi-gumi members stabbing his son. They did it after he wrote a series of articles they found unflattering. They attacked not the author himself but his son—simply because his son happened to be around. It wasn’t an isolated case of yakuza attacking civilians. When writing about organized crime in Japan, protecting sources can be a matter of life and death. I take it very seriously.

If Goto Tadamasa were still running his old organization, this book would have no acknowledgments and no dedications. But Goto’s priest and guru, Jishu Tsukagoshi, insists that the former gang boss is now a devoted student of the Buddha and living a life of peace, atonement, and tolerance—so I’ll assume things are different.

The other issue I wrestled with is that most of the women who worked in the sex industry when I was a reporter are now leading different lives. Some are married, some have children, most are in completely different jobs. I wouldn’t feel good about shaming them or exposing their pasts.

I’ve gone to great lengths to protect the names of my sources in this book. I have changed names, used nicknames, altered nationalities and identifying details, and more. I’ve tried to keep a good balance between obscuring and misleading, and I hope that has worked.