Jake Adelstein

The Last Yakuza tells the history of the yakuza like it's never been told before. Makoto Saigo, half-American and half-Japanese, grows up 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...

Now a hit HBO Max TV series starring Ansel Elgort, Ken Watanabe & Rachel Keller. From the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, here is a unique, firsthand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up. At the age of nineteen, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of...

A darkly comic sequel to Tokyo Vice that is equal parts history lesson, true-crime expose, 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...

The wild, true story of cyber-era commerce, crime, cold-hard cash, and one of the greatest heists in history. Even in hell, Bitcoin talks. This modern take on an old Japanese saying still holds true. Cryptocurrency was supposed to do for money what the internet did for information, but it didn't work out that way. Its virtual existence unleashed real-world chaos...