Tokyo Vice (25 page)

At this, Michiko burst into laughter and slapped Hikaru on the knees. “Your friend is very perceptive. Did you tell him?” she asked.

Hikaru shook his head and made comical denials.

The ice broken, Michiko, Hikaru, and I chatted for a while (Hikaru really was good at his job), and then Michiko left for the evening. It was almost four in the morning, and the place was filling up. The new crowd seemed to be mostly hostesses who had just gotten off work; all were dressed to the nines, many were fairly inebriated, a few were loud. I wouldn’t think that this would be where a hostess would want to head after hours, but then again, if you thought about it, it made sense.

I should have stayed for the after-five crowd, but I had a day job. As I was gathering my things, Hikaru asked if I wouldn’t mind leaving the rest of my cigarettes. “Of course,” I said, then asked, “How’d I do?”

His response: “You have a charm, but you really are a geek. You want to talk more about yourself than you want to listen to others, but you tell interesting stories, so I’m not sure that’s a minus. You’re also memorable and mildly amusing, and that’s a plus. The clove cigarettes are a nice touch. They smell good and they’re different, and they are one more thing that makes you memorable. I may start smoking them myself.”

He added that if I ever got tired of journalism I might have a fallback as a host. I laughed and thanked him and looked around to say sayonara to Aida.

Aida handed me a couple of coupons and urged me to come back anytime with some female colleagues. I myself didn’t return, but my colleagues apparently had a fine time.

•    •    •

Almost ten years later, Kabukicho isn’t quite like it used to be, but it is still a pretty shady place. The promise of encounters, danger, adventure, and erotic fulfillment is readily available if you just know which door on which floor in which building to knock on. Underneath all that, however, is the stink of isolation.

Tokyo is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, yet—or maybe because of it—there are so many people who have no one to confide in, no one to trust or burden with their secrets, worries, or disappointments.

There is, admittedly, the underlying game that’s the lure (but where is it not?): is this evening of sympathy and champagne going to lead to sexual intercourse? Be that as it may, what the clubs are really fueled by is alienation, boredom, and loneliness.

The rates are not unreasonable, but the costs in human terms are incredibly high.

I had to make a call to Tim Blackman, in Britain. I’d promised I would.

He wanted to know what had happened to his daughter Lucie as soon as I did. Mr. Blackman had so alienated the Tokyo Metropolitan Police in his quest to find her that he was the last person they would talk to about anything. They knew that anything they told him would be told to the press, and they didn’t like it. He realized they weren’t going to keep him up to date. He wanted to hear from someone he knew, rather than read about it in the paper. I’d promised that when there was definite news I would call and tell him, day or night, anytime. This was the time.

Lucie Blackman, his oldest daughter, had gone missing on July 1, 2000. I didn’t know it then, but the case would be a pivotal moment in my career. There was a whole world of sleaze and sexual exploitation beneath the veneer of Japan’s happy-go-lucky, in-your-face sex industry that I didn’t know anything about. The words “human trafficking” weren’t in my vocabulary or even in my realm of awareness. It would be years after this case that I finally made sense of what I would see while looking for Lucie.

Lucie, a British national, came to Japan on May 4, 2000. She had been working as a stewardess for British Airways part-time, but her best friend, Louise Phillips, had convinced her that there were good times to be had and good money to be made by coming to Japan and working as a hostess. Lucie had piled up some debts in Britain and the
stewardess gig was leaving her feeling constantly tired because of her problems dealing with jet lag. A “paid vacation” or “working holiday” sounded good to her.

Louise’s sister had spent a few years in Japan working as a hostess; she knew the tricks of the trade and the profit potential. Lucie and Louise arrived in Japan together on tourist visas and promptly found lodging in a dodgy gaijin house—an apartment building where the majority of the residents were foreigners, the deposits were low, and the usual honorarium to the landlord, “key money,” wasn’t required. The checks on visas were almost nonexistent.

Legally, you cannot work in Japan on a tourist visa. In reality, at the time it was generally tolerated by the authorities. Most foreign girls working as hostesses in Japan then were made to understand, after a few weeks, that they were working illegally because that way the management could use it as leverage in salary negotiations and anything else that came up.

Tall and blond, Lucie was an amazingly attractive woman. She and Louise headed for Roppongi. Roppongi, which literally means “Six Trees,” has long been the gathering place where foreigners in Japan and Japanese who want to mingle with foreigners meet, merge, and mate. In the bubbly late eighties, it was a high-dollar area with elaborate discos that charged $30 just to get in the door and had rigid dress codes as well. However, when the bubble crashed, so did the doors keeping out the riffraff, and gradually the area was taken over by cheaper hostess pubs, small nightclubs, sexual massage parlors, prostitution bars, after-hour bars where drugs were readily available, and huge clubs catering to the pond scum of the foreign population with cheap booze and no entrance fees. The classy clubs had moved toward Nishi-Azabu, leaving the old Roppongi to stew in its juices.

Some nameless Japanese neophyte of English had nicknamed Roppongi “High-Touch Town.” The emblem is engraved into the wall of a concrete overpass that runs over Roppongi Crossing. It is in many ways similar to Kabukicho but seedier and full of gaijin: thus, the “Gaijin Kabukicho.” The Azabu police had long since lost interest in cleaning the area up because if there were any crimes going on there, the victims were mostly foreigners. When Lucie arrived, the area was really just beginning to turn from seedy to sleazy.

•    •    •

By the ninth, Lucie and Louise were both working at Casablanca, a hostess club, just catty-corner to Seventh Heaven, Roppongi’s first foreign female strip bar. There were nine other girls working at the club at the time, all of them blond except Louise. Their pay was 5,000 yen, roughly $50 an hour. The pay was supplemented by drinkbacks
^1*
as well as specific requests for an individual.

Three weeks later, on July 1, Lucie called Louise from Shibuya, telling her, “I’m meeting a customer from the club, and he’s going to buy me a cell phone. I’m so excited.” In the evening she called Louise again to tell her that she was on the way home, but she never made it,

On July 3, Louise got a very strange call on her cell phone. It was from a Japanese man calling himself “Akira Takagi.” He told Louise, “Lucie has entered a cult in Chiba Prefecture. She can’t come home. Don’t worry about her.”

Now Louise was very worried. She went to the British Embassy and asked for advice and then went to the Azabu police station to file a missing persons report. The Azabu police did not want to take the case from the outset. However, the embassy had been notified and the mysterious phone call was impossible to ignore. If it hadn’t been for that phone call, there might never have been a real investigation. On the ninth, the TMPD Investigative Division (homicide, robberies and other violent crimes) officially decided to take over the case. It was out of the hands of the local cops and now a problem for headquarters.

Around that time, I got a call from a senior police reporter, Nishijima, aka Pablo, asking me to help cover the story, though it wasn’t really a story yet; the TMPD hadn’t made an official announcement, and the
Yomiuri
was just beginning its prep work. The details of Lucie’s disappearance were still very vague. Pablo warned me to keep my mouth shut about it for the time being.

I liked Pablo a lot; he was a good reporter and a gentleman to boot. Yamamoto and Pablo were both on the TMPD police beat, covering violent crimes and international crimes (Investigative Division 1 and International Crimes Division). Pablo was Yamamoto’s right-hand man.

Pablo didn’t look like a Japanese guy. He had an American ancestor somewhere in his family tree, giving him an almost Latin look. One of
our coworkers used to joke that there were really three foreigners in the National News Department: a Mongolian (Yamamoto), a Jew (myself), and a Mexican (Pablo).

On the phone, Pablo was refreshingly point-blank: “Well, Jake, it looks like you might actually be useful for a change. The victim is a foreigner and all her friends are foreigners. We need someone who can blend in and also talk to people who know her and her family. That would be you. Are you interested?”

Absolutely, I assured him.

Honestly, at the time I thought the whole thing was being overblown. I assumed that Lucie was just another gaijin hostess who had taken off to Thailand or Bali with her boyfriend or her sugar daddy and just forgotten to notify anyone.

Nonetheless, I applied for permission to abandon my usual duties and help the TMPD team for a few weeks. On July 9, when the investigation officially began, I went to the TMPD headquarters, was waved in, and went up to the ninth floor. Pablo and Yamamoto were waiting for me. Misawa, the boss and captain of the TMPD press club, was passed out on the couch. The office looked the same as it had in 1993, although the copy of Madonna’s
Sex
had long since vanished from the bookshelf.

Yamamoto was in good spirits and greeted me warmly. “Jake, long time no see. Still doing heroin?”

“No, Yamamoto. I’m just selling it to schoolchildren now. I don’t use anymore.”

“Is that so? No wonder you’re getting so fat.”

It was true. Not that I had stopped doing heroin (or ever had done heroin), but I had gotten pretty fat.

Yamamoto, on the other hand, had lost a lot of weight—perhaps too much. Of all the assignments you can get on the police beat, the homicide/violent crimes beat is the toughest. It had taken its toll on him. Vice isn’t an easy beat, but you rarely get called out in the middle of the night for a bust. Vice is not a spontaneous crime. I learned this covering the Fourth District. The social impact of a police raid on a sex club or the seizure of pornographic DVDs was nominal at best and not the kind of news story that required immediate and deep coverage. Most of the time, what the vice squad did, if it was announced at all, never made it into the newspapers. Oh, you had to write up the articles but with the understanding that it was more than likely to be work in
vain. Homicide and violent crimes are different. In a country where murders are rare, they are almost always big stories. They happen and are discovered at odd, inconvenient hours, and as news stories they have a real immediacy. You have to be on the scene quickly, and the competition is fierce to get a scoop on those kinds of sensational stories. I didn’t envy Yamamoto.

Pablo, on the other hand, probably because he was the guy on the ground floor rather than the middle manager, seemed to be entirely in his element. He quickly brought me up to speed on the case, referring to his notes. The cops had the following intel on Lucie at that point in time:

On the day Lucie vanished, she was last seen wearing a black dress with black sandals and a black bag. Her wallet was of brown alligator skin and folded in half, with a little change inside. She wore a heart-shaped diamond necklace and a square Armani wristwatch. She had worked for close to a year and a half for British Airways as a flight attendant. Her father had not forbidden her to go to Japan; Lucie had money, and he’d sent her money as well. She had told her parents it was possible to go sightseeing in Japan and earn a little money doing odd jobs. She did not intend to stay long.

The TMPD did not believe the cult story, especially in the context of the previous events. The homicide cops were already convinced that she’d probably been kidnapped and killed by one of the customers from the club. They were highly doubtful that Akira Takagi even existed; he was more than likely a fake identity created by the person responsible for her disappearance.

They were putting some guys from the homicide squad on the case, including a few detectives who spoke English (or who couldn’t really but wanted to speak English) and had experience with sex crimes. Pablo gave me the names of the detectives in charge. I knew one of them already.

Yamamoto came over to join us while Pablo continued the briefing.

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

Yamamoto took the lead. “We want you to go talk to people at the gaijin house she was staying at and start looking around Roppongi for people who knew her, for anyone who might have been a customer. You must have some friends there, right?”

In actuality, I avoided Roppongi like the plague. Most of my friends were Japanese. I was more comfortable hanging out in Kabukicho,
Shibuya, Ebisu, or even Korea Town. I had Sunao, so I didn’t need to or want to pick up an easy Roppongi girl for some no-strings-attached sex. I didn’t do drugs, nor did I have a fascination with big-breasted foreign strippers, discos, or expensive restaurants. I had no desire to fraternize with other gaijin. Roppongi was as foreign to me as it was to Pablo or Yamamoto.

So I told that to Yamamoto.

He just shook his head. “You’re an American, and you don’t go to Roppongi and you don’t know the rules of baseball. You must not be a real American. You’re really a North Korean spy, aren’t you. Confess.”

Pablo joined in. “Even I go to Roppongi now and then, and I’m Japanese.”

“Pablo-san, you look more like a foreigner than I do. This is why people call you Pablo. You belong in Roppongi. I’m sure the Filipino girls love you.”

“Is that so, Adelstein? Hey, at least I don’t look like an Iranian.”

While Pablo and I were trading crude insults about our ethnic appearances, Yamamoto pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and handed it to me.