It is, by any measure, an improbable tale of grit and determination. The show stars West Side Story’s Ansel Elgort as Adelstein, chronicling in painstaking, albeit typically stylish detail - this is Michael Mann, after all - how a wildly ambitious, hardworking young American was able to secure a job as a crime reporter and develop contacts within the cloistered world of the yakuza.
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He would also write several books, most notably the 2009 memoir Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, which now has been adapted into a limited series from Endeavor Content and HBO Max, with Michael Mann - producer of Miami Vice and writer-director of the cinema crime classic Heat - serving as exec producer and directing the pilot. “For a foreigner to learn Japanese that well, report and write articles in Japanese, work and function inside that culture, was truly impressive,” says Naoki Tsujii, who started with Adelstein at the Yomiuri’s Urawa bureau, north of Tokyo.Īfter leaving the Yomiuri in 2005, Adelstein would thrive as a freelance journalist, contributing articles to The Daily Beast, Vice and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He was the first Westerner to be hired as a reporter at the paper. This would be an impressive feat for any journalist in Japan, but in Adelstein’s case, it was downright extraordinary.Īfter leaving Missouri at age 19 to pursue his interest in Japan, Adelstein graduated from Tokyo’s Sophia University in 1993 and landed a coveted job as a cub reporter at the Yomiuri Shimbun, one of Japan’s leading news outlets and, at the time, the biggest newspaper in the world based on circulation.
The story helped cement Adelstein’s reputation as an unflinching chronicler of organized crime in Japan, propelling him to minor celebrity status as one of the primary experts on a shadowy underworld few had access to. Getting on the wrong side of major crime figures could very well lead to retaliation (the Goto-gumi was known for ignoring the rules that some yakuza clans make at least a pretense of following, such as avoiding unnecessary harm to “civilians”). How Kinostar Has Been Turning Niche Audiences Into Big Business for 25 Yearsįor Adelstein, the story came with some obvious risks.
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