TV review: Tokyo Vice: ‘The meticulous recreation of a very strange world’

Season two of Tokyo Vice opens with much the same panache and brutality with which its first eight episodes spun viewers through Japan’s neon-soaked criminal underworld. It’s night, and the camera pans slickly along the side of a yacht, following a waiter, before we move downwards – literally and symbolically – to the room where a yakuza henchman has beaten to death an eastern European model.

The crime drama’s debut series saw Jake Adelstein secure his dream job as the first foreigner on staff at one of Japan’s leading newspapers. An American Jewish expat drawn to Japan at the fag end of the 1990s as a literature student with a crime obsession, he’s played with jejune charm by former teen heartthrob Ansel Elgort.

After befriending a skirt-chasing cop and Samantha Porter, an American expat and hostess girl (think Memoirs Of A Geisha, minus the child kidnapping), played with sultry charm by Rachel Keller, Adelstein spent the show’s first eight episodes worming his way through Tokyo’s criminal milieu.

Clearly Japan’s native journalist corps had been slacking on the job, as within just a few days of joining the Meicho Shimbun newspaper Adelstein found himself knee-deep in intrigue, investigating a string of mysterious deaths and feuding with his editors over their seemingly conservative approach to pursuing stories.

The rookie reporter also brushes up against some antisemitism that seems to have developed absent any contact with actual Jews. “Many Japanese people believe Jews control the world economy,” one of the men interviewing Adelstein for the job declares to him. Later, another trainee tells him everyone at the paper thinks he must be working for Mossad.

Much of the appeal of the show is the meticulous recreation of a very strange world. Debtors are killed with samurai swords, glowering mob bosses deck themselves out with traditional tattoos, pensioners set themselves on fire because they cannot live with the shame of being unable to pay the money they owe.

And Japanese newspapers, it transpires, are even stranger. In real life, as recently as 2019, total circulation stood at 40 million. Yomiuri Shimbun, the leading title, sells eight million copies a day. Relative to Britain, where even The Sun can’t crack a million these days, these are staggering numbers.

Adelstein finds himself at the heart of this system, able to exercise its power to expose wrongdoing, but also locked into a near-feudal system of corporate obligation. He and his fellow reporters find themselves chained to their desks or scurrying around the city at all hours. Already fluent in Japanese, Adelstein’s growing ability to navigate his adoptive country’s sometimes impenetrable social norms and he ascends through this world is a running theme.

Watching Tokyo Vice, one can see why so many Westerners, from anime-obsessed shut-ins to preteen Hello Kitty fans, are obsessed with Japan. What’s really remarkable is that this story is based – at least in part – on reality. Adelstein really did move to Japan, force his way through sheer will into its insular journalism clique, and break a stunning expose of yakuza criminality that eventually forced him to flee the country.

What lets the show down, at points, however, is the slight hamminess of its dialogue. When, at the start of season two, one yakuza leader leans over the prone body a henchman who has been stabbed, he grimly intones: “Whoever did this to you… they will suffer.”

At the end of episode one of Tokyo Vice’s second season, Adelstein and Porter are left despairing over the deaths, respectively, of a veteran cop and a hostess girl. Comforting the rookie journalist, another police contact implies that Japan has many other hidden depths for us to explore in the episodes to come. “They will have their justice, for now we wait,” he tells Adelstein. “You did not come to Tokyo in pursuit of one man, there are other stories, other crimes to be exposed.