After an uneventful decade as a token foreign writer for the Yomiuri Shimbun covering all assortment of stories from the the paper’s “City News Desk,” Jake Adelstein, a wannabe crime reporter who spent nearly all of his Yomiuri career covering mundane stories, left the paper in dejection and wanting to be somebody. He proceeded to publish Tokyo Vice as a platform to establish his credentials as a “top crime reporter in Japan,” a ruse for which he was mostly successful. Foreign news outlets began to interview Adelstein and cite him as a source for stories about Japan, particularly on topics of crime, yakuza, etc. However, these news outlets never bothered to fact check Adelstein’s claims in Tokyo Vice and simply accepted his grandized self-assertions that he had been heavily involved in covering organized crime for most of his time with the Yomiuri and as such was an expert in this field.

After fact checking nearly 20 articles that were cited in Tokyo Vice, there is little credibility or ethics behind the contents of Adelstein’s main platform for his creditionals. Once lost, integrity is extremely difficult to recover.  A publication using him as a “journalist” is roughly the equivalent of a bank or store using a known thief to handle its money. Maybe he has cleaned up his act and will be good, or maybe he won’t. You just can’t trust anything Adelstein writes. To this date he is still lying about the veracity of Tokyo Vice and its position as a work of “nonfiction” that accurately depicts his career with the Yomiuri. In fact, Tokyo Vice is a fictitious novel centered around real life events by which Jake Adelstein has inserted himself as an action hero protagonist in countless scenes that are just not believable as well as not supported by the actual articles.

The sad thing about Adelstein is that there is no reason why he could not be a good journalist or writer on Japan. He clearly has a lot of knowledge of Japan. There is so much he could cover and write about, but he has to stop making up stories, inserting himself into the drama and pontificating with a holier-than-thou attitude on the issues he covers while blasting Japan as his M.O. His recent articles in particular usually end with some kind of gotcha rant about someone or some organization needing to clean up its act. Conversely, it is Adelstein who needs to look in the mirror and clean up his own act.

With Jake “the Fake” Adelstein believe nothing, check everything!