Tokyo Vice

2022 - 4 - 7

Post cover — Image courtesy of "menshealth.com"

Tokyo Vice Is Based on the True Story of Newspaper ... (menshealth.com)

HBO Max's 'Tokyo Vice' is based on the true story of American journalist Jake Adelstein, who worked at a Japanese newspaper reporting on the Yakuza.

But Adelstein began reporting on the yakuza regardless, leveraging contacts in the organization as well as the police department. Karate later inspired Adelstein to study Japanese as a freshman at the University of Missouri. For his sophomore year, he went to Tokyo, transferring into a Japanese University. Once in Japan, he never left. (Goto left the yakuza and became a Buddhist priest to protect himself against retribution.) Adelstein continued to investigate Goto, discovering that he had received a liver transplant at UCLA (yakuza livers are commonly damaged from drug use and excessive drinking). Adelstein learned that Goto had been given a visa after making a deal with the FBI, implying that he had sold out other yakuza in exchange for the organ. He is also working on a sequel to Tokyo Vice. While he began (as most police reporters for the paper do) by covering baseball, Adelstein soon began reporting on crime. That said, the production wanted the series to be grounded in the reality of Tokyo at the time. The yakuza, too, are meant to reflect how the organization operated at the time. As in the HBO series, Adelstein was initially dissuaded by collogues from looking into yakuza activity. None of the characters, Rogers said, are meant to embody real people. At the time, Adelstein was covering crime for Japan’s The Yomiuri Shimbun, the world’s largest paper. Just as the series depicts, Adelstein was threatened.

How HBO Max's Tokyo Vice differs from Miami ... (EW.com)

Tokyo Vice and Miami Vice both involve input from director Michael Mann, but the new series differs significantly from the classic '80s franchise.

Now the power of the yakuza is significantly reduced, both because of natural changes and new laws that have been enacted, but we're coming in at a time that was peak yakuza." An interesting divide between Tokyo Vice and both incarnations of Miami Vice is the relationship between their settings and the times in which they were made. "The '80s was the big boom time in Japan, when Japan was the number two economy in the world and looked like it might become number one. Both versions of Miami Vice therefore provide insights into the past, but they were made to respond to their times. Adelstein's perspective gives an important distinction between Tokyo Vice and Miami Vice: The protagonist of this story is a journalist, not a cop. Everybody will think it's Michael now doing the Tokyo version of Miami Vice.' But in the end it's what the book is called, and the show stands on its own."

Tokyo Vice Series-Premiere Recap: What Really Happens (Vulture)

A recap of “The Test,” “Kishi Kaisei,” and “Read the Air,” episodes 1, 2, and 3 of HBO Max's 'Tokyo Vice.” Executive produced by Michael Mann and starring ...

He articulates with precision what he brought to the show and what exactly he intended to provide for the rest of the series. Her passion, in her words, is for Tokyo itself — “bars, karaoke bars, gorgeous Onsens, way too much manga.” You might say her ambitions to save up enough money to start her own club and bring some of her fellow hostesses with her are the most immediately ambitious of anyone in the show. The situation has escalated (finally), and it’s bringing him closer to the heart of what’s really happening. In the meantime, Katagiri throws Jake a bone, takes him on his first raid, and allows him exclusive coverage of the arrests. When a fellow yakuza insults him in front of their whole gang, he does not heed his mentor’s earlier call to “read the air,” learn when to fight and when to negotiate, and punches the guy’s face in. In his next meeting with the lead editor of the police beat (Kosuke Toyohara), Jake is called out again for being a foreigner, and later that night, when the new recruits are treated to drinks, his newfound friends and fellow reporters tell him “everyone here thinks you’re a spy.” Tokyo Vice is shaping up to be a show steeped in “subcultures governed by deeply ingrained codes of conduct,” as Mann calls it. Plucked from the obscurity of a fish market, he’s our closest eyes and ears to all the yakuza intrigue, struggling to hold back his fists (and fashion tips) as the Oyabun organization holds back on retaliation against the Tozawa clan. The newspaper is the first in a kaleidoscope of subcultures the show will immerse us in through the eyes of someone working from the bottom up (or the from the outside in, to be more precise). Jake is asked why he wants to be a crime reporter in Japan (fair question) in his entrance interview, his motivation being that his fascination with using forensic evidence to “reason what actually happened” originated from his coroner father taking him to crime scenes and showing him dead bodies and murder files. Despite accidentally missing the last page of his exam (brutal, hate when that happens), Jake is given high marks for his excellent written Japanese, though in the same breath, is reminded that no foreigner has ever worked at “the greatest newspaper in the world.” Adelstein and Katagiri are preparing for a staked-out dinner meeting with the “number two yakuza.” The plan is to get into the restaurant and to their table first with their backs to the wall, but that all changes instantly when the receptionist tells them the yakuza arrived early and moved the meeting to the private lounge away from backup. In the slick montage leading up to his exam and preliminary interview, we’re given a rush of details about Jake’s solitary expat life — teaching an English class, grabbing quick meals at sushi bars with a book open in front of him, blowing off steam at the club, his tiny apartment decked with Japanese books and clippings about the yakuza — all framed within the distinct “palette, compression of nighttime Tokyo, the intense graphics and the overall ambiance of lighting,” as Mann describes.

Tokyo Vice review: Michael Mann's killer start gets squandered (Polygon)

Tokyo Vice follows Ansel Elgort as Jake Adelstein. Despite an excellent pilot directed by Heat director Michael Mann, the show wastes momentum and focus on ...

Pouring salt in the wound is the way he only seems to come to life in a romantic subplot with one of the show’s few white stars, Samantha (Rachel Keller), a fellow American now living in Tokyo as a hostess. This makes him a wildly frustrating protagonist, as it’s his plucky Americanness that gets him into and out of trouble, and nothing particularly specific to his character. Tokyo Vice slows considerably once the style of that first episode subsides and the work of being a show begins. Now, in 1999, he is just a lonely white man in Tokyo, diligently applying himself to the language, the culture, the city, and the very beginnings of a career as a reporter. The pilot introduces viewers to Jake as he begins work as low level crime reporter. The first episode of Tokyo Vice moves like a wildcat stalking the streets.

Review: 'Tokyo Vice' is a stylish crime noir, but Ansel Elgort isn't the ... (USA TODAY)

"Heat" director Michael Mann is back behind the camera for HBO Max's "Tokyo Vice," following a journalist (Ansel Elgort) in sleazy 1990s Tokyo.

With that in mind, the centering of Jake and Samantha's storylines seems more archaic than genuinely arresting. Instead, the stylish yet sluggish new series (★★ out of four) follows a plucky expat named Jake ( Ansel Elgort) in 1990s Tokyo as he snags a job with one of Japan’s top newspapers. Elgort and especially Keller are likable enough, acting as audience surrogates in an unfamiliar, at times dangerous place.

'Tokyo Vice' HBO Max review: A stylish, suspenseful adventure (Los Angeles Times)

HBO Max's tale of an American reporting on Japanese crime in the 1990s turns familiar tropes into an intriguing new yarn, with Michael Mann attached.

(Note Jake’s initial conversations with Sato, which center on pop culture, and carry both an edge of danger, and getting past danger.) The machinations of the plot are less important than the people it carries along; and it’s our concern for them — heightened by the feeling that things might go very wrong at any moment — that keeps “Tokyo Vice” suspenseful and, in the bargain, makes us care about the characters all the more. It’s a big show, with a vivid supporting cast of friends and foes and people just met along the way, but it revolves around five characters who in one way or another seem set to become allies. (He is also an executive producer.) Like that series, the films that Mann has directed (among them “ Manhunter,” “Heat,” “ The Insider,” “Blackhat”) can go long on style — and stylishness, which is just a shot away from shallowness and is very much a temptation in a show filmed against the neon-bright background of modern Tokyo. But he reins it in here — a slow-motion walking shot at the top, some significant focus-shifting. “You don’t get to think,” he is told, but that’s not going to happen; a routine investigation leads him to collect clues like Nancy Drew, and we are off. Ansel Elgort (lately loved-hated-tolerated as Tony in Steven Spielberg’s “ West Side Story”) plays Jake, a beanpole out of Missouri, who stands out in and above the Tokyo crowds. Jake Adelstein, the first non-Japanese reporter on staff at Japan’s largest newspaper, has had his 2009 memoir about working the police beat adapted into a 10-episode series for HBO Max, “Tokyo Vice.” Half that meal has been made available for review, and it is so far an intriguing mix of familiar flavors and unusual spices.

Tokyo Vice is a Michael Mann Throwback | Den of Geek (Den of Geek)

The eight episode series opens in 2001. Floppy-haired journalist Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) and Tokyo police detective Hiroto Katagiri (Ken Watanabe) enter ...

More important than anything else though, is that the show’s love for the decadently grimy Tokyo of the late ‘90s really comes through. And those same people will also get a real kick out of the unbelievable amount of training, prep, and testing Adelstein has to go through to get a job at a newspaper. The series is based on the real adventures of Jake Adelstein, an American journalist from Missouri who made a life for himself in Tokyo and ultimately published an action-packed 2009 memoir about his time there called Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. Had Tokyo Vice, the TV series, arrived closer on the heels of Adelstein’s memoir, it may have had an easier time finding its place among the crowded TV landscape. Though the Y2K era may not feel that long ago to some folks *clutches Beanie Babies*, Tokyo Vice is very much a period piece. After the yakuza boss delivers his ultimatum (which amounts to “don’t publish this story, or else”) Tokyo Vice flashes back even further in time to the beginning of its story in 1999, when Jake is fresh out of college and preparing to apply at Tokyo’s premier newspaper, Mainichi Shimbun (a fictional stand in for the real Yomiuri Shinbun). Floppy-haired journalist Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) and Tokyo police detective Hiroto Katagiri (Ken Watanabe) enter into the top floor of a plush Tokyo restaurant to have a meeting – or more accurately be threatened – by the number two figure in a Japanese crime family.

'Tokyo Vice' Episode 1 Recap: Mann Up (Decider)

The real star of the premiere (titled "The Test") is director Michael Mann.

I don’t wanna get myself into “You don’t get paid to think!” cliché territory, but, well, the city of Tokyo is a character in this thing, and it gets a star turn thanks to Mann’s camera. (Other directors will handle subsequent episodes; the series as a whole was created by writer J.T. Rogers, based on the real Adelstein’s book of the same name.) (Hell, Tom Cruise has made a career out of it, including in collaboration with Michael Mann!) There’s none of that logic present in Elgort’s use in Tokyo Vice. Having earlier traced the logo to a vacant office, he now approaches the second dead man’s wife, who explains that he was in deep to loan sharks from the yakuza. Music is maybe the single easiest way to convey the period of your period piece, so a whiff like this really rankles.] On his first full day as a reporter, Adelstein travels to a crime scene where a man has been stabbed to death by a traditional-looking blade.