Joshua Lawrence "Jake" Adelstein (born March 28, 1969) is an American^[1] journalist, crime writer, and blogger who has spent most of his career in Japan. He is the author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, which inspired the 2022 Max original streaming television series Tokyo Vice, starring Ansel Elgort as Adelstein.

Adelstein grew up in Columbia, Missouri and graduated from Rock Bridge High School.^[2] As a teenager he volunteered at KOPN and co-hosted a punk music program on the air. In 1988, he moved to Japan at age 19 to study Japanese literature at Sophia University.^[3]

In 1993, Adelstein became the first non-Japanese staff writer at the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, where he worked for 12 years.^[4]

After leaving the Yomiuri, Adelstein published an exposé of how an alleged crime boss, Tadamasa Goto, made a deal with the FBI to gain entry to the United States for a liver transplant at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2009, Adelstein published a memoir about his career as a reporter in Japan, Tokyo Vice, in which he accused Goto of threatening to kill him over the story.^[5] An April 2022 article by The Hollywood Reporter raised doubts about the veracity of the events described in the memoir.^[6] In November 2022, Esquire reported that Adelstein had released via Twitter a folder of source materials which he claimed supported his versions of events.^[7]

Adelstein was subsequently a reporter for a United States Department of State investigation into human trafficking in Japan,^[8] and now writes for the Daily Beast,^[9] Vice News, The Japan Times^[10] and other publications. He is a board member and advisor to the Lighthouse: Center for Human Trafficking Victims (formerly Polaris Project Japan).^[11]

On April 19, 2011, Adelstein filed a lawsuit against National Geographic Television, which had hired him to help make a documentary about the yakuza, citing ethical problems with their behavior in Japan.^[12][13] However, the court dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning the plaintiff is barred from bringing that claim in another court.^[14]

• Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. New York City: Pantheon Books. 2009. ISBN 978-0-307-37879-8. OCLC 699874898.
• Operation Tropical Storm: How an FBI Jewish-Japanese Special Agent Snared a Yakuza Boss in Hawaii (Kindle Single) ASIN B00Z7DUV7W June 7, 2015 ^[15]
• Pay the Devil in Bitcoin: The Creation of a Cryptocurrency and How Half a Billion Dollars of It Vanished from Japan. New York City: Pantheon Books. 2017.
• The Last Yakuza: A Life in the Japanese Underworld. New York City: Pantheon Books. 2023.

• Tokyo Vice Goes on Sale October 14th
• Adelstein, Jake (April 12, 2022). "Tokyo Vice's Jake Adelstein: Everything You Wanted To Know (But Were Mildly Afraid To Ask)". Unseen Japan. Retrieved March 24, 2024.
• How I escaped the Japanese gangsters who wanted to kill me : Jake Adelstein thetimes.co.uk
• Hard Lessons Learned From Tough People Jake Adelstein at TEDxKyoto 2012