He’s in his early forties, and he wears a trenchcoat and a porkpie hat, and he chain-smokes clove cigarettes from Indonesia. Adelstein does little to dismiss such rumors, apart from maintaining an image so flamboyant that it would shame any actual agency man. Others react with suspicion a number of people in Japan claim that his journalism is a front for C.I.A. They dismiss him as a crank, a paranoid foreigner who talks obsessively about death threats from the gangsters known as yakuza. Some people in town have trouble taking Adelstein seriously. Japanese police protection means that the cops make daily visits to Adelstein’s home, where they leave yellow notes that say, “There was nothing out of the ordinary.” The notes feature the Tokyo police mascot, Pipo-kun, a smiling cartoon figure with big mouse ears and an antenna jutting out of its forehead. One of the foremost experts on Japanese organized crime is Jake Adelstein, who grew up on a farm in Missouri, worked as the only American on the crime beat for Japan’s largest newspaper, and currently lives in central Tokyo under police protection.
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