Spoilers follow for “Endgame,†the second season finale of Tokyo Vice that premiered on Max on April 4.Â
Ansel Elgort’s Jake Adelstein is not always the best friend, lover, colleague, son, or brother. He’s too busy trying to be the best yakuza reporter in Tokyo, an effort the Max series Tokyo Vice has used to make Jake its middle man between the (very stylish and cool) gangs running the city’s underworld and the (also very stylish and cool) cops trying to bring them down. In season finale “Endgame,†Jake finally bags the story he’s been chasing for two seasons, an exposé that reveals the shady dealings of a gang leader who threatened Jake and his allies. But the biggest byline of Jake’s career is the result of a series of concessions to the two sides of the criminal divide, and the version he publishes is not exactly the full story.
Tokyo Vice is a great gangster show, full of references and homages to The Godfather, The Departed, Eastern Promises, The Irishman, and Heat. But it’s also a great journalism show, a well-rounded entry in HBO and Max’s history of series about the industry — less rushed than The Wire season five, not as smug as The Newsroom, more tonally consistent than The Girls on the Bus. In complicating Jake’s ethics as a journalist, Tokyo Vice finds a thought-provoking balance between its appreciation for the industry’s power and a cynical awareness of how easily it can be limited by the more powerful.
Since its Michael Mann-directed premiere, the series (adapted from the real Adelstein’s same-named 2009 memoir) has used American-expat reporter Jake as our entry point into Japan’s capital city circa 1999. Jake works at the fictionalized Meicho Shimbun newspaper, where he’s supervised by senior investigative reporter and editor Emi Maruyama (Rinko Kikuchi), the rare woman in a male-dominated profession. (More on her later.) In his capacity as a reporter, Jake grows close to the unflinching detective Hiroto Katagiri (Ken Watanabe), who believes that balance among the various yakuza gangs must be maintained to keep Tokyo safe and running smoothly. And in his capacity as just a 20-something dude who hangs out at various clubs, he connects with fellow American Sam (Rachel Keller), a hostess at an establishment favored by the yakuza, including up-and-coming Chihara-Kai member Sato (Show Kasamatsu, single-handedly making smoking sexy again). Sato gets taken under the wing of clan leader Ishida (Shun Sugata) when he saves him from an assassination attempt by rival gangster Tozawa (Ayumi Tanida), and Tozawa becomes Jake’s enemy, too, when he and Emi learn that his clan is causing a rash of suicides related to bad loans. (Jake starting an affair with Tozawa’s mistress Misaki, played by Ayumi Ito, also complicates things.)
All of these interpersonal relationships become a network of sources for Jake as he runs around Tokyo chasing down leads and frantically taps away at his boxy computer in the Meicho newsroom. His alliances with Katagiri and Sato, two sources with their own specific perspectives on how the yakuza system should work, result in Jake fully absorbing the idea that yakuza are so ingrained in Japanese life they can’t be eradicated, but should follow an honorable code. That ideology guides his reporting, and in season two, it increasingly puts him at odds with Emi.
Emi doesn’t disagree with Jake’s desire to bring down Tozawa, and when someone in the newsroom destroys a videotape with evidence of Tozawa’s relationship with Japan’s Minister of Transport and their roles in killing a young woman, she realizes the Meicho is somehow caught up in the oyabun’s grasp, too. But Emi wonders whether Jake wants to bring down Tozawa because he thinks it’s his responsibility as a reporter to effect change, or because Tozawa killed Sato’s mentor Ishida and one of Sam’s friends, threatened Misaki, and tried to assassinate Katagiri’s wife and daughters. Emi is coolly analytical, pragmatic about verifying the information leaked to Jake, and level-headed where he’s not, performatively abiding by Japan’s cultural rules of politeness and hierarchy, but committed to finding the truth without any of Jake’s cowboy shit.
That cowboy shit is on full display in “Endgame,†which primarily centers Jake, Katagiri, and Sato working together to confirm that Tozawa was an informant for the FBI, and Katagiri, with Jake’s knowledge, leaking the information to Sato so he can share it with the other yakuza oyabun, ensuring Tozawa’s death at their hands. “Your paper did not stop him. The police did not stop him. There are times when the right choice is not the moral choice,†Katagiri says to Jake; his pessimism about the corruption of both the newspaper industry and the criminal-justice system is infectious, and his alliance with Sato to bring down Tozawa is expedient. Katagiri, Jake, and Sam wait outside a restaurant where Tozawa is forced by Sato and the other oyabun to kill himself. When Sato exits flashing a peace sign, it’s time for Katagiri and Jake to go in, and for Jake to once again acquiesce to Katagiri’s plan for how this story should be handled: “There is the version you have lived. And there is the version you will write,†Katagiri says, and Jake puts down his camera. Later, in the season’s final scene and some time after Tozawa’s death, Jake shows Katagiri his story, with the headline “Deceased Yakuza Boss Had Secret Deal with FBI.†Katagiri working with Sato to end Tozawa’s reign presumably isn’t part of that story, and won’t ever be public knowledge.
Should we disrespect Jake for all this compromise? Tokyo Vice doesn’t necessarily push that angle. He does his best to protect his sources and to share the perspectives of society’s forgotten and pushed-aside people; if anything, the series wants us to focus on how young and overzealous he is, and how he cares too much. He might not be a journalist forever, and his subjectivity is obvious, but his intentions are good. And to counter all the accommodations the series makes for Jake, it provides in Emi the type of investigator and editor Jake could grow to be.
The contrast in Jake and Emi’s journalistic perspectives come through in the different stories they champion in “Endgame†and how they report them. While Jake is working with Katagiri and Sato to ensnare Tozawa (changing the story to get the story), Emi is methodically trying to prove a financial connection between him and Transport Minister Jotaro Shigematsu (Hajime Inoue), now next in line to be prime minister (chasing the story to get the story). And while Jake accepts his mentor Katagiri dictating terms for how his journalism will function, Emi refuses to let her mentor, Meicho national news desk editor Ozaki (BokuzŠMasana), dictate similar terms for her. When Emi goes to Ozaki with evidence that definitively links Tozawa and Shigematsu, he congratulates her and promises her a promotion — but also refuses to publish her work. He had previously told her of Tozawa, “I want you and your team to follow any lead that could help bring that monster down,†but now admits he destroyed the videotape implicating Shigematsu to protect the paper’s connections to the government. He’ll leak her new evidence to allies within the power structure to sideline Shigematsu, but he won’t authorize the Meicho printing what they’ve proved. The cost, Ozaki says, is too high. “No access to sources. No access to the truth. How would that serve our readers?,†he asks Emi, sending Kikuchi’s face into a paroxysm of agony and shock.
Unlike Jake, who accepts what Katagiri tells him about a tweaked story serving a specific purpose, Emi isn’t buying what Ozaki tries to sell her about what the Meicho owes its readers. She had previously told Jake that if he had a problem with “the Meicho doing its job … you need to work somewhere else,†and now she considers her own advice, taking the Tozawa and Shigematsu story to the magazine Shukan Forum, a rival to the Meicho. When Jake’s story about Tozawa finally runs, it’s there (mirroring how Adelstein actually broke the story about gangsters’ U.S.-conducted liver transplants in May 2008 not in the Japanese newspaper he had previously worked for, Tokyo’s Yomiuri Shimbun, but in The Washington Post).
Tokyo Vice doesn’t tell us how much this piece includes about the relationship between Tozawa and Shigematsu, the information which so scared Ozaki that he literally burned evidence and figuratively burned two of his employees to hide it. But it also doesn’t need to. The parallels between Emi and Jake, and their relationships with Ozaki and Katagiri, are precise enough to let us understand the complicated role journalism plays in a society where law and order are compromised by so much — by the yakuza and their money, by the failures of the police, by the rigidity of the government — and to encourage us to consider whether the journalistic expectation of objectivity can realistically function in such a system. Through Emi, we understand the ideals of this industry, and we understand the professional and personal risks she takes by sticking to those principles instead of caving; through Jake, we understand that a cop-approved version of events isn’t exactly impartial, but a reflection of journalism as a series of negotiations that sometimes dirty the hands of those who should keep theirs clean. Yet “Endgame†abstains from positioning Emi as some wide-eyed naïf or Jake as a scheming opportunist, because more than anything, it’s nostalgic for when journalism was robust enough to support various approaches, and clear-eyed about how the power of the written word can always be tempered by those who allow it to be published.