“You need to watch this.â€
Tokyo Vice is back. Two years, a couple of industry strikes, and a massive streaming-market shakeup later, the surprise hit Michael Mann production continues the adventures of American reporter Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) and the cops, gangsters, and smooth operators of Tokyo’s criminal underworld. This is another immediate case of must-see TV for the Max-subscriber crowd.Â
And true to form, the season-two premiere picks up right where we left off. Jake has just shown up at Detective Katagiri’s (Ken Watanabe) door, video evidence in hand, sender unknown. Katagiri puts the tape in his VCR and studies the footage. Polina (Ella Rumpf) is being kicked to death onboard the Yoshino (Tozawa’s private “luxury cruise liner,†for very important partners-in-crime only). Jake’s seen enough of Polina’s (alleged) murder, but Katagiri just recognized someone in the video: Jotaro Shigematsu (Hajime Inoue), vice-minister of foreign affairs. A government official they can tie directly to Tozawa.
Just when it seemed the trail had gone cold, a juicy new lead comes into view, bringing higher stakes and graver consequences along with it. Tokyo Vice’s debut season was about “how the system works in this precarious balance of power between the police, the press, and the Yakuza,†as executive producer (and episode director) Alan Poul put it for Entertainment Weekly. “Over the course of season two, you begin to see what happens when it stops working.â€
Katagiri gives Jake the go-ahead to run the story. Meanwhile, he will lift a print off the video’s envelope, connect some dots, and hopefully arrest Tozawa himself when the time is right. At the offices of Meich Shimbun, the senior editorial team mulls over what to do with the tape. Baku (KÅsuke Toyohara) figures they have enough to run with. It’ll be the biggest political scandal in years. He first assigns the article to Emi (Rinko Kikuchi) — punishment for Jake’s getting re-involved in something he was told to back away from — but acquiesces to the suggestion that Jake and Emi work on the piece together.
Things heat up real quick at the vice-minister’s office. Largely thanks to Jake, who can’t help but go Wild West on his interlocutor. Emi, the consummate professional that she is, keeps her cool and lets the vice-minister know that now’s his time to comment before they run the story. He seems unphased. “You’re not the one who killed the girl,†Jake retorts. “You’re being set up by Shinzo Tozawa, who made this tape to blackmail you. Isn’t that right? Give us Tozawa, and we’ll make that clear in the article.†The vice-minister doesn’t take this veiled threat from a “slovenly foreigner†kindly, and Emi shuffles them out in a hurry.
Emi continues to be the Obi-Wan of reporters on this show — not the most powerful or highest-ranking Jedi Master around, but a well-rounded harbinger of her profession’s highest ideals. Jake’s cavalier, classic-American-TV-hero approach isn’t without its merits (dramatically, at least). Threatening a government official was a calculated risk if they want to connect Tozawa to the murder. But they don’t have Tozawa yet, Emi reminds him. “We have the vice-minister, one nameless Yakuza, and another missing woman presumed dead. Who deserves to have her story told.†This seems to get through to Jake, or at least calm him down enough to rethink the scenario. Maybe he can do right by Polina in this story first. Time to deliver the bad news to Samantha (Rachel Keller).
When we last saw Samantha, she’d signed a deal with Hitoshi Ishida (Shun Sugata), Oyabun of the Chihara-kai clan, to finance her new hostess club. She barely has time to react to the news that Polina is presumed dead, her body still missing, when Jake starts asking her for more information. “I was actually hoping that you could tell me a little bit about her. Where she’s from, what brought her here,†he says. “I wanna do right by her in the article. She deserves that. I don’t want her to be another faceless victim.â€
Time is of the essence here, and Jake’s heart seems in the right place. But the one-two punch of finding out you’ve lost a friend from the mouth of another friend who’s then immediately going “work mode†on you over it is understandably too much for Samantha. Her sad, solitary bender ends at the steps of Tokyo’s Atago Jinja Shrine, triggering a memory with Polina. They’re saying a prayer and walking the grounds; Polina tells her a story from her childhood. She’s 10, 11 years old, her grandfather ties her pet sheep, Bella, to a tree, gives her a gun, and tells her to keep watch all night for bears and wolves. Around 3 a.m. along comes a wolf. Bang!†She misses the wolf, but her grandfather, ready and waiting 20 meters away, gets the killing shot. “Best lesson I ever got,†she tells Samantha. “Same for you. You see a wolf, you’d better not miss the shot. Promise me: Don’t ever fucking miss.†(Hey, that’s the name of the episode!) And it bodes ill for anyone on this show who thinks they’re making it the next rung up the ladder without facing some hungry wolves of their own.
Okay, let’s go back a bit and see what’s up with our boy Sato! The last we saw of everyone’s favorite tragic-hot Yakuza sweetheart, he was bleeding in the street, fucking gutted by Gen, one of his own, at clan Chihara-kai. Gen is lounging near the back of the office when Sato’s little brother, Kaito, shows up looking for him with news of their father on his deathbed. Gen keeps quiet and Kaito gets a call from the hospital, where Sato is on the verge of death himself. Kaito arrives a few minutes before the boys from Chihara-kai come rolling in and pick up Sato by force. Gen knows it’s curtains the second Sato wakes up. But the question remains: Was this guy on a simple, petty revenge trip over Sato’s meteoric rise in the ranks? Or is something more sinister afoot?
Either way, he’s backed into a hell of a corner. So he visits Yabuki (Kazuya Tanabe), Tozawa’s right-hand man, presumably in hopes of some mutually beneficial trade of information for protection. But Yabuki brings Gen straight back to the traitor’s boss, Ishida (Shun Sugata), in the trunk of a car no less. Ishida’s been at Sato’s side since his boys brought the poor guy back to home base and got him fixed up in one of these dingy mafia-doctor-type situations. Now he’s got his hands on the turncoat who killed his newfound surrogate son and an audience with his enemy’s senior adviser.
“My Oyabun left the country recently,†Yabuki tells Ishida. “He is very ill.†He claims never to have agreed with Tozawa’s move on Ishida’s territory. Now’s the time to mend fences and hostilities. Returning the traitor is the first step.
It’s hard to know how on the level this conversation really is. Nevertheless, this is good news worth taking at face value. Ishida bids Yabuki a “we’ll be in touch†and gets back to the task at hand. Poor Sato hasn’t been conscious for more than a few seconds when Ishida’s got a blade in his hand and Gen’s throat in a slit position. “No more,†Sato manages to get out. His emotional arc at the end of season one put him on a path of contemplative lamentation. He more or less regrets what he’s chosen for himself, is unable to undo it, and knows the only way forward is to excel. He’ll show temperance and mercy where his peers might not. Contain the collateral damage of his devil’s bargain. With all of that fresh in his foggy mind, oscillating between life and death, he spares Gen’s life.
At the police station, Katagiri gets an envelope with a matchbook from the Apio Hotel inside. “Miyamoto. Room 107,†it reads. He makes his way to the hotel, armed and anxious, to find Miyamoto dead, clearly arranged in a chair with a needle in his arm. Miyamoto was known as something of a risk-taker, but nobody who knew him is buying he’d all of a sudden shoot up meth and risk an overdose.
Katagiri brings the assistant commissioner up to speed on Miyamoto’s mini-undercover operation gone south. He asks the assistant commissioner for a task force and protection for his family to strike back on Tozawa for “killing one of their own.†Um, it’s going to be a “no†on that one. Protecting the organization is a top priority now. It’s time to let sleeping dogs lie and avoid public scandal. “You think this office is going to trust you with a task force after this? The threat against your family. Miyamoto’s death. They’re your fault.â€
Our first sign is that this whole “nail Tozawa†thing isn’t to go as planned. And it’s a bad omen for Jake, who’s celebrating with Trendy and Tin Tin when they get the call there’s been a fire at Meicho. Jake had just hit send on his final draft, naming Misaki (Ayumi Ito) — Tozawa’s mistress and Jake’s current love interest — as the registrar of the Yoshino. Harsh move, but the smart one, and a route to putting Tozawa in the article. But it’s all for naught. A mysterious fire has conveniently destroyed the tape and every copy they’d made of it at the Meicho office.
Jake ends the night over at Katagiri’s, where the two lick their wounds and sip whiskey on the porch. “Tozawa is an octopus,†says Katagiri, “tentacles extending everywhere. Cut off one, another grows in its place.†Tozawa may be gone, but make no mistake, he’s got eyes on our guys. Polita and Miyamoto will have their justice. For now, Katagiri says, they wait. “There are other stories, other crimes to be exposed.†That’s Jake’s job, after all. Both of them are seeing what happens when you go too far outside the bounds of your official job description, smack against the limits of justice, thwarted by the tentacles at the levers of power.
Off the Record
• Before the sun rises again in Tokyo, Katagiri will make an incredibly badass point of not waiting around. No sooner than telling Jake to step back and cool off does he pay a midnight visit to the vice-minister, trading in his double-breasted suit for a vigilante’s black Patagonia. “The next lie out of your mouth, I take a finger.†It turns out that Tozawa was trying to get some help getting off the U.S. no-fly list. “This meeting never happened. If you say otherwise, I’ll come back and kill you.†Hell yeah. Anyway, something tells me this is far from the last we’ll see of our key players saying one thing and meaning or doing the opposite. Acting on instincts, they warn their allies to quell.
• Ken Watanabe remains one of the most mesmerizing actors of all time. Every expression and contemplative twinkle of the eye communicates waves of mood and thought. The way his cigarette quivers in his mouth when he gets the matchbook. The absolute rizz of our guy just sitting on the floor, eighth whiskey in, listening to jazz in a fog of cigarette smoke. You can see the devil’s bargain he’s making with himself before he goes rogue on the vice-minister. Damn, Watanabe’s good.
• Taking a beat to appreciate how awesome it is we’re back here, man. I know I’m not the only one who figured Tokyo Vice would be another fantastic HBO show to end on a cliffhanger and peace out before its time. But fate had other plans, and somehow this show survived all the big reorgs over at Warner Discovery to land another season on the newly minted Max. I’m sure we have the show’s popularity in Japan to thank for that. And we can thank Tokyo for, by all accounts, opening the city up to the show for the season-two shoot. It really sings in the final product.