Adelstein’s media career launch through ‘right-wing’ newspaper owned by CIA asset: Stage I, liftoff

This post continues to introduce Adelstein, examining his background through various articles and the start of his media career in Japan.

Stage I, liftoff

The first event that shows up as a significant blip on the radar in tracking the assent of the CIA’s launch of Adelstein into his mass media celebrity orbit was having him hired—under false pretenses through CIA network nepotism—at the Daily Yomiuri (stage 1). The Yomiuri (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yomiuri_Shimbun) is a newspaper that had been owned by CIA asset and former class A war criminal Matsutaro Shoriki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsutar%C5%8D_Sh%C5%8Driki). Shoriki had been jailed as a WWII Class-A War Criminal (http://www.economist.com/news/christmas/21568589-media-mogul-whose-extraordinary-life-still-shapes-his-country-good-and-ill-japans) and was subsequently granted clemency—along with current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishsi (a former PM and Nixon cohort)—at the behest of the CIA. Recently, Adelstein himself described his former employer in a recent piece published by the Guardian where he can be seen to be performing a damage-control role for the CIA in relation to information I’ve disclosed in the lawsuit (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/11/japanese-emperor-akihito-has-feelings-too), “the Yomiuri, a rightwing newspaper that is also the biggest in Japan”. Adelstein didn’t mention his former affiliation in the Guardian article. In a piece by Adelstein from several years ago (http://www.japansubculture.com/how-the-cia-helped-put-the-yakuza-and-the-ldp-in-power/) that mentions Shoriki and his work for the CIA:

Operations in Japan turned out to be one of the Agency’s rare success stories. Not only did the CIA put their party of choice in power, according the book 原発 正力 CIA-機密文書で読む昭和裏面史 (What Secret Documents Tell Us About The Hidden Showa-Era History of Ties Between the Nuclear Industry, Matustaro Shoriki–the former president of the Yomiuri Shimbun and founder of Nippon Television) published by Shinchosha, but using the Japanese media, they were able to convince Japan to invest in nuclear energy.

[] Full Disclosure Memo: In the worst of the Japanese press and blogosphere, I’ve been accused of being an agent of the CIA several times.

The link to that page is dead (http://www.nikaidou.com/archives/1889), as the blog post was removed (for some unknown reason), but it was archived (http://web.archive.org/web/20141009044827/http://www.nikaidou.com/archives/1889), and a cursory inline translation of the slangish Japanese text is as follows.

元読売新聞のジェイクはCIA

The Daily Yomiuri’s Jake is CIA.

「家の都合で実家に帰る」といって会社を辞めたのになぜか日本にいて、後藤組の話（FBIと裏取引）をスクープした。

He claimed he was quitting his job to “return to American due to family reasons”, so why did he stay in Japan and scoop the story about the Goto syndicate (and the FBI behind the scenes deal).

奴はＣＩＡ職員です。家もとんでもないところにあったもの。FBIはメンツ丸つぶれだったもの。

The guy is a CIA officer. His house was in an unimaginably ridiculous place. The FBI was completely disgraced by the story.

それにしても、CIAは偉いね。ちゃんとああいうのを読売新聞みたいな所に入社させておくんだもんね。用がないのか中にほかの草を作ったのか知らないけど、やめたということはそれなりに違うミッションがあるんでしょうな。読売の情報もＣＩＡに筒抜け。

Nevertheless, the CIA is really something else. They can set someone like that up with a position in a company of the likes of the Yomiuri. I don’t know whether they didn’t need him anymore, or whether they had set up another plant in his place, but it’s clear they had another mission for him. The Yomiuri’s information is being leaked.

Unfortunately, the Japanese blogger hadn't discovered that Shoriki was actually a CIA "asset", as disclosed by the CIA in documents declassified in 2005:

• https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/SHORIKI%2C%20MATSUTARO%20%20%20VOL.%203_0027.pdf 
• https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/SHORIKI%2C%20MATSUTARO%20%20%20VOL.%202_0019.pdf

The piece on nuclear power is from December 2012, but Adelstein failed to mention that others, including foreign professional in Tokyo, had suspected and claimed he was CIA, as reported in a lengthy piece about him that appeared in the New Yorker in February, 2012:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/09/all-due-respect

In that piece, Peter Hessler, a writer that claims to have attended the same high school as Adelstein, states:

Some people in town have trouble taking Adelstein seriously. They dismiss him as a crank, a paranoid foreigner who talks obsessively about death threats from the gangsters known as yakuza. Others react with suspicion; a number of people in Japan claim that his journalism is a front for C.I.A. work.

Hessler also seems to mock Adelstein’s claims as to being under police protection, which include the outlandish assertion that the Japanese police would essential report to Adelstein daily, leaving him little notes:

[] currently lives in central Tokyo under police protection. 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.

and describes another pertinent yet highly implausible circumstance of Adelstein's ascent as follows:

Adelstein himself makes a number of contradictory and revealing claims about the Japanese authorities, but I will leave those aside for the moment.

Journalist Chris Beck wrote an article criticizing the English language media hype about an impending yakuza war, addressing Adelstein’s articles as a prime motivator (http://www.splicetoday.com/pop-culture/japanese-gangsters-cancel-halloween-in-japan), and Adelstein retaliated by sending a letter to Beck’s editor accusing him of “trolling” and taking revenge by writing under an assumed identity (http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/journalist-in-japan-sends-weird-email-to-my-editor). First, Beck’s original article included the following:

Emiko Jozuka, writing for Motherboard, informs us that a yakuza outpost in the city of Kobe will break a 10-year tradition of handing out bags of candy to local children. Actually, Jozuka's not really sure why they cancelled it, but a Japanese tabloid speculated that this was the reason. The Telegraph, Daily Beast, The Guardian, Yahoo News, and International Business Times all ran similar stories.

The cancellation of Halloween in Kobe will be forgotten, however, as soon as the yakuza start dropping bombs on each other with drones and shooting with 3-D printed guns. Tokyo-based correspondent Jake Adelstein—who also wrote a Yakuza Halloween story himself—reported for VICE that the police were preparing for such innovative tactics. His source: an anonymous detective with the Hyogo Police Department. "So even if a gang has no weapons on hand, they just need the right equipment. Print, kill, melt the gun," the VICE article quotes the detective. "Those new guns will be hard to trace…. Escalation could be very fast and very bloody."

Fast and bloody escalation of violence with drones dropping bombs from the sky! Hey, I used to live in Japan back in the 1990s, when things were safe, but it looks like I made the right decision returning to the US, where all we have to deal with are frequent killings by police, daily gun deaths, and mass shootings. I’m being sarcastic, because I don't know how else to react, given the breathless reporting on this forthcoming "war," much of it coming from Adelstein, who also wrote similar articles about it for CNN, The Japan Times, and the Daily Beast. The latter’s article is headlined The Coming Yakuza War, but I'll go on the record as saying this war is not coming. Drones won't be dropping bombs from the sky either, and nobody will be killed by a 3-D printed gun.
[]

In his CNN piece, Adelstein wrote, "The possibility of the gang war reigniting frightens the general public considerably." I don't know where he got such information. Maybe from the usual "anonymous sources," like the Hyogo cop. None of the people I know who live in Japan have said such a fear existed among the public.

The piece Beck wrote in response to Adelstein—which I won’t quote from now due to time constraints—linked to the following thread about Adelstein on Reddit, from September, 2015 (https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/3lnpt6/is_jake_adelstein_a_good_source_for_investigative/), a number of people sound off about Adelstein and his fraudulent ascent. 

One relevant point made is this:

Adelstein claimed that he scored better than many Japanese college graduates on the Yomiuri entrance exams, which were in Japanese, after only 4 years of studying Japanese. That's not possible. The truth is that Adelstien received a personal introduction to the Yomiuri from the president of Sophia university.

[] I heard about the introduction from someone who heard it directly from the President of Sophia. The President there is probably not going on the record about it, so it's just hearsay, but regardless, one thing is for sure, no mortal foreign human being can score better than Japanese college graduates on company entrance exams that are in Japanese. Jake hangs himself on this point in his own book where he described his Japanese skills as up to a 7th grade level about a year into the job. This would be excellent language progress after 4 years of study and better than most. He got into the Yomiuri through a back door introduction and not through the front door with competitive language exams.

Yeah, I just listened to the audio book version and in it he talks about how one of his interviewers mentioned that they had previously associated with one of Jake's teachers at Sophia. To me it was pretty clear that he was out and out saying that a large factor of getting through the rigorous interviews at the Yomiuri was due to that connection.

As someone who had been fluent in Korean beforehand (grammatically nearly identical to Japanese) and who passed the top level of the Japanese language proficiency test after studying for three years, which was faster than a person that majored in Japanese at UC Berkeley, there is no question that the above comments are correct. Hessler touches on this totally implausible point in the New Yorker article as well:

He learned Japanese so quickly that within five years of studying the language he had passed the three-part exam to become a police reporter for Tokyo's Yomiuri Shimbun. Adelstein is believed to be the first American ever to make it through the newspaper's rigorous exam system.

Moreover, it is absolutely absurd to believe that Adelstein was put in a position of responsibility to cover organized crime on his own in the Tokyo Metropolitan area as an American in his mid-20s with half-crocked proficiency in Japanese. As another comment mentions, his book contains no bibliography whatsoever:

Adelstein and his publisher declared Tokyo Vice "non-fiction," but it has no bibliography and is in fact a "fake memoir." Adelstein embeds lies, which are mainly inserting himself into the action, among a lot of real events and news stories about them.

Adelstein commented on that thread, and attacked the person who posted some of the above comments. Here is the last exchange in the thread.

[–]jakeadelstein -1 points 11 months ago
I have issues with a troll who says that female prison guards are "begging to be raped". http://streetfights.org/?p=1835 Creepy. 低俗で男尊女卑の考え方ですね。この方の実名はまだ知りませんが、虫酸が走る.
Yaesu Kita says: February 26, 2014 at 9:02 pm "What is a women doing in the middle of all of those guys, many of whom are psychopaths with little to lose? It’s a situation for just begging for a rape."
---😡 Wow. Maybe you're just a sexist. Blame the woman, of course--you would.
[–]yaesukita 8 points 11 months ago
Wow Jake! Your response to all those accusations about the lies in your book is to troll the Internet for a quote that might put the messenger in a bad light? I do not have any memory of ever seeing that video, and I've never been on that Web site in my life. If I had seen that video it would have been on Youtube where I could find it on a search just now. But I could not find those comments. My first thought was that you had somehow put the comments there yourself but it seems it would have been hard to backdate. I think you've got a different Yaesu Kita user. As for the comment itself, it's kind of a common sense comment, i.e., in other words it's dangerous for a woman to be working in a prison like that. You are trying to twist it as if someone said a woman dressing like that deserved to be raped. In any case, it's nonsense. I didn't write it and you're trying to deflect attention away from your own lies. I guess you don't have much of a defense do you?
[–]Silvasbluepills 7 points 11 months ago
He just proved what every single person on this thread has been saying about him.
He's a shitty journalist, who twists the truth to fuck over others and to make himself look good.

That is as far as I can get with this today.

Stage 2 will be next.