Another American in Japan, hoping to learn how it all works from Ken Watanabe: It seems Tom Cruise was just the second-to-last samurai. Now we get Ansel Elgort, tall and lanky and pale, easy to spot in a crowd in Tokyo Vice. With Michael Mann as an executive producer, and director of the first episode, HBO’s new thriller is slick, swift, and surprisingly substantial. It doesn’t play for mere touristy kicks, perhaps because of the abundance of Japanese talent in front of and behind the camera. This is a lived-in Tokyo, from the noirish streets to the high-end karaoke clubs where young yakuza unwind.
Based on Jake Adelstein’s nonfiction account of writing for the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, where he worked for 12 years, Tokyo Vice bears many hallmarks of the Mann style, from cool blues and grays to macho life-or-death showdowns. The violence can get gruesome, especially among the honor-bound yakuza whom Jake wants so much to infiltrate. But there’s no cheap xenophobia in Tokyo Vice, no Rising Sun-style exoticism. Jake is as much a mark as a savior. Eager to show he belongs in a world that doesn’t take to outsiders easily (“gaijin” might as well be his official name in the newsroom), Jake gets used by cops and crooks alike. If he’s a hero, he’s also a chump.
Jake has a counterpart in Samantha (Rachel Keller), an American hostess at one of those high-end karaoke clubs. Rachel has her own hustle: She came to Tokyo as a missionary, fell in love with the grind of the city, and ended up stealing a big chunk of change from her church. Now she’s a wanted woman, trying to use that cash to open her own club and looking over her shoulder for the debt collector. Samantha is more street-smart than Jake — she’s been around longer and knows how to play the angles. Keller gives her a premature world-weariness, a cynicism that makes her comfortable among the lowlifes Jake chases for a living.
Meanwhile, as Elgort and Keller play fish out of water, a native steals the show. Show Kasamatsu plays the young yakuza Sato with the brooding, laconic intensity of a young Brando or Dean. In love with Samantha, intrigued by Jake, beholden to gangsters, he saunters through the bloodbath of Tokyo Vice with a mix of swagger and vulnerability, his conscience trying to poke through the rubble. Sato is the series’s pivot point, its reluctant moral compass. Whatever “it” is, Kasamatsu has it. Expect to see him soon, starring on this side of the ocean.
Tone is crucial to Tokyo Vice. The least bit of Mr. Moto stereotyping could have toppled this thing to the ground. Thankfully safeguards were taken, starting with the cast and the crew. The directors include Josef Kubota Wladyka and Hikari. Watanabe, Kayo Washio, and Ken Tajima are among the producers. The cast is stocked with top-flight Japanese acting talent. Subtitles are the rule, not the exception. There’s a homegrown integrity to Tokyo Vice, baked into the show at the most fundamental level. It’s a model for any such series that seeks to do more than drop into Japan for a mere visit or use the country as an exotic backdrop.
Jake has two police father figures in his adopted land (he has little use for his real father, back home in Missouri). One is Watanabe’s Hiroto Katagiri, a patient, frowning, stoic detective who emphasizes the long game of building relationships over the mirage of the quick bust, no matter how big it seems. The other is Jin Miyamoto (Hideaki Ito), who’s a little worn out by the whole thing. He makes arrests with one hand, washes a yakuza kingpin’s back with the other, and does his best to do as Jake Gittes suggests in Chinatown: “as little as possible.” Both find Jake useful — his naivete makes him an easy target for misdirection. Not that the police are always looking to make a difference. “Our job is to clear cases,“ scolds Katagiri’s superior, sounding more than a little like a middle management cop from David Simon’s The Wire.
Aside from the police, two other institutions fall under the microscope of Tokyo Vice. One is the yakuza, elaborately tattooed, demanding of their subordinates, driven by amoral honor. Shun Sugata plays the elder crime boss, Ishida, and Ayumi Tanida is his younger, more reckless rival, Tozawa, who seems to be involved in a recent string of suicides. Then there’s the fourth estate, represented here by the fictional, high-profile newspaper Meicho Shimbun, where Jake works. Top management at Meicho doesn’t want to ruffle feathers, but Jake’s immediate boss, played by Rinko Kikuchi (an Oscar nominee for 2006’s Babel), is the kind of editor reporters dream of: firm but supportive, willing to color outside the lines to get the story. Jake bristles a bit at the newspaper’s strict style rules — and at the unwritten rules for taking it easy on the rich and powerful. (In U.S. newsrooms, we call them “sacred cows.”) But he gradually finds his place after a couple of early humiliations.
Tokyo Vice deserves credit for pushing well beyond its white-boy-abroad premise. At its best, it presents a complicated dance between organized crime, law enforcement, and the journalists scurrying to make sense of it all. Jake is our surrogate, the outsider with more questions than answers, initially more assured than he has any reason to be until the picture gets blurrier and he gets less cocky. Elgort is cast well for these purposes. He’s kind of a blank slate on which viewers can project their ignorance of how things are done here, a squirt of ketchup in a wasabi world.
Chris Vognar is a culture writer living in Houston.
