Reading · Tokyo Paladin with Jake Adelstein

“Honey, We Bought a Website.”

Yes, that’s really the title of this article. And yes, it’s true.

After more than thirty years looking into organized crime, I’ve started to think the most stubborn crooks targeting me aren’t the yakuza — they’re the endless stream of scammers pretending to be literary agents, editors, and other writers. They all email from plain Gmail addresses. At some point you notice the pattern: no real published author, actual literary agent, or working journalist emails from something like AndersonCooper.60minutes@gmail.com or MichikoJKakutani@aol.com. If a Gmail address is attached to someone claiming those jobs, the odds are they’re a con artist, not a colleague.

So the fix seemed simple: get an email address on my own domain — something that looked like it belonged to a real person with real work behind them, not a phishing setup. When I went to register jakeadelstein.com, it turned out someone had been sitting on it for years and forgot to renew. It was just… available. So I bought it.

That’s how, not purely by accident, but with intention, I ended up with a website. Having a website now almost seems wonderfully analog. Like having a MySpace page or a blog. But you know what? It’s useful. Welcome to it. Below is a guide to everything I’ve written, made, and am working on now. It’s a work in progress. Suggestions welcome!

The books are listed in chronological order from the latest to the first (#TokyoVice).

About Jake Adelstein (me) (from the landing page)

Code Blue is our next book. The first book I’ve written that has nothing to do with Japan and is a sort of homecoming to a land that has grown stranger to me in the years away—but also a place where my father taught we what was important in life. And in death.

Jake Adelstein has been an investigative journalist in Japan since 1993, reporting in both Japanese and English. From 2006 to 2007 he was the chief investigator for a US State Department-sponsored study of human trafficking in Japan. He has been writing for The Daily Beast, The Japan Times, Unseen Japan, ZAITEN (Japan) Tempura Magazine (France) and other publications since 2011, and was a special correspondent for The Los Angeles Times. Considered one of the foremost experts on organized crime in Japan, he works internationally as a writer and consultant.

Adelstein has appeared as a commentator on CNN, The Daily Show, NPR, the BBC, France 24, and other media outlets.

He is the author of the book Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter On The Police Beat in Japan, which became a hit series with two seasons on HBO Max, and also The Last Yakuza: Life And Death In The Japanese Underworld (2023). He co-hosted and co-wrote the award-winning podcast about missing people in Japan, The Evaporated: Gone With The Gods in 2023. His latest true crime podcast, Night Shift, investigating a series of mysterious patient deaths at the VA Hospital in his Missouri hometown in the 1990s, was released by Sony Music on September 1, 2024 and quickly reached the number 1 spot on Apple’s top podcast charts. Adelstein’s book, Tokyo Noir: In and Out of Japan’s Underworld, a memoir and sequel to Tokyo Vice which further sheds light on the dark side of Japan, came out on October 1, 2024. This was followed by The Devil Takes Bitcoin: Cryptocurrency Crimes and the Japanese Connection in October of 2025. His latest book, Code Blue: the Serial Killer, the Cover-Up, and a Two-Generation Quest for Justice, will be released on February 9, 2027.

Follow Jake Adelstein on social media:

Instagram: @tokyovice

X(Twitter): @jakeadelstein

Substack: Tokyo Paladin

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Honey, We Bought A Website. The creation of "JakeAdelstein.com" was a necessity in a world of AI generated literary scams with Gmail galore.

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