Hiroto is smart and pragmatic enough to notice that Jake - using his journalism instincts and his American brashness - has gained an entree with the criminals that the police can exploit to head off a brewing gang war. Here we get the pleasure of seeing Watanabe, the powerful Japanese actor familiar to Western audiences from the recent “Godzilla” movies and the 2018 remake of “The King and I,” embody a frustrated detective who is unwilling to take bribes or to stand by while the yakuza conduct business as usual. Luckily, there’s more going on in another triangle, the one involving Jake, the yakuza at large and Hiroto Katagiri, a Japanese cop (Ken Watanabe). Neither the screenplay nor the performers give the Jake-Sato-Samantha situation any heat, however through the five episodes (of eight) available for review, not much has happened, and it’s hard to care whether anything will. One involves Jake, a soulful young yakuza he befriends named Sato (Show Kasamatsu) and a secretive bar hostess to whom they’re both drawn, Samantha (Rachel Keller of “Legion”). The focus, though, is on a pair of more traditionally melodramatic groupings, both romantic in their way. As part of its genre package, “Tokyo Vice” is also an above-average journalism story, and the interplay among Jake, two fellow new hires (Kosuke Tanaka and Takaki Uda) and their editor (Rinko Kikuchi) gives the show a structure and an undercurrent of prickly office comedy. Hostess and host clubs, love hotels, picturesque alleys around the corner from shimmering seas of neon - you know the drill.Īnd like “Lost in Translation,” with its voluptuous, melancholy romanticism, “Tokyo Vice” finesses its exoticism by asserting a distinctive style - in this case the moody, atmospheric naturalism of Michael Mann, who directed the pilot (one of three episodes premiering on Thursday) and helped set the look and rhythms of the series.Īfter opening with a flash-forward to Jake (Ansel Elgort) in a perilous confrontation, the show shifts back to 1999, when he passes the newspaper’s hiring examination.
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It also indulges in a full measure of Western fetishizing of Japanese cool and the notion of Tokyo as the world’s most stylish den of sin, in a way that occasionally recalls the movie “Lost in Translation,” which came out around the time the series is set. It’s a reasonably tasty hand roll of yakuza drama and turn-of-the-millennium American coming-of-age tale, and it is generous with the condiments that combination promises: full-body tattoos and missing fingers, point-and-shoot cameras and bonding over the Backstreet Boys. The concurrent growth of yakuza wealth and power and the rise of radical rightist sentiment causes limited worry by some social commentators.“Tokyo Vice” arrives on HBO Max wrapped in layers of nostalgia, beginning with its title, which sounds like a come-on from Cinemax’s late-night heyday. Many are members of some of the extreme right-wing organizations which cruise through the streets in large sound trucks which blare out demands (‘Return the Northern Territories’, a demand that Russia return four islands seized at the end of World War II) and martial music. They profess the traditional values such as loyalty to their boss, which they express by slicing off the tip of a finger, and strong nationalism. The values and social organization of yakuza are usually very conservative. Former Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru has been attacked for allegedly receiving money donated through the yakuza. As the criminals have moved into more ‘legitimate’ types of business, they have often formed conduits between companies and politicians. They have often relied on yakuza to rough up opponents or protect supporters. Politicians and political parties, especially the conservative ones, have a long relationship with yakuza. Some companies employ the yakuza so that the company is not subjected to extortion or embarrassment by other yakuza or by legitimate stockholders. Companies frequently pay large amounts of money in order to ensure that the yakuza keep quiet, a form of extortion. For example, yakuza have often purchased a small number of stocks in a company and then raised embarrassing issues about the company. They have also moved into sophisticated activities. In the last few decades, yakuza have expanded into drugs and other more serious criminal activity. Recruitment is frequently through gambling or in recent years, motorcycle gangs. They tended to be relatively unaggressive outside of these activities. Until the early 1960s yakuza concentrated on gambling, especially pachinko, and the entertainment industry where prostitution and protection rackets were profitable. For many decades, the yakuza were a relatively minor type of criminal, but in recent decades, they have become more of a problem.
Yakuza are criminals who are organized into criminal organizations somewhat like the Mafia in the US and Italy.
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