Tokyo Vice
Funny and heartbreaking, the story of an American Jew who studied in Japan and worked as a reporter for a prestigious newspaper (as a gaijin, this is an extremely remarkable feat in itself) and exposed some high-ranking members of the yakuza.
I was learning a lot from Sekiguchi, most important that it’s the time you take when it seems unimportant that is the most important time of all. Sekiguchi, whenever he put a yakuza in jail, would always pay a visit to the guy’s family. He’d check up on them periodically, sometimes even buy them groceries or help the wife with house repairs. He would contact the yakuza in the “pig house” (a euphemism for jail, not a typographical error) and let him know how things were going at home. He never made the crime and the criminal a personal thing. He was doing his job, and they were doing theirs.
