Thank You For The Kind Letters About TOKYO VICE (from Jake)

Scott-san,

I should have followed in your footsteps, perhaps. 🙂 . Well, I would have been a lousy cop, never was good at following the rules. I’m glad, in a funny way, that there’s someone else grieving for her. I hope she’s made peace with her life as it was on earth and moved on the next realm–that she’s not trapped in the realm of hungry ghosts. Sometimes, I sort of believe that such a realm exists.

No, I never read her email. I don’t think I ever will. I don’t think I could live with any more remorse than I have now. I’m just not that strong.

I hesitate to compare my book to a video game, but after having played through the very-well scripted and thought out “Yakuza 3” (The original Japanese title 龍が如く３)–it made me think that it was important the book started where it did. To understand anything or anyone, you have to take the time to know where they came from and where they want to go. I think so.
One of the interesting choices the makers of Yakuza 3 do is force you to spend time running an orphanage as an ex-yakuza and getting to know the kids and locals. In that way, they make you emotionally invested in the dilemma the protagonist (and you the player) will face later in the game.
I wasn’t aiming for the same thing but I did want to make the reader understand Japan the way I learned to understand Japan. It wasn’t easy to remember what I used not to know.
I’m glad that the suffering the seedier factions of the yakuza inflict on the world came through in the pages. I feel that I may have glorified certain aspects of their society without sufficiently communicating the harm and mayhem they produce as well.
If the book made you feel like you were in my shoes and walking around Japan, than I’m honored. I was hoping it would do that for some people. I also hope that you learned something from the book that stays with you.
That book may be the best thing I will ever write. I’m perfectly content with that, if that’s the case.

“Find a job that you love and you will never work again”–quote tributed to Mencius, Chinese philosopher

Tay-san,
You’ve written a very honest well-thought out letter and it merits a real reply. I can visualize you on that bus, and I understand how that feels. At 24, I was working for the Yomiuri Shinbun, and even though the early days were extremely rough—I was happy because I was doing something that I wanted to do. It wasn’t easy getting there. I studied Japanese very hard in college, and I didn’t have an aptitude for it. Even before getting hired, I spent a year preparing for the entrance examinations to the newspaper and that involved hours of study every day and every night. Between working weird jobs.

The thing about a memoir and also about movies is that it compacts all the exciting stuff into a tight-fitting package. The day to day experiences of the job were grueling, difficult, and often boring. In the early days as a reporter, we were over-loaded with meinial tasks, the most horrible being typing up local sports results–which had to be done in a very complicated pattern to be processed by our archaic work terminals and which I felt few people ever read. I once spent three days following around a monkey in a high-yen neighborhood in Tokyo because that had become “the story” of the moment. I was once told to stand in front of a hospital where a relative of the emperor was ill and keep a look out for “something unusual” and left there for almost eighteen hours.

Figuring out how Goto Tadamasa got past Customs and into the United States for his liver transplant involved wading through a gigabyte of leaked police materials–one page at a time. I’m working on a second book now about Yakuza in the business world, “The Nine Fingered Economy” and a great deal of it involves looking at real estate deeds, company registration, cross-referencing newspaper articles, and typing in data to make connections. The interviewing people part is the exciting part and fun but there is some seriously brain-numbingly boring work involved. But at the end of the day, I’m still doing work that I enjoy and means something to me, so it doesn’t really feel like work. My work is my life, my hobby, my reason for existing. Of course, friends and loved ones are a huge part of that life as well. Finding a balance isn’t easy.

Sometimes, we all have to endure a lot of crap to get where we want to be in life. Academic life seems like an elaborate form of hazing at times because most of what you really need to know is learned on the job. I couldn’t tell you if your writing is good enough for a national newspaper. Getting a job as a reporter is difficult, surving on the terribly salary even more difficult, and not getting burnt out as you watch your workload increase while your pay decreases is almost impossible. Its almost impossible but not if you believe in what you’re doing and you have the support of some good friends. (What exactly is a good friend–that’s another question in and of itself). Most of what we do at any job means nothing, is rarely helpful, and often even damaging to the world. I think the Buddhist idea of Right Livelihood is certainly something to consider–it’s why it’s part of the eightfold noble path, but it’s also something everyone should consider. If you’re not doing any harm to the world by your work, that’s not so bad. However, if you don’t enjoy it–if it’s not what you really want to do, then I’d encourage you to take the risk of failing and try to do what it is that you want to do. And you need to ask yourself why you want to do that. “I want to write because I like writing and communicating” isn’t a bad reason. Follow your bliss.

However, if you want to write because you want to become famous then you have to ask yourself, “Why do I want to become famous? Why do I need recognition and approval from the world?” But back to your question. If you want to be a writer, remember the three rules of writing that Robert Heinlein once stated, and I’m paraphrasing: 1. You must write (and write often until you improve). 2. You must finish what you write. 3. You must sell what you write.

We all have to work. Crunching data for a heartless company sounds hellish. I might suggest you read a good book about Zen Buddhism and try to turn it into a meditational exercise. In any event, if its not a job you love, start planning a way to find the work you’d like to do, that would be meaningful for you. You may fail at this the first time around but persist. Work is 70%-90% of our adult lives. It should be a good experience and the ideal is as Mencius says, to find a job that you love so you never really “work” again.
Good luck.

Vince-san,
I really appreciate letters like this. Well, Tokyo Vice isn’t a perfect book but I wanted to capture some universal truths about life and better ways to muddle through it. The loss of one loved one is devastating to the people who knew them. It’s a sobering thing to realized that everyone we love will eventually be taken away from us or we from them. Everything that has a beginning has an ending. It’s not always easy to make peace with that.
I’d like to believe that karma exists in this world or the next because it certainly seems that justice does not prevail. Maybe all we can hope to do is set the balance a little better and take care of and try to contribute to the happiness of the people in our lives.
I’ve had some positive influence in the world, some, and there’s solace in that. The good deeds we have done and the memories others have us are all we really get to leave behind.
Best wishes to you as well.

jake