There were many ways in which the much-feared Japanese gangster Tadamasa Goto could express his displeasure.

He could order his goons to slice your face multiple times, disfiguring you so badly that every look in the mirror made you regret ever crossing him.

He might have bulldozers driven into your home or workplace, levelling it in minutes. Or have you savagely beaten in front of your wife and children.

Then again, he could simply threaten to eliminate you – but first erase your family one by one so that you ‘learn your lesson before you die’.

As fans of the acclaimed TV series Tokyo Vice will know, the latter was the chilling warning given to American journalist Jake Adelstein when he dared to cross Goto in the early 2000s.

The show is a dramatisation of his book of the same name, a gritty account of how he became the first foreigner ever to be hired as a reporter by a Japanese newspaper and spent the next 12 years navigating the neon-lit criminal underworld ruled over by the Yakuza, as the Japanese mafia are known.

The on-screen Adelstein, played by Baby Driver and West Side Story star Ansel Elgort, is incredibly reckless in the lengths he will go to in pursuit of a lead. Most notably, we see him sleeping with one of mob boss Shinzo Tozawa – the character inspired by Goto – mistresses in the hope of eliciting information from her.

But the real Jake Adelstein did just that and more. And that obsession with getting at the truth has come at the cost of his own peace of mind, as is evident even before our interview begins.

Jake Adelstein (pictured) was the first foreigner ever to be hired as a reporter by a Japanese newspaper

Pictured: Much-feared Japanese Yakuza boss Tadamasa Goto who threatened to kill Adelstein for his reporting on the Yakuza

As instructed, I find myself standing outside a branch of Mister Donut, a chain popular in Japan, in a quiet residential suburb of Tokyo. I presume we will be talking here but this rendezvous is just so Adelstein can check me out from a distance.

‘I wanted to make sure you were who you said you were,’ he says before leading me through a bewildering maze of narrow residential streets until eventually we reach his home.

Goto’s death from pneumonia back in February should, in theory, mean the threat he posed to Adelstein has disappeared altogether. But the two security cameras trained on the exterior of his house suggest that his days of living under police protection and having to hire a bodyguard have not been forgotten.

‘I’m still careful, still wary,’ he says, understandably so. In the TV show, Tozawa seems impossibly villainous yet Adelstein says this is an accurate portrayal of how ruthless his real-life counterpart could be.

‘I have this 120-page analysis of Goto written by Japan’s National Police Agency and all that was used to write the character of Tozawa.

‘Goto was into human trafficking, child pornography, anything that you could make money at, he was fine with it. He almost seemed to enjoy it. He was the closest I have ever come to pure evil.’

The journey which saw Jake Adelstein, the self-described ‘nice Jewish boy’ from Columbia, Missouri, pitted against one of the world’s most terrifying mob bosses began with a fight at high school, after which he took up karate as a means of self-defence and became fascinated with all things Japanese.

After his first year at the University of Missouri, he joined its exchange programme with Sophia University in Tokyo, graduating from there with a degree in Japanese literature in 1993.

Pictured: Lucie Blackman (left) with her sister Sophie. Lucie went missing while working at a club in Tokyo’s entertainment district

Adelstein was out nearly every night in the bars of the entertainment district Roppongi while looking for stories (pictured)

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Having worked on the student newspaper, and determined to improve his Japanese, he gave himself the seemingly impossible goal of passing the entrance exam set by the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s most prestigious newspaper.

His long hours of revision paid off and he scored highly enough to get invited back for three interviews, after which he was somewhat amazed to be taken on as a reporter, aged 24, in 1993.

‘I really didn’t expect to get hired as a journalist. It was only when they offered me the job that I thought, hell, yes.’

He was first posted to the paper’s regional bureau in Saitama, a largely suburban area just north of Tokyo, and from the start he was not above using decidedly unorthodox methods.

On one occasion he stole letters from a murder victim’s mailbox. On another he blackmailed a police chief into giving him information about one case by threatening to expose his department’s failure to make arrests in another.

By the time Adelstein was posted to Tokyo in 1999, he was married to a business journalist named Sunao and their marriage was soon tested by his devotion to his work.

Their daughter Beni was born in September 2000, but Adelstein was out nearly every night in the bars of the entertainment district Roppongi pursuing a major story that had made headlines worldwide.

This was the disappearance in that July of 21-year-old Lucie Blackman, a former British Airways flight attendant from Kent who had been working as a hostess in one of the clubs there, encouraging men to buy overpriced drinks as they flirted.

It was a case which made headlines worldwide and the chief suspect was Joji Obara, 48, a millionaire Japanese property developer.

Pictured: Sophie Blackman holding a poster with her then missing sister Lucie’s picture in September 2000

Pictured: Policemen investigating the disappearance of missing Brit Lucie Blackman carry evidence bags containing items left behind in a cave in Miura, Kanagwa Prefectre in 2001

He had just been arrested on multiple counts of raping and drugging unconscious women at his apartment in Zushi, a seaside town about an hour south of Tokyo. But the press had been unable to prove a link between the Tokyo Ripper, as he became known, and Lucie.

Eventually, Adelstein’s persistence paid off and he came across a young woman who was handing out flyers outside a strip club but had previously worked at the same bar as Lucie and recalled seeing her talking to a long-haired man matching Obara’s description.

It was a great scoop for Adelstein’s paper the Yomiuri Shimbun, but the case is clearly a difficult one for him to look back on.

In part, this was because of the trust he built up with Lucie’s father, Tim Blackman, who played a huge role in turning her disappearance from a relatively low-priority missing-person inquiry into a case commanding international attention.

‘He talked to the press so frequently that the police were afraid he would say something that would destroy their criminal case so they kind of cut him out of the investigation,’ explains Adelstein.

Blackman ended up relying on him for updates about what was happening, including when Lucie’s dismembered body was discovered in a seaside cave about 200m from Obara’s apartment.

‘The police contacted Lucie’s mother Jane but they didn’t tell Tim so I thought ‘OK I’m going to call him because it would be better for him to hear it from me than on the news.’

‘So I called him up and said ‘Hey Tim, I’m going to need you to take a deep breath because what I’m about to tell you is going to confirm your worst fears.”

Pictured: The red light district in Shinjuku, Tokyo where Adelstein worked during his time as a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper

He remembers Blackman accepting what followed calmly but Adelstein wells up as he talks about the phone call.

‘It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. I mean, I have a daughter, right? So can you imagine telling someone your daughter’s dead?’

It wasn’t until April 2007 that Obara was finally sentenced to life imprisonment for multiple rapes and the manslaughter of Australian hostess Carita Ridgway, and it took another year before he was also convicted of the abduction and dismemberment of Lucie Blackman.

As the aggressive defence case funded by Obara’s wealthy family kept the proceedings grinding through the Japanese legal system, Adelstein began focusing on another sadistic monster, Tadamasa Goto.

Born in Tokyo in 1942 and raised a street thug, Goto had eventually become boss of his own criminal syndicate, the Goto-Gumi, a subsidiary of the Yamaguchi-Gumi, the largest of the 23 Yakuza organisations in Japan.

The Goto-Gumi adhered to many Yakuza traditions, among them the all-over body tattoos which signified that they had set themselves apart from everyday society.

Like other ‘oyabun’ – the Japanese equivalent of ‘godfather’ – Goto also insisted on his subordinates severing the top of their own little finger if they were deemed to have failed him in some way. But he had little time for other strict codes of behaviour which, if followed, meant that the police left them largely alone.

Chief among these was the rule that the Yakuza should only attack each other, and never members of the public. But in 1992 Goto took offence at a Japanese film satirising the Yakuza and ordered three knife-wielding members of the Goto-Gumi to slash and beat the director Juzo Itami outside his Tokyo home.

Itami continued to speak out against the Yakuza and when he leapt to his death from the roof of his production company five years later, the police deemed it suicide, but a source later told Adelstein that five of Goto’s men had cornered him and made him jump.

Operating a vast network of front companies masking extortion and financial fraud, Goto built up a personal fortune equivalent to around half a billion pounds today and even became a major shareholder in Japan Airlines, the country’s national carrier.

He also threw his considerable resources into supporting whichever political party served his criminal interests and kept meticulous records of their leaders’ darkest secrets, ready for when he needed to call in favours.

By the time of Lucie Blackman’s death, he seemed invincible yet his own body was failing him, years of the heavy drinking which was part of the Yakuza lifestyle having left him with liver cancer.

Born in Tokyo in 1942 and raised a street thug, Goto (pictured) had eventually become boss of his own criminal syndicate, the Goto-Gumi, a subsidiary of the Yamaguchi-Gumi, the largest of the 23 Yakuza organisations in Japan

In 2001, along with three other senior Yakuza bosses whose livers had taken a similar hammering, he was desperate for a transplant but a shortage of donors in Japan meant that the only place they could turn was America.

The problem was that their criminal records meant they could not enter the US and so they struck a deal with the FBI, agreeing to supply information about the Yakuza’s links with the American Mafia in return for transplants at the elite University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Having learned of this through a Yakuza source four years later, Adelstein had started digging into it when he was summoned to a meeting with Goto’s enforcers at a five-star hotel in Tokyo.

Goto’s men made it clear that they knew what he was planning to write and it was then that they issued the threat about erasing his family and then him if he went ahead. Reluctantly, he agreed that he would not write the piece.

By then, Adelstein had two children, his son Ray having arrived in September 2004, and a month after that encounter he left the Yomiuri Shimbun and moved his family back to Missouri for their safety. He then shuttled between the two countries as the chief investigator for a study on human trafficking in Japan, commissioned by the US State Department.

The more he dug into the stories of foreign women who had been lured to Japan with offers of jobs as hostesses, only to be forced into prostitution, the more a familiar name came up.

‘I just kept running into these horrible operations run by Goto and I was like, ‘what a motherf****’

Deciding to return to the extraordinary liver transplant story and find yet more evidence to stand it up, he reasoned that nobody was more likely to have the dirt on Goto than his 15 lovers. With the help of a police source, he identified one woman who had a particular grudge against him.

‘Goto was allowed to have mistresses but when he found out that this woman was also dating a ski instructor, he had his men pick him up in a van and break all his bones so he couldn’t ski and he couldn’t walk.

‘He had the whole thing recorded then he played the tape to the woman and continued to sleep with her. He was just a sick f*****.’

The on-screen Jake Adelstein is played by Baby Driver and West Side Story star Ansel Elgort (pictured) 

‘I met her a couple of times and there was this back and forth about what information she had and whether I could get her out of the country when the story came out and then at one point we were both drunk and we went to bed.

‘We both knew this was crazy. She said ‘Are you just doing this because you hate him?’ and I said ‘No, actually, I like you,’ and she said ‘Well, I like you too,’ and then we had this weird, strange relationship.’

When Goto somehow discovered that he had resumed work on his liver transplant exposé, a detective told Adelstein that he was the subject of renewed death threats.

‘What the cop said was really chilling. ‘I know you’re not the type to run, but don’t go home, because the trouble will follow you, and everyone around you will be killed as collateral damage.”

Back in Missouri, his family were advised to install alarm systems and buy guns in case Goto’s reach extended there. In Tokyo, Adelstein was put under police protection and also hired a bodyguard, an ex-Yakuza who drove him everywhere – he could not risk taking the subway any more in case someone pushed him in front of a train. 

‘Part of our agreement was that I had to buy a Mercedes-Benz, because that’s what Yakuza drive. I told him that they were gas guzzlers but he insisted.

”If you want people to be intimidated, and harness the power that I bring to the table, you’re going to have to put me in a Mercedes-Benz,’ he said.’

In March 2008, Goto was acquitted of various charges of property fraud and Adelstein infuriated his police handlers by turning up on the last day of his trial and following him to the lifts at the back of the courtroom.

In Tokyo Vice, he described how ‘when Goto looked you in the eye, it felt as if he had his hand around your throat’ but still he stood his ground.

‘At the elevator we had literally 15 seconds, and he saw me and I saw him and we knew who each other were. He mouthed something like ‘You’re dead’ and I told him I was going to outlive him and that was the end of our conversation. 

‘I was thrilled, because I wanted to let him know I wasn’t afraid of him.’

For Goto, the priority was to kill Adelstein before he could get the article published so Adelstein tried to get it into print as soon as he could but the Yomiuri Shimbun and other Japanese publications refused to take it for fear of reprisals against their staff.

Instead, Adelstein turned to the Washington Post which ran the story in May 2008 and the repercussions for Goto were almost immediate.

Later that year, he was thrown out of the Yakuza and announced that he was becoming a Buddhist priest. This was supposedly because he had renounced crime, but Adelstein takes a more cynical view.

After his reporting on Goto and the Yakuza, Adelstein was put under police protection and also hired a bodyguard, an ex-Yakuza who drove him everywhere

‘He was worried his former colleagues would kill him. It’s bad to kill a priest, right? He did it to save his life.’

There was certainly something rather unholy about Goto’s misleadingly titled autobiography Humble Apologies, published in 2010. It was an instant best-seller in a Japan in which the Yakuza were regarded as such glamorous figures that, until recently, they had their own fanzines.

Showing virtually no remorse for his violent criminal past, Goto included a chapter in which he implied that he would be very happy if something terrible happened to Adelstein.

‘That was sort of a Yakuza fatwa,’ he says. ‘So that makes you nervous, right?’

The modern Yakuza is not what it was, its numbers tumbling from around 80,000 members in Goto’s heyday to fewer than 19,000 today – in part because of legislation making it illegal to conduct business with the mobsters. That includes paying them protection money, one of their main sources of income.

According to Adelstein, its members have diversified into areas which previous generations wouldn’t have touched.

‘Traditionally in the Yakuza world, what was off limits was theft, robbery, sexual assault, drug dealing, fraud. The ‘new wave Yakuza,’ as I call them, are fine with all that.’ 

Reporting on the old guard at their peak took its toll on Adelstein’s personal life but, although his marriage to Sunao is long over, he is now in a long-term relationship with Brazilian photographer Jessy Nakamura and busy promoting his latest book Code Blue.

It’s the story of how he returned to his hometown of Columbia, Missouri, to continue an investigation started by his father Eddie Adelstein, the coroner there, back in the summer of 1992.

Suspicious about a series of unexplained deaths at the local military veterans’ hospital, Adelstein senior and his colleagues were convinced that a particular nurse named Richard Williams was a serial killer.

Instead of looking into the case properly, the authorities subjected the whistleblowers to years of intense harassment and, although Williams was eventually indicted on 10 counts of first-degree murder, problems with the forensic evidence led to the charges being dismissed before trial.

Not easily intimidated, Eddie Adelstein has never given up on trying to bring Williams before a jury and that determination is clearly a quality inherited by his son.

‘You come to this point, and realise that if everybody runs from the a**holes of the world, that the a**holes are going to run the world,’ he says. ‘Somebody has to step up and if you don’t do it, no-one else will.’

Code Blue by Jake Adelstein with Amy Yoshida-Plambeck, Scribe Publications, £10.99. Publication date: February 2027.