‘Tokyo Vice’ Episode 6 Recap: Appearances

The cost of keeping up appearances can be substantial. Take yakuza boss Tozawa, for instance. In order to make up for his encroachment on boss Ishida’s Tokyo territory—an encroachment that included an assassination attempt, though everyone seems too courteous to bring it up in so many words—he has to fork over a large sum of cash. But more than that, he has to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness. 

Ishida, observing all the formalities, accepts the apology, and some, but not all, of the cash. But for Tozawa, the forced groveling is intolerable. Only the words of his own bosh, Chairman Nakahara (Renji Ishibashi)—who is the true force behind Tozawa, the true Don Barzini of Tokyo Vice—keep him from exploding. After all, it all has to be made to look like a minor tussle, instead of the major play it actually is.

And even then Tozawa must go through the motions. He takes his mistress Misaki (Ayumi Ito) out for an expensive steak dinner, but he’s so sick with his mysterious and seemingly terminal illness (I assume it’s AIDS, though I don’t know for sure) that he can’t eat. Like a cat toying with its prey, he lures Misaki into telling him her vision of a future life without him, then turns on her for ostensibly giving up on him, threatening to kill her if she takes another man to bed before he dies. 

Misaki winds up on reporter Jake Adelstein’s radar thanks to another journalist, if that’s the right word for it—Ukai Haruki (Motoki Kobayashi), a meth addict who glorifies Tozawa in what are essentially yakuza fan magazines. But Jake has another contact in the underworld: Ishida himself, who tips Jake off to a major shipment of meth ordered by Tozawa. Ishida’s hope is that Jake can take the shipment down without anything pointing back to Ishida as the source of the raid.

But Jake’s main police contact, Katagiri, resists the temptation, insisting that more time is required to investigate the lead. So Jake goes to Miyamoto, his first police contact. (He’s very much alive, contrary to what I wrote about the previous episode. Sorry!) 

The problem is that Miyamoto is, in fact, an agent of Tozawa. He conducts the raid on the meth shipment, but deliberately steers his men away from the parts of the airplane where the meth is actually stored. This is huge black eye for his reputation as a cop, and an even bigger one for Jake as a reporter. (He winds up being forced by the editor-in-chief to write up a story of police failure rather than yakuza criminality.) Katagiri is furious with Jake for his rashness, while Miyamoto willingly eats shit as a cop to protect his true boss, Tozawa. After all, appearances must be maintained.

You might say that the same is true of Samantha. The love interest of Ishida soldier Sato, who has just made his first kill, she’s being pressured by the private investigator Matsuo to have sex with him or be exposed to the man who hired him to find her, her father. So she tells Sato what’s going on, and, predictably, Sato murders the guy. “What did you do?” Samantha asks him afterwards, when he tells her he’s solved her problem. “What do you think I would do?” he asks in response. Throughout the entire transaction she’s maintained the appearance of a person who doesn’t know what her mobbed-up boyfriend might do to a man who’s extorting her for forced sex on behalf of her religious, and possibly abusive, father—but we all know better than that, don’t we?

This episode of Tokyo Vice, written by Jessica Brickman and directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka, is one of my favorites so far. It has a biting sense of humor, like when Jake approaches Tozawa’s mistress and says “One of Tozawa’s mistresses went missing because she spoke to the press—would you care to comment?” It delivers a Godfather-worthy meeting of mob bosses. It plays with lighting in a beautiful way: the dim recesses of the car in which Ishida passes his intel to Jake, the lovely blue light when Sato picks Samantha up after work, the lurid pink-red when her friend Polina gets wasted on the dime of her club-owner boyfriend, that dazzling green mirror backdrop at Samantha’s club.

And it all ends with Miyamoto delivering Jake’s name to Tozawa as the source of the information for the raid on his plane. The whole route now has to be abandoned, presumably at a significant price, and Jake Adelstein is to blame. What will be the cost of keeping up appearances now, and is it worth the life of a gaijin reporter?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.