‘Tokyo Vice’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: Pointing Fingers

Sato and Samantha are in bed together, and Sato is taking his ring off. Watching from home, I’m wondering why. Is this item of jewelry significant to him in some way — a mark of his membership in Chihara-kai, maybe? If so, I don’t remember it coming up before. Nor is it a wedding band he couldn’t bear to part with following a death or divorce, not unless there’s a whole lot about Sato we don’t know. I couldn’t quite figure out why writers Annie Julia Wyman & Joshua Kaplan and director Takeshi Fukunaga bothered to include this detail, beyond perhaps adding a little down-to-earth touch to the sex scene…until I noticed the position of Sato’s arm between Sam’s legs. He took off his ring so he could finger her without hurting her. 

I bring this up not out of prurient interest — although I firmly believe that if you’re not operating at least partially out of prurient interest, you’re not watching TV for the right reasons — but out of admiration for how Tokyo Vice handles, well, pretty much anything. For the second episode in a row, the show has served up an admirably graphic sex scene, in which the technical aspects of physical sexuality are made clear, whether that’s Trendy’s legs in the air around his boyfriend or Sato slipping off his ring before putting his fingers inside Sam. Much as I hate to give them any oxygen, there’s a vocal contingent of viewers who prefer not to watch sex scenes at all. Sex is as much a part of life as anything else going on in Tokyo Vice, and as such it belongs on screen. The show has little time for those who think otherwise, and good on the show for it.

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It took some doing, and about a season and a half of doing it, but the show has fully gotten all the Meicho characters over the line, at least with me. Witness the heel turn executed by Tin Tin/Kushihiro, who all but gleefully plasters Samantha’s name all over the front page, complete with an article tying her to Boss Ishida and Masa Ohno, the yakuza boss and prominent architect slain at her table at her club. Jake, who looks more and more like a titanic eight year old every episode with his floppy hair, carelessly slung backpack, and mane of floppy hair, goes absolutely apeshit at the office over it, all the more so when he sees that Tin Tin basically welcomes his anger at this point. 

Emi taking Kushihiro’s side over Jake’s — he really did have more tangible information with which to write a story than Jake does with his “Tozawa is behind it all” theory at this point — is the last straw for Jake. He tears down his Tozawa conspiracy wall and heads home to surprise his family at his dad’s 60th birthday party, having previously told them he couldn’t get out of his work obligations. No such worries now, he thinks.

Little does he know that Ozaki (Bokuzô Masana), a high-ranking executive at the paper, wants Jake to chase the Tozawa lead down, even after his outburst in the newsroom. Apparently this guy is as sick of the yakuza running amuck as Jake or Katagiri, and he trusts Emi and her gaijin to get to the bottom of it. What’s more, he’s willing to take the risk that their reporting will uncover wrongdoing at the Meicho, where Emi suspects Tozawa has agents. This is a level of institutional support for the investigation I frankly never saw coming, and just as frankly don’t believe will last.

But I find myself drawn in by Emi’s personal life now, too. I enjoy spending time with her and her boyfriend Shingo, a easily guy to like. That’s what makes his rejection by her bipolar brother Kei, after an evening he spent pretending at the very least to tolerate the guy, so shocking. The nominal grounds for objection are that Shingo is divorced; the real objection, of course, is that he’s someone she cares about other than Kei.

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The menace of the yakuza is a constant theme in this episode. With Ishida gone and Sato shoved aside, only the most bloody-minded players remain. The ep never lets you forget it, either. Tozawa threatens Katagiri in a police station men’s room, and addresses Samantha, whom he’s never met before, by name. (She is royally freaked out by this, as she should be.) His minions, indeed, are everywhere — including outside Jake’s apartment, waiting to pick up Misaki as she leaves a rendezvous she thought she’d kept secret. Misaki may have been replaced as Ishida’s main goomar, but that’s far from being free.

Hayama, Ishida’s successor, is an even bigger shitheel than Tozawa. He deliberately recruits Sato’s brother Kaito for a suicide-mission assassination attempt against Tozawa, which Sato stops at the last second. When he finds out Sato thwarted the plan, he threatens to kill everyone Sato cares about: his family, Samantha, Erika, Erika’s adorable son. Sato breaks things off with Erika immediately thereafter, but can’t quite quit Samantha. I can’t imagine Erika will be thrilled to find this out.

In a flashback, we even see Sato’s introduction to Ishida, who’s as gruff to the young man as he is to everyone else. It reminds me of how much I’ll miss Shun Sugata’s gravelly gravitas as the oyabun. Ishida’s moral seriousness, even when planning crimes, was a vital ingredient if you want to convey the idea that the yakuza are at least partially honor-based for real, and that the policy of accommodation favorted by Katagiri does make some ethical sense. He was every bit the Marlon Brando Vito Corleone to Tozawa’s Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo.

Which leads to the crux of the episode from a plot perspective. Tozawa, of course, denies responsibility for the hit on Ishida, with convenient photographs that prove he and his men have an alibi. But why would he have the photos if not to provide an alibi for a crime he knew was gonna happen? Katagiri and Nagata similarly find out they stayed off the phones that day, as though aware their conversations would be picked over for clues after the pending shooting.

But Katagiri (although not Jake, who’s monomaniacally fixated on Tozawa) thinks something else might be at play here, and that Hayama made a move so he could take over. That certainly fits the guy’s personality and penchant for lying to literally everyone. It also explains why the shooters were spotted by Sam sporting tattoos that link them to the yakuza outfit that recently worked out a truce not with Tozawa-gumi, but Chihara-kai. That would give Hayama easy access to them, especially since as two of the few guys in their crew not to get arrested, they’d be desperate for paying work. (Hayama, perhaps a bit too secure, says as much to Katagiri.)

Here’s my best guess: The Meicho isn’t the only organization with a Tozawa man on the inside, and Hayama is secretly in cahoots with Tozawa. Get rid of Ishida and the last major holdout against the Tozawa takeover plan falls, leaving whoever steps into his role to be amply rewarded by his new employer. 

Windows are Tokyo Vice’s visual signature. Not the glass grids of Better Call Saul, evoking the captivity of the characters within their own amorality — big wide windows that let the light in, or which serve as a thin membrane between the inside world of their thoughts and conversations and the outside world of Tokyo at large. I’ve sprinkled images of this leitmotif throughout this review, so by now you probably get the picture. But I’m ending on this note because, again, it speaks to Tokyo Vice’s attention to detail. Whenever it can, it wants to remind you there’s a whole city out there, full of human bodies, and hands to please or hurt them with.

This show is really good.

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.