[7] Adelstein was initially assigned to "tacky" Saitama, and the memoir covers his next 12 years as a staffer for the paper, describing 80-hour work weeks, relationship difficulties, and the interactions between crime reporters and the police.

Specific cases involve the search for the killer of Lucie Blackman,[3] and the memoir also details death threats after he published an expose on Tadamasa Goto.

[11] Sekiguchi told Adelstein that the yakuza did not use that term to describe themselves, and instead call themselves gokudo, a portmanteau of goku (extreme) and do (the path).

[16] He described how he took a photograph of a drawing of a suspect in a police station surreptitiously, which he used to blackmail a detective to give him a scoop about a thief.

[3] Kirkus Reviews called it "Not just a hard-boiled true-crime thriller, but an engrossing, troubling look at crime and human exploitation in Japan.

[28][29] The 8-part television series stars Ansel Elgort playing Jake Adelstein, an American journalist who embeds himself into the Tokyo Vice police squad to reveal corruption.

The series also stars Ken Watanabe[30] and is written and executive produced by Tony Award-winning playwright J. T. Rogers,[31] with Endeavor Content serving as the studio.

[31] John Lesher, Emily Gerson Saines, and Destin Daniel Cretton also serve as executive producers, alongside J. T. Rogers, Mann, Elgort and Watanabe.

"[4] After the THR article was published, Adelstein published a response stating, "Mr. Blair deliberately left out or ignored correspondences testifying to my credibility or verifying my reporting", arguing the piece focused too much on the 2011 lawsuit and was inaccurate about keeping sources anonymous, and releasing a collection of documents and sources on Twitter stated to be from the making of the book.