Tokyo Vice True Story Explained (And What The TV Show Changes)
HBO Max's Tokyo Vice is the platform's latest original series, adapting the book Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan from author Jake Adelstein, begging the question of just how much of the story is true. The show was created and written by J.T. Rogers, who also serves as showrunner, with veteran director Michael Mann serving as the pilot director, setting the tone, style, and pace for the series. Tokyo Vice stars Ansel Elgort as Adelstein, with Ken Watanabe as Detective Hiroto Katagiri, Rachel Keller as Samantha, Ella Rumpf as Polina, Shô Kasamatsu as Sato, Hideaki Itô as Jin Miyamoto.
The real Adelstein moved to Japan when he was 19 years old and was hired to work for the largest newspaper in the world, the Yomiuri Shinbun, eventually assigned to work the police beat in Tokyo. Adelstein worked for the paper from 1993 to 2005, publishing his Tokyo Vice memoir in 2009. The book was optioned by Paramount to become a feature film starring Daniel Radcliffe as Adelstein, but it ended up falling through, leading to HBO, where Rogers was hired to adapt it as a TV show for the network.
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Tokyo Vice showrunner J.T. Rogers has said that while the HBO Max adaptation is inspired by real events, but is still fiction, serving as neither biography nor documentary. Outside of Adelstein, none of the supporting characters are meant to represent actual people in real life, despite some stark similarities. Ultimately, the story focuses on the setting, digging into the time period when the Yakuza were a powerful force in Tokyo before their downfall. The series covers events related to Adelstein's book, including a Yakuza boss informing on his own crew in
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