Author Joshua "Jake" Adelstein supposes that if he'd stayed home in rural Missouri and had never come to Japan, he'd probably have become a small-town lawyer or a very happy detective on the local police force.
"I was always attracted to the law, probably because my father was the county coroner for many years — and still is now," he says.
But Adelstein has spent roughly half his life in Japan, first as a student at Sophia University in Tokyo and then as a reporter for the vernacular Yomiuri Shimbun, where he landed a job that put him in touch with what he describes as "the dark side of the rising sun."