Tokyo Vice
BBC 1 | ★★★★✩

One of the sweet things about doing these reviews is getting calls and texts from friends and family any time they watch a programme that’d work here; “Switch over to BBC1, there’s a Jew on!” And so it was with Tokyo Vice…

Wait a sec, a crime drama set in Tokyo circa 1999, how on earth did a Jew get in the mix? Well this is one of those “so strange it has to be true” situations, and indeed it’s based on a book by the protagonist Joshua “Jake” Adelstein, about his moving to Japan to first study literature for three years before getting a job at their largest newspaper and working the crime beat, ingratiating himself with the police and yakuza.

We’ve had American in Japan stories before, but I can’t see a scriptwriter having the insight to go, “Let’s also make them Jewish to heighten their outsider status”, which bizarrely it does.

Jake isn’t an ordinary gaijin to either emulate or scorn, for as his newspaper bosses say about their highly educated and informed employees, “Many here believe Jews control the world economy.” They then give him the nickname “Mossad” because they all think he’s an Israeli spy.

It’s almost comforting to at least know the bigotry you’re facing, as opposed to the more insidious forms it’s taken recently in the West, but I think Jake’s ethnicity runs deeper to the narrative, and I’m not just referring to the extreme lengths gone to escape overbearing parents.

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Ansel Elgort (BBC)

He’s an outsider, he’s a questioner, and ultimately he’s a disrupter. In a society such as Japan, with such rigid well-established social structures, that provides more for Jake to rally against, finding cracks in the system and exploiting them as he pushes further for a story, or builds contacts with Tokyo’s cops and robbers.

The city is itself a character, bought to life in the pilot in its gritty neon contradictions by esteemed filmmaker Michael Mann.

The fetishisation of this unique culture flows from Jake to us, and as he enmeshes himself in the mystery of connected deaths, the larger mystery is revealed of the inner workings of Japan.

With a background mostly in theatre, the show runner J.T.Rogers obviously has an appreciation of the necessary facade of make-believe at play within this world, and Ansel Elgort is a fine choice as our avatar for peeking behind the curtain.

He’d never really impressed me in the past, but his subtle state of flux here between driven, beat, cynical, awed, kind, and exploitative, conveys authenticity. Learning fluent Japanese probably didn’t hurt either.

No such reservations about the giant Ken Watanabe though, who delivers the finest blend of worldweary cynicism in any setting, but as a frustrated police officer is playing the home game. There’s a second season in the works, so while these eight episodes might not provide much resolution, be comforted by the larger story left to tell.
And, who knows, we might also learn why Jews love sushi.