I'm two episodes in and totally digging it. I'm surprised though there's no love interest. Any good looking gaijin with blonde hair and that fluent in Nihongo is getting laid.
I know several guys that worked with Adelstein at the Yomiuri but they were at the English paper. Looking forward to them watching it to get their takes.
One thing about the Yakuza, I always found them to be kind of comical. Definitely not in the same category as the Russian mob.
First Japanese girl I ever dated was the daughter of a Yakuza member. We dated for 4 years. Great chick, still keep in touch. Anyway, her dad ran a red-light district somewhere around Asakusa. She didn't care for her father at all. When she was a kid, he fell in love with one of his prostitutes. She recalls going to Ueno Park one day with her dad and some strange woman. He eventually left them for this chick. He was arrested a few years later and she testified in court against her dad at age 11. She only saw him sparingly after getting released.
A few months after we started dating, she told me I had to have a sit down dinner with both of her divorced parents at the apartment. It's unusual to meet Japanese parents when you're only casually dating. He definitely wanted to meet this gaijin dating his daughter. Definitely a memorable dinner. He wasn't impressed.
I worked briefly at a small English school in Asakusa, pretty heavy Yak area. All of our Japanese staff were women. One day, a couple of Yakuza fellas came in wanting to speak to the manager. They were put in one of the classrooms until the manager finally came in and introduced herself. They repeated their request to speak to the manager but she replied that she was in fact the manager. They told her that they didn't do business with women and that they would return later to speak to a man. A few days later, they came back to find the same manager and - again - said they would return to talk to a man. They never came back. Weird.