‘Tokyo Vice’ is a gritty neo-noir crime thriller. The show ‘Tokyo Vice’ tells the story of Jake Adelstein, the real life American journalist who built a career as a crime reporter in Tokyo, establishing deep relationships with members of the city's criminal underworld to document the dealings of the Yakuza.

Jake Adelstein is the first foreign hire at macho shim-bun the world's largest paper with a daily reader base of 12 million, Macho isn't a real paper in japan in fact many of the names of companies and characters throughout the season have been changed so it's likely this is based off yomiuri which once held the Guinness world record for most read newspaper Jake has left his life in Missouri to get away from the pain of his family. We learn his dad disowned him and his sister tried to kill herself. So, Jake runs as far as he possibly can to Tokyo, Japan. The theme of the runaway is something found in many of the characters in one way or another. Sam Porter the nightclub hostess ran away from her controlling father and life as a mormon. Sato ran away from his life as the son of a poor fisherman, in the hope of making his name as a member of the yakuza. Not only do these character share a prosperity to run away but they are extremely ambitious. Jake studies day and night to learn Japanese and immersing himself in the culture to get a chance to join the best newspaper in the world. Even when he gets the job he continues to strive for excellence but as Jake will find out things work differently in Japan, the police and yakuza work in tandem to keep a tenuous veil of peace things like honour and shame play a much larger factor in people’s lives than they do in North America and getting what you want sometimes means making deals with notorious gangsters, So Jake has to navigate this new world on top of being a gaijin a Japanese term for outsider.