'Tokyo Vice' Recap, Season 2, Episode 2

It’s three months later on Tokyo Vice. And all is about as calm as ever for our ragtag Tokyo underground operators. Tozawa is nowhere to be seen or heard from. Samantha’s newly minted Club Polina has been open for a month without incident. Jake is off yakuza stuff and crushing it with other news stories at Meicho. Katagiri is laying low at the Organized Crime Consultation Department, taking senile reports of yakuza stealing tea bags from old ladies. Sato is healed and thriving as Ishida’s No. 2 at Chihara-kai. Everything’s coming up Milhouse, as we say in my household. Just in time for the stakes to rise and a whole new, complex underworld of shit to hit the fan.

The trouble starts at Club Polina when Samantha catches her highest-earning hostess, Claudine, stealing from the club. “You know who owns half the club,” Samantha tells Claudine. “You cannot steal their money and go set up shop somewhere else.” Claudine sees the outsize value of her labor in the current configuration, but she seized the opportunity a little too hard, and now she’s brazenly disrespecting Samantha, a straight-shooting Michael Mann–ian protagonist who doesn’t suffer fools.

The next morning, Jake rolls into work, where Emi praises his latest piece and gives him two new tips to choose from. One’s a dead body found the night before in a pawn shop. Police think he’s a yakuza. Still lying low and visibly determined to do so, he opts for the other story: the rising rates of motorcycle theft.

So Jake shows up at Club Polina during the day like, hi Samantha, just happened to be passing by and would you know any shady characters who could help me with this motorcycle thing? She begrudgingly gives him a name and number. Jake also checks in on his old pal Katagiri. Over coffee in the park, Jake asks if there’s any word from Tozawa. Nothing, other than he was trying to go to the United States, last he’d heard. Of course, he heard that from the vice-minister when he had a knife to his throat, but he doesn’t tell Jake that part. Later, back at the station, Katagiri gets a meeting request from the National Police Agency. There’s a new deputy superintendent in town, and she’s ready to bash heads and take yakuza names.

D.S. Nagata (Miki Maya) cuts to the chase. “I hear no one knows the yakuza better than you.” She also knows of Katagiri’s “keep the balance” approach and thinks it’s bullshit. She’s more of a strong-arm-of-the-law-type operator. Fine with her if the yakuza escalate their internal conflicts and kill each other in the streets. Besides, Nagata has the go-ahead to build a new task force to combat organized crime in Tokyo. “Smash the yakuza in this city once and for all.”

Nagata is, rather consciously, playing the devil on Katagiri’s shoulder here, just when he’d reverted to the shadows. She’s offering him a chance to make the blistering force he showed at the end of the last episode an institutional weapon by giving him the resources to wipe out his enemies for good and wage a heavy peace for the city. Katagiri initially turns her down, and his hesitance is exacerbated when his wife presents the idea of retiring and moving away from the city. They both know something has to give if they want to raise their family in peace. At the crossroads of accelerating the game or bowing out of it for good, Katagiri is ultimately compelled to the former. And we see the match strike in his eyes when he returns to Nagata’s office, accepting the offer to “be done with balance.”

Back on the motorcycle beat, Otsuka, the mechanic, fills Jake in on the simple economics of motorcycle theft. Parts are worth more than bikes. Bike companies only make enough parts for their new models and can’t keep up with the demand for spare parts. So, “every bike is an organ donor.” The follies of the legit market beget the dark one.

Dropping Samantha’s name also gets Jake a tip on where he can meet up with some of these bicycle thieves. He finds himself at a family restaurant at the same time as a Bōsōzoku biker gang and charms them into a free meal. It takes some uneasy back-and-forth and a fight in the parking lot to gain the respect of Tats, their leader, but Jake gains their confidence and sets himself up for a great new story. Meicho has covered Bōsōzoku plenty before, but never with this much access.

“The focus will be these kids,” pleads Emi. “Fallen through the cracks.” Baku gives them the go ahead to move on it. On his night out with Tats (which includes, sorta accidentally but also on purpose, stealing a bike from an unwitting couple), Jake gets a clear picture of the rebellious spirit that propels these kids, and the economic and class realities that push them underground.

“I’d rather get high, fuck girls, and steal bikes than live like normal people,” Tats says. “If I steal enough bikes, I can pay for my sister to get a spot in private school. Get her out of here.”

And get me the fuck out of here is what Sato is thinking over at Chihara-kai, where Ishida’s prodigal right-hand man has returned from a seven-year stint in prison. “I will do as my Oyabun commands,” is all Sato says at the ceremonial meeting, where Hayama (Yosuke Kubozuka) is welcomed back as Wakagashira, and he’s demoted to Wakagashira-daiko. From the get-go, Hayama’s nothing but dagger eyes at Sato. It’s obvious that he’s Ishida’s most trusted son of the clan, which is likely partly why he reclaims a club from Tozawa’s territory with horrible, unnecessarily violent force.

“Look at you,” he taunts Sato outside the club. “So worried they’re gonna retaliate. I fucking hope they do! I look forward to it.” This is where Sato knows there’s going to be plenty of trouble ahead with this guy at the wheel. It might be time to go behind Ishida’s back and buy a gun. No one can argue with the honor and inherent badassery of the traditional yakuza swords-only credo, but in these modern times, one must bring a gun to a gunfight.

Back at Club Polina, things are pretty up and down as well. Samantha’s reassured by Sato’s return to overseeing the club for Ishida, and she’s got her old friend and former club mama-san Erika (Hyunri) working at the club on mutually beneficial terms. She’s also rejected Ishida’s command to rehire Claudine, opting to win back a big client on her own terms. I am happy to report that a new gorgeous himbo just dropped with Masahito Ohno (Takayuki Suzuki), a charming architect and said big client, whose interest in Claudine shifts to Samantha herself. Good for business, but a little too involved for our girl. Still, accepting an invitation to spend more time with Ohno personally is a clear path to getting the money flowing and Ishida off her back.

By the time Sato shows up at the club, asking Sam for a locker, the push and pull of necessary distance and longing for closeness between them couldn’t be more palpable. Sato puts all that pressure in the locker with the gun, bound to cause a deeper fissure between them the second Samantha finds out about it.

“Is this a rebellion against society, or is it a cry for help?” Jake writes in his biker-gang article when he gets a call from Misaki. When he gets to her place, she’s pouring two glasses of Champagne (safe to say, that whole deal of almost naming her in the scrapped Yoshino article isn’t going to come up in conversation anytime soon). She hasn’t heard from Tozawa in months, and his men are no longer concerned with her. So we fuckin’ or …?

We all agree that it’s unbelievably dumb of Jake to do this, right? But the dramatic propulsion of the scenario is undeniable, and it certainly etches the looming specter of Tozawa deeper into every frame.

• Sato’s father has passed. He remains estranged from his mother, but he’s opened back up to his brother Kaito. I love the time-capsule moment of these two doing a little early-internet stolen-sneaker trading, but I hate what that portends for both of them. But, hey, maybe Sato caving just a little to his brother’s desire to enter his dangerous world will work out fine.

• A skim through the Bōsōzoku biker gangs’ Wikipedia page proves worthwhile supplemental material. Like every organization on either side of the law in Japan, these gangs are well organized and deeply adherent to the traditions of their subculture. Some gangs have membership fees and ritual punishments. Today, their numbers have fallen dramatically from the 1980s peak, with modern Bōsōzoku riding scooters instead of tricked-out motorcycles. You know they’re still rocking the drip, though.

• Here to report that Samantha talking about “lecturing her girls on not showing too much cleavage and swearing too much” is peak Mormon Den Mother energy, LOL. She remains my sister in the ranks of LDS AWOLs.

• Hayama immediately presents himself as a diabolical foil for Sato. Perhaps a little too conveniently so, if not for the insatiable pull of Kubozuka’s performance. He brings an unpredictable energy to Chihara-kai’s otherwise stable collective aura. Something of a narrative twin-flame energy with Nagata, both expressing a drive to heat things up on either side of a cold war. The kind of cast expansions you want from any top-notch stylized procedural, season to season.