Tokyo Vice
A Western journalist working for a publication in Tokyo takes on one of the city's most powerful crime bosses.
Metadata
| Creators | J.T. Rogers |
| Year | 2022 ~ |
| Stars | Ansel Elgort, Ken Watanabe, Rachel Keller |
The Show in 3 Sentences
I like Ansel Elgort, so I really wanted to get into this one. Maybe I just never made it past the initial barrier to entry, or maybe gangster stories simply aren’t my thing, but it never fully clicked for me.
A lot of people praised how accurately the show portrays Japanese culture—from English teaching, casual racism, brutal working hours, and suffocating office bureaucracy to the heavy smoking and drinking and the Russian women working in hostess and “snack” clubs. The neon wonderlands of Kabukicho and Shibuya are all there, but filtered through something much darker, grittier, and more noir to match the subject matter.
I’m familiar enough with Japanese culture to recognize many of those details, but I’ve never actually lived there, so I can’t really judge how true the portrayal is. It did make me wonder, though: if someone made a Korean version of this exact kind of show, would I be much more invested simply because I could pick apart every little cultural detail myself?