True Crime Podcast ‘The Evaporated’ About Missing People In Japan Shakes Up The True-Crime Genre

The Evaporated: Gone With the Gods takes the standard true crime formula and gives it a bit of a Japanese flavored twist with a deep dive into Japanese culture and people who are in so much trouble that they want to dissapear without a trace.

The 9-part series comes to us from journalist Jake Adelstein who is well known for his memoir Tokyo Vice about being a white journalist covering crime in Japan as the only non-Japanese staff writer.

Evaporated is the rare true crime podcast that begins from a first person narrative before transitioning to something like an investigative journalism podcast. It all begins when Jake Adelstein discovers his accountant is missing with all of his taxes 10-days before his taxes are due. He uses this event to expound on the history of missing people in Japan and how there is a cultural heritage behind it. Specificially, there’s a superstitiuous tradition called “Yokai” about spirits that are behind people’s mysterious dissapearances and it casts a dramatic shade over the real life people that are behind this culture where more than 80,000 people a year dissappear.

Jake as a narrator is friendly and trustworthy and the co-host that he invited on to share the work of the show, true-crime creator Shoko Plambeck, provides a pleasing counterpoint to the outsider energy that American Jake brings to this mystery.

They weave together interviews, mysteries, and stories of cultural traditions into an effective overall narrative that feels like lifting a window into a largely unexplained world. However, the way that Jake offers his narrative opinion after the interview segments is often done in a humorous way that undercuts the tension and feels like a mystery show on tv with humorous sound effects and jokes.

They build up each story with extensive interviews with people close to them that nonetheless seem to meander a bit without always connecting all the dots. For instance, the central conceit that Japan has a tradition of people dissapearing is taken for granted without any comparison of missing people in other countries.

On the downside, the audio levels are all over the place! Sometimess when the show jumps between the various audio clips there doesn’t seem like too much of an effort to make sure the differences between audio levels aren’t so dramatic that it doesn’t grate on the ear. In other places the editing seems a bit sloppy as in when you can hear heavy crackling static from the original recording source.

The first episode begins with the dissappearance of Jake’s accountant Morimoto (not his real name) and they interview his friends Steve and Becky whom Jake had reccomended to them to use his services. His accountant had been allegedly embezzling money so it appears like his disappearance is connected to money. It’s a fascinating show for anyone interested in Japanese culture as it discusses elements like how Japanese taxes don’t have extensions and how company culture causes workers to feel as though they owe their life to their job.

These mysterious are genuinely baffling as they’re detailing people who dissappear without a trace and also focus on Japanese “moving companies” that are real and relatively legal. They call them “night movers” and they help people escape in the middle of the night with no trace of them left behind. They aren’t the only shady people in the Japanese underworld as the the series touches on other elements like loan sharks and Yakuza, and gives more context to why people might want to dissapear

A trailer is available here, and a subscription to Sony podcast company The Binge enables all episodes to be unlocked early. The show started December 12th, 2022 and new episodes will premiere until the finale on January 30th, 2023.