‘Tokyo Vice’: Who Is Erika? Meet Samantha’s Number One Girl

‘Tokyo Vice’ is a crime drama television series adapted from Jake Adelstein’s book of the same name, created by J. T. Rogers. The show explores the underworld of crime and corruption in Tokyo, following the experiences of an American journalist as he navigates the complexities of Japanese society. ‘Tokyo Vice’ has a plethora of interesting characters, and it seems that more are being added with each passing season. In the first two episodes, we meet Erika played by Hyunri Lee and she is bound to become a serious player in the coming season. Let’s see who Erika is and how she is connected to Samantha.

Following Polina’s death Samantha reached out to some people from her past

In the first season of ‘Tokyo Vice’ we’ve seen Samantha carefully saving up money and using her stolen Mormon funds as seed to starting her own club. This was something that she believed she was meant to do and could do better than her previous bosses at Onyx. Her dream came in danger when Polina, her first in Japan disappeared. We’ve heard that Polina got in trouble with Yakuza and that she borrowed a hefty sum of money to help out her boyfriend Akira.

What Samantha had no idea about was that Polina was actually dead. Polina’s fate was revealed on a tape that was sent to Jake just before he was about to depart for the US. A videotape reveals Polina accompanying a guest to their cabin on Yoshino. When the guest attempts to assault her, Polina defends herself, leading to a violent altercation where the guest accidentally kills her. But this is something that Samantha had no idea about when Akira approached her and told her that he needed money to rescue Polina. Samantha was hesitant but gave away almost all of her money to save her. She was conned, and it seemed like the idea of her own club wouldn’t come to fruition after all. She was supposed to make one large payment for the club to finally be hers and she had no idea where to come up with the money

Samantha eventually made a dangerous deal with Ishida who promised to finance her club. Samantha loans the money to make a final payment on her club, knowing full well that this can go very very wrong. Following this, Samantha learned about Polina’s ultimate fate and broke down mentally. She attempted to contact Erika while drunk but the woman seemed unavailable at the time.

Samantha recruited Erika to replace Claudine

In the first two episodes of season 2, we see Samantha running her new club it was named after Polina and the place was booming Samantha was pulling in quite a lot of money until she figured out that someone, namely one of the girls was stealing from her.

This someone turned out to be Claudine, one of the girls working as a hostess. The problem was Claudine was pretty cocky and despite admitting that she was behind the theft she also refused to acknowledge it as a problem, claiming that she deserved the money. You’re probably wondering how Claudine can afford to be so cocky in front of the owner who has connections with Yakuza. Well as it turns out as soon as Claudine was fired her connection to Sato came to light. Sato tries to “coerce” Samantha into rehiring Claudine and Samantha refuses, she realizes that she needs to be surrounded by people she can trust, someone from her past.

And this is where Erika comes up once again. Samantha makes her way to where Erika is currently living. She meets her at her own house and we can see that Erika is now a woman with a family and she seemingly left that part of her life behind. It’s obvious that the two had a pretty close relationship in the past as Samantha calls Erika “Mama-San” and Erika calls Samantha “Wild Child.”

What did Samantha offer to Erika?

During their conversation, we learn that Samantha used to work in Club Destiny before she moved to Onyx and Erika was happy to give her a chance to work since she knew that Samantha would be a good hostess. We also learned that Erika just disappeared and that the two never had a proper goodbye. Samantha then offers Erika the position of the “Number One Girl” and Erika at first dismisses her telling her that she went out of the business for a reason. But Samantha offers her an incredible deal: half of all her table charges, half of all the bottles she sells. Erika naturally accepted.

In the following episodes we’re most likely going to see while Erika was the boss at Club Destiny and we’re going to see what Sato plans to do that, since when he noticed that Claudine wasn’t rehired, he bought a gun.

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