From the Fatherland, with Love, page 16
“I find it hard to believe that members of the People’s Army would rebel,” he said.
“So who the hell are they, then?” asked Suzuki.
“I don’t know.” He really didn’t know.
A press officer from the Cabinet’s crisis-management room reported that an SDF helicopter was bringing the PM in. He had apparently been in Morioka attending a rally of the local prefectural party. The Chief Cabinet Secretary had been in his constituency in Okayama, and since there wasn’t a helicopter available for him there, he was on a bullet train to Osaka, where he would be able to board one. The Minister for Foreign Affairs had been at a “Dialogue with Citizens” event in Nara, where a private helicopter pilot offered to help; but the helicopter had a limited flight range and had to stop off in Nagoya to refuel. The Minister for Home Affairs had been in Ibaraki at the opening ceremony for a digital museum, but since the expressways were jammed by day-trippers on their way home from Disneyland, he’d caught a train back to Tokyo. The Minister of State for Defense had been at home in Sagamihara, and was being driven in with a police escort. The superintendent general of the Metropolitan Police had given a talk at a career-training workshop in Saitama, after which he’d gone to watch the opening game of the season between the Lions and the Fighters. The whereabouts of the head of the National Public Safety Commission was unknown, and no one had managed to contact him.
The highest-ranking bureaucrat currently present in the room was Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Yamagiwa. Yamagiwa was sixty-seven, and had come to the Diet from the Bank of Japan. He had no ministerial experience, having served innocuously as a Diet member in what used to be the biggest faction of the Liberal Democratic Party, managing to avoid making any enemies. Feeling the pressure of imminent retirement and wishing to make a name for himself, however, he had taken up the post of deputy chief cabinet secretary. When the LDP had split four years earlier over the issue of the freeze on bank deposits and consequent inflation, the younger reformist faction joined forces with the leading faction of the Democratic Party to form a new party called Japan Green. To begin with it was ridiculed as the Green Tea Party, but it gained support amongst independent voters, prompting several core Diet members of the LDP and DPJ to join, one after another. Eventually Japan Green had taken power from the LDP-Komeito coalition that had won the previous general election by a narrow margin. And Yamagiwa was the grandee of Japan Green.
The other leading members present were Iwata, chief of CIRO’s Domestic Division; Kondo, the Cabinet Crisis-Management Center’s Systems Maintenance section leader; Yoshizaki, from the Intelligence and Analysis Service’s First Division at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs; Korenaga from the Second Investigation Department at the Public Security Investigation Agency; Tsuboi from the Foreign Affairs Division of the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Department at the National Police Agency’s Security Bureau; Katsurayama from the Security Division of the NPA’s Security Bureau; Yonashiro from the Documentation Division of the Defense Agency’s Intelligence HQ; his colleague Sakuragawa, from the Research Division; and Hida, from the Regional Support Bureau of the Home Affairs Ministry. Other than Hida, they were all from intelligence-related services, although none of them from sections dealing directly with terrorism. Iwata’s team gathered intelligence on national political parties and labor unions, while Kondo’s dealt mainly with computer data. Yoshizaki’s division primarily analyzed intelligence from the US State Department and CIA. Korenaga’s department investigated extremists and religious cults in Japan, while Tsuboi’s mostly gathered intelligence on foreigners in the country, and Katsurayama’s provided protection for VIPs abroad. Yonashiro’s division, as its name suggested, classified and circulated documentation, while the main function of Sakuragawa’s was to investigate hostile nations and their military, equipment, and current status. Everyone present was considerably higher ranked than Kawai. None of them even knew who he was, other than Iwata, who was just winding up his briefing when Kawai entered the room.
“NHK and commercial broadcasters have as many as ten television cameras between them in Fukuoka Dome. Also, the surveillance cameras are still intact, and the control room is reporting that as things stand there are between ten and twenty armed guerrillas. This tallies with the numbers captured on the various TV cameras. There are two or three in the Dome’s broadcasting booth, between three and six in the infield stands, and five to ten in the bleachers. Of course, there may be more hidden in the stadium’s passageways, restrooms, restaurants, and so on—a possibility that rather ties the hands of security personnel. We’ve ascertained that the guerrillas are armed with pistols, sub-machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades, but, again, we can’t discount the possibility that they might have other firearms and explosive devices.”
As thirty-one-year-old Kawai walked in, the senior people around the doughnut-shaped table all looked at him as if wondering who the hell he might be. There was no space at the table, and since Iwata indicated a row of stacking chairs without armrests by the wall, he took a seat there. These were intended for young aides from the secretariat’s office, the Foreign Ministry, the Police Agency, and the Defense Agency. Whenever documents pertaining to statistics, guidelines, agreements, and so forth were needed, the aides would discreetly approach the round table like the black-clad stage assistants in kabuki and hand them to their superiors. The large, square room had maps of Japan and the world on the walls, computers with access to top-secret data, several dozen hotline telephones, and a number of television monitors with inbuilt IP video phones, and was built to withstand even being at the epicenter of a major earthquake.
The television monitors at the center of the table were showing images from the NHK broadcast. Smoke was still spewing from the wrecked scoreboard, but there had been no major developments since. It was unknown whether there were any casualties. The demands made by the North Korean rebels were periodically repeated: No police within a radius of five kilometers from Fukuoka Dome. Disable all air-defense systems around Kyushu and ban all activity by the Air Self-Defense Force for two hours, beginning now. The Prime Minister and Chief Cabinet Secretary had both indicated that the demands should be met. There had been three telephone contacts with the guerrillas, who apparently hadn’t requested anyone in particular to negotiate with. Yamagiwa had spoken to them on the first phone call, Korenaga on the next, and then Tsuboi—but the exchanges could hardly be called negotiations. The rebels had made their demands, and the moment Korenaga and Tsuboi said they “understood,” the line had gone dead.
Yonashiro rose to his feet. “Surely we can’t shut down the air-defense system?”
“We had to say we would, to prevent anyone getting killed. That’s all,” Yamagiwa replied.
After some discussion, it was decided to ignore the instruction to disable the air-defense system for two hours. SDF radar was monitoring airspace as usual from the Kyushu bases at Ashiya and Kasuga, and the Unijima substation in the northern tip of Tsushima Island. The order hadn’t referred specifically to radar, and in any case it wasn’t possible to tell from outside whether the radar system was functioning or not. The Western Air Defense Force’s Nyutabaru and Tsuiki bases, and the South-Western Air Defense Force’s Naha base, were all on twenty-four-hour alert against airspace violations, and had fighter planes ready to scramble at a moment’s notice.
“If an unidentified aircraft comes within the flight-identification zone and fails to respond,” said Sakuragawa, “then we give the order to scramble, right?” Yamagiwa brushed the question off, merely saying that in such a contingency, they’d consider the situation and give instructions accordingly. Sakuragawa and Yonashiro seemed stunned by this reply and immediately started phoning the various bases. “Scrambling means emergency interception,” muttered a young aide from the SDF’s Intelligence HQ sitting next to Kawai in the outer ring of chairs. “Saying we’ll consider the situation when it happens is tantamount to admitting we won’t be able to intercept.” The rebels’ demand to close down the warning system had raised the specter of the Taepodong ballistic missile in many people’s minds. And now Yamagiwa was asking, “If a Taepodong is launched, will the ASDF be able to shoot it down?”
“I’ve already answered that question dozens of times in the Diet and in Cabinet meetings,” Yonashiro told him. “Without an effective missile defense system, once a missile has been launched, shooting it down with fighter planes or ground-to-air missiles would be like catching an arrow with your bare hands. Impossible.”
“How did that bunch get into Japan so easily in the first place?” Yamagiwa growled. He clearly didn’t like having his ignorance exposed.
“I’ve put in dozens of requests for more P-3Cs, to no avail,” Yonashiro said matter-of-factly. “The condition of our fleet of surveillance planes has deteriorated and the number on regular patrol has actually decreased. We don’t even have our own spy-satellite system but rely on US military satellites to watch what’s going on around the North Korean coast. You have to understand that with our current number of surveillance planes, detecting a suspicious North Korean ship is like looking for a contact lens in a public swimming pool.”
The room’s phones were ringing off the hook with calls from Diet members and other bigwigs, including the Fukuoka prefectural governor and the mayor of Fukuoka City. The mayor was agonizing over whether they should evacuate residents. And what about the Dome complex? Customers in the shopping mall and hotel had been urged to leave as quickly as possible. They couldn’t tell the room guests to leave, however, with the risk of further terrorist attacks on the station or airport. A bigger problem, though, was the fact that issuing an evacuation order was likely to cause panic. Worse still, right opposite the Dome was the National Kyushu Medical Center. This hospital provided the highest quality care in the whole region, with many terminal cancer patients, almost four thousand operations carried out yearly, and a large number of emergency patients. If they evacuated the area around the Dome, how would they handle the hospital?
The callers raised all kinds of concerns. What should they do about any casualties in the Dome? Could the Self-Defense Force deal with those? What about contacting the International Red Cross? Were missiles likely to be used? Could they please be given any relevant information as soon as possible? Was it possible to clarify which things they could decide for themselves, and when they should await government instructions? These were matters for which the local authorities needed urgent answers, but all they got was, “We’re keeping an eye on the situation, and will let you know in due course.”
“So just what is this rebel army faction?” Yamagiwa asked those seated at the round table. Yoshizaki of the Foreign Ministry quoted the statement from the North Korean embassy in Beijing. “That much is already in here,” Yamagiwa told him irritably, shaking the dossier in front of him. Just then a call came for Yamagiwa from the Prime Minister and Chief Cabinet Secretary with directions to convene a Cabinet meeting to discuss the application of emergency legislation. A young aide from the Cabinet Secretariat leaped up from his chair by the wall and started making phone calls. Would the emergency legislation improve matters? Kawai didn’t think so.
Just who would make the decision to evacuate residents in the vicinity of Fukuoka Dome? Under the Emergency Acts of 2004, the chain of command was vague at best. In principle, in the event of a terrorist or other attack, a government task force would give directions to prefectural governors, but under certain circumstances the local authorities might be obliged to use their own judgment if the matter was urgent. However, the precise circumstances were left unspecified. Nor was there anything in the Emergency Acts that dealt with the possibility of terrorists blending in with the general population, or of residents getting caught up in street fighting. It bandied about words like “aggression,” “terrorism,” “weapons of mass destruction,” and so forth, but had nothing to say about dealing with a real, live enemy at close quarters.
One hour after the initial occupation, the crisis-management room issued the order for all police to remain outside the stipulated area, but there was nothing to stop curious onlookers from gathering near the Dome. Local TV stations had sent out mobile broadcasting vans that showed an ever-growing crowd there. To contain this problem, the Fukuoka city council decided to set up a police cordon at a radius of seven kilometers from the stadium, but it took another fifteen minutes to obtain government approval. Blocks were to be set up on the expressways and highways first, although it would be impossible to monitor the city’s maze of narrow side streets. To prepare for further terrorist attacks, reinforcements from other prefectural police forces were brought in, and riot police were deployed at Fukuoka Airport, the Hakata bullet-train terminus, the government district, and the port facilities.
Contact with US military personnel stationed in Japan revealed that by now the US army was on the relatively high alert of DEFCON 3. The commander of US forces in Japan and the American ambassador had both confirmed that they would respect the Japanese government’s wishes and instructions, and would not take any action without contacting the Japanese government in advance. Nevertheless, they had already closed the consulate in Fukuoka and evacuated all personnel to the base at Yokota. And anyone would have thought civil war had broken out from the sobering TV coverage of the American embassy in Tokyo, where heavily armed soldiers with night-vision scopes were stationed all around the grounds, and snipers armed with rifles and light machine guns were installed on the roof. A young Foreign Ministry aide sitting in the outer ring told Kawai that there had been a tenfold increase in the number of US marines on guard.
The Prime Minister and Foreign Minister had apparently been trying to phone Washington, but it was early Saturday morning there, and they hadn’t been able to get hold of a single senior official, let alone the Secretary of State or his deputy. Maybe it had something to do with the anti-American mood prevalent in Japan lately, Yamagiwa suggested to Yoshizaki from the Foreign Ministry, but the latter was on the phone and couldn’t answer. After a while Yoshizaki hung up and reported that he’d finally managed to get through to someone from their Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs on his home number, only to be told that it was basically an internal problem for Japan. “What about the damned Security Treaty?” demanded Yamagiwa angrily. Yoshizaki said that it was only the opinion of that particular employee and not an official response from the State Department, before taking another call.
Most of the key members around the table were working the phones—landlines or mobiles or both at once. All the landlines were in use, and as soon as someone hung up on one call, the phone would start ringing again. Typescripts of all calls were supposedly circulated to everyone present, although there weren’t enough typists to keep up, let alone anyone to edit the information. Kawai sat in his stacking chair reading the printouts constantly being handed to him. All this random information was just confusing, he thought. Instead of trying to get hold of the US top brass and the State Department, they should first be considering how to guarantee the safety of those thirty thousand people in Fukuoka Dome, and second, analyzing the demands made by the North Korean guerrillas and what to do about them.
*
How long before Suzuki got here? Kawai checked his watch. It was past nine in the evening. Kawai had been in the room for an hour, and an hour and forty minutes had already passed since the start of the crisis. Suzuki’s arrival was unlikely to change anything anyway. Even if the Prime Minister and Chief Cabinet Secretary turned up it was doubtful any action could be taken quickly, since they hadn’t yet discussed, much less decided, their priorities. And without priorities, they weren’t going anywhere. Here everything was ad hoc—the question of whether ASDF planes could be scrambled or not was just one example of the simultaneous discussions going on amid the clamor of ringing telephones, shrill TV anchors, and keyboard clatter. None of the people at the table were in any way stupid; it was just that they were completely unaccustomed to this type of situation, and knew practically nothing about North Korea. They all had their own specializations, so this was only to be expected, but the fact that they didn’t ask the advice of people who did know about such things was a major problem.
There were plenty of things that Kawai was itching to say. He wanted to discuss the likelihood of rebellion in the North Korean People’s Army, for instance, and the nature of the particular branch of it that the guerrilla leader belonged to, not to mention the need to contact people in Beijing and Seoul. Yet he was seated with the other low-ranking bureaucrats on the fringe of things, where you weren’t allowed to say anything unless you were asked for an opinion. There were around thirty other staffers seated near him, but they were simply making internal calls and distributing memorandums. Occasionally they might be called up to the round table to whisper some information into their boss’s ear. They were all experts in something or other, but they couldn’t offer an opinion openly from these seats. They would have to wait until they returned to their ministry or agency or department, prefacing their comments even then with some phrase such as, “I hope I’m not intruding, but…” or “I apologize for speaking out of turn, but…”
One young bureaucrat came into the meeting room on the verge of tears to say that the Cabinet Secretariat was being hounded by the media demanding to know why there hadn’t yet been any official statement. An NHK anchor and his studio guest, a military analyst, had just expressed their dissatisfaction and concern over the lack of any comment from the Prime Minister, while commercial broadcasters had been less circumspect in their calls for the PM to address the nation. But the consensus here was that it would be inexpedient for any top politician to face the media when there was still too little information to take any firm countermeasures. Furthermore, the PM was currently in a helicopter and it was physically impossible for him to comment.
