From the Fatherland, with Love, page 21
As for vehicle traffic, the Kanmon Tunnel had been barricaded, and parts of the Kyushu Highway and the national routes were now off-limits. Caught up in the crisis were overnight express buses that had left Fukuoka on the evening of April 2 headed for Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka, and other cities on the mainland. Pursued by police helicopters on the Sanyo and Meishin Expressways, they were stopped and boarded by armed officers who subjected the passengers to a thorough interrogation. Lined up on the runways of Fukuoka Airport were armored vehicles along with armed SDF personnel, and at the adjoining army base an SDF battalion and US-made attack helicopters were standing by. The SDF had also closed the Shimonoseki Tunnel, with armored vehicles and tanks guarding the northern end. The government was using the army to isolate Fukuoka and the police for security checks in Tokyo and other major cities. Haneda Airport, the Imperial Palace periphery, and government buildings were teeming with the navy-blue uniforms of the riot police. The present state of affairs, newscasters reported, clearly smacked of martial law.
“Why? What for?” murmured Ri, as she looked at the TV images. Pak could well understand her reaction. Why, instead of engaging the KEF in combat, was the Japanese government sealing off Fukuoka and going to such extraordinary lengths to monitor activity in Tokyo? It had been completely taken in by the rumors. A moment’s thought would have made it obvious that the KEF was in no position to turn the entire nation into an intransigent enemy, inviting an all-out counterattack. No, the government had simply panicked at the prospect of terrorist strikes in the capital and reacted in a manner that was doubly counterproductive. First, it was wastefully expending men, equipment, and money on these cordoning operations. Tens of thousands of SDF and police personnel must be involved, which alone would cost a fortune. Secondly, the blockade meant stopping the flow of both people and products between Kyushu and the rest of the country. The economic fallout would be colossal.
Ri Gyu Yeong went on looking at the television screen with the same puzzled expression. Pak knew what she was thinking. Why weren’t Japan’s military forces on the attack? If the costs of defense were already ruinous, why not go on the offensive? If the Republic were in a comparable situation, the Dear Leader wouldn’t hesitate to order a counterattack. Eliminating the KEF would undoubtedly mean a lot of civilian casualties, but the financial cost and the physical damage would be relatively small. On joining the operation, Pak had asked Colonel Han if it were true that the Japanese government wouldn’t engage in any sort of military action that might affect civilians. “Is that just for humane reasons?” he ventured. Han had responded with a laugh. “A humane politician,” he said, “is like a bellicose pacifist—a contradiction in terms. Politicians are obliged to accept the fact that their job involves sacrificing the minority for the majority. The Japanese government’s primary concern won’t be the lives of Fukuoka’s citizens but the nationwide fury the government itself would incur, and the loss of support it would suffer, if it ordered the SDF to attack and many died as a result.”
Ri now excused herself, saluting and saying that she was on hand should Lieutenant Pak need her assistance. The packet of “tissues” she’d handed him after he had spilled the tea still lay on the table. They were neatly folded, so that each one could be removed separately from the open slit in the plastic wrapper, on which the name of a taxi company was printed. Pak wondered why a taxi company would be in the business of producing these things. He took out a sheet to feel the texture. Never before had his fingers touched such thin, soft paper. He put it to his mouth and then wiped his cheek. It felt to him like silk. The thought occurred to him that the whole nation of Japan was much the same: soft. The air at daybreak on Nokonoshima Island had been tepid and soft, like the evening air at Fukuoka Dome—and like that young farmer’s eyes. Choi Hyo Il had described the sensation of gouging out his eyes as being “like poking through bean curd.”
The Japanese underwear distributed at the training camp was so soft and smooth that it seemed hardly made of real material. The hotel beds and sofas too had a feathery touch. Pak waved the tissue paper in front of his eyes. The slightest breath was enough to make it flutter like a butterfly. Ri Gyu Yeong had told him that she’d acquired them from a taxi driver forced into service at Gannosu Air Station. They were apparently given away without charge. It wasn’t something limited to certain privileged customers, but rather an abundant and inexpensive commodity distributed free to quite ordinary people. The level of technology required to produce it was beyond Pak’s imagination. And yet far more baffling was how a country capable of such know-how could also be so politically inept. Wasn’t anyone thinking of the consequences of shutting off Fukuoka from the flow of goods and services? He himself came from a world of frequent food and fuel shortages, even for the privileged, and he knew that the social consequences could be hellish.
The meeting with the governor and mayor would be held in a separate banquet hall adjoining this one. Thirty minutes beforehand, Pak Myeong went in to make sure everything was ready. Side by side on the front wall were the flags of both Japan and the KEF. On a large sheet of paper decorated with artificial cherry blossoms were written the words CELEBRATING FRIENDSHIP, in both languages. Hung from the ceiling against the surrounding walls were radial braids of red and white, and in the middle of the room was a long, narrow table on which a cloth embroidered in the Korean manner had been laid out. Depicted on it was a sage teaching virtue to a tiger emerging from a bamboo grove. Jo Su Ryeon had deliberately chosen this and brought it from the Republic as a symbol of the relationship between Fukuoka and the Koryo Expeditionary Force.
Laid out on the center table and on several smaller ones along the walls, filling the room with their fragrance, were yellow, white, and purple tulips, primroses, daffodils, rape and cherry blossoms, azaleas, and camellias. Second Lieutenant Kim Hyang Mok and her female subordinates had begun preparing the arrangements early that morning.
Food and drink were already in place. The ample beverage selection included Pyongyang soju and purplish-pink Kamhongno, Japanese whiskey and beer, coffee and a variety of teas (including ginseng), as well as water and soda. The food was nothing short of a sumptuous feast, one worthy of May Day or the Great and Dear Leaders’ birthdays. Most striking was the basket in the middle of the main table, filled with apples, tangerines, melons, and other kinds of fruit that Pak Myeong had never before seen, though he could guess that they were South Sea rarities: one was green, egg-shaped, and covered with downy fibers; another was yellowish and shaped like a sweet potato. Next to the basket was a bowl piled high with chestnuts, deep-fried jujubes, sesame cookies, and various Korean candies. And all of this was surrounded by various meat dishes, including deep-fried beef, pork and kimchi on skewers, minced chicken patties, and, most fragrant of all, the deep-fried slices of pork known as cheyukjon. There were also deep-fried mackerel and stir-fried green pepper and octopus. A bowl of chilled seaweed-and-cucumber soup sat at each place setting.
For Pak Myeong the aroma was nostalgic, abruptly recalling his own village, as his mother sometimes cooked cheyukjon. Pak had been brought up and raised in a hamlet near Pyonggang in Kangwon Province. There, pork was something for special occasions, being normally reserved for members of the Party. His paternal grandfather had been killed in action during the Great Liberation War, but though this gave the family a perfect pedigree, they all lived in straitened circumstances, and from an early age he’d been obliged to work in the family orchard. When he was five, a younger brother was born, and as part of the celebration he found himself eating cheyukjon for the first time. He remembered his father boasting that for consistently producing first-rate apples and peaches, the regional head of the Party had given the family some pork. Making cheyukjon first involved mixing bean curd—after the water had been wrung out with a towel—with kimchi (also strained), ground pork, salt, black pepper, garlic, and sesame oil. Then egg yolk was added before it was all deep-fried. The aroma it produced was one of a kind.
After tasting cheyukjon that first time, the five-year-old Pak asked his parents if they had made it when he was born too. “Yes, of course,” his mother replied. “But I don’t remember eating it!” he said, and the assembled relatives and neighbors all laughed. After that, his mother had cooked cheyukjon for him on various special occasions: when he joined the Party, for example, and when he received permission to go to university. On the day he left for Pyongyang, his mother told him with a sad face that there was no pork with which to make his favorite dish. At the time, there was not even enough rice or maize to eat, let alone meat. She said that the older men who worked in the orchard had spent three full days scouring for rice. He went outside and looked at the rice paddy he had played near as a child. It was now winter, and he could see high-school girls with red mufflers, members of an ice-skating team, gliding on its thickly frozen surface. Beyond were the hills where he had gone to pick acorns, nuts, and berries. Weeping, his mother told him again and again that when he returned, she would make some cheyukjon, but Pak just gazed fixedly past her at the girls and their red mufflers.
Later, whenever he went home, he found that conditions were worse than ever. His parents looked more and more emaciated, and his father’s neuralgia got so painful that he couldn’t work. Each time Pak returned he could see that the orchard, like the hills themselves, had been further whittled away. Unable to bear the cold and the famine, the villagers had cut down the apple trees as well as the trees on the slope, where they planted maize instead. And even when the paddy field froze over in winter, there were no longer any skaters. Once, on furlough, he brought some pork with him, but there was no sesame oil, garlic, eggs, or bean curd. There was not even any kimchi. His mother said she couldn’t make cheyukjon. Not knowing what went into it, Pak had somehow thought that all that was needed was the meat. Here, in a room made ready for a banquet, Pak felt oddly drawn back into the past. In the monochrome of memory, amidst winter snow against somber hills, the only hint of color was in the image of those skaters. At the back of his mind he could still clearly see them, their mufflers flying in the wind, alongside the sad, gaunt face of his mother. Why are you remembering all this? he asked himself. The mayor of Fukuoka and his entourage were about to arrive. Pull yourself together.
“In the name of the Koryo Expeditionary Force, I hereby welcome His Honor the Mayor of Fukuoka City and His Excellency the Governor of Fukuoka Prefecture.” Han Seung Jin had worded his greeting to take account of the fact that the mayor was older than the governor. The mayor was of slight build, whereas the governor was a fleshily imposing figure, with a paunch and a bright complexion that indicated ample nourishment. On entering the room, the two men looked at the feast prepared for them in wide-eyed surprise, clearly not having expected such treatment. They were shown to the table in the middle of the room, across from Colonel Han. On his right was his second-in-command, Major Ri Hui Cheol, who due to his limited Japanese was relying on Second Lieutenant Ri Gwi Hui, next to him, to be his interpreter. At the far end was Pak Myeong, who in his administrative capacity was recording the meeting’s proceedings. Still standing behind their seats, the mayor and the governor glanced warily at Ri Gwi Hui with her laptop; they had already been given reason to fear her investigative skills.
Accompanied by two NHK Fukuoka cameramen as designated media representatives, along with a man identifying himself as the chief of the prefectural police, the pair had arrived in a large black Toyota at Checkpoint A. The occupied zone was bordered by the Hii River to the west, the coastal expressway and beach to the north, the Komo River to the east, and Yokatopia Avenue to the south; and the KEF had set up five checkpoints—one at each of the four corners and one more midway along Yokatopia Avenue. Checkpoint A was near the hotel, at the foot of the big bridge over the Hii. Ri Gwi Hui was waiting there to confirm the men’s identities before they got out of the car. As she later said with a laugh, it was no doubt the first time they’d had an AK-74 pointed at them.
The identification check showed that while the men purporting to be the mayor and the governor were indeed who they said they were, their companion, Okiyama Hiroto, was not the prefectural chief of police but rather the head of the National Police Agency’s Kyushu bureau. In an instant, Ri had access to a fund of information about him. Drawing on resident-register data, she indicated that she knew his place of birth, the university he had attended, and his work record in the foreign-affairs section, noting as well the operation he had undergone for a herniated disk four years before, his wife’s pen name as a haiku poet, and the fact that their second grandchild had started at a prestigious kindergarten in Tokyo. With three protruding front teeth, the bespectacled, late-fiftyish bureaucrat looked very like a squirrel. At the mention of his wife and grandchild, he paled.
It had been Major Kim Hak Su who’d gone to meet the three at Checkpoint A as the KEF representative. He was so angry that Ri Gwi Hui thought for a moment he was going to shoot Okiyama on the spot. SOF troops under his command had often quailed at his rebukes, and now the 1.85-meter-tall Kim towered menacingly over Okiyama like a soccer referee chewing out an errant player. “You are not the prefectural chief of police!” he shouted, pointing a pistol at the man’s temple and threatening him with public execution. Okiyama broke down, quietly begging that his family be left out of this. The mayor, whose name was Tenzan, despite being short, thin, and stoop-backed, pleaded Okiyama’s case with Kim, pointing out that he was guilty of nothing more than following government orders.
Instructions finally came from Han saying that Okiyama was to have his papers confiscated, that he was to formally acknowledge having misrepresented himself, and that he was to be arrested and detained in the hotel. Okiyama submitted to the humiliation of confessing: “I, Okiyama Hiroto, have committed identity fraud in a deliberate attempt to disrupt the Koryo Expeditionary Force as well as the stability of Fukuoka and its citizens.” Ri Gwi Hui then presided over a simple impromptu trial, reading aloud the charges, pronouncing the accused guilty, and ordering him to be taken away. Okiyama thus became the first “criminal” arrested by the KEF. His hands bound behind him, he was frogmarched away by two soldiers, with the entire event recorded by NHK Fukuoka.
After being led into the banquet room by Han, the mayor and the governor handed slips of hard paper to each of the KEF officers present, introducing themselves: “Tenzan de gozaimasu.” “Yoshioka de gozaimasu.” In the center of the little rectangular cards were their names in thick Chinese characters—Tenzan Toshiyuki, Yoshioka Masaru—and in the upper-right-hand corner their titles. These slips of paper, Jo Su Ryeon quietly explained, were business cards, known as meishi. They appeared to be made of a unique sort of paper, as though of translucent fiber. Pak felt the bumpy surface, wondering what technique had been used for the embossed lettering. He had never seen such things before and wondered what their purpose was. Wasn’t it enough simply to jot down a new acquaintance’s name, position, and contact information?
“Well, thank you very much,” said Han politely, holding up the cards. “In the Republic, we do not use these convenient ‘meishi’ of yours, though from now on I suppose we will be obliged to! In the meantime, we will introduce ourselves verbally.” He gave a resounding laugh, from the pit of his stomach, at his own little joke. The governor feigned a smile; the mayor did not. “Again welcome! Please sit down.” When they were seated, Han reached across the table to shake hands with both of them. The short Tenzan leaned forward, taking care not to let his suit brush against the food, while Han, still clasping both men’s hands, smiled into the NHK camera. As this was the only part of the meeting that the media would be allowed to film, the cameramen would now withdraw, returning only for the joint news conference that would follow. Although the KEF’s seizure of Fukuoka was of worldwide interest, the blockade imposed by the Japanese government precluded representatives of the foreign media from being present. Lieutenant Jo Su Ryeon, director of propaganda and guidance, had granted NHK exclusive coverage for the beginning of the meeting; they would be joined at the press conference by reporters from four newspapers—the Asahi, Mainichi, Yomiuri, and Nishi Nippon. All participants had been required to provide their resident-register information.
“When we in the Republic entertain important guests,” said Han, pointing to the display of food, “we tend to go somewhat overboard. Our purpose today, however, is less to entertain than to form a friendship. First, I wish to propose a toast to His Honor the Mayor and His Excellency the Governor.” At this point, two women soldiers, Kim Sun I and Ri Gyu Yeong, entered the room, now dressed not in khaki but in navy-blue skirts and white blouses, with orange scarves around their necks. Kim had clear, pale skin, a broad forehead, a small mouth and nose, and eyes whose corners slanted slightly downward. She was tall, with the well-balanced body of a gymnast. The two women each took a bottle of liquor from the table, went to stand behind Tenzan and Yoshioka, and prepared to pour some Kamhongno into their glasses. “Sake?” Yoshioka asked in surprise, covering his glass with his hand. Kim stood holding the bottle at the ready, looking disconcerted. Ri too appeared uncertain whether to pour anything into Tenzan’s glass.
“Why are we being served alcohol at a time like this?” Yoshioka whispered into Tenzan’s ear. Han Seung Jin smiled, silently fixing his gaze on the two men. “Why not?” said Tenzan, holding out his glass. “I’ll have a drink.” The liquid flowed in, making a sound like a gurgling infant. “I’m not much of a drinker,” Yoshioka said, gesturing with his hand to stop Kim Sun I when she had filled the glass halfway. “This is a special brand of soju made in Pyongyang,” Han explained. “We brought it from the Republic for the sole purpose of drinking it with Your Honor and Your Excellency.” When everyone’s glass had been filled, Han rose to his feet and exclaimed, “Kanpai!” Pak Myeong had never tried Kamhongno before and found it delicious. As though sensing his reaction, Jo glanced at him from several chairs away and gave him a look that said: Don’t overdo it.
