From the Fatherland, with Love, page 43
For the past four days, however, the government had been primarily occupied with preparing the legal basis for the Maritime Self-Defense Force to intercept the North Korean ships, and how to deal with the US government and Japan-based US forces, as well as the Chinese government and the UN Security Council. Even Kai’s indirect involvement had left him feeling that the government didn’t know what it was doing. It had taken hours of debate before the decision was taken to stretch interpretation of Clause 20 of the Japan Coast Guard Law, promulgated in the wake of the spy ship incident of March 1999, to allow the Maritime SDF to prevent the expected fleet from entering their territorial waters. The Foreign Ministry had also been pushing the US and other allies to stop the ships leaving North Korea on the basis that it would provoke military conflict in East Asia. However, a senior official in the US State Department had apparently responded off the record that the only threat of conflict came from Japan if it attacked the ships carrying the rebel army.
Outside it was exceptionally warm for April, but Kai soon realized the heat was due to the lighting used by the riot police. The entrances of all the government buildings and surrounding streets were as bright as day, and there was a constant tinnitus-like hum from the generators. He felt unsteady on his feet. He hadn’t had any sleep to speak of for the past five days, and he smelled bad, having been unable to wash thoroughly in the cramped showers in the ministry. He didn’t feel particularly stressed, but he was still too wired to be able to sleep right away. He decided to go for a drink, and called his mother to let her know that he wouldn’t be home until late. Kai wasn’t much of a drinker. A doctor had once told him his low tolerance of alcohol was probably psychological. His mother was a teetotaler, and this had probably affected him—whenever his mother disliked something, he tended to follow suit. But there was a bar in Akasaka that never had any loud karaoke or rowdy customers, and never put any pressure on you to drink more than you wanted. The proprietor, Sanjo Masahiro, had started the place after retiring from an undistinguished career in the Financial Services Agency. Its pleasant atmosphere was conducive to enjoying a quiet drink along with some good music and conversation.
For the last couple of days, TV broadcast vans had been banned from the Kasumigaseki government district, and the number of TV cameras and reporters allowed in had also been severely restricted. The only civilian vehicles circulating in the area were chauffeur-driven limos, taxis, and official cars. It wasn’t that the area had been sealed off as such, but the riot police checkpoints were so stringent that ordinary traffic naturally avoided it. According to the National Police Agency, over fifty thousand riot police from all over eastern Japan had been mobilized. The number of SDF soldiers guarding the ministries and agencies had also been substantially increased. They had been kitted out with gas masks, and a chemical protection squad from Omiya had already arrived in Tokyo. Tanks and armored personnel carriers had become a familiar sight. Rows of riot police trucks lined the roads, and riot police were permanently deployed every few meters and in the local subway stations, on the alert for terrorist attacks. The whole area felt as if it were under martial law, and not many people were out on the street. As Kai walked past the riot police, he held up the photo ID hanging around his neck for them to see, and they double-checked his face against it.
When he’d declined an official car on the pretext of wanting some fresh air, he had been warned to be careful. Just the day before yesterday Doihara, Minister for Land, Infrastructure and Transport, had been attacked by a man wielding a wooden sword as he was about to get in his car after attending a meeting of top domestic and foreign airline executives in a central Tokyo hotel. His attacker had been an unemployed man in his late forties with no political background, his motive being simply that the blockade had prevented him from being at his mother’s deathbed. He was easily overpowered by a bodyguard, but the media had shown widespread sympathy for the man, however. For the past six months, Doihara’s attacker had been sending his entire unemployment benefit package to his elderly mother in Fukuoka, who had heart and lung problems, and he himself was severely undernourished. When her condition had taken a sudden turn for the worse and his relatives sent word for him to come immediately, there were no planes or trains in operation to Fukuoka, so he was unable to travel. Numerous other people had been similarly affected.
Kai flagged down a taxi and asked to be taken to Akasaka. The elderly driver kept glancing in the rear-view mirror at his face and ID. Kai felt uneasy. What if the man was from Fukuoka? He might get aggressive if he knew that his passenger was a government official. Until recently, Kai had never really bothered about what part of the country people were from. Now, though, ministry employees from Kyushu, especially those from Fukuoka, had acquired a particular aura, as though each was capable of sudden violence. According to a survey conducted in 2008 by the Statistics Bureau, there were about four hundred thousand people from Fukuoka and a million or so from Kyushu as a whole who were now living elsewhere in Japan. Given that there was a daily average in Fukuoka City of thirty-four weddings and twenty-nine deaths, with the corresponding figures for Kyushu as a whole at two hundred weddings and three hundred and twenty deaths, this made for an awful lot of people unable to attend the weddings and funerals of family, friends, and relatives. The combined monthly passenger figures for JAL and ANA flights to and from Fukuoka had approached a million, which translated into a daily average of sixteen thousand passengers arriving at Fukuoka Airport. The backlog was obviously enormous, with the accumulation of freight destined to leave Fukuoka for East Asian countries like Korea and China in the past four days alone said to amount to some ten thousand large containers.
There had been several other incidents, too. A spate of suicides among female high-school students had been sparked by the cancellation of the Kyushu leg of a tour by a popular rock band. The night the concerts had been called off, a high-school girl in Kumamoto jumped off a building, and subsequently girls in Fukuoka and Nagasaki had taken overdoses or slit their wrists, making a total of seven deaths in all. One psychologist interviewed on TV said that the cancellation of the tour wasn’t entirely to blame, and that the sense of isolation caused by the blockade had also played a part. Then the day before yesterday, Umezu, the Minister for Economy, Trade, and Industry, had resigned over a related incident. Early in the morning of the seventh, a patient suffering from acute kidney failure died due to a lack of dialysis solution at a private hospital in Saga. Umezu was himself from Fukuoka, where his family was heavily involved in local industry, and he must have come under a fair amount of pressure from the local business community. People seemed to be divided in their attitude toward his resignation, with around fifty per cent voicing disapproval.
Public opinion on the blockade kept vacillating. Even within the government there were factions opposed to it, although there was also support from the opposition. The main media outlets daily overplayed the issue without taking a clear stand either way. And then all of a sudden a consensus arose that, should the blockade be lifted, major mainland cities like Tokyo and Osaka were bound to be attacked. There was a general sense of guilt at having imposed the blockade, so some kind of justification for it had to be found if the people of Fukuoka weren’t to have been sacrificed in vain. It had to be accepted as inevitable. And it followed that any assault on the KEF or its ships would result in widespread terrorist attacks.
For the past couple of days, rumors had been spreading on Internet message boards that the North Koreans would target liquefied-natural-gas facilities, and before long the national media had picked up on it. One website run by an American couple, both scientists, attracted particular attention. They had long been warning that LNG installations were soft targets for terrorists in that an entire city could go up in flames if pipes or tanks were hit. Subsequently, the top story in one national paper detailed how Fukuoka would be engulfed in a sea of flames in the event of an attack on the Seibu Gas installation on Higashihama Pier. One expert pointed out that although underground LNG containers were protected against earthquakes and soil liquefaction, an anti-tank rocket could crack the upper surface and cause a leak that might well explode with the power of a small atomic bomb, which led to frenzied speculation that gas terminals and pipelines across the country could also come under attack.
Once the media had decided that if the blockade was lifted the whole country might explode, nobody—neither the politicians and media who had remained on the fence about the blockade, nor even human rights and antiwar advocates—was any longer able to voice opposition to it. Or rather, thought Kai, they were no longer under any pressure to take a side. For the same reason, conservatives and right-wingers were unable to push for an attack on either the North Korean terrorists’ camp in Fukuoka or their backup fleet. The question of whether the KEF actually intended to carry out terrorist attacks around the country ceased even to be debated.
Yet even as public opinion fluctuated this way and that, cracks began appearing in the veneer of humanitarian concern to reveal glimpses of vested interests. Two days earlier, the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations had started criticizing the blockade on behalf of companies exporting parts for automobiles and electronic equipment from Fukuoka to China, and demanded that freight operations be resumed from Hakata Port to East Asian destinations. Since these were influential exporters, their opposition to the blockade had a major effect. There were also persistent rumors that unless deliveries were resumed, Chinese firms would start petitioning the Japanese government. The government couldn’t afford not to consider lifting the blockade. The PM and his deputy weighed up numerous options, but kept running up against the unfortunate fact that Fukuoka City had handed over the resident codes to the North Koreans, and some private banks and firms were actively collaborating with them. For all they knew, the city might have issued them Japanese passports. If this was the case, it would be impossible to contain them once air and rail travel was resumed.
A further concern was that if they allowed exports to go ahead, there was a risk that it would further consolidate the occupation. The possibility of Prime Minister Kido and Foreign Minister Ohashi going to Fukuoka to negotiate with the KEF leaders had also been discussed a number of times, but the principle of not negotiating with terrorists kept getting in the way. This point was of major importance for the government, though it probably made little difference to the people of Fukuoka. But there was criticism from abroad that in not going to Fukuoka or appointing a negotiator, the Japanese government was demonstrating its cowardice and incompetence.
Near the Kasumigaseki exit of the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway, a group of people sat on the ground in a candlelit vigil. It was a peaceful demonstration by young and old alike, with a banner that read “LOVE AND PEACE TO ALL THE PEOPLE OF FUKUOKA.” Someone was playing a guitar, and everyone sang along. Looking at the flickering candlelight, Kai suddenly felt sick to his stomach. He wanted to grab them by the collar and yell at them, “Just how the hell do you think all this love and peace will get there?” In Fukuoka people were actually dying. A yakuza carrying a shotgun had been shot at point-blank range by a member of the terrorists’ police squadron. The man had fired two bullets in quick succession from a Kalashnikov into the victim’s head. And then a whole crowd in Ohori Park had been caught up in a shoot-out. The streets of Fukuoka were already full of death.
Kai had the taxi drop him at the top of Hitotsugi Street, and removed his ID pass from his neck as he set off down the sidewalk. The tension prompted by the heightened police presence elsewhere was absent from Akasaka’s entertainment district. Heavily guarded areas were around the Diet and the Imperial Palace, the Kasumigaseki government district and the Defense Agency, as well as Tokyo Station, Haneda Airport, the port facilities, the Metropolitan Government office, and the embassies of important countries. Outside the metropolitan area, places like nuclear power stations, dams, LNG and oil storage facilities, and SDF bases were also covered. Entertainment and shopping areas were not considered targets and so were left unguarded. It wasn’t that nobody worried about it—what if sarin gas was released in, say, a cinema in Kabukicho? But without a tenfold increase in the number of police, SDF soldiers, firemen, and doctors, there was no way of preparing for such a scenario; and so the government had simply taken the optimistic view that these places were not in danger.
It was Kai’s first visit to Akasaka in quite some time. The bustle and atmosphere was unchanged, but there were a lot of foreigners, especially Americans, around. Inflation and the recession were keeping Japanese customers away, and with the collapse of the yen overseas visitors found Japan a bargain and came in droves. A flashing neon sign drew attention to a famous Italian restaurant that had its main branch in Rome. The sign combined the restaurant’s name with prawns, salami, and the tripe that the place was famous for. In the alley next to it, two homeless men were checking out a plastic bucket of raw garbage. They had removed the lid and were rummaging inside with their bare hands. One was stuffing macaroni and spaghetti leftovers into a plastic bag, while the other was chewing the last bits of meat from a bone—lamb, maybe, or chicken. Apparently missing some teeth and unable to bite properly, he scrunched up his mouth and used his tongue, gums, and remaining teeth in an effort to strip the meat off. He looked like a baby with its lips clamped around its mother’s nipple.
The man stuffing pasta into a bag was at most in his late twenties, and the one sucking on the bone wasn’t of an age at which you would normally lose your teeth. He’d probably had them smashed in by someone. Kai had read in a weekly magazine of a trend amongst juveniles to work over people like this. Both men were dressed in shirts, cotton pants, and sneakers, and both had their long hair pulled back in ponytails. Their clothes and shoes were grubby, though if they hadn’t been scavenging in garbage bins they probably wouldn’t have been noticeable. As Kai stood watching them, the bone-sucker looked over at him. His eyes locked with Kai’s, but his expression didn’t change.
A group of people with ID passes from the nearby TBS TV station appeared. An anchor from the TBS evening news program had recently resigned in protest over the blockade. He was a former university professor from Fukuoka. His resignation had apparently been big news down there, but hardly even gained a mention in Tokyo. At the start of the blockade, the daily reality of those “sacrificed” in Fukuoka had been widely debated on news programs. In an appeal to viewers’ sympathy, the media had been focusing on individuals affected by the blockade, from crying children at Fukuoka Airport unable to travel to Disneyland, to businessmen prevented from going on business trips, lawyers complaining that important documents weren’t getting through because the mail had been stopped, journalists whose papers were limited to a six-page edition because of the shortage of paper and ink, and pharmaceutical companies and hospitals scrambling to secure supplies of disinfectants and blood agents. After the Ohori Park incident, however, such reports had abruptly ceased. The word “sacrifice” had an attractive ring to it, with its sense of noble self-denial—until, that is, the reality hit home with bodies shown being blown apart.
In the middle of the group of male TBS employees was a woman anchor in charge of the evening news. She was well known, with the intelligence and good looks typical of TBS. She was probably on her way out for a bite to eat with her crew, having finished the evening broadcast. Her long, slim legs were sheathed in flesh-colored stockings, and she wore a pale-green suit and a scarf around her neck. Her hair was tinted brown; her eyes slanted upward at the corners. As they walked, the men suddenly burst out laughing at something she’d said. Attracted by the sound, passers-by noticed her, and a group of students called out, “We love your program—keep up the good work!” Kai felt rage welling up inside him again: with Japan in such a serious fix, how could they be so lighthearted? The anchor ignored him as they passed each other—there was no reason why she should have noticed him, but Kai felt as though he’d been cold-shouldered. There were a lot of people in Kyushu who couldn’t laugh right now even if they wanted to. Did these people really understand that? After they had gone, the scent of the woman’s perfume seemed to linger in the air. The smell was odious to him.
Outside one building, a Japanese bar girl was locked in an embrace with a foreign customer wearing a soft gray suit that looked Italian-made. He had one arm around her waist as he kissed her repeatedly on her cheeks and forehead, murmuring to her in English, “I’ll be right back to see you. Don’t forget you promised to come to Kyoto with me…” East Coast accent, thought Kai. After Tokyo University, Kai had gone to study at a small college in Boston through a contact of his mother’s. His homestay family was extremely strict, and he became fluent in English. Following the 9/11 attacks, it had become difficult to obtain a student visa for the US, so there were few foreign students around and hardly any other Asians. He had often felt hurt by the behavior of the East Coast rich kids toward him, but he’d stuck to them like a suckerfish and even made a few friends. His given name was Tomonori, so he told them to call him Tom. During those days, he often thought of returning to Japan, but his mother would never have allowed it.
Kai’s father ran an import-export retail business dealing in luxury tableware and furniture; his mother was the daughter of a diplomat and had lived for many years in the US. Kai was their only child, and with his father often away from home on business, his mother’s ambitions for him were a strong influence. The main reason Kai had given up the idea of becoming an academic in favor of the Home Affairs Ministry was his mother’s urging him to “make something of himself.” When he’d been promoted to director general of the LGWAN, newly formed to expand the Juki Net, she had been overjoyed. There wasn’t much that Kai wouldn’t do for her sake—making her happy and earning her praise made it all worthwhile. He sometimes thought it was probably because of her that he’d never married, even though he’d dated a number of women. But he had no regrets.
