From the Fatherland, with Love, page 44
Kai entered the alley where the bar was located. He could see a woman asleep on a sofa in a closed-down ethnic food place, but he couldn’t tell whether she was homeless or just drunk. A group of middle-school kids came out of a convenience store and, catching sight of a policeman in the distance, scuttled away. A young man was gathering skewers from the garbage can outside a yakitori restaurant: quite well dressed in suit and tie, he didn’t look down-and-out. He tied the skewers with a rubber band and put them in a bag, possibly collecting them to sell. A woman yelled from the other side of the building. It sounded like an elderly person—probably a homeless woman being bullied by that gang of school kids he’d seen a moment ago. Many innocent elderly people had been “sacrificed” in Fukuoka. Yet strangely no one—not even the government—appeared to have caught the full impact of what had happened in Ohori Park.
Inside the bar, one customer sat at the counter, and a couple more were on a sofa. Jazz music was playing at low volume. Sanjo, the bar owner, always made his own selection from his collection of vinyl records, not CDs, for the nightly playlist. Resting on an easel marked “now playing” was an album by Stan Getz. It was an old bossa nova recording featuring a plump-cheeked female Brazilian vocalist. Kai thought its languorous mood suited the atmosphere and décor of the place. The sturdy oak counter had been meticulously polished, and the Spanish-made sofas along the wall were upholstered in paisley with comfortable arm-and backrests. On the walls papered in a simple design hung reproductions of works by the likes of Goya and Mondrian. Behind the counter, a Wedgewood tureen filled the place with a briny, buttery smell. Sanjo told his customers, “In kaiseki cuisine a broth is always served before the main dish,” and urged them to have some of his traditional Boston clam chowder before starting to drink. Exhaustion washed over Kai as soon as he entered the bar, and instead of sitting at the counter he sank onto a sofa.
Sanjo came over with a tray on which he’d placed a bowl of soup and a straight vermouth in a Venetian glass with an elaborate gold-leaf pattern. “Let’s get you warmed up first,” he said, spreading a linen cloth on the table and placing the glass and soup bowl on it. “Talk to you in a bit,” he said with a smile and went back behind the counter. He was always at pains to put his customers at ease by serving them some warm soup and a light aperitif right away. Kai had never much liked clam chowder when he was in Boston, but in this bar he only had to smell it to feel himself relax.
Seated in a black leather-upholstered chair at the counter was the owner of a French restaurant in Moto Azabu who was a regular here. Kai had often been to his restaurant. The chef there, who had trained at a three-star restaurant in Montpelier in the south of France, served a delicious bouillabaisse and dessert soufflé. On the other sofa were two women: an art dealer and her business partner, who mostly promoted young Mexican artists at their gallery in Minami Aoyama. The business partner, though still only about forty, was the widow of the CEO of a major paper manufacturer and had inherited a vast sum of money. Kai sipped his drink and nodded at them in greeting. He took a cracker from the demitasse saucer and broke it up into the clam chowder, then picked up the silver spoon engraved with the name of the bar and dipped it in. Smoke from the restaurant owner’s cigar—a Cohiba Robusto—wafted over from the counter. I can’t think of anywhere more relaxing than this place, thought Kai, exhaling deeply. The art dealer and the widow were deep in discussion over an etching by Goya on the wall. The piece depicted a scene from Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, with soldiers shooting people against a backdrop of a mound of corpses. It reminded Kai of the images of Ohori Park shown repeatedly on TV.
The Osaka SAT team had laid an ambush for the North Koreans with the help of a certain Kuzuta Shinsaku, who was on the terrorists’ list of people to be arrested. In line with the SAT plan, Kuzuta had asked for the arrest to be made at a restaurant in Ohori Park instead of at home, and the terrorists had agreed to his request. The Koreans had sent a squadron of only six Special Police, which meant they were heavily outnumbered. Where the SAT people miscalculated was in failing to anticipate the opposition dividing into two squadrons. The SAT captain and his team had hidden in the restaurant, while his deputy had waited in the buses with a backup squadron. On being informed that the Koreans had split into two groups, the SAT captain told his deputy to get instructions from Osaka. But just as this was being done, a squad member hiding on the restaurant terrace had detonated a stun grenade in the belief they’d been spotted by one of the terrorists. This was impossible to verify, but nobody blamed him. How else should he have responded to unforeseen circumstances? He couldn’t have known that the decision to go ahead had not yet been cleared with those higher up.
The following day, the Asahi Shinbun reporter accompanying the terrorists on their round of arrests had published a detailed report in which he stated that the SAT had opened fire first, and worse, that they had fired from a position that was most likely to put bystanders at risk. When the terrorists’ reinforcements started retaliating, the crowd of onlookers had cheered. Foreign governments and media held that the SAT’s strategy had been unjustifiable, a senior official in the British government commenting that if they were prepared to sacrifice ordinary citizens, then why didn’t the SDF just go ahead and attack the Koryo Expeditionary Force? The chairman of the UN Security Council took the unprecedented step of urging the Japanese government to show more restraint. Of the forty Osaka SAT members, twenty-four died, twelve were injured, and four surrendered and were now being held captive. Valuable personnel had been lost due to a strategic error.
“You’re looking pretty glum, Tom.” Sanjo had brought a drink over and sat on a stool facing Kai’s sofa. ‘Corcovado’ started playing. Kai said he couldn’t believe they’d fouled up so badly in Ohori Park. Sanjo nodded and smiled ruefully. He was drinking Famous Grouse Scotch. It was a cheap brand with a label bearing an illustration of the bird, but he liked its flavor. Kai himself had never acquired a taste for whiskey. He took a sip of vermouth, and even this burned his throat and stomach. Sanjo was of medium height and build, and always dressed in a white long-sleeved shirt, navy-blue pants, and dark-brown lace-up shoes. His hair was completely white, but perhaps because he was single and relatively free of worldly cares, he didn’t give the impression of being that old. Now and then, to keep up his English, he would translate an old spy novel. On graduating from a private university in Tokyo, he had been employed by the Tokyo branch of a foreign financial institution and had subsequently spent almost twenty years working in its UK head office and in Barbados. Toward the end of the Eighties, he had gone to work for what used to be the Financial Services Agency on a temporary basis, and ended up being employed there until retirement four years ago, when he opened this bar. Kai had first been brought here by Matsuoka Kusuko, the Minister for Information and Communications, and had been a regular customer ever since.
“I suppose the Foreign Ministry has petitioned the Security Council?” asked Sanjo, then muttered, “But in any case it’s a mess…” His slim neck rippled as he swallowed some whiskey. The occupation of Fukuoka was certainly an act of aggression as defined by the United Nations, but it wasn’t clear that the aggressor was another nation as such. The foreign media referred to the Koryo Expeditionary Force by name, as a group of armed defectors. Furthermore, there hadn’t been a battle, and the Japanese government hadn’t formally demanded that the terrorists disarm. In other words, there hadn’t yet been any real contact—they had simply imposed a blockade. And although they could blame North Korea as much as they liked, it wasn’t as if they could expect the North Korean government to restore Fukuoka to its original state.
“They should have sent the Foreign Minister to the UN to explain our situation,” said Sanjo, before asking what the government planned to do about the fleet preparing to sail from North Korea. “They don’t seem to know yet,” Kai replied, scooping up the last spoonful of clam chowder. With a pang of dismay, he remembered that the Foreign Ministry had assigned a task force to review international law in search of a solution. Over two hundred staff members had twenty-four hours to prepare a report on precedents such as Israel’s invasion of Gaza, the issue of sovereignty in the Falklands War, and the UN resolution on the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. But it was just like Sanjo said: they should have made Japan’s position and wishes known to the whole world right from the start.
“Shall we all have some melon before we go home?” Sanjo pointed at a wooden box on the bar. “I got these fantastic melons from Miyazaki. Brought the last one along to share with everyone tonight.” When Kai asked what he meant by the “last” one, Sanjo explained that he couldn’t get any more due to the blockade. He glanced at the clock. “Right, I’ll close the bar, then,” he said, walking over to the door and switching off the neon sign. “We don’t want a bunch of new customers coming in now. There won’t be enough melon to go around.” The art dealer laughed and said, “As if you ever get any new customers!” She was wearing a Chanel suit that looked good on her. Her friend wore a simple dress that had a slight sheen to it, set off with a necklace of evenly matched pearls. Sanjo cleared away the soup dish, changed the record from Stan Getz to Bill Evans, and came back with another whiskey, humming along to Evans’s piano rendition of ‘Willow Weep for Me.’ “So how are these North Koreans laundering all that moola they’ve been stealing?” he asked Kai. Money-laundering was a subject Sanjo had specialized in. “But then they probably don’t need to bother,” he added, “since the ones they’re arresting have already done it for them—all those drug dealers and yakuza and international con men. One of the regional banks must be collaborating with them—in which case, you can’t call it money-laundering as such. The people they’ve been arresting have all been busy laundering their proceeds through unregistered credit or bank bonds, gold bullion, Swiss bank accounts, accounts under false names in Hong Kong, or offshore funds in places like Andorra or Lichtenstein, Monaco, the Cayman Islands, Nauru. Whatever way, the stuff must be normalized by now, so all they have to do is grab it.”
“They can always invest in art,” chimed in the widow. According to her, paintings were more popular than ever as investments, especially after the rise of international Internet auctions. “There was a time when wealthy Saudis were rumored to be using Netherlandish art to mobilize funds to support terrorism, so the FBI introduced a system whereby any trade of over half a million dollars had to be registered, but basically it’s like Sanjo-san says: it’s just not possible without the cooperation of the banks. And of course the banks don’t want to make enemies of the rich.”
“Wine’s a good investment too,” put in the art dealer, raising her glass. The two women were drinking a Château Cheval Blanc Saint-Émilion. Kai’s homestay family in Boston had had wine every evening with dinner, and although he himself hardly ever drank he had become quite familiar with the varieties and their fragrances and flavors. The Cheval Blanc had an almond aroma. “More and more people are buying vintage Bordeaux over the Internet. A dozen bottles of, say, a 1982 Le Pin will be worth tens of thousands of dollars. There are companies that specialize in buying on commission, as well as the management and storage of the wine. Depending on how you go about it, you can easily launder huge amounts that way.”
“But those North Koreans don’t know the first thing about Château Le Pin,” the widow said cheerfully. “According to all the magazines, the Generalissimo drives a Benz, has a Rolex, and drinks Rémy Martin. But he’s never been to the West, so he doesn’t really know anything about the world. Just like Japan thirty or forty years ago. In our case it was Koenig Specials, Franck Mullers, and Grande Champagne Cognac, because we didn’t know any better. Now, of course, people act as though they’ve been drinking Le Pin all their lives.”
She swirled the wine around in her glass and brought it to her nose, savoring the aroma. “And just how long have you been drinking it?” teased her friend, and everyone laughed. The two women accompanied their wine with cluster raisins, and now and again one of them lit up a cigarette. The art dealer was from Yamanashi. The widow was Tokyo born, and lived within a stone’s throw of the bar in a large house set in extensive grounds, with her secretary and two borzoi dogs. Once the laughter had died down the sound of Bill Evans’s piano came through again with ‘Someday My Prince Will Come.’ The notes were like jewels dancing in the air. Kai felt unburdened—the sort of feeling you get when a persistent fever has finally broken—but some nagging thoughts that hadn’t bothered him while he was at work began to resurface in his mind. The biggest puzzle was why these terrorists were as effective as they were. They showed an astonishing skill in the way they ruled the city and dealt with public relations, not to mention their shooting and combat ability.
With an economy in tatters, widespread starvation, and several hundred thousand so-called political prisoners reportedly held in concentration camps, there was the possibility of the Kim Jong Il regime collapsing at any time. The level of international confidence in the regime was zero, and the only leverage they had for negotiating was the nuclear threat. And yet a group of just five hundred men and women from that country had not only taken control of Kyushu’s capital—a city with a population of a million—but also appropriated the assets of Japanese nationals, and were using Japanese workers to build housing for them with that money. They had seized upon the Ohori Park incident to inform the world, via their own TV program, that it had been the Japanese government that attacked Fukuoka citizens; they had told the foreign media that they were willing to accept UN inspections; they had accurately read the moves of Japanese firms and foreign countries wanting the shipping of car parts and semiconductors to be resumed; and they had announced that they were willing to allow all countries to reopen their consulates at any time. China was apparently considering doing so soon, since once the export embargo was lifted, moving the backlog of cargo would be a priority. And if South Korea and the US followed suit, the legitimacy this would give the occupation would be disastrous.
“I hate to say this, but there’s a possibility that Japan is already screwed,” said Sanjo. “We’re the only country that has anything to lose by an army of North Korean hardliners establishing a base in Fukuoka. I’m apolitical, not right-wing or left-wing or liberal or anything else, but this really smacks of a conspiracy. Not necessarily an international conspiracy—more likely it’s a unilateral action by North Korea, although I do get the feeling that there’s some kind of tacit agreement in the international community. Acts of aggression are prohibited by international law, in order to preserve peace. But there’s no state of war in Fukuoka. Didn’t a spokesman from the US State Department protest just the day before yesterday that the Japanese government had neglected its duty to protect their consulate in Fukuoka? If America can make a complaint like that in all seriousness, then you can see where things are headed, can’t you? The government probably should be applying the provisions in the penal code for crimes related to an external threat. That’s the law under which anyone who assists or offers any military benefit in the event of armed aggression by a foreign country can be sentenced to death or life imprisonment. But now that we’ve imposed a blockade, we can’t very well start indicting people, can we?”
Sanjo had been a finance pro trained in offshore funds. He had been managing accounts of several hundred million yen by his late twenties. He modestly claimed that all he did was fiddle with them and move them around by computer, but if you understood where and how the world’s money circulated, you could see the way the power games between countries played out. “Of course that gang of North Koreans in Fukuoka is tough,” he said, taking his empty glass back to the bar, where he poured himself some more Scotch before returning to his stool. “In diplomatic terms, those guys are old pros at walking the tightrope between Russia and China, and playing chicken with America by using nuclear brinkmanship to force negotiations for a mutual non-aggression treaty. Being a diplomat there means knowing that if you fail, you’ll be purged—and not just you but your whole family. Sent away for ‘discipline.’ It’s the same with finance.
“For a country in which seventy per cent of the people are starving, they’ve somehow managed to run the place by manipulating information, eliminating anyone who protests, and pestering other countries for money. It makes me sick, but they’ve actually become really good at it. When it comes to propaganda, nobody can hold a candle to them. ‘A matchless intellect, as bountiful as the sun, as indomitable as steel’—at one point there were thirty-eight such phrases glorifying Kim Il Sung. And it’s not easy to come up with things like that, you know. They have to be subtle enough to take in a whole mass of people. And then, if the Generalissimo or one of his aides doesn’t like what he comes up with, the guy in charge of propaganda will be sent packing, along with his family. It’s a hard-ass society. The Special Operations Forces undergo fearsome training programs, and are well funded, too. The provincial officials in Kyushu don’t stand a chance against them. But they’ll end up their own worst enemies, you mark my words. They’re not civilized enough. Even Pol Pot and the Nazis lost because of that.”
The occupants of the bar listened to him, nodding. Bill Evans was playing ‘My Foolish Heart’ now, with Scott LaFaro’s bass picking out the wistful melody. “Anyone ready for some melon?” Sanjo asked. “We are!” chorused the two women, raising their right hands like schoolgirls. The box was brought over and Sanjo, humming along to the music, opened the lid with a knife. The women drew closer, exclaiming, “You can already smell it!” As they watched the melon being lifted out, the restaurant owner muttered, “But you can’t blame them for the blockade. It probably was a mistake, but it’s easy enough to say that now. When you have to make big decisions, you don’t always know how they’ll turn out.” Sanjo stopped humming to say that even a school kid could now see that the blockade was a mistake. “I don’t understand politics,” the widow admitted, spreading a handkerchief over her knees. “But the worst thing is when people are injured or killed. As long as that doesn’t happen it doesn’t make much difference whether there’s a blockade or an occupation, does it?”
