The Samurai Strategy Part 9

Which may be why Tamba province has another claim to history as well.

It is the location of the one-time warrior castle- fortress of Sasayama, once a regional command post of the Tokugawa strongmen in Tokyo. You won't find overly much about Sasayama in the usual guidebooks, since it has the kind of history that's more interesting to j.a.panese than to tourists. The place has no gaudy vermilion temples, no bronze Buddhas ten stories high. Fact is, very little remains of the fortress itself these days except for a wide moat, green with lotuses, and a few stone walls lined with cherry trees that blossom an exquisite white for a few breathtaking moments each spring.

Although the castle is now burned down, a few homes of the samurai retainers of its various warlords remain. If you stand on the rocky edge of the moat at its southwest corner and look down through the cherry trees, you'll see an old-style house built some two hundred years ago by the twelfth _daimyo_ of Sasayama for his most loyal retainer. Its walls of white plaster are interspersed with beams of dark wood, its thatch roof supported by the traditional ridgepole.

Think of it as the home of the samurai most trusted, the guardian of the gates, the warrior nearest the fount of power.

Perhaps it will not seem surprising, therefore, that this ancient samurai residence, in the shogun stronghold closest to ancient Kyoto, was now home base for a powerful warrior of modern j.a.pan. Matsuo Noda.

Samurai had once battled in Sasayama's streets; many's the time its castle had been stormed by raging armies; much blood had been shed and much honor lost. But the event that occurred in Sasayama precisely two weeks after Tamara Richardson's dinner in New York was a historical moment more important than any in its thousand years prior.

It began shortly after dawn, a cool September gray just ripening to pink over the mountains. The early sounds of morning--birdsong, the faint bell of the tofu seller, the steam whistle of the autumn sweet- potato vendor--were only beginning to intrude on the quiet. Noda was where he always was at this moment: on the veranda overlooking his personal garden, a cla.s.sic Zen-style landscape whose central pond was circled by natural-appearing rocks, trees, bushes, paths. It was, of course, about as "natural" as those sculptured hedges at Versailles. In order to create the illusion of perspective and depth, the stones along the foresh.o.r.e of the pond were bold, rugged, ma.s.sively detailed, while those on the opposite side were dark, small, smooth--a little trick to make them seem farther away than they were.

It's a game heavy with nuance. For example, the stone footpath on the left side of the pond may look as if it goes on forever, but that's just part of the art: the stones get smaller toward the back, curving in and out among the azalea bushes till they make one last twist and disappear among the red pines and maples at the rear. Which trees, incidentally, have themselves been slightly dwarfed, again enhancing the illusion of distance, just as the back is deliberately s.h.a.ggy and dark, like the beginnings of a forest that goes on for miles.

Noda's Zen garden, which deludes rational judgment by manipulating all the signposts we use to gauge distance and s.p.a.ce, appeared to be limitless. The secret was that nothing actually ends: everything simply fades out and gets lost. It was a closed s.p.a.ce that seemed for all the world as if it went on and on if you could only somehow see the rest of it. Yet peek only a few yards away, and you've got the mundane streets of sleepy Sasayama.

This special dawn, as a few frogs along the edge of the

pond croaked into the brisk air, he knelt on the viewing veranda in a fine cotton morning robe, a _yukata_ emblazoned with his family crest (an archaic Chinese ideogram meaning "courage") and began to center his mind. He'd left his Kyoto headquarters early Friday evening, skipping the usual after-hours-drinking obligation of j.a.panese executives and grabbing the eight-thirty San-in Express to Son.o.be, where his limo waited to bring him the rest of the way home. Now he was up before daybreak and readying his usual morning ritual. As he sat there, gazing across the placid water dotted with lotuses at the foresh.o.r.e and framed with willows at the far horizon, his silver hair contrasted with the marine blue of the robe to create a presence easily as striking as the garden itself.

For a time he merely knelt, silently contemplating the view and listening to the metrical drip of water from a bamboo spout situated just at the edge of the steps. Finally he turned and picked up his _sumi _stick, a block of dried ink made from soot, and carefully began to rub it against the concave face of an ancient inkstone, till its cupped water darkened to just the proper shade. When the fresh ink was ready, he wet a brush in a separate water vessel, dried it by stroking it against a sc.r.a.p of old paper, dipped it into the dark liquid, and looked down.

This was the moment that demanded perfect composure, absolute control.

Before him was a single sheet of rice paper, purest white, and now his hand held the brush poised. He was waiting for that instant when his senses clicked into alignment, when the feel of the brush merged with his mind, much the way a samurai's _katana _blade must become an extension of his own reflexes.

Although he would stroke only a few kanji characters, scarcely enough for a telex or a memo, the moment required discipline acquired through decades of practice. His Zen-style calligraphy allowed for no hesitation, no retouching. It must be dashed off with a spontaneity that was, in itself, part of the art. As with the swordsman, there could be no time for conscious thought, merely the powerful stroke guided by intuition. No decision that confronted him throughout a business day would demand half so much mental control, inner resolve.

Just then, at the far end of the pond, the first sun flickered through the wisteria. Suddenly, without his consciously knowing the exact moment had arrived, as a Zen archer's arrow must release itself of its own will, his hand struck. The dark tip of

the brush pirouetted down the paper, starting at the left and laying down a mere five lines, twenty-two syllables.

_Inis.h.i.+e ni

_Once held_,_

_ari kemu hito no

_it's said, _

moteri cho

_by men of long ago,_

omitsuwa wo

_my ancient prize-- _

ware wa mochitari

_at last is near!_

_

It was done.

He sighed, leaned back, and reached for the cup of green tea that rested beside him on the polished boards. The verse was in an archaic style, a few syllables longer than a haiku, modeled on an eight- hundred-year-old work by a court poet of the Heian era. The strokes were perfectly nuanced, the flow of the brush precise, the intuitive strength as natural as a waterfall.

Noda drained his tea, then rose to go back inside. His antique house was tastefully "empty": its _tatami_-floored rooms, measured in multiples of those standard three-by-six reed mats, were barren, a museum to times past. They also were open to each other, their sliding doors, _fusuma_, being pushed wide. The walls, too, were vacant expanses of white plaster with only an occasional mounted six-fold screen depicting poetry parties of the Heian era, that courtly civilization portrayed in The Tale of Genji. And there were no overhead lights, merely an occasional cypress _andon_ floor lamp to augment the pastel glow of the rice-paper shop windows.

"_Asa-han_." He curtly ordered his gray-haired cook to bring breakfast, then turned to mount the ancient stairs.

"_Hai_." She nodded and was gone.

Although he kept the lower floor exactly as it had been two centuries past, the upstairs was a different matter entirely. It had been converted into a high-tech office, hooked through a maximum security TeleSystems TCS-9000 direct uplink (via the mid-Pacific Mareks-B satellite) to the mainframe of his new NEC information management system in the Kyoto headquarters, an augmented NEAX 2400 IMS, which handled voice, data, text, image. He had scarcely flipped on the system when the woman who managed his kitchen appeared, bowing, and deposited a tray bearing _miso _broth, rice, an uncooked egg, and more tea.

He grunted thanks as he was checking a CRT screen for the current rate on Fed funds, the cost of the money American banks lend each other overnight to meet reserve requirements. No surprises. Then he turned and cracked the egg over his rice, adding a leaf of dried _nori _seaweed. As he leaned back, chopsticks in hand, he quickly glanced through the Tokyo papers, followed by The Asian Wall Street Journal and the satellite edition of London's Financial Times. Finally he tossed them aside.

This was always the moment when he liked to take measure of the three photos standing in a row across the back of his teak desk. The first was his deceased wife Mariko--long-suffering, deferential, resignedly selfless. A model j.a.panese woman. He still thought of her with fondness, but as was expected of a j.a.panese helpmate, she always ran a distant second in his affections. His work came first.

The next picture was very different. This woman's face was white, her hair a lacquered wig, her lips a tiny red pout. Her name, Koriko, had been a.s.signed years ago in the Gion district of Kyoto, and she was holding a three-stringed lute, a samisen, and intoning some cla.s.sical melody from centuries past. These days she purchased thousand-dollar kimonos the way most office girls bought jeans, but she worked for the money. She was a geisha, a real one, an artist whose calling required years of training and commanded the awe of even the most modern j.a.panese. Like a prizefighter or a matador, she'd spent long painful hours perfecting style, technique, art. She had been Noda's one-time protegee, beneficiary of his patronage. Now, though, she had other "patrons." He still missed her, but the memory was fading.

The third photo was a face familiar to all of j.a.pan's avid TV viewers-- Akira Mori. She was wearing a dark blue Western suit, her hair a glossy pageboy cut, the conservative look of times past. It was the occasion of her graduation from the School of Law, Tokyo University (Tokyo Daigaku, or Todai as it's known), an important moment. Todai's alumni represent a network, a _batsu_, of the country's ruling elite, who compete with each other for the choicest, most prestigious government ministries. Although she had chosen a more visible career, she still relied heavily on her contacts in this governing clique, heads of the leading ministries, including Finance, Foreign Affairs, and of course the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, MITI.

Matsuo Noda himself had, in fact, once headed MITI, probably j.a.pan's most powerful ministry. He came from ancient samurai stock--fittingly perhaps, since the bureaucrats of modern j.a.pan are mostly of that cla.s.s. The samurai caste, men who served a liege lord and were forbidden to engage in trade, were actually j.a.pan's first public servants. In between civil wars they became sword-carrying bureaucrats.

Many a modern bureau chief has ancestors who wore two swords and sliced up a peasant or a merchant now and then with impunity, which may help explain why the average citizen still views government officials with such nervous awe.

A Todai honors man himself, Noda was a natural for MITI, which runs what is in many ways a covert operation. The head offices are in a nondescript, soot-covered building of tinted gla.s.s and limestone near Tokyo's Hibaya Park, guarded by armed, helmeted members of j.a.pan's National Police. Inside it's mostly open floors and lines of gray steel desks; no plush carpets and mahogany suites. MITI has twelve bureaus, each devoted to a major industrial sector. If its officials decide j.a.pan's strategic interests would be served by a certain manufacturing group's cutting production, lowering prices, altering product lines, these "recommendations" are pa.s.sed along. And it happens.

Noda began his career there by circulating through the different sections, "going around the track" as it's called, after which he proceeded to run the General Affairs office of various bureaus, by which time everybody had him picked for a mover, on the "elite course."

Eventually he was promoted to section chief in the International Trade Bureau, next on to bureau chief, and finally at age forty-seven he made the top. Vice minister.

After he reached the pinnacle, he held the job for a mere five years, then routinely left. He had to go; early fifties and you're out. MITI is no country for old men. He moved on to head the j.a.pan Development Bank, JDB, where he financed various high-tech start-up industries.

Finally he retired and went out on his own.

Unlike most other retired government officials, however, he didn't accept any of the lucrative private offers he received, the suddenly "vacant" spot on a conglomerate's board of directors. No, he had his own smoldering vision. In a dazzling and successful departure from usual j.a.panese convention, he

founded Nippon, Inc., an adjunct to j.a.pan's major financial players, with headquarters in the commercial center of Kyoto. His new organization immediately became a financial fixture in the new postindustrial, high-tech j.a.pan, and now, five years later, Nippon, Inc. was a thriving force in the management of capital. These days even the new generation at MITI routinely called him up for "consensus."

For Matsuo Noda now, everything was in place; he was at last ready to pursue a lifelong dream. He'd never forgotten the end of the war, that last day on Okinawa when Us.h.i.+jima's 32nd Army was a dazed remnant. He'd been in the cave above Mabuni when the general radioed his farewell to Imperial Headquarters, then severed his own spinal cord. Matsuo Noda, with anguish he could still remember, had burned the regimental flag and told those remaining to scatter, to become guerrillas--repeating Us.h.i.+jima's last command to "fight to the last for the eternal cause of loyalty to the emperor." Noda had declared that their struggle would continue on for a hundred years if need be.

He had overestimated the difficulty. The plan now poised had required less than fifty.

As usual for a work-at-home Sat.u.r.day (just another business day in j.a.pan), he was wrapping up loose ends from the week, finis.h.i.+ng reports, signing off on audits. Two printers were running, since he preferred to work with hard copy, and he was reviewing the list of outstanding loans NI was in charge of monitoring, checking for any early signs of trouble. Had any credit ratings slipped? If a receiving corporation was publicly traded, had its stock faltered? What was the overview: securities, un-amortized discounts on bonds, cash on hand? Next he paged through the weekly updates from the Small Business Finance Corp., the National Finance Corp., the Shoko Chukin Bank, various credit a.s.sociations and savings banks. It was all on his Kyoto information base, pulled off the new fiber-optic network that linked j.a.pan's financial centers.

He was about to ring down for fresh tea when a priority override flashed on the screen for his eyes only. This meant a coded message that could only be unscrambled using a special module in the computer.

The Kyoto office knew he was on line, but they hadn't wanted to route the information directly.

Highly irregular.