Cult X

by Fuminori Nakamura

  Hirai stared blankly at the man on the monitor in the meeting room. He never imagined he’d be in a situation like this. It was his second year as Chief of Security Division Two. He sneaked a sideways glance at the face of the Deputy Superintendent General and the Director of Security. The Chief of Detectives, Chief of Public Security, Chief of International Affairs Division Three, Security Division One, and Organized Crime Division Five were also there. They were all stunned. An independent ward? What nonsense were they talking about? No, more importantly, what had become of this whole situation? Criminals commanding the police to remain calm?

  First of all, the information they had been provided and the actual situation were too different. The cult they called by code name X was armed, and was going to carry out a terror attack. They had also abducted two civilians. Among them was a man affiliated with an armed African group. This cult was believed to be a branch of an international terror organization. To crush them in one fell swoop would be common sense in the current international situation. But if they were terrorists, why were they talking about group suicide? There was no way to control this situation. How had their information been so wrong? Was it a mistake, or sabotage? Had someone higher up intended this? Come to think of it, where was the chief of Division Four of Public Security? He’d been there a minute ago.

  This situation was incredibly troublesome. There was not just one group to negotiate with, but two. And the group that had occupied the television station and the cult itself seemed only loosely connected. There was also the possibility that their intentions did not line up. Hirai thought the chances of resolving this situation were close to zero. An independent ward? Do they really think we can answer that demand?

  Is this reality? As he watched the crying men occupying the TV station, he remembered the case from 1995, when another cult spread sarin gas through the subways. Back then, something he imagined impossible unfolded right before his eyes. What were they doing releasing sarin in the subways? At the time, Hirai, who had been working at the detective department of the Regional Legal Affairs Bureau, wasn’t sure. This cult existed cut off from the rest of the world. The longer they stayed apart from that reality, the further they slipped away from common sense. Then suddenly they appeared in this world as something “unreal.” Back then, he thought it seemed exactly like fiction. On 9/11, when New York was attacked, who could immediately recognize that scene as reality? But that terrible event had really occurred. Reality, everyday life, is fragile in the face of these sudden fictions. An independent ward? The Tokyo War Crimes Trials? What were they talking about?

  But he had a premonition.

  We had better not let them talk anymore.

  The Parliamentary secretary entered the room. He was an envoy to the government. The Superintendent General and Chief of Police followed. The Parliamentary secretary whispered something to the Defense Chief, who shook his head. “There are too many inconsistencies in our information. If we forced our way in now and there were many casualties, what would we do? Don’t try to simplify things.”

  “They’re armed.”

  “That’s true. That’s true, but there’s such a thing as timing. And when we begin is up to us. Can you explain our decision to those down the chain who will be shot to death?”

  “It would be an order.”

  “And who would take responsibility for that? Who? I could. But who else?”

  Everyone in the meeting room focused on the TV screen, where Sasahara was beginning to speak again. “We also want you to know that we are not alone . . . It has just begun . . . It should be on the news soon.”

  It made no sense. Everyone simply stared at the screen. Silence lingered. But on one network’s broadcast, white text ran along the bottom of the screen. Then the phone rang. There had been a massive explosion in Aichi Prefecture. It was not yet known if anyone had died or was injured.

  “. . . You’ll all see the videos soon.” Sasahara continued, crying. “I expect there was a blast radius of thirty meters. But don’t worry. No one died or was injured. Our colleagues are on the lookout. We will send you the video of the blast. How we did it. The bomb was detonated by calling a cell phone. This blast was a warning. These types of explosives have been placed throughout the country. What would happen if I lined up all those phone numbers on this screen? . . . Someone watching TV might dial one of those numbers. In other words, the detonators are in the hands of our countless citizens. Everyone has a cell phone.”

  The meeting room was wrapped in silence.

  “But please don’t worry. I won’t do that. However, the moment the police set foot in either this place or that facility, or the moment this broadcast is cut off by the government, my colleagues on the outside will dial all of those numbers. And we don’t just have bombs. There is also a system in place to release vast amounts of sarin gas. Several thousand people will likely die. If you enter here, we’ll die anyway, and according to our beliefs, we will all go to heaven as heroes. We no longer need resolve or courage. There is one way to stop this. For all of Japan’s cell phone companies to work together and block all service . . . That could work. But it wouldn’t change much, would it? We could still set off the bombs without those networks.”

  Hirai couldn’t do anything but stare at the screen. Terror attacks in unspecified locations.

  “Let’s see if this country, Japan, is the sort of country that would allow so many deaths just to save face.”

  The meeting room was still silent. The Parliamentary secretary called someone on the phone. Everyone in the room watched him. But there was no longer any other choice. Hirai felt it. Everyone in the room felt it.

  “Wait to move in,” the Parliamentary secretary said in a whisper. “Negotiate. Since it’s come to this, based on the 1998 decision, we’ll have to assemble an Emergency Operations Center in the Cabinet. And send the message to all police departments. Immediately detain all people known to have any connection to the cult . . . Search everywhere. Anywhere there may seem to be explosives . . . I know it’s impossible. But we must check every corner of this country . . .”

  19

  “They’re probably listening to us,” the white-haired commentator on the JMN Network special program said. The giant monitor in the middle of the JMN studio was playing the JBA broadcast of Sasahara holding the gun. Every channel was airing their broadcast the same way. The JMN commentator turned and spoke directly to the filming camera. “Hey! Cult members, are you watching this broadcast? If you’re watching, tell us who you are.”

  A newscaster tried to cut off the white-haired commentator—they didn’t want to be guilty of instigating anything.

  But JBA had a live feed of all the other networks’ programming, just like every other studio, and Sasahara heard the question and responded. “It doesn’t matter who we are. I thought you would understand that.” He spoke to the camera as if it were a televideo call. Sasahara and his men didn’t know enough about the studio equipment to set up anything more sophisticated.

  “We’d understand?”

  “Yes. You have your own god, right?”

  “God? Well, we have a variety of beliefs here.”

  “A variety? Don’t you all worship at Yasukuni Shrine? When the head of the country, the prime minister, went to worship at Yasukuni Shrine, the media proclaimed it the top religion of the country. Shinto’s our state religion, isn’t it?”

  “What? No. Japan doesn’t have a state religion. I’m opposed to the prime minister worshiping at Yasukuni Shrine. But if I had to defend his behavior, I’d say he was paying his respects to those who died in the war. He was mourning, not proclaiming his religion.”

  “Mourning? Yasukuni Shrine is for mourning those lost in war?” Sasahara asked. He took a single breath. “Yasukuni Shrine was erected after the start of the Meiji Period. It’s a relatively new shrine. Those who died fighting to protect the country, mostly soldie
rs, are enshrined there as deities. However, for example, the members of the Kamakura Shogunate, who died defending us when the Mongols were expanding their hegemony, are not enshrined there. While most of the world fell to the invading Mongols, Japan defeated them. The Kamakura Shogunate actually beat them twice, protecting our country. However, they are not enshrined at Yasukuni. When the Meiji government was established, those who fought on the government’s side in the civil war were enshrined, but not those on the enemy side. In other words, the old shogunate and other antigovernment elements were excluded. The many Japanese who died in air raids and from nuclear bombs are not enshrined. Despite that, those who led us into the Second World War, those Class A war criminals, are enshrined there. What does this mean? The standards are simple, and follow a specific ideology. That shrine draws the line at those who fought for the emperor. Most of Japan’s wars were civil wars. There was once even a custom of enshrining the enemies we killed, out of guilt. But Yasukuni Shrine is not like that. Your god is Amaterasu Ōkami, right? Her great-great-great-grandchild Jimmu was the first emperor of Japan. And the imperial line continued from him. The emperor today is his descendant, right? Japanese legends are like Greek legends. We’re polytheistic. But the big difference here is that our emperor exists as a descendant of those gods. Even during World War II many of our country’s people praised this land as one united under the descendant of Amaterasu Ōkami, didn’t they? When we die, we’ll meet at Yasukuni. Soldiers went off to die saying that to each other, didn’t they? Many probably died shouting tennou banzai, Long live the Emperor, didn’t they? The Americans and the English feared the unnatural bravery of the Japanese soldiers, didn’t they? And that’s not just something from our past, is it? The main purpose of Yasukuni Shrine is not to serve as a place to mourn those who have sacrificed themselves in war. Isn’t it a place where we honor them as heroes? To honor them means to let the public know of their contributions, and to commend them for that work, right? That fundamental premise of the Yasukuni Shrine has not changed. When we were occupied by America in 1946, they began to change that stance of ours, and there was an idyllic moment in our history following Japanese independence, but since 1978, things have returned to how they were before. Total conservatism. Unified thought. That is what the people in charge of this country worship. Aren’t you a democrat? Doesn’t that make your faith the one of Yasukuni Shrine?”

  At the JMN studio, the white-haired commentator’s featured guest, a man in glasses, yelled, “Quit this nonsense!” He was known as a conservative pundit. “Are you making fun of our war heroes?”

  “I am not.”

  “What are you saying, then?”

  “Those in charge should worship at the shrine with confidence. And they should say they’re confident. And they should say, like you pundits do, that Japan wasn’t wrong when they went into World War II. They should say that the veterans in Yasukuni Shrine are heroes, and they should be praised as such. They’re not sacrifices of a mistaken war; they’re heroes who fought righteously in a just war. Japan was right. We just lost. They should say that the Tokyo War Crimes Trials carried out by the international community were also a fraud. Air raids and nuclear bombs went unpunished, but Japan was prosecuted one-sidedly because we lost. Instead of cowardly hiding their true thoughts, those in charge should bravely declare they don’t care about the opinion of the international community and they should openly worship at that shrine. That’s the fundamental ideology behind Yasukuni Shrine, isn’t it? And if anyone complains, we should just pull out of the United Nations, like we pulled out of the League of Nations before.”

  “Listen,” shouted the man in glasses again. “The Pacific War was a war of self-defense. We were being crushed under America’s extreme economic sanctions and had no choice but to fight. Those heroes died fighting for our country.”

  “Pundits like you always say things like that. But will you answer just two questions for me?”

  The Metropolitan Police Department’s headquarters had already called the JMN studio, ordering them to quiet the pundit so as not to agitate the criminals; the Cabinet had dispatched personnel to manage the crisis in person. But meanwhile the program continued.

  Sasahara spoke again. “You say that we had no choice but to go into Word War II. And that after the Hull Note, Japan had no choice but to fight. If that’s the case, let me ask this. If that sort of thing happened now, would you do it again?”

  “Listen. America tried to get Japan to attack first. We know now that America already wanted to go to war. That was written in American documents from the time.”

  “Please, for now, forget about the other countries. If a similar situation were to occur now, would you make the same decision?”

  “It’s wrong to judge past people’s judgments by our own values. And the international situations were different.”

  “That’s why I’m asking what you’d do if the situation were the same, and the same things occurred. Shall I change the question? If you returned to that period now, and you were powerful enough to control everything that happened in the country, would you have stopped the war?”

  “I would not. We needed to fight.”

  “I see. If someone like you were to become a politician, the people would probably be quite nervous. I’ll ask one more question. Do you and your colleagues worship the emperor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then let me ask this. Didn’t the politicians of the time expose the emperor to great danger by starting the war? What do you think of their responsibility for that?”

  “I said there was no choice, didn’t I? That’s why the people of Japan risked their lives to protect the emperor.”

  “You say there was no choice. You say America made ridiculous demands that sent Japan to war. But those negotiations were mostly over China. If we had withdrawn our troops from China, we could have avoided war. Because Japan had expanded its forces too far, our interests clashed with America’s. Isn’t that right? Wars are born out of clashes between interests. So, would you put the emperor in danger for those concessions in China?”

  “You’re wrong. If we had let go of China at the time, we would have lost power and been occupied anyway.”

  “Wasn’t it absolutely idiotic to go to war with China when we knew America supported China? America, the country that supplied almost half of the oil we needed just to meet internal demand? What a foolish decision. Even an idiot could have predicted that we’d be put under embargo. The Japanese aren’t so weak that we couldn’t have given up our concessions in China. We wanted to fight proper wars when our colonies were put in undue danger. That is the true Japanese way. Concessions are profits, and if our national profits decline, that’s just money in the end. Does that mean that money is more important than our great emperor, or our soldiers, or the lives of our citizens?”

  “No. We fought that war to create the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. We were trying to free the various Western colonies in Asia from the rule of racist white men.”

  “By joining forces with the Nazis? You must understand that when we joined forces with the Nazis, we did something we could not justify to the world. I’ll say it once more. We joined forces with the Nazis. If we hadn’t joined the Triple Alliance with Germany and Italy, would America have really gotten so mad at Japan? And if we were really so incredibly powerful, then the Nazis would have won!”

  “That’s a matter of war strategy. Japan at the time didn’t completely understand the Nazis. We were simply petitioning, as the leaders of Asia, for Asian freedom.”

  “It’s best not to make stupid excuses to the international community about not knowing the full extent of what the Nazis were doing. And Asian freedom? We had to send about three-point-two million condoms to troops in our occupied territories in 1942 to fight a war of Asian freedom? That war where we occupied foreign territories and turned them into so-called comfort stations
—that was a war for freedom? Don’t be so indulgent!”

  Sasahara continued. “Your leaders all talk about ideals. Among the soldiers who fought in that war, there were ones so noble and proud that we can’t even imagine. I can’t read the diaries of the kamikazes, the Special Attack Units, without shedding tears. But isn’t it disrespectful to use the purity of the souls of the deceased to try and make others feel that war was just? Those souls have been used not only to manipulate public opinion, but also to make money. And further, not all Japanese soldiers were heroes. I’m sure even you can’t say that all of the millions of soldiers stationed abroad obeyed the military’s rules. You talk about ideals. But we didn’t have the national strength or ability to follow through on those ideals. Ideals are a bunch of self-gratifying nonsense. The more awful the war became, the longer these ridiculous and cruel battles continued. For too long we exposed our soldiers to the stress of thinking they might die tomorrow, or even in a matter of seconds. We didn’t allow them to surrender or be taken as POWs. We forced them to see so many corpses. Leaders, friends died in tremendous numbers. In that sort of hopeless situation, isn’t it just foolish and ignorant of the reality of war to tell soldiers to go on living as men of virtue? We transformed kind and gentle, delicate Japanese men into madmen. Would you say that no one was responsible? If you count both civilians and soldiers, millions of Japanese died in that war. We were a ruined country. For a politician to say that we couldn’t help going to war, that it wasn’t wrong, that if it ever happened again, we’d fight bravely—that would be completely unacceptable. World War II was a war of aggression against the rest of Asia. War is not beautiful. There exists no country without any dark spots on its past. The cruelties of war have existed since the start of human history, and they continue, they still continue today. Can you call a pundit who does not try to reexamine each one of the dark parts of our history, who doesn’t try to improve the world for the next generation, who says that war was right, and we couldn’t help it—can you call that pundit great? What right does someone like you have to tell us how things are?”