“You want a pair?” she whispered, knowing all about my sleep problems.
When she first had heard that I was raised in a bomb shelter she had howled in laughter. It was funny. Her boyfriend was a troglodyte! But then I reminded her of the circumstances—the Cuban missile crisis, the duck and cover drills, the fear of instant death—and she understood. Her father was a captain in the Air Force, and she was an Air Force brat, moving from base to base. She always called him “Sir.” In 1962, when she was thirteen years old, her father was stationed in Salina, Kansas, as part of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). He was a navigator aboard a B-52 bomber loaded with nuclear bombs. In October, a red alert was called, and suddenly all the fathers disappeared from the base. The moms were tense, and Donna and the other children felt surrounded by suppressed hysteria. She said she held the memory in her gut.
“I don’t need the plugs right now,” I whispered back. “I need to talk.”
“About what?”
“The ceremony, the teacher, Kazz, everything. What did you think?”
“Well, Kazz reminds me of my ex-husband. He seems really difficult.”
“Difficult?”
“Yeah. He has his hands tightly on the wheel. He’s very careful.”
“And the teacher?” I asked.
“He’s wonderful,” she answered. “I really like him.”
“I don’t know…” I said.
“What?” she asked, turning to look at me in the glow of the streetlight. “You don’t know what?”
“Why is the project secret? Why doesn’t Kazz and his teacher tell the others in the group? You know I don’t like secrets.”
Donna knew that my father’s work at the Lab was highly classified, and that I always resented the fact that he couldn’t tell us what he did.
After a moment Donna said carefully, “There’s probably a good explanation. But in the meantime, why don’t you relax? This is really special. We’re in Japan! We’re lucky to be here.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I answered.
I knew one thing. I was honestly happy to be with Donna in Japan. I had some doubts when I first asked her to go. Six weeks traveling together seemed like a long time. It was early in the trip but so far so good. We traveled well together. Then I remembered the teacher’s comment about us being brother and sister. Even though he had qualified it, saying it was our souls that were related, it still bothered me. Did he doubt the passion of our relationship? Did he see something I didn’t? Okay, so I did have a few reservations about the relationship. For one thing, she kept talking about moving to New York. And when it came to the ins and outs of relationships, she was so self-assured. No doubt about it, she was more experienced than I. She’d been married, divorced, had done the therapy thing. When we talked about ways to make things work, I was always feeling a bit left behind, a bit inadequate. But it would work out. It always did, didn’t it? Suddenly I felt claustrophobic and my heart tightened.
“Were you offended when the teacher called us brother and sister?” I asked her.
“No, were you?”
“I thought it was rather strange, that’s all.”
“Well then, as your older sister,” she said, handing me the earplugs, “I say ‘go to sleep.’”
We spent the next day in Gose. On a stroll around town, while Donna remained at home with Tazuko and the kids, I learned how Kazz had become involved with the Sword of Heaven. He told me that it was indeed Juan Li who made him curious about Shinto. After he returned from Kashmir, at a used bookstore in Tokyo, Kazz chanced upon a rare book about Shinto by a man named Tomokiyo. The author described Iwakiyama, a sacred mountain located in southern Japan where he had founded a monastery. Kazz was so intrigued by the book that he made a special pilgrimage to the mountain monastery. There, Kazz learned that Tomokiyo had died in 1952, but had passed on his knowledge to a group of disciples. One of the disciples was Hakuryu Takizawa, the White Dragon, whom Kazz quickly befriended. Soon he became his disciple.
During our time together, I also got a sense of Kazz’s ambivalence toward modern Japan. We stopped at a grocery store in the center of the small town. At the cash register in front of us was a small boy buying a candy bar, dressed in a cute school uniform with matching shorts, jacket, and cap.
Kazz caught my inquisitive look. “We never wore fancy uniforms. We couldn’t afford them.”
We walked past an electronics store, well-stocked for such a small town.
Kazz sighed. “I met a Japanese girl on a plane headed to Los Angeles. Do you know why she was going to L.A.? To shop! I tried to tell her about Shinto, about the spirit world. She wasn’t interested.”
After a moment he said,“A lot of things are different now. And not all of them are good.”
On that same walk, I asked Kazz more about the monastery in southern Japan. I was unclear exactly what the relationship was between Kazz’s teacher Takizawa and the other disciples. If they were all disciples of Tomokiyo, the founder of the monastery, why then was Takizawa teaching here, in the north, so far away?
“To be frank,” Kazz answered,“the other teachers see him as a bit of a renegade.”
“What? They don’t like him sending Shinto gods outside of Japan?” I asked.
“They don’t know about the project,” he said.
“It’s a secret from them too?”
Kazz was silent, and instead of giving me an answer, he just turned and looked at me impassively. It was becoming a familiar look. As I shrugged my shoulders, I wondered if he was purposefully playing with my head. Did he enjoy frustrating me with his vague and incomplete answers? I was getting tired of this game, and if Kazz wanted me to keep playing, he better tell me all the rules, quick.
The next day it was time to visit the teacher in Osaka. Kazz drove us to his home, a modest suburban house with a simple Japanese garden. The teacher greeted us at the door and first invited us into a Western-style living room complete with a couch, a coffee table, and a TV. After a few minutes of casual conversation, we stepped behind a set of shoji screens and sat in a room filled with traditional tatami mats and incongruously lit by fluorescent lights.
I had brought several bottles of Jack Daniel’s whiskey from the States, a gift I knew was much appreciated in Japan. I handed one of the bottles to the teacher. He graciously accepted it and passed it on to his wife, who took it and our coats to another room. Later I saw a cupboard full of various whiskies, gifts appreciated but untouched.
As in our first meeting several days earlier, our conversation followed a circuitous route before arriving at the topic of the Sword of Heaven. We discussed Donna’s and my itinerary. We talked about Japanese bathing customs, and we talked about the teacher’s son. We even talked about the weather.
The moment the project came up, Kazz shifted his legs underneath him. He pulled his back up straight. The teacher’s voice changed, becoming deeper and more deliberate. Occasionally he looked thoughtfully into space.
The teacher reached for a globe sitting nearby, covered with red-topped pins. He proudly showed us where the gods had been placed. I could see a pin in the spot where I placed a god in Norway and one in Taiwan where Juan Li had been. Europe was well covered, including London, Paris, Helsinki, and Athens. So was China and Southeast Asia. Kazz had placed a god in Antarctica, but there were none in southern Africa. Gods had been placed in the Panama Canal; as well as Peru and Chile but none elsewhere in South America.
I stared at the globe and for the first time really appreciated the magnitude of the project. The teacher had already accomplished so much, and yet there was so much left to be done. I asked the teacher where he got the idea for the project in the first place.
“It was the 11th of May, 1954,” he remembered, “when I was instructed by God to go to the top of Takachiho mountain in southern Japan, on the island of Kyushu.”
On the mountain, the teacher said he made spiritual contact with Tomokiyo, the man whose book had led Kazz to the m
ountain monastery. Tomokiyo had died two years before, but his spirit gave Takizawa instructions to go into solitary prayer and meditation for 1,000 days.
“Over three years. What patience!” I whistled.
“The teacher’s wife brought him food once a week, but he didn’t talk to her or anyone else the whole time,” Kazz added.“That’s when he had the vision to move to Osaka and build a shrine here on Mount Katsuragi and to both teach and begin the project.”
“And how do you know where to place the gods?” I asked. “Do you have a plan?”
“God always gives one a sense of control,” the teacher said. “So if one day you say to yourself: I want this or I want that, this is a message from God. God has made contact, and you know.”
I recalled my attempts to place a god at the Lab and my adventures on Mount Shasta with my terrible dream. Perhaps the teacher could explain why it was so difficult. Had I picked bad spots?
“The place wasn’t the problem,” he answered. “Bad spirits always make the problem. If you had been successful, these places would have become very important places for peace.
“Bad spirits had to do something,” he continued, “like make a storm or give you bad dreams. There are always bad spirits who want to interfere with our work for peace. Our actions and prayers weaken the power of these bad spirits.”
Donna, who had been listening quietly, now leaned toward me. “Are you sure you really wanted to place them?” she asked.
I looked at her intently. “I’m not sure of anything.”
I had been wondering since I first heard about the project how the teacher broke the sword into so many pieces and how he embedded them in stone. I didn’t dare look inside. First, it seemed wrong. And, besides, they were tightly sealed, and it would have taken a chisel to break them open. I received an enigmatic answer when I asked.
“It’s very difficult to say what is inside the stone,” he answered and then paused for a long time.
“But is it metal, from a blade?”
“The stone is the mental body of the sword. For 3,000 years we have had a method, called chinkon, of making the body of God.”
“So it’s not really an actual piece of sword inside the stone?” I asked, directing my question to Kazz.
“Yes, it is,” replied Kazz.“And at the same time, no it isn’t.”
“But there are really only 108 pieces?”
Kazz shot me a funny look. “Where did you get that number?” he asked, not bothering to translate my question for the teacher.
“From Juan.”
“This 108 is not a Shinto number. It’s a Buddhist number.”
“Well, how many gods are there then?”
“Something like 108.”
Okay, I thought, one more contradiction to consider. Would I ever get the details right? It didn’t look like I could. Maybe I should take Donna’s advice and relax and not let the details mess up a good story.
We talked for about an hour. The teacher complained that countries were obsessed with themselves: they had forgotten the needs and concerns of other countries. Humankind had forgotten to pray and there was a price to pay. He called the earth one big home, a “small shrine of the highest God of the universe.” He said we really didn’t need individual countries but “small groups, like states.”
Then like a father giving friendly paternal advice, the teacher told me that I should live abroad. It would be good for me to get away from the United States for a while. I appreciated his advice and found myself craving more, wanting to be told what to do by someone older and wiser.
Near the end, I apologized for asking too many questions, although in fact I had many more.
“It’s okay,” said the teacher. “When man has questions he has power.”
At the end, the teacher stood. Donna and I stiffly followed suit.
“Each land has its own gods,” he said looking at both Donna and me, “but because of bad spirits, it is difficult for them to connect. When we put the body of God—the Sword of Heaven—around the world, the vibration of this body of God makes a loop around the earth. This network makes the God work easier in the human world.
“This meeting has been very important,” the teacher said as he motioned us to the door. “Each of us gets a vibration from the God world. As we understand each other, our minds become one. Remember, when you meet anyone, you are meeting the body of God. Man is God’s embodiment. Every evil arises when he forgets this.”
On the way out we stopped for a moment in the living room where I asked the teacher one final question. “Should I try placing a god on Shasta or at the Livermore Lab again?”
“First you have to get more power,” the teacher replied. “Then you can put the gods in the same place.”
“And how do I get this power?” I asked.
“Some day you must visit Iwakiyama,” he said. “At the mountain monastery many interesting things are taught. There you may get the power you need. I will see that you are welcome.”
Finally we left, and Kazz drove us to the train station. Donna and I carried two-week train passes for unlimited travel in Japan.
We followed a suggestion from the teacher’s wife and traveled to the southern island of Kyushu. There we spent two weeks exploring the rugged coast and the sharp, craggy inland mountains. We quickly noticed that the area was much less populated than the rest of Japan. The hotels and food were cheaper, and the people were more relaxed and friendly. At the southernmost part of the island, in Ibusuki, we found the tsunaburo, or sand baths that teacher’s wife had also told us about. Natural volcanic vents heat the sand around Kinko Bay, and a small service industry has grown up around turning the heated sand into an enjoyable bathing experience.
We paid an old woman a small fee to prepare our “bath.” She carefully sifted the hot sand, creating the perfect temperature for a relaxing “soak.” She gave us cotton yukata coverings to wear. While we put them on, she dug a hole, which she had us lie down in face-up. Then she covered us with hot sand from our feet to our necks. We stared across the beach, through palm trees waving in the wind, to the other side of the bay where we could see a smoking volcano. We felt we had found paradise. Donna crawled out of the sand and took goofy pictures of me looking like a mummy with my body covered in hot sand and my white head poking into the air.
We returned to Tokyo a week before Christmas. We had been in Japan a month. The leaves were gone, and the fastidious Japanese gardeners had carefully wrapped trees in muslin to protect them from the winter cold. Snow sprinkled the cheerfully decorated streets. As if on cue, people stopped dressing in fall mauves and donned winter blacks. We spent our last two weeks visiting museums, temples, shrines, art galleries, and amazing department stores which contained everything from restaurants to fantastic gardens. On Christmas Day we exchanged gifts and visited the Imperial Palace.
Just before we left Tokyo, on the 27th of December, I called Kazz to say goodbye. We didn’t have much to say on the phone. He didn’t ask about the five gods I still had remaining in San Francisco, nor had I brought them up during our stay. He wished us a safe trip home.
As our plane climbed, I recalled moments of clarity during the beautiful ceremony at Mount Katsuragi. The moving words of the teacher about world peace and the great love of Christ had been so direct and spoke to my heart. And yet, my doubts remained. Why were there so many secrets between Kazz, the teacher, and his followers? Were there more ominous things that they were hiding from me?
chapter 8
Donna put two feet forward while I put only one.
At the beginning of 1984, not long after I returned from Japan, the famous doomsday clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was ominously moved ahead to three minutes before midnight. The Bulletin, which has tracked international tension and developments since 1947, said, “The blunt simplicities of force threaten to displace any other form of discourse between the superpowers.”
The sun was shining when we landed in San Fran
cisco but I hardly noticed. A few days later, at a New Year’s Eve party that Donna had quickly organized, I sat quietly in a corner, feeling a darkness closing in around me. At midnight, while the rest of the guests toasted 1984, Donna asked me what was wrong. I offered the lame excuse of being tired, but she knew something more than jet lag had sapped my spirit.
Here I was back from a long visit to Japan, and I felt no closer to really understanding what I was caught up in than I did before I left. I had met Kazz and the teacher, and yet I felt I had only more questions. Furthermore, while Donna and I had traveled well together, six weeks of day-to-day intimacy had taken a toll on me. Now that we were back, I craved solitude. I needed time to sort out both the relationship and the Shinto project.
The year being welcomed by my champagne-sipping friends would prove to be one of the most difficult of my life. At first, I felt as though the world was simply against me and that I had no control over the outside forces that were making my life miserable. Only later, when things got better and I still felt miserable, did I began to suspect that I was contributing more to the problem than I had acknowledged.
Within days of returning from Japan, I contracted every bug that came within ten feet of me: colds, the flu, and finally pneumonia. The pneumonia put me on my back for two weeks, unable to move or work. Donna managed to avoid my harmful germs, but for the first time in her life, she developed violent allergic reactions to common things like dust, cats, and wool. It was the result, a doctor told her, of going from Japan’s especially dry winter air to the dampness of San Francisco. Her incessant talk of moving to New York stopped, at least for a while.
In February, a month after I had recovered from pneumonia, Donna and I got in a terrifying car accident. We were headed home from an evening concert. I drove across the street at the exact moment the driver of a large white van full of late-night commuters was frantically pumping his failed brakes. He hit Donna’s side of the car going full speed, tossing her onto my lap and pushing the car onto the sidewalk.
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