Remote Control Read online

  Not surprising that Aoyagi would have a father like this. Torn thought in disgust. Between the two of them, they'd managed to piss off the whole country.

  After the interview ended, they cut away for a while to coverage of various accidents and incidents around the city. A man who had kidnapped a baby was caught at one of the checkpoints; some characters who had been robbing people on the subway were arrested thanks to a tip from a witness; and the leader of a gang that had committed a murder in Tokyo several years back had suddenly turned up in a hotel in Sendai. None of these had anything to do with the Kaneda assassination, but it seemed that the arrests had been the direct result of information passed along by a tense and extra-vigilant public.

  Later that evening in the smoking area, the middle school boy was holding forth again on his new pet theme: the tyranny of the surveillance society. "They know everything about everyone, thanks to those pods," he was saying. "They intercept every email and phone call, so they're solving all these other cases as a kind of side effect of the Kaneda thing." Torn wondered how a kid that young could get so worked up about it. It seemed the boy had also been following the news online. "And you wouldn't believe how many postings there are from people claiming to be Masaharu Aoyagi! But this isn't like looking for a needle in a haystack; they're hunting for this one guy and everyone knows exactly who he is and what he looks like. How tough can that be?"

  Day Three

  Torn awoke to someone tapping him hard on the shoulder—in fact, so vigorously that he found he was angry before he was fully awake. Floating just above him was Hodogaya's wrinkly face.

  "What do you want?" he grunted. "And what time is it, anyway?" He was so groggy he could barely think.

  THE AUDIENCE

  "It's four," Hodogaya told him.

  "In the morning?"

  "Naturally."

  Four o'clock was technically morning, but it was way too early to be awake. "It's still dark," he muttered.

  Ignoring his protests, Hodogaya grabbed the remote from the bedside table. "Take a look," he said. "We're getting to the climax."

  "What climax?" Toru said. He reached down to scratch under his cast, but stopped as he realized what he was seeing on the TV.

  Fhe screen was filled with a shot of the Central Park, a large open space used for concerts and other events just across the street from Sendai City Hall. With no playground equipment or fences to block the view, the camera caught the whole park at once. The sky in the background was dark, a mottling of black and deep gray, showing that this was live—before dawn.

  Klieg lights had been focused on the park, illuminating one area like a spotlight on a stage. The camera panned slowly along the buildings at the perimeter, and uniformed men with rifles could be seen lining the roofs, their telescopic sights trained on the bright patch.

  Then the angle shifted to a reporter standing in the street some way from the park, apparently kept back by the police lines. " Fhe marksmen are waiting for orders," he said. The blades of a helicopter could be heard beating the air above him. This must have taken the shot of the rooftops. "Masaharu Aoyagi is reportedly coming here to surrender. And we've been kept at a distance since he has apparently taken another hostage."

  loru was surprised to see how quickly things had come to a head. "What happened?" he asked Hodogaya.

  "About an hour ago, the police announced that Aoyagi had contacted them to say he was going to give himself uj). He called the media as well."

  "Why'd he decide to surrender all of a sudden? And why are they turning it into such a circus? I've never seen so many lights." Dozens of beams were trained on tlie park from the rooftops ot the surrountling buildings. ()ur taxes at work, he thought irritably. "A whole lot ol luss, and all those guns, lor one guy?"

  "But they can't just shoot him, can they?" said Hodogaya. "Not on live 'I V. It's not a pul)lic execution."

  "We're all watching if they do, that's lor sure."

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  "They'd have a big stink on their hands."

  "Which is why they've got dart guns. Not a public execution, a public sedation."

  "Dart guns?" Hodogaya echoed, apparently hearing about this plan for the first time.

  "They mentioned it yesterday; they're planning to use these new tranquilizer darts on him."

  "Seems 1 missed something, too," said Hodogaya, sounding genuinely disappointed.

  "Aoyagi's probably assuming they won't dare shoot him with all these cameras, but he never thought of darts."

  "Poor bastard," Hodogaya sighed.

  "You feel sorry for him?" Toru asked, but Hodogaya suddenly pointed at the screen.

  "Look, is that a manhole cover?" A round shape was just visible on the ground near the center of the park.

  "Could be," Toru said.

  "I bet it leads to the sewers. There's a storm drain about six meters down."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I did a little research on the waterworks, for my old job."

  "What job?" Toru asked, but without waiting for an answer he stuck the earphones back in—just in time to hear an announcer say that Aoyagi had appeared.

  Then everything went suddenly quiet, as though the earphones had stopped working. A man had appeared out of nowhere in the park, his hands raised above his head. T hin and disheveled, he wore a black sweater over jearis. A disappointingly ordinary figure.

  "So that's it," Hodogaya murmured.

  Masaharu Aoyagi advanced slowly to the center of the park and stopped, then stared around the ring of buildings, as though staring down the barrels of the rifles trained on him. Perhaps it was tension, or exhaustion, but there was something of a wild-eyed dog in the way he looked.

  As Toru reached under the edge of his cast to scratch, it struck him that the fun would soon be over—and that he would probably miss it. He had already forgotten where he'd felt the itch.

  PART

  THREE

  TWENTY YERRS ERTER

  When Prime Minister Sadayoshi Kaneda was assassinated in Sendai twenty years ago, the media reaction was unusually frenzied. This was natural enough given the circumstances, but in hindsight we can see the consequences of the lack of balance in this response. Newspapers and the networks fanned the flames of public outrage by relaying undigested police reports and endless unsubstantiated accounts from ostensible witnesses. Despite the fact that the evidence against Masaharu Aoyagi was never more than circumstantial, from the very beginning of the incident the media identified him as the assassin with astonishing certainty—or, rather, it would be astonishing if this kind of error didn't continue to occur with dismaying regularity today.

  Just how astonishing their errors were became apparent to me as 1 began to research the events of that period in preparation for this account. Under normal circumstances, almost anyone is capable of seeing reason, respecting civil liberties, and playing the game straight. But in times of crisis, clear heads seem to be in short supply, and everyone gets swept up in the excitement.

  Even now, decades after the event, the facts of the Kaneda assassination remain unclear. Findings were published by the investigatory commission established less than a month after the assassination by Prime Minister Ka-tsuo Ebisawa, Kaneda's successor, and headed by Supreme Court Justice Ukai, but the "Ukai Report" is a remarkably vague document that amounts to little more than a list of reasons why we don't know the full story.

  Furthermore, since Ebisawa specified that all information gathered by the Ukai Commission, the police, and other agencies should be kept sealed well into the next century, further investigation is virtually impossible. There can

  TWENTY YERRS LRTER

  be only one conclusion: the government that sealed the evidence was determined the incident should be forgotten altogether.

  No doubt the majority of the population now subscribe to the theory that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy organized by Ebisawa, who was Kaneda's number two at the time of the incident. A memoi
r published by Ebisawa's legal counsel caused a considerable sensation a few years back by hinting at his client's participation in the affair.

  In his lifetime, Sadayoshi Kaneda was compared to the youthful hero of legend, Yoshitsune, while Ebisawa was known as his faithful old retainer, Benkei. It would certainly be a shock if it turned out that Benkei had orchestrated his master's demise, but given the political path he was pursuing and his deeply jealous nature, it isn't difficult to imagine that this was in fact the case.

  Ebisawa split from the Labor Party, which had enjoyed a virtual lock on power in the postwar period, and established the rival Liberal Party. He then worked for many years as the leader of the opposition, prodding recalcitrant MPs through their legislative paces. And time after time he stood as the Liberal Party candidate for prime minister, in each case losing to his Labor Party rival, sometimes by a narrow margin and sometimes in a landslide.

  Twenty years ago, however, opportunity had come calling. The Labor Party was self-destructing in the wake of much-needed but ultimately unpopular tax hikes. T he stage was set for a changing of the guard and with it, Ebisawa clearly believed, his chance to become prime minister. Just at this moment, however, a young politician, Sadayoshi Kaneda, emerged from Ebisawa's own party to hijack his ambitions. T he elder politician suffered a crushing defeat in the primaries, and even at this historical remove it isn't hard to imagine the bitterness he must have felt.

  In public, Ebisawa took the high road, {^raising Kaneda as the new voice of a more youthful party and promising to support his run for prime minister and even serve as his dej)uty. But according to the lawyer's memoir, he was simultaneously passing along cam|)aign secrets trom the Kanetia camp to the Ealxjr Party leadership, l.bisawa was also said to be the source ol a story that came out in one ot the weeklies during the campaign, revealing that Kaneda's late mother had worketl in a bar and had died horn stab wounds during an argument with a customer. He seemed to have decided tlnit il lu* was to be relegated to the role ol kingiiKjker, il was belter to iinnoinl M.ikoto

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  Ayukawa, his old rival from Labor, than to allow the upstart Kaneda to prevail. But better for whom? For the country? The people? For his party? No, said his lawyer, Ebisawa wanted revenge, pure and simple.

  So by the same logic, when Kaneda eventually won the general election despite the sabotage, Ebisawa decided to take matters into his own hands, to eliminate his rival and thus succeed him as prime minister—or so the memoir suggests.

  It is not widely known that the route for the prime minister's parade in Sendai that day was changed at the last minute, nor that the new route was decided by then-mayor Sachio Sato, a college classmate of Ebisawa's. When this information is combined with the fact that the textbook warehouse, which happened to be along the new route, was owned by Sato's sister, the conspiracy theory begins to seem plausible. And while the victory parade in Sendai was managed by the prime minister's public relations office, it is said that the original idea for the visit came from Katsuo Ebisawa.

  An equally persistent theory, however, contends that the assassination was the work of the Labor Party itself, manipulated by a greater and more sinister power. Whenever something mysterious occurs in Japan, something happening behind the scenes, the fingers always point to the same culprit, the mastermind, the puppeteer: the United States. Such, perhaps, is the fate of the powerful.

  Twenty years ago, japan was wrestling with the question of whether or not it should develop nuclear arms. A year before the election that brought Kaneda to power, the then prime minister Ayukawa came back from a meeting with the U.S. president and suddenly announced that he wanted to begin looking at the question of a domestic nuclear deterrent. Ayukawa was lambasted by the Liberal Party and the media, but he responded that he had never actually proposed developing an arsenal, merely that the issue be given due consideration. He wondered aloud whether a nation could govern itself or conduct diplomatic relations with others if it was unwilling to debate the difficult questions confronting it. And so a public debate was held.

  But at the same time there were those who maintained that the idea of a nuclear japan was simply part of a new U.S. defense scenario, that America wanted an armed japan as one wing of its China strategy. Among the

  TWENTY YERR5 LRTER

  main proponents of this theory was Sadayoshi Kaneda. He gave voice to an uncomfortable feeling that was shared by most people at the time: namely, that American foreign policy in Asia had been muddled and inconsistent ever since the Pacific War, that the U.S. had no idea what to do with Asia, and that many of Japan's problems, including things as basic as the country's Occupation-imposed constitution, were the result of American ambivalence and misunderstanding. In the early days after WWll, the U.S. had sought to neutralize the Japanese threat through Article 9 of the constitution, in which the country renounced the right to military force. But when the Cold War began almost immediately afterwards, Japan was suddenly an important strategic asset; and while Article 9 remained in effect, the Americans urged the country to develop a military capability. Eventually, they began to campaign actively for the revision of the article itself.

  Kaneda accused Ayukawa of being an American flunky, of encouraging a debate that was supposed to get the Japanese thinking for themselves but was actually just part of a larger U.S. design. He acknowledged that the idea of Japan rearming was a traditionally conservative one—and thus counterintuitive for a liberal politician—but he felt that any government that simply followed the lead of the U.S. would be a laughingstock not only to the Americans but to the whole world. "The United States has never had a vision for Asia," he insisted, "so it is incumbent upon us to chart our own course in matters relating to defense. To take this further, it seems imperative that we develop a credible nuclear deterrent." He also proposed that Japan take steps to upgrade its technical know-how in the areas of strategic data collection and surveillance, especially if it proved difficult to acquire a nuclear arsenal in the short run. In other words, he argued, more than an offensive capability, the country needed a fast, accurate system for gathering data on the military strategy and prejiaredness of other nations. T hese were measures that could be taken within the framework of the constitution; and while he supported strengthening the missile defense system, he felt it was wise to put resources into acquiring such technological advantages rather than an arsenal of ABMs. (T^rtainly, these kintls of innovations shoukl be within the reach of Ja|)an's tecTinological prowess. "We may not possess the brute force," he said, "but we can make ourselves indisiiensable it we possess the most accurate inlormation."

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  Another fact revealed in the lawyer's memoir is that Kaneda decided soon after becoming prime minister that he would visit China and the Korean peninsula and hold talks aimed at resolving longstanding territorial disputes and demands for Japanese acknowledgement of its actions during the war. But he was not intending to make unilateral concessions, just open discussions; and he was often quoted as wondering why China, in particular, reserved such special animosity for Japan when it had suffered at the hands of other adversaries, such as the British during the Opium Wars, who had never offered any apologies to the Chinese.

  He was convinced, however, that Japanese politicians, who tended to be all bluster at home, lacked both the interest and the resolve to conduct a successful foreign policy. It never seemed to occur to them that they should be seeking common ground with their counterparts overseas. "There are no statesmen among us," he was known to say, and for that view he no doubt incurred the wrath of Uncle Sam, at least according to those who hold with the second conspiracy theory.

  Then, too, there are those who tend to focus on the site of the assassination: the city of Sendai. In other words, they believe he was eliminated by a powerful local bloc.

  Kaneda scored a victory in the primary elections despite being younger than the other candidates and virtually unknown. Several factors contributed to this ups
et, including the above-mentioned tax reforms pushed through by the Labor Party. But perhaps even more important was Kaneda's good fortune that the first primary in the election season was held in his home district of Sendai.

  Like the U.S. system, the general election for a prime minister is divided into two stages: primary elections within the Labor and Liberal parties to determine their candidates, and then a general contest for prime minister. The primaries are held region by region, with the party candidate getting the most votes claiming that region. When the voting is finished, the candidate who has won the most regional elections becomes the party's nominee.

  Since the primaries are held sequentially, it was particularly significant that the first one was in the city of Sendai, in Miyagi Prefecture. Sadayoshi Kaneda's early campaign was therefore conducted with the utmost care and

  TWENTY YERR5 LATER

  planning. He made the rounds of all the businesses and organizations in his district, attending countless events in the six months leading up to the primaries, giving hundreds of speeches, and generally making himself known to his constituency. From the outset, he offered a fresh, fearless, new face, combined with a winning speaking style, and he quickly gained the allegiance of voters in his own party and eventually even some of those who had traditionally supported Labor.

  Furthermore, Kaneda's charisma and self-confidence must have rattled Katsuo Ebisawa, who was running as a senior member of parliament and the hea^^veight in the contest. Ebisawa's campaign became mildly hostile, asking voters whether they could really trust such a young, untested candidate, but this tactic backfired and ultimately strengthened Kaneda's position. Negative ads are a part of any campaign, but voters apparently took offense at a commercial that juxtaposed a particularly snooty-looking picture of Kaneda with one of an elderly, bedridden man. What the Ebisawa campaign did not foresee was that the negative reaction would be directed at Ebisawa as the source of the commercial rather than at Kaneda. Apparently, in the Sendai race, this was enough to tip the balance in Kaneda's favor.