Diane Joplin’s JAL flight landed at Narita at exactly the designated time. 10.28AM. She had spent the entire flight, all four hours of it, getting acquainted with a portable Lonely Planet augmented reality information system on Tokyo she had purchased in one of the souvenir shops at Logan International Airport.
The unit didn’t work during the flight, relying as it did on visual markers on the ground to function properly, but Diane had figured that if she jacked the glasses into the in-flight entertainment system she could probably use the latter’s display to view the contents of the database. And she’d been right. Inside the plastic glasses was a tiny piece of flash memory containing the entire database on Tokyo as well as a simple operating system that overlaid the data over what you were seeing through the glasses. Old technology but it worked.
Diane found out that by switching the unit to manual mode and pointing the glasses at a photo of Tokyo Tower in one of the glossy in-flight magazines she’d be able to pull up the data. There was a small thumbwheel on the side of the glasses for scrolling through the data and that worked just fine for her purposes. The Japanese salaryman in the bifocals sitting next to her observed all of this with furtive interest.
Satisfied with the comprehensiveness of the data, she’d disconnected the unit and performed a cyberspace search on the name Kenzo Yamamoto on the airline system. Apparently, out of the countless Kenzo Yamamoto’s that existed across the entirety of the Japanese islands, quite a few were considered newsworthy. There was Kenzo Yamamoto the baseball player, the football player, the hentai-crazed teenager, the fashion designer, the politician. The latter sparked her interest but she quickly discounted him when she found out that he was but a lowly government official in Okinawa who used the level playing field of cyberspace to voice his discontent over government policies.
All this translated on the fly by the intelligent agent browser into grammar-perfect English. There was a whole bunch of other Kenzo Yamamotos gleaned from online family trees, sports meeting results, university professor lists, convention speakers and some downright weird stuff. Diane learned that a Kenzo Yamamoto had broken his high school machine-assisted 100-meter dash record in an astonishing 5.2 seconds. Then her eyes honed in on a Yomiuri Shimbum news headline that had her hair standing on end, goose bumps breaking out all over. Kenzo Yamamoto, suspected wakagashira of the powerful Yamaguchi-gumi Yakuza faction slain in Shinjuku.
Breathlessly, Diane performed another search, this time cross-referencing the name Kenzo Yamamoto with the Yakuza gang, the Yamaguchi-gumi. The more she read the more convinced she was that this was the man who had sent her father the console. The Japanese man beside her was now looking at the glowing panel of her screen with renewed interest. Diane ignored him and continued reading. Kenzo Yamamoto was allegedly second in command of the dreaded Yamaguchi-gumi Yakuza faction although none of the newspapers reported this as a statement of fact. It was just conjecture but Diane knew what that meant. The newspapers were being polite, evasive in that uniquely Japanese way. Yamamoto had not been formally convicted of anything but there were countless references to his involvement in information theft, electronic fraud and corporate blackmail though an intricate network of well-informed sokaiya, or shareholders meeting men, who blackmailed corporations into paying fees or face embarrassing disruptions at shareholders meetings.
Kenzo Yamamoto’s front, the newspapers alleged, was a string of corporations stretching from Tokyo Bay to the Kanto Plain. Yamamoto’s empire covered real estate, hardware and software, virtual entertainment, including the nurturing and promotion of idoru or virtual stars, KTVs, newspapers, magazines, reality game shows, banks, currency exchange bureaus, messenger and courier services and pachinko parlors. Kenzo Yamamoto’s forte, it appeared, was corporate and industrial blackmail on a global scale and the buying and selling of sensitive information. The legitimate businesses also acted as fronts for the much seedier part of his empire, which included a sizeable chunk of the sex industry and the accompanying audio-visual sex racket. Kenzo Yamamoto, speculated one particularly well informed but conspicuously anonymous journalist, was second in command only to Nobu Takahashi, Japan’s Minister of Internal Affairs and Communication.
Diane Joplin could not believe what she was reading. The man who had sent the console to her father, a seedy figure from the Japanese underworld, was deceased and her father was dead too. There was definitely something very fishy going on there. And she was going to find out what it was if only to bring closure, to find out that her father hadn’t died in vain. She resisted the temptation to think about her father as tears threatened to burst from her eyes. The Japanese passenger beside her was becoming increasingly perplexed. Here was this American girl, reading about the death of some no-good Yakuza boss with tears in her eyes. And what was this wild claim that Yamamoto’s boss was none other than a high-ranking government official, this Minister Takahashi.
An alleged Yakuza oyabun was in charge of the ministry responsible for administering pensions for Japan’s civil servants, national communications, the postal service, information technology usage in government, statistics, local tax and local finance. It was unbelievable. If the reports were true, the Yamaguchi-gumi was running the country pure and simple. And if this Yamamoto character was a dealer in information globally then through his oyabun he had access to sensitive information in all of Japan. The foxes were well and truly in the chicken coop.
As she continued to read, she quickly realized that everything pointed towards the Tokyo business area of Shinjuku. According to the results of yet another search, it was in Shinjuku that she would find the new government offices of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, the official headquarters of the Yamaguchi-gumi and the seedy underworld of Yamamoto’s “water business” in Kabukicho. It was in Shinjuku she would find answers to her questions, she thought, yet each of the three possible destinations seemed more foreboding than the next. She’d have to make a choice.
She looked up Shinjuku hotels in the in-flight magazine and was horrified by the amount they charged per night. Wincing, she booked a deluxe room in the main tower of the Keio Plaza Intercontinental Hotel. Although this was one of the older Shinjuku hotels, it was just a block away from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office building, and a short walk from the Yamaguchi-gumi’s lair in the business district and the gaudy neons of Kabukicho’s vice-ridden back alleys. The in-flight system did a good job of making a visit to the latter by a foreign girl on her own sound like a positively hair-raising proposition. Diane Joplin shrugged. She’d get to the hotel, freshen up and consider her options.
Tokyo was covered in a blanket of snow when her flight landed at Narita. From the air, between the vast expanses of white, Diane could make out the stretches of colored neon that made the city come alive at night like she’d seen in the pictures. It was snowing lightly and she let that feeling of arriving in a new country for the first time wash over her. The aircraft was still taxiing to the gate, yet her Japanese co-passenger had already unfastened his seatbelt and was fumbling under his seat for his pilot’s briefcase over an unmoving potbelly. Diane leaned over and fished it out for him and he bowed awkwardly from the neck up embarrassed by their first communication for the entire length of the flight. She thought about her Samsonite up there in the luggage compartment and what it contained, the sleek but harmless looking console that had probably already lead to the death of two people. She hoped that she would not be the third.
She donned the AR glasses and looked out of the window. Immediately a text overlay informed her that they were at Terminal 8 of the New Tokyo International Airport (Narita) and the temperature was minus four degrees Centigrade, exactly the temperature indicated on the in-flight display system. Narita was located in the area known as Chiba, a featureless concrete sprawl some sixty-six kilometers from downtown Tokyo. The ride into Shinjuku Station would take just fifteen minutes by NEX Maglev, the Narita express train service.
She was on the driver-less electric shuttle hurtling across the tarmac towards the arrivals lounge. Diane took in everything from the freshness of the snow, the smell of Japan, which reminded her strangely of fragranced disinfectant, to the various states of travel fatigue exhibited by her fellow passengers. She spotted the man who had occupied the seat next to her in the far corner of the shuttle but he seemed to be ignoring her. The whir of aircraft, the snow falling on the shuttle windows and the tarmac and melting on contact, the comforting feel of her Samsonite between her legs and the foreign smell of Japan all combined to give her a strange sense of calm. This is what she had escaped Boston for, this olfactory confirmation that she had successfully transitioned from the horror of her father’s death into some totally new domain where his demise was but a specter in the snow, dissolving into the wet black tarmac.
She had been impressed by the cool efficiency of the Japanese cabin crew although she could never tell whether they were really smiling at her or whether their visages were complex masks hiding a litany of other thoughts, not all of them benevolent. She noticed the quiet precision with which aircraft maintenance staff went about their business outside, side by side with the robots, which sidled up to the aircraft and performed their tasks of removing baggage from the hold or cleaning the exterior of the aircraft.
The shuttle was driverless, but probably to reduce culture shock for foreign visitors used to seeing flesh and bone in the driver’s seat, they had rigged up a mechanical dummy up front so that, from the back at least, it looked like a human being was in charge of things. The dummy wore a peaked blue cap and was going through the motions of turning the steering wheel and shifting gears in synchrony with some computer program that was actually controlling the vehicle. Diane found the purely cosmetic shifting of gears absurd, as everyone knew that nobody really used manual gearboxes anymore.
Outside bands of snow shifted diagonally downward as the vehicle came to a standstill outside the gate. Diane stepped off the shuttle and followed the throng to passport control. When it was her turn, the customs officer looked her over in a way that bordered on an invasion of her privacy.
“Where staying at?” he asked in halting English.
“Keio Plaza Hotel, Shinjuku,” she replied, wondering why he needed that particular piece of information.
He then proceeded to enter some data on to her passport chip, presumably a visa. He nodded and returned her chip. Her heartbeat slowed a little. Moving now towards the X-ray inspection machines, Diane wondered whether anything within the console would prompt a request to open her suitcase. The young guy in front of the monitor stared at the X-ray image of her Samsonite and Diane’s heart stopped when she saw the man lean forward and gawp at the image. A few seconds later he leaned back and started chatting to a female colleague. Heart pounding, Diane grabbed her suitcase from the X-ray machine’s conveyor belt and walked briskly towards the sign for the trains into Tokyo. She tried hard not to look back.
Fifteen minutes later she was cutting across snow-covered suburbs towards the center of Tokyo. Everything felt new to her. The hushed conversations in Japanese around her, the Kanji signs and the advertising that portended an altogether different culture from what she was used to. But, that was what she needed most now, the anonymity of the sprawling metropolis that was Tokyo. She needed to lose herself in its myriad neon-soaked sounds, in its sights and in its smells. She needed to find herself in its distinct culture, which was holding on for dear life against the onslaught of some kind of ultra modernity, one that was developing on a radically different tangent from the rest of the world. Outside the window of the shape-shifting NEX Maglev, she spotted a gang of kids on motorcycles trying to match the train for speed. The AR unit informed her that they were bosozoku or teenage bike gangs and that many of them would grow up to become fully-fledged Yakuza. The word Yakuza blinking on the display got Diane thinking about Kenzo Yamamoto and Minister Takahashi.
The train was now cutting through huge swathes of gray concrete, flyovers, suspended expressways and forests of neon. The snow had disappeared from the ground leaving nothing but a black slush that adhered to the side of the roads. Then the concrete forest got a whole lot bigger, and the neon signs in kanji just kind of grew in size and scope and there were all these gigantic TV screens hollering at each other in dulcet toned but very persuasive Japanese. And just as a hulking building of red brick and black glass came into view, the AR unit notified her that she had arrived at Shinjuku Station.