The Toyotomi Blades (6 page)

“I don’t know why someone would steal such a distinctive sword,” Wim Brock, the museum’s director, said. “It will be murder to sell.”

Authorities believe the theft may be an inside job because there was no evidence of forcible entry and the alarm system was operative. Although the investigation continues, police admit that they have no suspects at this time.

STUDENT IN BIZARRE ‘SEX’ DEATH

 

TOKYO (REUTERS)—A student suspected of stealing a rare 17th-century samurai sword from the Japan National Museum was found dead yesterday under bizarre circumstances. Yasuo Ishibashi, 19, was found strangled in a Japanese “love motel,” and Tokyo police are uncertain how to characterize the death.

“It could be a suicide because of the trouble Mr. Ishibashi was in or it could be an accident involving strangulation for sexual pleasure. It could even be murder,” commented Tokyo police inspector H. Hayase. “Right now, it’s difficult to comment because of the strange circumstances.”

Hayase said there was no suicide note and that Ishibashi was found hanging in front of a television showing pornographic movies. “There are actually some people who derive sexual pleasure from strangulation,” commented Hayase, “and this may just be a bizarre accident involving this kind of practice.”

Ishibashi’s family said he was under considerable pressure because he was a suspect in the theft of a rare 17th-century samurai sword that was stolen from the Japan National Museum. The family said he was not suicidal and had no known proclivities for the kind of sexual perversion suggested by the police.

The sword, made by master swordsmith Kannemori, is considered a national treasure by the Japanese. The sword dates from the early 17th century, an era in Japanese history made popular by the novel and television show,
Shogun.
Ishibashi was working as a student volunteer at the museum and museum officials claim Ishibashi was the only one with access to this sword when it disappeared.

Ishibashi attended prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo. He took additional classes in Japanese history and martial arts at All Japan University, also in Tokyo.

“This is strange,” I commented. “There seems to be an epidemic of deaths and sword thefts, and all are swords made by the same swordsmith. That’s a peculiar connection.”

Junko took the news stories from me and read them. She looked at me and shrugged. “Weird,” she said.

6
      

J
unko was right about the promotional piece taking more than an hour to organize and shoot. There was much shuffling around and a couple of false starts before we finally walked on the set and shot the promo. As befit the stars of the show, Nagahara-san and Yukiko-chan didn’t show up on the set until we were actually ready to shoot.

The two hosts of the program were certainly an odd couple. Nagahara-san was a man in his late fifties with a somber face covered with age spots and a large mole on his upper lip. It occurred to me that in the U.S. a mole of that size would be removed for cosmetic purposes by most people, not just those in show business. His salt-and-pepper hair was closely cropped and his suit was crumpled. He looked like a local shopkeeper instead of a television personality, but maybe that was his appeal to Japanese audiences. Aside from “Hello,” his English was almost nonexistent, and Junko translated his laconic greetings for me.

Yukiko-chan was a young woman who was probably in her midtwenties.
Chan
added to the end of a name is a diminutive usually reserved for children and women. Applied to women, it shows a linguistic mind-set that must drive Japanese feminists to despair. Yukiko-chan corrected me when I tried to call her
Yukiko-san,
however. She liked the chan honorific.

Her English was also poor, and when she saw me, she started speaking Japanese. I guess if you have a Japanese face, some people think you must speak Japanese. It’s the reverse of what I experience in the U.S., where if you have an Asian face, some people don’t think you can speak proper English. Like many Asian-Americans, I’ve actually been complimented on how well I speak English. When Yukiko-chan started in with Japanese, I gave her the kind of blank stare I usually reserve for people in the U.S. who think they have to speak pidgin English to me, only this time the stare was genuine. Junko gently inserted herself to translate.

Yukiko had a face that looked like a teenager’s, and she was dressed in a short pink frilly dress that was styled like something the young Shirley Temple would have worn. Her hair was cut short and shaped to frame her tiny face, and when she talked she revealed crooked teeth. Japanese TV audiences seem to find crooked teeth cute. In different clothes Yukiko would look her age, but apparently she wanted to cultivate a little girl look. Her on-camera personality could only be described as perky, but away from the lens she seemed a bit petulant.

The promo was shot with Yukiko-chan and Nagahara-san sitting at the desk of the set like news anchors. They had me stand to one side of them, holding the blade of the sword with the tip resting on the desktop. Sugimoto suggested that it would be more dramatic if I removed the sword from the scabbard. When they played back the promo, which only lasted ten seconds, I must say I cut a dashing figure. Okay, maybe dashing is stretching things a bit, but I did think I looked just fine. Junko told me that my little statement in Japanese, which I got to say at the very end of the promo, sounded great and I must say I was pleased by that, too.

No matter how pleased I was, my body clock was telling me it was about five in the morning L.A. time, and when they finally got me bundled into the limo and over to the Imperial Hotel, I was exhausted.

The Imperial Hotel is across from Hibiya Park and very near the Imperial Palace. It was originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and was famous for surviving the great 1926 Tokyo earthquake. Wright’s design may have withstood earthquakes, but it couldn’t survive urban renewal, Japanese style. The original building was torn down in the sixties and a new hotel was built on the same site. Later a tower was added to the main hotel, but Sugimoto said the show got me a room in the older section because the rooms were much bigger. I don’t know if that’s true, but by that time, I was just interested in a room with a bed.

The room was nice, but not spectacular. It had a small couch and the usual overpriced minibar. If you ignored the package of dried squid snacks I found in the minibar, it was a room that wouldn’t be distinctive in L.A. or New York or Cleveland.

Before I went to bed, I filled out a card for a breakfast to be delivered to my room at 9 A.M. the following morning. I noted with a little shock that with the current exchange rate, a modest egg breakfast cost around $35.1 also noted with amusement that the little check boxes for breakfast delivery indicated times that were ten minutes apart. I smiled at this phony precision and changed my time selection to 9:10 A.M. When I finally crawled into bed, I immediately dropped off into a deep and dreamless sleep.

A knocking at my door woke me. I pried open my eyes and looked at the clock on the bedstand. Precisely 9:10 A.M. A little groggy and bemused, I opened the door to a waiter standing next to a cart holding my breakfast.

As I ate, I turned on the television. The hotel had an English language channel, but it was playing an incredibly boring interview with a visiting Christian missionary. I would think missionary work could be interesting and exciting, but the interview featured a great deal of bureaucratic mumbling about the details of the missionary’s trip and almost nothing in the way of interesting stories or observations.

I turned the channel to the network that ran
News Pop,
and although everything was in Japanese and I didn’t understand a word, I still found it more interesting. The Japanese shows seemed to start at odd times, like 9:35, instead of regular hourly or half-hourly intervals. They had more commercials, but individual advertisers seemed to run shorter commercials. An advertiser might run the same commercial two or even three times in a row, however. With some of the commercials, it was hard to figure out what they were trying to sell because the pictures seemed to have nothing to do with the product. They might show a picture of rain in a pine forest and at the last minute pitch you to buy shoes. Maybe if I understood Japanese the relationships would be clear, but trying to figure out what I was seeing was still amusing. One thing that was very exciting was seeing the promo I shot the previous night. In the forty-five minutes or so I watched TV, I saw it run twice.

It was around 10 A.M., which meant it was 5 P.M. in Los Angeles. Mariko had told me to call her to let her know I had arrived safely. I knew she was waiting for my call so I picked up a card by the phone and read how to make a long distance call to the Kawashiri Boutique, where she worked when she wasn’t looking for acting jobs.

Mariko is in her midthirties, so she’s a bit younger than I. She worked for most of her life at a bank and decided a few years ago that she wanted to be an actress. She also realized she had a drinking problem and got active in AA. She reshaped her life by her own choice and I admired her for it. With the loss of my job, my life was changed through the actions of others and I was still trying to figure out how I was going to cope.

I guess changing our careers and lifestyles two or three times during the course of our lives is no longer unusual in the United States. Internal changes and external changes demand this from increasing numbers of us. Mariko and I have both had failed marriages, so we’ve both already had major changes in the course of our lives. For me, finding Mariko was another major change and the longer I know her, the more I realize how profound that change is.

I started punching numbers on the phone, using the U.S. country code, the area code, and the boutique’s phone number. She picked it up after only a couple of rings.

“Hello, Kawashiri Boutique,” she said. Pretty mundane, but her voice sounded like the sweetest poetry to me.

“It’s me. I got here uneventfully and I’ve already seen myself on Japanese TV pitching the show.”

“I’m glad you called. I miss you already.”

“You should have gone into hock and joined me.”

“Don’t tempt me. It’s just too much money.”

“That’s true. My breakfast this morning cost around thirty-five dollars for eggs and toast. That’s about fifteen dollars per egg and five dollars for the toast.”

“So the beautiful pearl necklace I was expecting is out?”

“Don’t worry. I haven’t done any shopping, but I’m sure I can find a lovely souvenir T-shirt for you.”

“You don’t have to bring anything back for me except yourself,” she said. “Just come back safe.”

“That’s no worry. I’m here in Tokyo, the safest big city in the world.”

“Tell that to the thousands gassed by that Japanese cult. Speaking of safety, I had some excitement here last night.”

“What happened?”

“Mrs. Hernandez called the police because she thought someone was breaking into your apartment.”

Mrs. Hernandez is my neighbor in the duplex I rent. She has a good heart, but she’s a snoop. When I’m doing the snooping, it’s okay. When I’m being snooped on, it’s annoying. I’ve left my apartment at 6 in the morning and returned at 2 A.M. the following morning and she’s commented on it, including the exact times I left and returned. She’s retired and has nothing better to do than to watch the comings and goings of her neighbors. The positive part about her is that she is superior to any home alarm system.

“What happened?”

“She was convinced that someone was prowling around your apartment late last night, so first she called the police and then she called me.”

“Why did she call you?”

“She knows I have a key to your apartment. She wanted me to come and let the police into your apartment.”

“I’m surprised she hasn’t had a key made for herself, just so she can snoop at leisure. Did you go down?”

“Of course. We went in and looked around, but I saw nothing out of place and the police saw no signs of a forced entry. At least your apartment didn’t look like Cathy’s.”

Cathy was a friend of Mariko’s who was called at work by the police and asked to return home because her apartment had been burglarized. That morning Cathy was rushed and late for work, so she actually ran out of her apartment without properly slamming the door behind her. A neighbor noticed her door was ajar and peeked through the open door to see if everything was okay. What the neighbor saw caused him to call the police.

When Cathy got home, there were two police cars and four police officers waiting. A female police officer pulled Cathy aside and said to her, “We want you to enter your apartment to see what’s missing. Please don’t touch anything because we want to dust for fingerprints.” The officer hesitated a moment, then said, “You might want to prepare yourself for a few seconds before you go in. I’ve been inside and they pretty well trashed your apartment looking for valuables. Things are thrown everywhere and it’s a complete a mess, so watch where you step.”

Cathy braced herself and stepped into an apartment with clothes and other belongings tossed on the floor and spread around the apartment. Then she had to brace herself a second time to tell the police officers that nothing was missing and that was how she normally kept her apartment.