Around the World, and Above (Part 3)
KYOTO, JAPAN
[The old photo of Kondo Tatsumi shows a skinny, acne-faced teenager with dull red eyes and bleached blond highlights streaking his unkempt hair. The man I am speaking to has no hair at all. Clean-shaven, tanned and toned, his clear, sharp gaze never leaves mine. Although his manner is cordial and his mood light, this warrior monk retains the composure of a predatory animal at rest.]
This is such an obvious, like… letting this guy start an interview talking about how once he was pathetic and weak, but now he's a disciplined, sharp-eyed warrior monk, and you can be too, if you'll just pay the monthly subscription and purchase the requisite brain pills or whatever the fuck.
The dividing line between the leadership of Japan's various profoundly alarming warrior cults and the grifters scamming impressionable Americans out of their money is so fine and so blurry as to be meaningless.
I was an "otaku." I know that term has come to mean a great many things to a great many people, but for me it simply meant "outsider." I know Americans, especially young ones, must feel trapped by societal pressure. All humans do.
Maybe it is my personal biases, but why would he choose to interview this guy? Quite aside from being pretty odious, he's just not got a whole lot to say?
I don't know. I would've interviewed Nomura Kimiko, if I wanted to talk to someone about the Fall and Rise of Japan - she isn't per se a good person, but she's not a grifter, and she was fighting from Kansai to Kamchatka and back. She's not even controversial; the Japanese government loves her.
Or one of the Yakuza who ran people from Kyushu to South Korea when the government pulled out - the Kudo-kai are willing to give interviews, I believe.
Or maybe the good Doctor, the man with the spreadsheets, who knows better than anyone alive how Japan crumbled.
Really just anyone except an imperial irrendentalist who used to be an otaku shut in would be preferable.
However, if I understand your culture correctly, individualism is something to be encouraged. You revere the "rebel," the "rogue," those who stand proudly apart from the masses. For you, individuality is a badge of honor. For us, it is a ribbon of shame.
There is an odd predilection with individualism; it is variously exalted and condemned. It is one of America's shining virtues, and yet in the next breath is why they nearly perished, needed to be taken in hand by their government, given menial labour and an enforced sense of community, have dissent be made illegal…
Here at least it makes sense; he's criticising pre war Japan, and then praising America because he wants to keep them sweet. It doesn't need to be coherent.
We lived, particularly before the war, in a complex and seemingly infinite labyrinth of external judgments. Your appearance, your speech, everything from the career you held to the way you sneezed had to be planned and orchestrated to follow rigid Confucian doctrine.
This isn't coming from wanting individualism, not as such. This is a place of contempt and condemnation for the civilian nature of the rigid rules and regulations. Doctrine and regulation without the military strength behind it. It is a fascist's objection to the liberal state.
Some either have the strength, or lack thereof, to accept this doctrine. Others, like myself, chose exile in a better world. That world was cyber space, and it was tailor-made for Japanese otaku.
He has to thread a really fine line here, it's pretty impressive he even attempts; to subject yourself to the pre-existing hierarchy is either strong or weak, depending, and fleeing it is either strong or weak. Hell of a way to sound like you're saying something whilst making no statements anyone could easily object to.
I can't speak for your educational system, or, indeed, for that of any other country, but ours was based almost entirely on fact retention. From the day we first set foot in a classroom, prewar Japanese children were injected with volumes upon volumes of facts and figures that had no practical application in our lives.
This is all well and good, but what he wants instead - what he has consistently advocated for, what is taught in the Monastic Schools his organisation runs - isn't critical thinking and a thoughtful, student-first approach to learning.
No, the Shield Society schools teach a two-tier system where some students learn "Life Skills" to make them more useful cogs in machines, and others learn war.
Repulsive little man.
You can understand how this education would easily lend itself to an existence in cyberspace. In a world of information without context, where status was determined on its acquisition and possession, those of my generation could rule like gods. I was a sensei, master over all I surveyed, be it discovering the blood type of the prime minister's cabinet, or the tax receipts of Matsumoto and Hamada,[1] or the location and condition of all shin-gunto swords of the Pacific War.
He's going to use his "knowledge" of where all the factory produced piece of shit WWII swords were in a minute. Bear with me.
When the crisis reached Japan, my clique, as with all the others, forgot our previous obsessions and devoted our energies entirely to the living dead. We studied their physiology, behavior, weaknesses, and the global response to their attack upon humanity. The last subject was my clique's specialty, the possibility of containment within the Japanese home islands.
Convenient.
Also, just a note - I have obviously no way of researching this dude beyond skimming his website, there's
hundreds of people like him in Japan, so the point where he starts to embellish the truth is a little hard for me to pinpoint, precisely.
I was the first to hack into Doctor Komatsu's personal hard drive and read the raw data a full week before he presented his findings to the Diet. This was a coup. It further elevated my status among those who already worshipped me.
Once more wishing he had spoken to the Doctor instead of this fucking guy. The man's a prick, but he knows more about Japan's collapse than anyone else alive.
Like, I get why he's done it - the warrior cults in Japan are one of the most pro-American subcultures, and they want to lay the groundwork in case they pull some shit, but still, it does make for a profoundly frustrating read; the guy is just reeling off his traditional barely veiled tirade against pre-war Japanese liberalism.
Japan's low crime rate gave it one of the relatively smallest and most lightly armed police forces in the industrialized world. Japan was pretty much also a demilitarized state. Because of American "protection," our self-defense forces had not seen actual combat since 1945.
This is a growing refrain in Japan - that if they hadn't been castrated by the Americans after the war, they'd have survived the apocalypse easily.
It is a belief which leads naturally into wretched imperial apologia, which is growing increasingly common.
America's alliance system in East Asia is in shambles; South Korea and Japan hate each other, Hainan is terrified enough that they're reopening communication with the mainland and everyone remembers Taiwan, so no one
trusts American promises of protection any more.
So it took us all by complete surprise when Doctor Komatsu publicly declared that the situation was hopeless and that Japan had to be immediately evacuated.
This is the last chronological thing he says that I think can be seen as uncontroversial fact. Everything about his life hereafter I think should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Japan's evacuation was a desperate gamble - they didn't think they could pull off a 'conventional' Redeker; the country was too densely populated and not nearly armed enough - so they decided instead to pull those they could out and launch an occupation of Kamchatka to wait the ghouls out.
That must have been terrifying.
Not at all! It set off an explosion of frenzied activity, a race to discover where our population might resettle. Would it be the South, the coral atolls of the Central and South Pacific, or would we head north, colonizing the Kuriles, Sakhalin, or maybe somewhere in Siberia? Whoever could uncover the answer would be the greatest otaku in cyber history.
This is where I start to get suspicious; he wasn't stupid, and I don't think his parents were either. I don't think he was unaware that the evacuation was concerning, or indeed that the evacuation plans only called for at most 10% of the population to be evacuated.
No, I think he's claiming to be unaware because he wants to make his story "cooler" and more transformative.
What about your parents?
What about them? We lived in the same apartment, but I never really conversed with them. I'm sure they thought I was studying. Even when school closed I told them I still had to prepare for exams. They never questioned it.
I obviously never met his parents, but this seems unlikely. It would be obvious he was lying. I think this is part of an embellishment; part of his sales pitch is that he went from as unready as possible to being "a badass" and You Can Too.
I woke up that morning, as I always did; gratified myself, as I always did; logged on, as I always did. It was midday before I started to feel hungry. I hated those feelings, hunger or fatigue or, the worst, sexual desire. Those were physical distractions. They annoyed me.
But then he can't stop himself from some autofellatio about how even as an Otaku he was distancing himself from material desires or whatever.
This is after his parents have died or disappeared in some way. I personally assume they died trying to get the family out of the city, and he was with them. His escape does not ring true.
You never questioned where your parents were?
The only reason I cared was because of the precious minutes I was wasting having to feed myself. In my world too many exciting things were happening.
I do think this is almost a slip. He's trying to come across as having been disenfranchised from society, but he hits closer to "heartless" instead.
How long did this go on for?
About three days. The last post, from another otaku in Sendai, stated that the dead were now flowing out of Tohoku University Hospital, in the same cho as his apartment.
Granting that this happened, it was less because they all got eaten, and more because as the government pulled out, they shut down the power stations behind them, to prevent accidents like the one at West County in America. Most people who died in Japan - most people in Japan, then - died after the evacuation, not before.
And that didn't worry you?
Why should it? I was too busy trying to learn all I could about the evacuation process. How was it going to be executed, what government organizations were involved? Would the camps be in Kamchatka or Sakhalin, or both? And what was this I was reading about the rash of suicides that was sweeping the country? [3] So many questions, so much data to mine. I cursed myself for having to go to sleep that night.
Japan had a crazy high proportionate suicide rate; something like seven in a hundred people left behind by their government in the evacuation. This isn't terribly surprising; a professor got up in front of the Diet and said everyone in Japan was fucked if they didn't get evacuated, and then most people didn't get evacuated.
More Japanese survivors got out through Yakuza trafficking lines to South Korea and elsewhere than the official evacuation, which has resulted in a
massive swell of Yakuza numbers, especially in the south.
When I woke up, the screen was blank. I tried to sign on. Nothing. I tried rebooting. Nothing. I noticed that I was on backup battery. Not a problem. I had enough reserve power for ten hours at full use. I also noticed that my signal strength was zero. I couldn't believe it.
I'm fairly sure this is not true. I think most of what he says from here on out is not true, but I think it is informative about the ideological shit Tatsumi is trying to play here.
One server might go down, maybe even a few, but the whole net? I realized it must be my computer. It had to be. I got out my laptop and tried to sign on. No signal. I cursed and got up to tell my parents that I had to use their desktop. They still weren't home. Frustrated, I tried to pick up the phone to call my mother's cell. It was cordless, dependent on wall power. I tried my cell. I got no reception.
Japan shut off all power to different cities at different times, depending on how defended the power stations were.
There are some claims that they shut down some places proactively, but there's a lot of unfocused disdain towards the government, so it's hard to get a read on how true that is.
Do you know what happened to them?
No, even to this day, I have no idea. I know they didn't abandon me, I'm sure of it. Maybe my father was caught out at work, my mother trapped while trying to go grocery shopping. They could have been lost together, going to or coming back from the relocation office.
There's a lot of this sort of feeling, in Japan but also everywhere - the complete lack of knowledge what happened to family and friends. I'm not sure if it is better or worse than knowing.
The Japanese government kept running relocation offices even in cities pretty much totally overrun, even when they wouldn't be relocating anyone else, but I don't think those are what he meant. Other people also ran relocation offices in Japanese cities; Yakuza, some of those odd religious cults, even, slightly alarmingly, some Keiretsu. They all wanted different things, but they all got, in the end, the same thing; the loyalty of an unsettling proportion of the surviving Japanese public.
My knuckles split, the sight of my own blood terrified me. I'd never played sports as a child, never been injured, it was all too much. I picked up the monitor and threw it against the wall. I was crying like a baby, shouting, hyperventilating. I started to wretch and vomited all over the floor. I got up and staggered to the front door. I don't know what I was looking for, just that I had to get out. I opened the door and stared into darkness.
In two minds. I think it is eminently feasible that he had a breakdown like this, but equally, I think this has a tinge of "I was so pathetic (in contrast to once the crisis and my philosophy were able to fix me)" which sits far too comfortably with his whole, like, erection pills and 12 step programs vibe, you know?
But like, obviously I wasn't in Kokura with him, so I can't say either way for sure.
Did you try knocking at the neighbor's door?
No. Isn't that odd? Even at the height of my breakdown, my social anxiety was so great that actually risking personal contact was still taboo. I took a few steps, slipped, and fell into something soft. It was cold and slimy, all over my hands, my clothes. It stank. The whole hallway stank. I suddenly became aware of a low, steady scraping noise, like something was dragging itself across the hallway toward me.
I can never decide whether I'm amused or pissed when fascists wax lyrical about the loss of community or whatever. They identify the problem, the atomisation of society and alienation people feel, and then they go "the solution is the cult of war".
Anyway, he's basically making shit up, now. The dark hallway stinking of ghoul, the half-ghoul dragging itself across the floor towards you? He might as well have said "Then a scene from a movie happened".
Kokura was engulfed in hell. The fires, the wreckage…the siafu were everywhere. I watched them crash through doors, invade apartments, devour people cowering in corners or on balconies. I watched people leap to their deaths or break their legs and spines. They lay on the pavement, unable to move, wailing in agony as the dead closed in around them. One man in the apartment directly across from me tried to fight them off with a golf club. It bent harmlessly around a zombie's head before five others pulled him to the floor.
There's no way he looked out the window and saw this. This is the idea people have in their heads of how a city falls, but it's both slower and faster than this; you don't get people otherwise going about their day until one day all hell breaks loose, and you don't get a mass swarm in the city within hours of the power going out. This is a story he's telling, it's part of his patter.
This is closer to what you see when a swarm breaks open a safe zone than what you see in the opening days. People otherwise going about their lives suddenly dealing not with one or two ghouls but thousands.
Then…a pounding at the door. My door. This…[shakes his fist] bom-bombom-bom…from the bottom, near the floor. I heard the thing groaning outside. I heard other noises, too, from the other apartments. These were my neighbors, the people I'd always tried to avoid, whose faces and names I could barely remember. They were screaming, pleading, struggling, and sobbing. I heard one voice, either a young woman or a child on the floor above me, calling someone by name, begging them to stop. But the voice was swallowed in a chorus of moans. The banging at my door became louder. More siafu had shown up. I tried to move the living room furniture against the door. It was a waste of effort. Our apartment was, by your standards, pretty bare. The door began to crack. I could see its hinges straining. I figured I had maybe a few minutes to escape.
This whole sequence is described in such an earnestly unbelievable way. It fits what he wants to sell too well - the otaku loser everyone thinks is worthless suddenly learns how to survive and thrive when the vestiges of modern civilisation are torn away. There's some stuff later in this interview to really drive home his point for anyone who didn't properly understand it.
Escape? But if the door was jammed…
Out the window, onto the balcony of the apartment below. I thought I could tie bedsheets into a rope…[smiles sheepishly]…I'd heard about it from an otaku who studied American prison breaks. It would be the first time I ever applied any of my archived knowledge.
Fortunately the linen held. I climbed out of my apartment and started to lower myself down to the apartment below. Immediately my muscles started cramping. I'd never paid much attention to them and now they were reaping their revenge. I struggled to control my motions, and to not think about the fact that I was nineteen floors up.
He did not do this. I don't have anything more to add really - he did not do this. There would not be enough bedding, he would not have enough time, the balcony bars would not be strong enough. He did not do this.
The next section is profoundly unpleasant. He makes it to the apartment below, which is barricaded and safe, but…
I slid the bathroom door open and was blown back by this invisible, putrid cloud. The woman was in her tub. She had slit her wrists, long, vertical slices along the arteries to make sure the job was done right. Her name was Reiko. She was the only neighbor I'd made any effort to know. She was a high-priced hostess at a club for foreign businessmen. I'd always fantasized about what she'd look like naked. Now I knew.
We get this hateful shit. Reiko is judged here, for failing to survive, for killing herself, far more harshly than others who made the same decision. She's sexualised, we are told she is a hostess at a club, she is killed and there's a decided sense that these things are tied together - she's weak, used to finery, she's decadent, a whore, and she caters to foreigners. And thus, she is incapable of surviving, she kills herself, stinks of putrescence and disease.
If it weren't for later portions, I might think I was reading too much into this.
Strangely enough, what bothered me most was that I didn't know any prayers for the dead. I'd forgotten what my grandparents had tried to teach me as a little kid, rejected it as obsolete data. It was a shame, how out of touch I was with my heritage. All I could do was stand there like an idiot and whisper an awkward apology for taking some of her sheets.
And he uses her as a place from which to talk about how he has become out of touch with his Japanese Heritage, stolen from him, and isn't that a shame?
The reactionary shit simmers barely under the surface here, it's like an abscess. By the end of his interview he lances it.
It took me three days to make it all the way down to the ground floor. This was partially due to my disgraceful physical stamina. A trained athlete would have found my makeshift rope antics a challenge so you can imagine what they were for me. In retrospect it's a miracle I didn't plunge to my death or succumb to infection with all the scrapes and scratches I endured.
He humblebrags a lot about how even though he had a disgraceful physique and was working on no sleep, his strength of will allowed him to climb 19 stories using bedsheets. It's dumb.
There wasn't anything?
[Smiles.] This was not America, where there used to be more firearms than people. True fact—an otaku in Kobe hacked this information directly from your National Rifle Association.
I meant a hand tool, a hammer, a crowbar…
What salaryman does his own home maintenance?
This whole section is a parable on the emasculation of Japan - men don't have guns, they don't do their own maintenance, all they have is hapless golfing and business work, and thus Japan was uniquely unprepared, and must return to stronger times.
It's classic fash shit.
By now I had my entire escape plan worked out: land on the fourth-floor balcony, break into the apartment for a new set of sheets (I'd given up looking for a weapon by then), slide down to the sidewalk, steal the most convenient motorcycle (even though I had no idea how to ride one), streaking off like some old-timey bosozoku,[4] and maybe even grab a girl or two along the way. [Laughs.]
He talks about this as though getting on a motorbike and riding into the sunset is
more ridiculous than what he's trying to convince us actually happened.
Anyway he claims he got ambushed by a ghoul and had to leap to safety at another balcony. After three days without sleep, three days climbing down the face of a building whilst ghouls try to kill him at every turn.
Whatever, man.
My eyes fell on the only other item in the room, a Kami Dana, or traditional Shinto shrine. Something was on the floor beneath it, I guessed a suicide note. The wind must have blown it off when I entered. I didn't feel right just leaving it there. I hobbled across the room and stooped to pick it up. Many Kami Dana have a small mirror in the center. My eye caught a reflection in that mirror of something shambling out of the bedroom.
This whole section exists to valorise Japanese veterans of the Second World War and the traditional ways of life - that's why the Shinto shrine very literally saves his life by warning him.
The adrenaline kicked in just as I wheeled around. The old man was still there, the bandage on his face telling me that he must have reanimated not too long ago. He came at me; I ducked. My legs were still shaky and he managed to catch me by the hair. I twisted, trying to free myself. He pulled my face toward his. He was surprisingly fit for his age, muscle equal to, if not superior to, mine.
The difference between how this old man - who also committed suicide - is depicted; he's still strong, more muscular than Tatsumi, more driven even as a ghoul, and how Reiko was depicted early is, I think, genuinely telling.
He snarled and came at me again. I backed up, tensed, then grabbed him by his one good arm. I jammed it into his back, clamped my other hand around the back of his neck, and with a roaring sound I didn't even know I could make, I shoved him, ran him, right onto the balcony and over the side. He landed face up on the pavement, his head still hissing up at me from his otherwise broken body.
Three days without sleep, food or water. Come on now.
Anyway this is pretty normal - he's discovered his Faith or Will or whatever, and now he's got the vigor and strength to do what must be done, like the samurai-soldiers of old.
That's what had caught my attention, one last photograph that was on the bare wall in his bedroom. It was black and white, grainy, and showed a traditional family. There was a mother, father, a little boy, and what I guessed had to be the old man as a teenager in uniform. Something was in his hand, something that almost stopped my heart. I bowed to the man in the photograph and said an almost tearful "Arigato."
You see, he served in the Imperial Japanese Army, this undoubtedly fictitious old man. Served as an army officer. I could speculate about whether he served in Nanking, or make some other snide remark about how evil the IJA was, but there's no point - this didn't happen. He did not climb down 19 stories in 3 days, without eating, sleeping or drinking, tying together bed sheets and leaping from balcony to balcony. That didn't happen.
No, this is mostly relevant as the final open statement - not merely Japan's martial past, not merely Japan's imperial past, but specifically Imperial Japan of WWII was what saved him, what - he implies - saved
Japan. The shield society is one of the most overtly pro-IJA of the various pseudo-fascist cults they have knocking around - it's even named after a previous paramilitary which tried to restore the Emperor - and it's certainly the
largest but they're all pretty much like this.
What was in his hand?
I found it at the bottom of a chest in his bedroom, underneath a collection of bound papers and the ragged remains of the uniform from the photo. The scabbard was green, chipped, army-issue aluminum and an improvised, leather grip had replaced the original sharkskin, but the steel…bright like silver, and folded, not machine stamped…a shallow, tori curvature with a long, straight point. Flat, wide ridge lines decorated with the kiku-sui, the Imperial chrysanthemum, and an authentic, not acid-stained, river bordering the tempered edge. Exquisite workmanship, and clearly forged for battle.
[I motioned to the sword at his side. Tatsumi smiles.]
I've seen Shin Guntō - not like, a lot? Cuba's a long way from anywhere you're likely to find one, but we get a few Americans who had them. They're machine stamped, obviously, and mass produced. They suck
absolute shit, and no one who has tried to use one of these broadly ceremonial weapons in anger has a single good word to say about them except "it isn't as heavy as a lobo".
But then, I've seen pictures of Kondo Tatsumi, too - I looked him up and he's in a bunch of pictures on the Shield Society website - and the sword he's always posing with isn't a fucking guntō.
It's too short, the handle's too modern - he tries to cover for this here, but it's clunky - and the blade is fairly ordinary stainless steel, like you'd see for a kitchen knife. It isn't a guntō, it isn't big enough to be a katana, and it isn't fancy enough to be from a museum or a specialist blacksmith. There's really only one other place he'd have been able to find a 'sword' like this.
If you ask me what happened, what Kondo Tatsumi really experienced? I think his parents found a way off Kyushu; a Yakuza. I think they went, the three of them, to meet the Yakuza who was going to traffick them out. I think this was probably once the outbreak was simmering, not yet boiling over, but I think the Yakuza was dead when they arrived. Killed his parents. And I think Kondo took the shitty wakizashi from the Yakuza's belt, and fled. Because that glorified dagger he waves around isn't a katana, and is an obviously extremely modern sword. I'm sure it's basically "okay" at killing ghouls, because most handheld things made of metal are, but I doubt it's a lot of fun trying to destroy the brain with it.
But if you were wondering - yes, you
can purchase an exact copy of his sword, to best get in touch with your inner samurai, to understand what riled them to wage war on the world in earlier, more savage days.
It'll be machine stamped, and probably made of mild steel.
This is going to be a long update - the interview with his "sensei" is next.
KYOTO, JAPAN
[Sensei Tomonaga Ijiro knows exactly who I am seconds before I enter the room. Apparently I walk, smell, and even breathe like an American. The founder of Japan's Tatenokai, or "Shield Society," greets me with both a bow and handshake, then invites me to sit before him like a student. Kondo Tatsumi, Tomonaga's second in command, serves us tea then sits beside the old master. Tomonaga begins our interview with an apology for any discomfort I might feel about his appearance. The sensei's lifeless eyes have not functioned since his adolescence.]
Horrible reactionary arsehole though he was, Tomonaga Ijiro was also pretty obviously being manipulated by Tatsumi; he was a full hundred years old when he died, which was, what, a month after this book came out?
Obviously I won't be shedding any tears over the guy who resurrected an imperial restorationist paramilitary, but elder abuse is elder abuse.
I am "hibakusha." I lost my sight at 11:02 A.M., August 9, 1945, by your calendar. I was standing on Mount Kompira, manning the air-raid warning station with several other boys from my class. It was overcast that day, so I heard, rather than saw, the B-29 passing close overhead. It was only a single B-san, probably a reconnaissance flight, and not even worth reporting. I almost laughed when my classmates jumped into our slit trench. I kept my eyes fixed above the Urakami Valley, hoping to maybe catch a glimpse of the American bomber. Instead, all I saw was the flash, the last thing I would ever see.
It's almost completely unrelated to him, but I was thinking. I was nearly too young for it, but I still remember - these were the only nuclear weapons used in anger, the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost enough time had passed that
by natural causes there was no one living with the scars of nuclear war.
That's not true any more. Hundreds of thousands, maybe
millions of people are blind or burned or sick because of nuclear weapons. From Islamabad to Tehran to Xilinhot to
fucking Shanghai.
There's people I pass on the street with radiation burns on their hands, forearms, faces. It's commonplace.
We were on the brink of having shown the simple restraint to let nuclear war drop from our collective memory, and we pissed it away without a backwards glance.
I don't know. It's shit.
I would have to be a pretty massive hypocrite to come out as anti nuclear proliferation after Sellafield, but I do find myself wishing no one had the fucking things, since we've let the genie out of the bottle.
So many times I tried inquiring about some manner of employment, some work no matter how small or demeaning. No one would have me. I was still hibakusha, and I learned so many polite ways to be rejected. My brother begged me to come and stay with him, insisting that he and his wife would take care of me and even find some "useful" task around the house. For me that was even worse than the sanatorium. He had just gotten back from the army and they were trying to have another baby.
Learning his arsehole brother was a junior officer in the Imperial Japanese Army does illustrate why he was such a piece of shit, I think.
There's some mythologising within their cult that the officer Tatsumi got his sword from was Tomonaga's brother, but since Tatsumi didn't get his sword from an officer, I think that's just shit Tatsumi heavily implies to make himself seem more legitimate as a successor, given the old man was dying.
I don't know how well that's worked, but they're still pretty unified.
I left the sanatorium without informing my brother. I didn't know where I was heading, only that I had to get as far from my life, my memories, myself, as possible. I traveled, begged mostly…I had no more honor to lose…until I settled in Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido. This cold, northern wilderness has always been Japan's least populated prefecture, and with the loss of Sakhalin and the Kuriles, it became, as the Western saying goes, "the end of the line."
This is just nationalist grousing about having lost them. They're Japanese again now, for the moment. Seized them as they returned from Kamchatka.
The Russians aren't pleased, though they're probably more pissed about Kamchatka itself.
There's going to be a war before too long. China's direct intervention in Khabarovsk is probably the death knell for the HRE, and if they're supporting the Russians this much, it means they don't plan to stop when they reach the Japanese occupied zones.
In Sapporo, I met an Ainu gardener, Ota Hideki. The Ainu are Japan's oldest indigenous group, and even lower on our social ladder than the Koreans.
Maybe that is why he took pity on me, another pariah cast out by the tribe of Yamato. Maybe it was because he had no one to pass his skills along to. His own son had never returned from Manchuria. Ota-san worked at the Akakaze, a former luxury hotel that now served as a repatriation center for Japanese settlers from China.
The old man's criticisms of pre-war and Imperial Japan are quite rare - he was generally pretty positive about it - but he was pretty strong on wanting their new Japanese Empire to have no internal minorities they discriminate against. That Japanese Koreans and the Ainu should both be accepted as an equal part of the Imperial Machine.
This isn't a view many of his adherents ever really came to embrace; the general view of Japanese Koreans is that they're Yakuza, and the general view of the Ainu is that they shouldn't exist. Tatsumi just wants both groups to integrate into nonexistence, lose their independent culture and become "normal" Japanese people.
I was still working at the Akakaze when I heard of the first domestic outbreak. I was trimming the Western-style hedges near the restaurant, when I overheard several of the guests discussing the Nagumo murders.
Things in Japan flared up pretty quickly, or maybe were just reported widely enough that people had a better understanding of how fast the crisis would spread when it breached containment. It was maybe a week between the murders in Nagumo and the outbreaks across far too many hospitals in far too many cities.
The voice that finally convinced me of danger came from the hotel's manager, a stiff, no-nonsense salaryman with a very formal manner of speech. After the outbreak in Hirosaki, he held a staff meeting to try to debunk, once and for all, these wild rumors about dead bodies coming back to life. I had only his voice to rely on, and you can tell everything about a person by what happens when he opens his mouth.
Honshu was on the brink of collapse before the rest of Japan was even really dealing with the infection at all. I think it must have been pretty surreal, living on Hokkaido or Kyushu, knowing hell was coming and your government wouldn't be stopping it.
And so, for the second time in my life, I fled. I considered warning my brother, but so much time had passed, I had no idea how to reach him or even if he was still alive. That was the last, and probably the greatest of all my dishonorable acts, the heaviest weight I will carry to my grave.
His brother was almost definitely dead by this point, but I don't imagine that matters. I know survivor's guilt when I see it.
I left at night and began hitchhiking south down Hokkaido's DOO Expressway. All I had with me was a water bottle, a change of clothes, and my ikupasuy,[2] a long, flat shovel similar to a Shaolin spade but which also served for many years as my walking stick.
It is literally just a shovel. It isn't a Shaolin spade, it certainly isn't a fucking ikupasuy - that's an Ainu prayer stick.
They sell them, of course, on their online shop.
No one was sure what the next day would bring, how far the calamity would spread, or who would be its next victim, and yet, no matter whom I spoke to or how terrified they sounded, each conversation would inevitably end with "But I'm sure the authorities will tell us what to do." One truck driver said, "Any day now, you'll see, if you just wait patiently and don't make a public fuss." That was the last human voice I heard, the day before I left civilization and trekked into the Hiddaka Mountains.
I don't think there exists a state in the world any more with this sort of faith in the government, now. It was squandered pretty well universally. I can't say I miss it.
I was very familiar with this national park. Ota-san had taken me here every year to collect sansai, the wild vegetables that attract botanists, hikers, and gourmet chefs from all over the home islands. As a man who often rises in the middle of the night knows the exact location of every item in his darkened bedroom, I knew every river and every rock, every tree and patch of moss. I even knew every onsen that bubbled to the surface, and therefore never wanted for a naturally hot and cleansing mineral bath.
Nah. Visiting a national park a few times a year in a specific season to collect vegetables does not make you know it this well.
What made him think he was this clear on where things were in the park I would probably put down to mental decline more than anything else.
He was a horrible fascist, but Jesus, the dude was pretty obviously a puppet a long time before he died.
Something did arouse me from my sleep one morning, but not a collection of giggling students, and no, it wasn't one of them either.
It was a bear, one of the many large, brown higuma roaming the Hokkaido wilderness. The higuma had originally migrated from the Kamchatka Peninsula and bore the same ferocity and raw power of their Siberian cousins. This one was enormous, I could tell by the pitch and resonance of his breathing. I judged him to be no more than four or five meters from me. I rose slowly, and without fear.
It's almost funny, he talked about how he could've used his spade to fight off this bear but chose not to.
A man in his 80s with a shovel deciding not to try to fight one of the largest bears in the world is not some grand choice, it is a simple acknowledgement of basic reality.
But being frank, this story is clearly allegorical - he faces his death before an avatar of the gods and is saved by the need the gods have of his service against the undead.
By exiling myself into the wilderness, I had polluted nature's purity. After dishonoring myself, my family, my country, I had at last taken that final step and dishonored the gods. Now they had sent an assassin to do what I had been unable to for so long, to erase my stink. I thanked the gods for their mercy. I wept as I prepared myself for the blow.
This remains a core ideological point of their specific vein of ideology; by our impurity and dishonour, we are by nature deserving of death, and only through the act of killing those more impure than us can we redeem ourselves in the eyes of the gods.
During the war, those "more impure" were ghouls, but it's been years since Japan was cleared, and the language these warrior cults use hasn't changed.
I could hear it reaching out to me, groaning and swiping at empty air. I managed to dodge its clumsy attempt and snatched up my ikupasuy. I centered my attack on the source of the creature's moan. I struck quickly, and the crack vibrated up through my arms. The creature fell back upon the earth as I released a triumphant shout of "Ten Thousand Years!"
This has been sanitised for American audiences; the war cry has been translated literally to conceal it, because Americans have engaged in serious historical myth making about "Banzai Charges" and they
really want to make out the imperial restorationists out to be their loyal and harmless allies. Whilst also wanting to venerate and build up their own military history, including the pacific war.
It must be hell, writing propaganda for the Junta.
It is difficult for me to describe my feelings at this moment. Fury had exploded within my heart, a strength and courage that drove away my shame as the sun drives the night from heaven. I suddenly knew the gods had favored me. The bear hadn't been sent to kill me, it had been sent to warn me. I didn't understand the reason right then, but I knew I had to survive until the day when that reason was finally revealed.
People believe what they want to believe to get through things like this.
I do apologise for my shortness here; two consecutive chapters that are just part of the opening pitch of a fascist paramilitary in Japan is getting a little much for me.
And that is what I did for the next few months: I survived. I mentally divided the Hiddaka range into a series of several hundred chi-tai.[3] Each chi-tai contained some object of physical security—a tree or tall, flat rock—some place I could sleep in peace without the danger of immediate attack. I slept always during the day, and only traveled, foraged, or hunted at night. I did not know if the beasts depended on their sight as much as human beings, but I wasn't going to give them even the most infinitesimal advantage.[4]
This I think he was either fed by his cult or he made up after talking with Tatsumi. He did not patrol the 150 kilometre mountain range. I expect he settled a little spot for himself and stayed there. He was old enough by war's end that he could probably be convinced of anything.
But no, a blind man in his eighties did not patrol an entire mountain range. He talks about paying attention to his other senses, which; sure, that probably helped him survive! He still didn't patrol the whole range.
As regards the footnote - "To this day, it is unknown how much the living dead depend on sight" - no it isn't. They're blind, they just have some sixth sense for people. They don't blink and their eyes get all scratched up - they're blind. The only people who disagree are people who want to pretend the ghouls do not have some extrasensory ability to find us.
Was there ever a problem with long-range detection, not being able to see an attacker several miles away?
My nocturnal activity would have prevented the use of healthy eyesight, and any beast several kilometers away was no more a threat to me than I was to it. There was no need to be on my guard until they entered what you might call my "circle of sensory security," the maximum range of my ears, nose, fingertips, and feet. On the best of days, when the conditions were right and Haya-ji[5] was in a helpful mood, that circle extended as far as half a kilometer. On the worst of days, that range might drop to no more than thirty, possibly fifteen paces.
A ghoul several kilometres away is a ghoul that does not matter to your patrol. This isn't unique to him.
I do not believe he had a 500 metre sphere of awareness, though I imagine he thought he did.
Did you always kill your enemy on the first strike?
Always.
[He gestures with an imaginary ikupasuy.]
Thrust forward, never swing. At first I would aim for the base of the neck. Later, as my skills grew with time and experience, I learned to strike here . . .
[He places his hand horizontally against the indentation between the forehead and nose.]
It was a little harder than simple decapitation, all that thick tough bone, but it did serve to destroy the brain, as opposed to decapitation where the living head would always require a secondary blow.
Not a chance that a shovel withstands being driven through more than maybe 10-12 skulls, I think.
Like, here's the thing. I'm sure he spent the war in the national park until he was found by Kondo Tatsumi, and I'm sure he killed a few ghouls in the process, but I don't think that many of them ever went into the national park, and I don't think he killed dozens or hundreds, because he was old and blind. That's just a useful claim now, when they're trying to frame their cult as being the sole saviours of Japan.
The answer came to me on the eve of my second winter in exile. This would be my last night in the branches of a tall tree. Once the snow fell, I would return to the cave where I had spent the previous winter. I had just settled in comfortably, waiting for dawn's warmth to lull me to sleep, when I heard the sound of footsteps, too quick and energetic to be a beast. Hayaji had decided to be favorable that night. He brought the smell of what could only be a human being.
He presents this like a crusade. Like the moment he discovered the "truth" of what happened to Japan, he was resolute in devoting his time to it. His "last night in the branches of a tall tree" - he will not be returning to his way of life.
This is of course not true - if he was living in the middle of the national park, we can assume he spent more nights in it on his way out - and even as a metaphor, it wasn't until it'd been almost a year that their group was large enough to start to make even the slightest impact, and they didn't go into a major settlement before then. Hardly a sweeping and urgent crusade.
I had come to realize that the living dead were surprisingly bereft of odor. Yes, there was the subtle hint of decomposition, stronger, perhaps, if the body had been turned for some time, or if chewed flesh had pushed through its bowels and collected in a rotting heap in its undergarments. Other than this, though, the living dead possessed what I refer to as a "scentless stink." They produced no sweat, no urine, or conventional feces. They did not even carry the bacteria within their stomach or teeth that, in living humans, would have fouled their breath. None of this was true of the two-legged animal rapidly approaching my position. His breath, his body, his clothes, all had clearly not been washed for some time.
Ghoulstink is a definite thing, but it is also substantially different from the smell of a living - dirty - person; the nauseatingly putrid sweetness of their slow rot, the almost… dusty? Body odour - they still have it, but it exists at a remove from the smell of a live human's sweat, the stronger putrescence from whatever is within their stomach and gut, slowly rotting from the inside.
You couldn't mistake a person for a ghoul by scent, not even if they had gangrene. He's not quite right about the breath, though; they don't breathe, so you can't smell it super well, but the stench rising out of their digestive tract tends to roil out from the mouth at the first opportunity, which is pretty close to bad breath.
It was still dark so he did not notice me. I could tell that his path would take him directly underneath the limbs of my tree. I crouched slowly, quietly. I wasn't sure if he was hostile, insane, or even recently bitten. I was taking no chances.
[At this point, Kondo chimes in.]
They were the only two people in this national park. Amongst the only people in Hokkaido full stop. As such, I obviously cannot comment on the truthfulness of this account of their meeting. Not in so many words.
That being said, this is clearly a pre-prepared spiel that the two of them reel out. Rehearsed.
KONDO: He was on me before I knew it. My sword went flying, my feet collapsed from under me.
TOMONAGA: I landed between his shoulder blades, not hard enough to do any permanent damage, but enough to knock the wind out of his slight, malnourished frame.
KONDO: He had me on my stomach, my face in the dirt, the blade of his shovel-thing pressed tightly against the back of my neck.
He was an octogenarian. This did not happen.
TOMONAGA: I told him to lie still, that I would kill him if...
KONDO: I tried to speak, gasping between coughs that I was friendly, that I didn't even know he was there, that all I wanted to do was pass along and be on my way.
TOMONAGA: I asked him where he was going.
KONDO: I told him Nemuro, the main Hokkaido port of evacuation, where there might still be one last transport, or fishing boat, or…something that might still be left to get me to Kamchatka.
You don't accidentally walk into the middle of a National Park. I don't know exact details, but it is pretty clear from survivor testimony in Hokkaido that people knew about the old man living in the National Park. I've got to assume Tatsumi sought him out deliberately. I suspect he lied about this to Tomonaga. He made his way all the way from Kokura in Kyushu to Hokkaido without ever picking up any real survival skills, and there's really only one way someone can do that.
I'm about to perform a magic trick, by the way - I'm going to get myself legally barred from ever travelling to Hokkaido.
You see, some of the less insane Japanese Red Brigades have mentioned finding individual survivor corpses, their supplies completely looted, with single stab or slash wounds. From behind, or whilst sleeping. Yakuza in Kansai have talked about this as well, but the Shield Society seems not to have noticed this happen at all.
I'm sure Tatsumi had nothing but good intentions when he sought out the blind old man in the woods, though. Probably he wasn't even the one who killed those other survivors.
But Tomonaga didn't have many supplies - that wasn't how he operated - so Tatsumi stuck around for a while, they started to salvage a situation, picked up some more followers, and he realised that grifting was a more stable source of supply and income for the post war.
TOMONAGA: I did not understand. I ordered him to explain.
KONDO: I described everything, about the plague, the evacuation. I cried when I told him that Japan had been completely abandoned, that Japan was nai.
TOMONAGA: And suddenly I knew. I knew why the gods had taken my sight, why they sent me to Hokkaido to learn how to care for the land, and why they had sent the bear to warn me.
KONDO: He began to laugh as he let me up and helped to brush the dirt from my clothing.
TOMONAGA: I told him that Japan had not been abandoned, not by those whom the gods had chosen to be its gardeners.
They still sometimes call themselves the gardeners of Japan, but the people they're talking about are, like, leftists, immigrants and the yakuza, rather than ghouls.
KONDO: At first I didn't understand…
TOMONAGA: So I explained that, like any garden, Japan could not be allowed to wither and die. We would care for her, we would preserve her, we would annihilate the walking blight that infested and defiled her and we would restore her beauty and purity for the day when her children would return to her.
KONDO: I thought he was insane, and told him so right to his face. The two of us against millions of siafu?
TOMONAGA: I handed his sword back to him; its weight and balance felt familiar to the touch. I told him that we might be facing fifty million monsters, but those monsters would be facing the gods.
Eighty million. There were eighty million ghouls in Japan.
They mostly got cleared by other groups, but I won't take it all away from the Shield Society and its splinter groups, which were also vile fascists. They cleared - and still control - Hokkaido, and they probably dealt with about a quarter of the Honshu swarm.
And I wonder - out of base curiosity - how long it took Tatsumi to convince Tomonaga that his shitty Yakuza dagger was his brother's sword? Do you think it was quick? Or do you think Tomonaga took a while to accede?
That's the end of the Japan section, by the way - and thank fucking Christ. The Americans realised just
how badly Japan was doing way too late, realised the government was going to fall one way or another, and that they probably couldn't work with the gangs, and definitely couldn't work with whichever of the various freak shit Red Brigades is currently looking like winning, so they've had to very quickly start to try and make groups who actively and unashamedly justify Imperial Japan and are named after paramilitaries which actively attempted coups in the Cold War look like sane and reliable allies. That's why the two chapters are right next to each other, and why they are presented so uncritically.
Japan's a fucking mess. When it collapses into civil war - and it will - an awful lot of people are going to begin massacring each other from day
one.
Next up we get the deeply stupid Cuba cope.
Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE].
Donate to the Lakota [HERE] - they're trying to rebuild as well as they can.
Argentina will be free! Donate to the cause [HERE]. This link might be illegal in your country, be careful.
I would put a link to a Japanese Communist Party or organisation here, but they so frequently reveal themselves to be
completely loco that I had to put an awful lot of research into vetting one, had everything lined up, and then the Japanese Workers' League schismed into about six different groups which all hate each other, so… Just leave Japan to it, I think. You don't want to donate money to a group and then discover they spent it buying anthrax.
AN: These chapters nearly broke me. Japan is written so appallingly weeb in this book, and he put the sections back to back. He also cannot stop himself from naming organisations after their most sociopathic Cold War equivalent. Its terminal.
