A Clean Kill in Tokyo

child prodigy. But his father yanked him out of all that when Yamaoto turned twenty, and sent him to the States to complete his education as a prelude to taking over the family business. Yamaoto got a master’s in business from Harvard, and was running the company’s U.S. operations when his old man died. At which point Yamaoto returned to Japan, sold the business, and used the money to establish
Conviction
and run for parliament.”
    “The piano training. Is there a connection with the way the disk is encrypted?”
    “There could be.”
    “Sorry. Keep going.”
    “Apparently the father’s former position in the Imperial Army and the long samurai lineage made an impression on the son’s politics.
Conviction
was a platform for Yamaoto’s right-wing ideas. He was elected in 1985 to a seat in Nagano-ken, which he promptly lost in the next election.”
    “Yeah, you don’t get elected in Japan because of your ideas,” I said. “It’s pork that pays.”
    “That’s exactly the lesson Yamaoto learned from his defeat. After he was elected, he spent all his time and political capital arguing for abolishing Article Nine of the Constitution so Japan could build up its military, kicking the U.S. out of Japan, teaching Shinto in the schools—the usual positions. But after his defeat, he ran again—this time, focusing on the roads and bridges he would build for his constituents, and the rice subsidies and tariffs he would impose. Very different politician. The nationalistic stuff was back-burnered. He got his seat back in eighty-seven, and has held onto it ever since.”
    “But
Conviction
is a marginal player. I’ve never even read about the LDP using them to form a coalition. Outside Nagano-ken, I doubt anyone has heard of them.”
    “True, but Yamaoto has a few things going for him. One,
Conviction
is very well funded. That’s his father’s legacy. Two, he knows how to dole out the pork. Nagano has a number of farming districts, and Yamaoto keeps the subsidies rolling in and is a vocal opponent of any relaxation of Japan’s refusal to allow foreign rice into the country. And three, he has a lot of support in the Shinto community.”
    “Shinto,” I said, musing. Shinto is a nature-worshiping religion that Japan’s nationalists turned into an ideology of Japaneseness before the war. Unlike Christianity and Buddhism, Shinto is native to Japan and isn’t practiced anywhere else. There was something about the connection that was bothering me, something I should have known. Then I realized.
    “That’s how they found out where I live,” I said. “No wonder I’ve been seeing priests begging for alms outside of stations on the Mita-sen. They blanketed me with static surveillance, traced me back to my neighborhood one step at a time. Goddamn it, how could I have missed it? I almost gave one of them some change the other day.”
    His eyes were worried. “How would they know to focus on the Mita line?”
    “They probably didn’t, for sure. But with a little luck, a little coincidence, a little Holtzer feeding them a dossier, maybe even military-era photographs, it could be done. If they placed me at the Kodokan, they would have assumed I wouldn’t live too far from it. And there are only three train lines with stops within a reasonable distance from the building, so all they had to do was commit enough manpower at enough places for enough time. Shit, they really nailed me.”
    I had to give them credit; it was nicely done. Static surveillance is almost impossible to spot. Unlike the moving variety, you can’t get the person behind you to do something unnatural to give himself away. It’s more like a zone defense in basketball: no matter where the guy with the ball goes, there’s always someone new in the next zone to pick him up. If you can put enough people in place to make it work, it’s deadly.
    “What’s the basis for the Shinto connection?” I asked.
    “Shinto is a huge organization, with priests running shrines at the national, local, even neighborhood levels. As a result, the shrines take in a lot of donations and are well funded—so they’re in a position to dispense patronage to the politicians they favor. And Yamaoto wants a much bigger role for Shinto in Japan, which means more power for the priests.”
    “So the shrines are part of his funding?”
    “Yes, but it’s more than that. Shinto is part of
Conviction’s
program. The party wants it taught in schools, it wants to form an