A Lonely Resurrection

are the most proficient at what they’ve learned.”
    It made sense. A resort to assassins wasn’t even original. In past centuries, the
shogun
and
daimyo
employed ninja in their own internecine struggles. I remembered Yamaoto from our run-in a year earlier and knew he would be flattered by the comparison.
    “Do you see how this development fits in with Yamaoto’s longer-range plans?” he asked.
    I shook my head. It was hard to think through the penetrating heat.
    He looked at me the way you might look at a slow but still likeable child. “What are Japan’s overall prospects for the future?” he asked.
    “How do you mean?”
    “As a nation. Where will we be in ten, twenty years?”
    I considered. “Not so well off, I suppose. There are a lot of problems—deflation, energy, unemployment, the environment, the banking mess—and no one seems to be able to do anything about it.”
    “Yes. And you are correct in distinguishing Japan’s problems, which all countries have, from our powerlessness to solve those problems, in which respect we are unique among industrialized nations.”
    He was looking at me, and I knew what he was thinking. Until recently, I had been one of the causes of that powerlessness.
    “All that consensus building takes time,” I said.
    “Often it takes forever. But a cultural predisposition to consensus building is not the real problem.” He lips moved in the trace of a smile. “Even you were not the real problem. The real problem is the nature of our corruption.”
    “Quite a few scandals lately,” I said, nodding. “Cars, nuclear, the food industry. . . I mean, if you can’t trust Mr. Donut, who can you trust?”
    He grimaced. “What was happening at the TEPCO nuclear facilities was worse than a disgrace. The managers should be executed.”
    “Are you asking me for another ‘favor’?”
    He smiled. “I must take care in my phraseology when I’m talking to you.”
    “Anyway, didn’t the responsible TEPCO managers resign?”
    “Yes, they resigned. While the regulators remained—the same regulators who get a cut from the funds allocated to the building and maintenance of nuclear plants, who only just publicized dangers they had known about for years.”
    He pulled himself up and sat on the edge of the tub to take a break from the heat. “You know, Rain-san,” he said, “societies are like organisms, and no organism is invulnerable to disease. What matters is whether an organism can mount an effective defense when it finds itself under attack. In Japan, the virus of corruption has attacked the immune system itself, like a societal form of AIDS. Consequently, the body has lost its ability to defend itself. This is what I mean when I say that all countries have problems, but only Japan has problems it has lost the ability to solve. The TEPCO managers resign, but the men charged with regulating their activities for all those years remain? Only in Japan.”
    He looked pretty depressed, and I wished for a moment he wouldn’t take this shit so seriously. If he kept it up, he’d have an ulcer the size of an asteroid. I sat next to him.
    “I know it’s bad, Tatsu,” I said, trying to give him a little perspective, “but Japan is hardly unique when it comes to corruption. Maybe it’s a little worse here, but in America, you’ve got Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, analysts pumping their clients’ stock to get their kids into the right preschools. . .”
    “Yes, but look at the outrage those revelations have induced in America’s regulatory system,” he said. “Open hearings are conducted. New legislation is passed. Heads of corporations go to jail. But in Japan, outrage is considered outrageous. Our culture seems strongly disposed toward acquiescence.”
    I smiled and in response offered one of the most common phrases in the language.
“Shoganai,”
I said. Literally, There is no way of doing it.
    “Yes,” he said, nodding. “Elsewhere they have
Cest la vie,
or That’s life. Where the focus is on circumstances. Only in Japan do we focus on our own inability to change those circumstances.”
    He wiped his brow. “So. Consider this state of affairs from Yamaoto’s perspective. He understands that, with the immune system suppressed, there must eventually be a catastrophic failure of the host. There have been so many near misses—financial, ecological, nuclear—it is only a matter of time before a true cataclysm occurs. Perhaps a nuclear accident that irradiates an