‘So, you had a good time the other night?’ Takata asked. ‘It certainly looks like it.’
I assumed he was referring to the colourful array of bruises offered up by the others. My own facial rainbow was mainly the result of prior events.
‘Yes, it was very interesting,’ I said, bowing. ‘Thank you very much.’
He waved my appreciation away.
‘You certainly have a knack for making things happen around you,’ he said, looking like he was working through the end of a chess game I’d yet to start.
His voice became businesslike again.
‘But anyway, I want to talk to you about what you’ll be doing for us.’
I’d been dreading the moment. My hungover anxiety only made me feel worse.
‘As I mentioned previously, you’re not much use to us in our traditional activities. I need you to work on a side project instead. We don’t have anyone else on it but if you need support at any time just let Kurotaki know. He’ll either help you himself or press the right buttons to ensure someone else does.’
The thought of Kurotaki ‘pushing buttons’ made my stomach go tight.
‘Understood,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, but could I ask exactly what it is you want me to do?’
‘Energy. We’re taking an interest in the energy industry. I need you to head an NGO we’ve set up.’
I stared at him blankly. I knew nothing about energy.
‘Thank you, I’ll do my very best. But I should probably point out I’m not vastly experienced in the field. Are you certain you want me to lead it? Perhaps I’d be better providing support?’
‘No, you’re going to lead it. So if you don’t have the requisite knowledge I’d suggest you acquire it quickly. Like I said, we can get you the very best help. You need to be proactive and make use of it.’
At the ceremony, Takata had suggested I was going to be at the centre of a transformational event. I was deeply concerned about how I could conjure it from this. For if I failed – as I had no doubt I would – my prospects seemed dim. The rest of my skillset had already been considered and dismissed.
‘I’ll do my very best,’ I said again with a bow, while every curse I knew ran through my head.
‘You’re to start with nuclear,’ Takata went on. ‘I want you to get a good understanding – you’ll need to know about its development, its pros and cons, major events, that sort of thing. That’s the generic part. I then want you to look at its history in Japan, the when, where, why and so on. Who’s been involved, who’s still involved, what are the stories, what’s behind them, who’s been steering them and why. The KanEnCo AGM is in a fortnight’s time. I want you prepped and ready by then.’
I kept my face a perfect mask to conceal the panic rising inside me. Two weeks to go from knowing nothing to sticking my oar in at an energy conglomerate’s AGM?
‘You look concerned, Clarence-san,’ he said. ‘Don’t be – this is an opportunity.’
‘Thank you. I’ll do everything in my ability to take it.’
‘I’m sure you will. Like I said, don’t worry. Do as I tell you and do the best that you can. Everything else will fall into place.’
I nodded, trying to look upbeat and proactive.
‘You never know. It might even help you find your girlfriend.’
That got my attention.
‘Tomoe’s disappearance is related to nuclear power?’ I asked, failing to see any connection.
‘Not directly. But sometimes the players in one game get involved in another. Before you know it, pieces start tumbling all around. When that happens some fall down that should have stayed up.’
I tried to return his look with one that didn’t reveal this was too cryptic for me.
‘If I look into the energy industry, I’ll get close to the people who pushed the first piece?’
‘There is that chance.’
A cryptic chance was better than none.
After an afternoon spent trying to develop some expertise, I started to wonder whether death would be preferable to nuclear research – science was never my thing. I decided the AGM wouldn’t end up as a debate on physics and changed tack to look at the industry’s Japanese history instead.
Initiated just nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan’s nuclear power industry had had its share of controversy from the start. The Fukushima disaster meant the entire nuclear sector was facing calls to be shut down. It seemed unlikely Tomoe’s abduction was related to these events so I decided to look at others in-between. I was surprised to find a litany of near-catastrophes and cover-ups that combined the corruption and incompetence of a banana republic and the transparency of a Soviet regime. One scandal in particular caught my eye. The Kamigawa reactor.
Commissioned in 2003, it had suffered a scare almost immediately when an earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale occurred just miles offshore. This was a problem. The reactor had only been designed to withstand shocks of up to 5.5 as it was built in an area that wasn’t thought to be on a major fault.
KanEnCo ran the reactor and their readings showed the earthquake had only measured 5.5 in its grounds – something particularly fortuitous given its maximum resistance and the fact all other local readings had it at 7. Their post-shock investigation concluded the plant had withstood the earthquake without ill-effect. The national inspection agency concurred and normal service quickly resumed.
However, the story didn’t end there. The first sign of trouble came when reports emerged that two workers had been rushed to hospital on the quiet. This led to the first postscript. It turned out a number of barrels containing radioactive material had been upturned during the quake. The workers had endeavoured to repair the damage but they were poorly trained and didn’t take the precautions necessary to safeguard their health. They died within a month.
Then came stories that radioactive water was leaking from the site. These were first denied and then admitted, with the caveat that readings were so low they didn’t warrant concern. But offshore tests by an environmental group forced the plant to admit contamination was at multiples of safe levels and far more water had escaped than first thought.
With the situation unravelling, the plant shut suddenly for ‘planned maintenance’ and remained closed for a year. At this point, the inspection agency, the one that had passed it previously, gave a new, glowing report and activity resumed once more.
Shocking as it was, this was the fifth scandal I’d read that day and it seemed pretty much par for the course: a pattern of negligence, leading to incidents, followed by cover-ups and lies. But at this point the story veered in a different direction.
Within a few years, rates of childhood leukaemia suddenly spiked. Distressed parents wanted to know the cause of their children’s plights. They looked to the plant for answers but received an unenthusiastic response. After six months’ silence, the plant abruptly changed tack and the president agreed to meet. He presented reams of data that proved the barrel incident’s effects were restricted to one room and the water leaks had not affected the local supply. Beyond that there had been no damage and the surrounding area had borne no ill-effects. He expounded on other possible causes – a mobile-phone antenna in the area and a recently banned fertiliser that had been used in local farms.
The parents remained suspicious but they were compelled to look into the alternatives. At least until a leaked report blew the president’s story apart. It revealed there had been damage to two reactor buildings. This had resulted in significant radioactive emissions in the weeks after the quake – the weeks the company had declared the plant safe and resumed operations.
Predictably, the parents were livid but they responded in a most unpredictable way. On the premise of delivering a letter of protest they were granted entry to the plant. They proceeded to force their way into the president’s office and dissuaded security from following them by holding a knife to his throat. When a negotiator doubted their conviction they sliced off a piece of the president’s ear.
Then, in the ultimate act of protest, one of the parents committed seppuku, the ritual act of suicide that mostly died out with the Meiji Restoration in 1868. It took an astonishing amount of bravery even in the days of the samurai, when there were world-renowned swords for the incision and, when the agony became too much, a second to slice off your head. A sushi knife and the time it took to bleed out were all the protestor had.
I turned from the report when confronted with this. I’d always been impressed by Fathers4Justice scaling landmarks dressed as superheroes in order to make their point. Their audacity suddenly seemed meek.
Until this time, the press had been strangely quiet. But the kidnap and maiming of a plant president, followed by the self-administered gutting of a small-town accountant, made it a story that was impossible to ignore.
Pressure mounted until both the plant and KanEnCo presidents resigned. Yet this wasn’t the same as accepting liability. They stood down ‘because of unfortunate circumstance and errors that resulted in the regrettable communication of information not wholly accurate’. The company still denied responsibility and the pace of the Japanese legal system meant a ruling would be at least a decade away, the final decision after appeals, most likely two.
So the parents came at them from a different angle. Collectively they bought single shares in KanEnCo, a move that granted them entry to the shareholders’ meeting. Blindsided, the board was berated and humiliated for over an hour.
This finally led KanEnCo to action, but not the action the parents’ group had hoped. Suddenly they started to fall victim to more ‘unfortunate circumstances’. One parent was maimed in a hit-and-run, another mugged and beaten close to death. They suffered random vandalism – bricks through windows, faeces in letterboxes. They were trailed by footsteps as they walked home at night. Still they persevered.
The next year’s AGM was different. This time fewer protestors got in – the meeting was already near full, despite their having been at the gates before it began. Once inside they realised why. A collection of hard-faced men, not dissimilar to those who had been harassing them, were already there. The infamous sōkaiya.
The sōkaiya were a side-shoot of the yakuza who specialised in industry shakedowns. They demanded money of Japanese corporations against the threat their AGMs would be disrupted or embarrassing information leaked. Conversely, they could be used by companies to have dissenting voices drowned out. There was hardly a major company not caught in their web.
This sōkaiya was linked to the Takata-gumi.
I stopped reading. Takata would have known I would come across this. I wondered why he’d direct me to a scandal that led back to him. It didn’t make sense, and from what little I knew of him that was out of character. Puzzled, I went back to the reports.
At the next AGM, the protestors were immediately drowned out in a torrent of threats and abuse. The meeting was suspended when a protestor responded to a sōkaiya who promptly broke his nose with a punch. Other sōkaiya waded in, security intervened and the board ended the meeting ‘regrettably early’. They issued a bland statement that looked forward to a more successful one the following year.
How they qualified success wasn’t made clear. But the next year the sōkaiya didn’t even wait for the protestors to speak. The meeting ended after just three minutes, an AGM record in Japan. That brought things to the present day.
I sat back. This had to be what I was looking for but I could see no connection to Tomoe and even less to myself.
What, who and why? That’s what Takata had said.
The ‘what’ appeared clear to a point, barring any further twists. Something crooked had happened at the Kamigawa Plant and Takata had got involved, either right at the beginning or when the escalating troubles alerted him to an opportunity.
The ‘who’ didn’t seem much more challenging – there was Takata and then the KanEnCo board and the Kamigawa Plant president, whose actions suggested guilt. But I didn’t think Takata would set such a clear line of breadcrumbs to a destination so easy to find. That meant it was unlikely things ended with them. I’d need to find who was lurking in the background. Once I had their names the ‘why’ would hopefully become clear.
I recapped the players. A gangster – Takata – and a corporate man – I decided to go with the KanEnCo president as the Kamigawa Plant boss reported to him. They were major figures. If anyone was orchestrating events behind them he would have to wield considerable clout. Who could complete the unholy trinity – a gangster, a businessman and … ?
I googled ‘politician’ and ‘KanEnCo’ and he came up top of the list. The energy minister. He’d recently assumed the post after a year’s enforced break from cabinet for accepting bribes – it wasn’t entirely untypical for a political career in Japan.
I considered it. He was clearly capable of involvement and he was certainly in the right job. But it didn’t sit right. This had all begun before he was in office and he’d shown no signs of any manoeuvring to date – the plant inspections may have been a whitewash but the painters appeared to come from within the regulatory body itself. The only thing that might have fingered him was if he had a financial interest in the affair.
My problem was I had no way to find out. The resources of the internet might be almost without limit but my technical ability didn’t match up. And without hacking into the minister’s bank account I couldn’t think of a way of discovering his possible stake. Unless …
‘He’s not in,’ said a gruff voice.
‘Do you know when he’s going to be back? Should I try the Ginza office?’
‘No. I’ll make sure he knows you called. If he wants to talk to you he’ll call back.’
The phone went dead.
Rather than have me spend hours ferreting for old information, it would have made more sense for Takata to tell me what he already knew. I could then search for what was still to be found out. As this logical course of action was so clearly out of the question, I decided to be proactive instead. I doubted the politician would be keen to grant an interview, but I was sure others would be happy to have an international voice take an interest.
‘We’ve been incredibly lucky – Eriko has been in remission a year. It’s been far harder for some of the others. There’ve been two funerals just this month.’
I cringed. I couldn’t be certain which side I’d land on in this affair but the initial signs weren’t good. Lying to someone so harshly affected made me feel like I’d reached a new low.
I was in a small town far removed from the bright lights and bustle of Tokyo. Eriko’s parents clearly took pride in their home but an apartment that compact inevitably felt cluttered, even with only household necessities and a few children’s toys.
‘I’m so sorry. The whole thing’s horrific. I hope you get the justice you deserve.’
‘That’s kind of you to say,’ she said and touched my arm. ‘I hope the details haven’t upset you too much.’
I needed to move the conversation along before my self-loathing became too much to bear.
‘Can you tell me what you think’s behind it? I mean, was it a catalogue of errors and botched cover-ups, or do you think there’s a bigger conspiracy at play?’
I’d been welcomed to ask questions like this because, as I explained to the local journalist who put me in touch, I worked for Energy Without Affect, consultants for a fossil-free future. We were reviewing the best and worst alternatives throughout the world. The parents’ group could put forward a case for why nuclear should be included in the latter.
‘I’m sorry, but I can’t answer that – it’s a question we’re still asking,’ she said. ‘It could be that it was just another KanEnCo incident, and for the most part these have been down to incompetence rather than anything else.
‘They assumed there wouldn’t be an earthquake here and scrimped instead of spending money preparing for the worst. When it went wrong they panicked. They didn’t want to be blamed. They thought if they kept the plant running and made repairs when the attention was off them, everything would turn out all right. But events spiralled beyond their control. They’re getting nasty because they’re scared. They don’t know what else to do.’
It was a very balanced account from someone who had been going through hell.
‘But …’
I looked at her. ‘You’re not convinced?’
‘Something feels strange,’ she said. ‘It feels like there’s something else, something still to be found out. But I just don’t know what it is.’
Although she must have become practised at masking her emotions I could see it was a thought that had been consuming her for years.
‘Is there anything in particular that’s made you suspicious?’
‘A million things. There are so many rumours, so many possibilities. It’s enough to drive you mad.’
She broke off. I desperately hoped I’d end up on her side.
‘One of them goes back to when they were planning the plant, in the early nineties, before my husband and I moved here. As you’d expect, there were all sorts of studies and surveys to make sure the area was right. There are stories they found something then, that there was something funny about the process, something wrong with the project from the very start.’
She gripped the handle of her cup so tightly her knuckles went white.
‘But that’s it – a rumour. And one that doesn’t have details let alone proof. It’s not exactly the breakthrough we need.’
It wasn’t. But it was something, and if Takata was true to his word, I’d be able to find out what it was.