On the Fifth Day

Outside the NHK studio in Kofu, Thomas joined a huddle of foreign journalists clambering off a bus, held up his passport and an old library card as the throng moved through security, and took a seat at the back. They were shown a five-minute video showing the layout of the site and listened to an elderly local archaeologist who explained the significance of the find. The translator was poor and clearly made no attempt to pass along the more technical details, but the archaeologist was clearly excited, and that set the tone for the afternoon.

When the foreign journalists—mainly Australian, Dutch, and German—were shown into the press conference proper, the place was already packed with locals, and the podium was surrounded by microphone stands and halogen lamps. Some of the major papers—The Yomiuri and Asahi Shimbun in particular—had at least five people in their teams, poised with recorders and cameras of all kinds, and every staff member of the TV station seemed to have abandoned their other duties to see Watanabe.

The room virtually exploded, flashbulbs going off so frequently that the brilliance was almost constant. A wave of applause swelled around the room, and all but a handful of the journalists—mostly foreigners—were beaming and cheering. It was a sportsman’s reception, a rock star’s.

For an archaeologist, Thomas thought, he looked like one too. He was thin, but well muscled, his arms roped with vein and sinew. He was perhaps fifty, but looked ten years younger, and his black hair was spiked with gel. He wore gray-lensed shades with a hint of blue, and a close-fitting designer T-shirt with a metallic sheen. His manner was understated, but comfortable, and he smiled easily at the cameras.

Watanabe took control of the proceedings, chatting amiably, making the occasional self-deprecating joke, and nodded to an assistant at the back who showed PowerPoint slides of the dig on a screen behind him: a few charts and diagrams, but mainly stills of the tomb, its contents, the neighboring—as yet unexcavated—tomb, and, of course, the great man himself, peering at the ground, pointing things out to his team, and generally looking casual, clever, and in control. The translator added a running commentary, stumbling over dates and—Thomas suspected—editorializing freely as the core elements of the find were laid out.

“Contrary to previous belief,” he said, “this demonstrates the presence of non-Asian foreigners in Japan in the middle Kofun period—about AD 600—and strongly suggests that they were early Christian missionaries.”

Everyone in the room knew this already, but it still caused a ripple of excitement, as if they had needed to hear it live to make sure, or that they had half-expected Watanabe to retract the outlandish claim. For the last four days, the site had been the source of the best stories of a scientific nature to hit Japan in years. Information had been carefully regulated, trickling out in teasing sound bites, the site and Watanabe’s lab facility close by kept under tight security. This was understandable given the scale of the find, but it also smacked of carefully orchestrated marketing.

Finally, with the air of a conjurer who had saved his best trick for last, Watanabe produced a Perspex box from under the podium containing a partial skull with the lower jawbone separate but intact and an ornamented silver crucifix. The crowd pressed forward and the wall of camera flash began again.

“The Japanese skull has very rounded eye sockets,” said the translator, as Watanabe showed comparative diagrams. Even to Thomas’s untrained eye, some distinction was clear. “. . . as did its Kofun forbear. The eye sockets of a European skull are clearly oblong, identical to those of the remains from our site. The long bones from the burial also supply evidence that the bodies originated in Europe, though these bones are considerably more fragmentary. A Japanese Kofun femur is noticeably straighter along its length than the European. As you can see, the examples from the grave are quite curved.”

Questions followed, mainly in Japanese, mainly softballs that Watanabe took some pleasure in stroking out of the park. Yes, there is evidence of Eurasian connections during the first and second centuries between Rome and Han China via the silk road. Yes, the Great Wall of China was—after all—built to keep out the Hsiung-nu—the same Huns who were besieging Rome. Recent DNA evidence suggests that a skeleton in Sian, China, that is more than two thousand years old is almost certainly European. The great ecumene between China and Europe was the realm of militant nomads who surely affected both cultures, and there may have been express contact with Japan via the Siberian kurgan. When all came to all, the lack of prior evidence was not a good enough reason to assert that there could not have been contact between East and West, between Europe and the farthest shores of Asia. There are also the famous blond mummies of western China . . .

It went on for some time and gradually deteriorated into “human interest” questions about how he stayed motivated, his work ethic, his “genius” for the shocking speculation that no one else was prepared to make but which was the only one to truly fit the facts. By the end, it was clear that this was less an inquiry into his finds than it was a canonization of the finder. The only sour note came from the New Zealander.

“We are confident,” he said in English, smiling at the surprise that this strategy produced in his audience, “that these bones show clear European origin in ways absolutely different from Kofun Japanese bones.”

“Not so rare that there can be any dispute about what they look like,” said Watanabe. “But to be absolutely sure, we are subjecting the bones to every available test, including small-scale measurement of the craniofacial details, which will then be run through a computerized data-evaluation system based on known examples. The data will be processed by an independent analyst.”

In a profession generally known for its dustiness, Watanabe was clearly a star, one who had always had a flair for dealing with the media. Now he had a real find to match the pizzazz of his personality.

“Every Japanese kids’ textbook will tell you that Europeans didn’t come here till 1543 when a Portuguese boat ran aground on the southern tip of Kyushu. Francis Xavier—or Saint Francis Xavier, depending on your persuasion—arrived, Bible in hand, six years later. If Watanabe is right, all that goes out the window. You have Christian evangelists deep in the Japanese heartland seven hundred years earlier than anyone suspected. It’s big news, all right. Certainly big enough to keep Watanabe’s highly polished smile on our TVs for a long time to come.”

“It’s partly him,” said the New Zealander, zipping up his camera bag and nodding toward the platform party. “He could find a Coke bottle in his yard and make it sound exciting. But it’s also them.”

“The Japanese. They don’t like being late arrivals at the important events. For the most part they take from whatever religion they want when they want. Buddhists worship at Shinto shrines on certain festival days, and have Christian-style weddings like they see in the movies. But Christianity is where it’s at, and the Japanese like to be at the heart of whatever is cool. Jesus is cool, apparently. And if they can rewrite history to discover that Christianity has actually been around here about as long as it has in the rest of the world—and a lot longer than it has in America—so much the better.”

He smirked, mirthlessly, and Thomas saw in him a familiar type of disgruntled ex-pat, himself a minor celebrity by sheer virtue of his foreignness but always a little on the outside of the culture in which he had chosen to live.

As he walked away, Thomas looked back to the platform party, where Watanabe was still being photographed and fawned over by the local NHK anchorwoman. She nodded and smiled in vociferous agreement, and Thomas felt a stirring in himself of the New Zealander’s bitterness, a stirring rather like memory. He watched them, Watanabe in his designer shades and all other eyes on him. Except one.

It was Watanabe’s assistant, a young, sallow-faced Japanese man in his early twenties, a graduate student, formally dressed, his hair was parted on the side. He was darker skinned than most of those around him and could have passed for Korean or even Malaysian. His gaze was fixed on Thomas, his expression unreadable, though there was a hint of something behind the studied blankness, and when his attention finally strayed back to Watanabe, Thomas thought he saw a hint of unease.

Thomas took a couple of steps forward and something very strange happened. Watanabe was in full flow, delighting all with his homey, quirky brand of academia, when he suddenly stopped midsentence. His audience waited politely, and someone giggled, thinking this was part of his performance; he tipped his sunglasses down his nose till he was peering directly out at Thomas. Then he became quite still, and Thomas, feeling the oddness of the moment, did the same.

The rare glimpse of Watanabe’s eyes prompted a flash of someone’s camera, and in that brilliant splash of light, the archaeologist looked cautious, even wary. The audience looked from him to each other, still smiling awkwardly, and then, slowly, like a theater audience that realizes that the show is going on in the house behind them and not on the stage, they turned to Thomas.

There was a moment of complete silence, and then the sallow-faced graduate student was talking again, pulling attention toward himself, so that finally even Watanabe turned, and the smiles that had grown strained and fixed broadened again. Almost immediately, a security guard appeared at Thomas’s shoulder with the translator who was asking to see Thomas’s credentials, using his body as a screen to block out the platform party, and begin shepherding him toward the door and out.