Kafka on the Shore

Chapter 8

U.S. ARMY INTELLIGENCE SECTION (MIS) REPORT Dated: May 12, 1946 Title: Report on the Rice Bowl Hill Incident, 1944 Document Number: PTYX-722-8936745-42216-WWN T he following is a taped interview with Doctor Shigenori Tsukayama (52), professor in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine, Tokyo Imperial University, which took place over a three-hour span at the GHQ of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Documentation related to the interview can be accessed using application number PTYX-722-SQ-267 to 291. [Note: Documents 271 and 278 are missing.]

Impressions of the interviewer, Lt. Robert O'Connor: Professor Tsukayama was quite calm and relaxed throughout the interview, as one might expect of an expert of his caliber. He is one of the leading psychiatrists in Japan and has published a number of outstanding books on the subject. Unlike most Japanese, he avoids vague statements, drawing a sharp distinction between facts and conjecture. Before the war he was an exchange scholar at Stanford, and is quite fluent in English. He is surely well liked and respected by many.

We were ordered by the military to immediately undertake an examination of the children in question. It was the middle of November 1944. It was quite unusual for us to receive requests or orders from the military. The military, of course, had its own extensive medical branch, and being a self-contained entity that put a high priority on secrecy, they usually preferred to handle matters internally. Apart from the rare times when they needed the special knowledge and techniques that only outside researchers or physicians had, they seldom appealed to civilian doctors or researchers.

Thus when they broached this we immediately surmised that something extraordinary had occurred. Frankly, I didn't like to work under military directions. In most cases their goals were strictly utilitarian, with no interest in pursuing truth in an academic sense, only arriving at conclusions that accorded with their preconceptions. They weren't the type of people swayed by logic. But it was wartime and we couldn't very well say no. We had to keep quiet and do exactly as we were told.

We'd been continuing our research despite the American air raids. Most of our undergrads and grad students, though, had been drafted. Students in psychiatry weren't exempt for the draft, unfortunately. When the order came from the military we dropped everything and took a train to [name deleted] in Yamanashi Prefecture. There were three of us-myself and a colleague from the Psychiatry Department, as well as a research physician from the Department of Neurosurgery with whom we'd been conducting research.

As soon as we got there they warned us that what they were about to reveal was a military secret we could never divulge. Then they told us about the incident that had occurred at the beginning of the month. How sixteen schoolchildren had lost consciousness in the hills and fifteen of them had regained consciousness thereafter, with no memory of what had taken place. One boy, they told us, hadn't regained consciousness and was still in a military hospital in Tokyo.

The military doctor who'd examined the children right after the incident, an internal medicine specialist named Major Toyama, gave us a detailed explanation about what had transpired. Many army doctors are more like bureaucrats concerned with protecting their own little preserve than with medicine, but fortunately Major Toyama wasn't one of them. He was honest and straightforward, and obviously a talented physician. He never tried to use the fact that we were civilians to lord it over us or conceal anything from us, as some might do. He provided all the details we needed, in a very professional manner, and showed us medical records that had been kept on the children. He wanted to get to the bottom of this as much as anybody. We were all quite impressed by him.

The most important fact we gleaned from the records was that, medically speaking, the incident had caused no lasting impact on the children. From right after the event to the present day, the examinations and tests consistently indicated no internal or external abnormalities. The children were leading healthy lives, just as they had before the incident. Detailed examinations revealed that several of the children had parasites, but nothing out of the ordinary. Otherwise they were completely asymptomatic-no headaches, nausea, pain, loss of appetite, insomnia, listlessness, diarrhea, nightmares. Nothing.

The one notable thing was that the two-hour span during which the children had been unconscious in the hills was erased from their memory. As if that part had been extracted in toto. Rather than a memory loss, it was more a memory lack. These aren't medical terms, and I'm using them for the sake of convenience, but there's a big difference between loss and lack. I suppose it's like-well, imagine a train steaming down a track. The freight's disappeared from one of the cars. A car that's empty inside-that's loss. When the whole car itself has vanished, that's lack.

We discussed the possibility that the children had breathed in poison gas. Dr. Toyama said that naturally they'd considered this. That's why the military is involved, he told us, but it seems a remote possibility. He then told us, Now this is a military secret, so you can't tell anyone. The army is definitely developing poison gas and biological weapons, but this is carried out mainly by a special unit on the Chinese mainland, not in Japan itself. It's too dangerous a project to attempt in a place as densely populated as Japan. I can't tell you whether or not these sorts of weapons are stored anywhere in Japan, though I can assure you most definitely that they are not kept anywhere in Yamanashi Prefecture.

– So he categorically denied that special weapons, including poison gas, were being stored in the prefecture?

Correct. He was very clear about that. We basically had no choice except to believe him, but he sounded believable. We also concluded that it was highly unlikely that poison gas had been dropped from a B-29. If the Americans had actually developed such a weapon and decided to use it, they'd drop it on some large city where the effects would be massive. Dropping a canister or two on such a remote place wouldn't allow them to ascertain what effects the weapon had. Besides, even if you accepted the premise that a poison gas had been dropped on the spot, any gas that makes children fall unconscious for two hours with no other lasting effects would be worthless as military arsenal.

Also we knew that no poison gas, whether manmade or naturally occurring, would act like this, leaving no aftereffects whatsoever. Especially when you're dealing with children, who are more sensitive and have a more delicate immune system than adults, there would have to be some aftereffects, particularly in the eyes or mucous membranes. We crossed off food poisoning for the same reason.

So what we were left with were psychological problems, or problems dealing with brain function. In a case like that, standard medical methodology wouldn't help at all in isolating the cause. The effects would be invisible, something you couldn't quantify. We finally understood why we had been called here by the military to consult.

We interviewed every child involved in the incident, as well as the homeroom teacher and attending physician. Major Toyama also participated. But these interviews yielded almost nothing new-we merely confirmed what the major had already told us. The children had no memory whatsoever of the event. They saw what looked like a plane glinting high up in the sky, climbed up Owan yama, and began hunting mushrooms. Then there's a gap in time and the next thing they recall is lying on the ground, surrounded by a group of worried-looking teachers and policemen. They felt fine, without any pain, discomfort, or nausea. Their minds just felt a bit blank, as you do when you first wake up in the morning. That was all. Each child gave the same exact response.

After conducting these interviews we concluded that this was a case of mass hypnosis. From the symptoms the homeroom teacher and school doctor observed at the scene, this hypothesis made the most sense. The regular movement of the eyes, the slight lowering of respiration, heartbeat, and temperature, the lack of memory-it all fit. The teacher alone didn't lose consciousness because for whatever reason what produced this mass hypnosis didn't affect adults.

We weren't able to pinpoint the cause, however. Generally speaking, though, mass hypnotism requires two elements. First, the group must be close-knit and homogeneous, and placed in restricted circumstances. Secondly, something has to trigger the reaction, something that acts simultaneously on everyone. In this case it might have been the glint of that airplane they saw. This is just a hypothesis, mind you-we weren't able to find any other candidates-and there may very well have been some other trigger that set it off. I broached the idea of it being a case of mass hypnosis with Major Toyama, making it clear this was merely a conjecture. My two colleagues generally concurred. Coincidentally, this also happened to be indirectly related to a research topic we were investigating ourselves.

"That does seem to fit the evidence," Major Toyama said after giving it some thought. "This is not my field, but it would appear to be the likeliest explanation. But there's one thing I don't understand-what made them snap out of this mass hypnosis? There'd have to be some sort of reverse triggering mechanism."

I really don't know, I admitted. All I could do was speculate. My hypothesis was this: There is a system in place which, after a certain amount of time passes, automatically breaks the spell. Our bodies have strong defense mechanisms in place, and if an outside system takes over momentarily, once a certain amount of time has passed it's like an alarm bell goes off, activating an emergency system that deprograms this foreign object that blocks our built-in defenses-in this case the effects of mass hypnosis-and eliminates it.

Unfortunately, I don't have the materials in front of me, so I can't quote the exact figures, but as I told Major Toyama, there have been reports of similar incidents occurring abroad. All of them are considered mysteries with no logical explanation. A large number of children lose consciousness at the same time, and several hours later wake up without any memory of what happened.

This incident is quite unusual, in other words, but not without precedent. One strange instance took place around 1930, in the outskirts of a small village in Devonshire, England. For no apparent reason, a group of thirty junior high students walking down a country path fell to the ground, one after the other, and lost consciousness. Several hours later, as if nothing had happened, they regained consciousness and walked back to school under their own steam. A physician examined them right away but could find nothing medically wrong. Not one of them could recall what had taken place.

At the end of the last century, a similar incident occurred in Australia. Outside of Adelaide fifteen teenage girls from a private girls school were on an outing when all of them lost consciousness, and then regained it. Again there were no injuries, no aftereffects. It ended up classified as a case of heatstroke, but all of them had lost consciousness and recovered it at nearly the same time, and nobody showed symptoms of heatstroke, so the real cause remains a mystery. Besides, it wasn't a particularly hot day when it occurred. Probably there was no other accounting for what had taken place, so they decided this was the best explanation.

These cases share several things in common: they took place among a group of either young boys or girls, somewhat distant from their school, all of whom lost consciousness essentially simultaneously and then regained it about the same time, with no one displaying any aftereffects. It's reported that some of the adults who happened to be with the children also lost consciousness, and some did not. Each case was different in that regard.

There are other similar incidents, but these two are the best documented, and thus are representative cases in the literature of this phenomenon. This recent instance in Yamanashi Prefecture, however, contains one element that differentiates it from the rest: namely that one boy did not regain consciousness. This child is the key to unlocking the truth to this whole event. We returned to Tokyo after our interviews in Yamanashi and went straight to the army hospital where the boy was being cared for.

– The army, then, was only interested in this incident because they suspected it may have been caused by poison gas?

That's my understanding. But Major Toyama would know more about this, and I suggest you ask him directly.

– Major Toyama was killed in Tokyo in March 1945, in the line of duty, during an air raid.

I'm very sorry to hear that. We lost so many promising people in the war.

– Eventually, though, the army concluded that this was not caused by any chemical weapons. They couldn't determine the cause, but they decided, didn't they, that it was unrelated to the war?

Yes, I believe that's true. At this point they'd concluded their investigation into the matter. But the boy, Nakata, was allowed to remain in the military hospital, since Major Toyama was personally interested in the case and had some connections there. Thus we were able to go to the military hospital every day, and take turns staying overnight to investigate this unconscious boy's case further, from a number of angles.

Though unconscious, the boy's bodily functions nevertheless continued normally. He was given nutrients intravenously and discharged urine at regular intervals. He shut his eyes at night and went to sleep when we turned out the lights, then opened them again in the morning. Other than being unconscious, he appeared completely healthy. He was in a coma, but didn't dream, apparently. When people dream they exhibit characteristic eye movements and facial expressions. Your heart rate goes up as you react to experiences in your dreams. But with the Nakata boy we couldn't detect any of these indicators. His heart rate, breathing, and temperature were still slightly on the low side, but surprisingly stable.

It might sound strange to put it this way, but it seemed like the real Nakata had gone off somewhere, leaving behind for a time the fleshly container, which in his absence kept all his bodily functions going at the minimum level needed to preserve itself. The term "spirit projection" sprang to mind. Are you familiar with it? Japanese folk tales are full of this sort of thing, where the soul temporarily leaves the body and goes off a great distance to take care of some vital task and then returns to reunite with the body. The sort of vengeful spirits that populate The Tale of Genji may be something similar. The notion of the soul not just leaving the body at death but-assuming the will is strong enough-also being able to separate from the body of the living is probably an idea that took root in Japan in ancient times. Of course there's no scientific proof of this, and I hesitate to even raise the idea.

The practical problem that faced us was how to wake this boy from his coma, and restore him to consciousness. Struggling to find a reverse trigger to undo the hypnosis, we tried everything. We brought his parents there, had them shout out his name. We tried that for several days, but there was no reaction. We tried every trick in the book as far as hypnosis goes-clapping our hands in different ways right in front of his face. We played music he knew, read his schoolbooks aloud to him, let him catch a whiff of his favorite foods. We even brought in his cat from home, one he was particularly fond of. We used every method we could think of to bring him back to reality, but nothing worked.

About two weeks into this, when we'd run out of ideas and were exhausted and discouraged, the boy woke up on his own. Not because of anything we'd done. Without warning, as if the time for this had been decided in advance, he came to.

– Did anything out of the ordinary take place that day?

Nothing worth mentioning. It was a day like any other. At ten a. m. the nurse came to draw a blood sample. Right after that he choked a bit, and some of the blood spilled on the sheets. Not much, and they changed the sheets right away. That was about the only thing different that day. The boy woke up about a half hour after that. Out of the blue he sat up in bed, stretched, and looked around the room. He had regained consciousness, and medically he was perfectly fine. Soon, though, we realized he'd lost his entire memory. He couldn't even remember his own name. The place he lived in, his school, his parents' faces-it was all gone. He couldn't read, and wasn't even aware this was Japan or the Earth. He couldn't even fathom the concept of Japan or the Earth. He'd returned to this world with his mind wiped clean. The proverbial blank slate.