The Toyotomi Blades

19

The world headquarters for Nissan Motors occupies two imposing towers on the outskirts of the Ginza district. It was walking distance from the Imperial Hotel, but I took a cab. The talk of the Yakuza the previous night did not go unheeded.

In a small courtyard outside the front entrance of the building were a series of ancient building blocks projecting from the stone floor of the courtyard like weathered dragon’s teeth. They looked centuries old and appeared to be pieces from some ancient castle. Just a few feet away was the lobby and showroom for Nissan, with new cars basking under lighting that made them look positively glossy. The dichotomy of old and new is the prevailing theme in Japan.

A crew from News Pop was there to film me walking into the Nissan building. They made me do it three times so they could get different angles of me walking into the building with the single camera they brought. It made me feel silly, especially as a small crowd gathered, and I was grateful when the camera crew left so I could go about the business of trying to enhance the fax images.

In the lobby I was greeted by a pleasant young woman sitting at a reception desk. Her English was weak, but good enough to understand that I was there for a meeting with a Mr. Kiyohara. I cooled my heels for a few minutes looking at the new cars and another young woman appeared to take me to an elevator. Once we were on the working floors of the building, the shiny newness of the lobby was left behind and the halls and decor became very austere. The office she took me to was very much like the others I had seen in Japan, with rows of tiny desks facing each other, all jammed together. The desks were cluttered with papers, little souvenirs, photos, and people. Although several employees looked up as I entered, most seemed hard at work.

At the end of each row was a slightly larger desk positioned so that the person sitting at it could look down the rows. Here the supervisor or manager sat. It gave the office a crowded but intimate atmosphere and allowed management to know almost through osmosis who was diligent and working hard and who wasn’t.

Mr. Kiyohara was a tall, thin man with a soft-spoken manner. He was quite handsome, with sharp cheekbones and a square-cut chin. His eyes sparkled with intelligence. His English had a mumbled quality to it, as if he wasn’t quite confident of his command of the language and didn’t want to speak out, but I found it very understandable.

“The television program explained what you’re trying to do. I hope we can help,” Kiyohara said after we had introduced ourselves. He seemed to be in his mid-forties and his face had a serious demeanor that I’ve noticed on other adult Japanese, but with Kiyohara I got the impression that the seriousness was a mask and underneath there was a lively sense of humor to match the intelligence shown in the eyes.

Kiyohara led me to a conference room. Like the rest of the office, it was positively spartan, with a gray metal table with chairs of green vinyl and metal. He introduced me to several younger Japanese whom he identified as team members who worked in the area of photo enhancement, and I noted that two of the team members were women.

“Ohara-san has explained to me that you’re interested in enhancing the image on a photograph,” Kiyohara began when we had all settled down around the table. “As you might know, Nissan not only makes automobiles, but we also get ourselves involved with a lot of other things. We make boats, looms for weaving, and even guided missiles. A Nissan rocket put the first Japanese space satellite in orbit, as a matter of fact.

“Because of our involvement with satellites, we’ve been working on image enhancing to improve the quality of weather photographs. One of the projects is a complete digital map of Japan that we want to use in a navigation system for cars. In addition to roads, the map will show all of Japan’s major features and many of its more significant buildings.

“To do this, we had to develop techniques that would allow computers to analyze photographs, pick up features, and resolve them into some kind of mathematical pattern. The United States is the leader in this area, but I think we still have the facilities to help you.”

I took the faxes out of my pocket and placed them on the table. “It would help enormously if we could get enhanced images of these. If you saw last night’s show, it should be clear how helpful it would be to see the patterns on the blades.” I pushed the faxes over to Kiyohara.

He picked them up and looked at them with interest. Other members of the team craned their necks to take a peak.

“You’ll notice the sword blade is clearly visible,” I said. “But because of the size of the photo and the quality of the fax, I can’t make out the symbols on the blade. Even if I get originals, I’m not sure about how the quality of the image will be maintained if we try to enlarge the photos to a size that’s useful for comparison with other images of blades I have.” I took the copies of the three blade rubbings I now had and gave them to Kiyohara. As promised, Hirota had given me a rubbing of my own blade, and I had Junko make a photocopy of this rubbing, too.

“Ideally, I’d like an image that was the same size as these photocopies of rubbings. I think the blades fit together to form a map, and I’d like to be able to manipulate the rubbings and images to see if I can fit them together.”

“How will you know what it’s a map of?” Kiyohara said. “Is there some reference point so you know what you’ll be looking at?”

I sighed. “No, and I’m actually missing a piece of the map because I don’t have a rubbing or picture of one of the blades. I think there are six of them, but as you can see I only have five represented with what I have. In fact, I don’t even know in what order they fit together, but I figure that I’ll just approach things one step at a time. With only a week until the next show I have to keep moving, even if I’m not always making progress.”

“Well, we can help you with movement and hopefully it will also be progress. Are you familiar with the technique of photo enhancing?”

“I know a little bit about it, but if you have the time I wouldn’t mind having an explanation about what you are going to do with the faxes.”

“Well, in concept it’s really quite simple, although it’s part art as well as part science. It does take a lot of programming and computer power to accomplish it on a large scale, but we have big computers at our data center to do all sorts of design and engineering tasks; photo enhancement is just one of them.

“What we do is divide the photograph, such as the photographs on these two faxes, into a series of tiny squares. With photographs of this size, the squares will be about one-tenth the diameter of a hair: very, very small. Then we take the section of the photograph that we are interested in and digitize it. That is, we give a number to the square, based on its color value.

“In a good black-and-white photograph you should have all sorts of tones, ranging from almost a pure white to a pure black. You can measure these tones and apply a number to each tone, let’s say from one to ten. One is white and ten is black. The gray values in the middle would have numbers like two, four, or six. This way we can number, or digitize, each spot on the photograph.

“The actual numbers we use are much more complex. They go up to 1,024 for the shade and over sixteen thousand for the hue, or color. Still, the process is the same as the one-through-ten example I gave you. By scanning the photograph and taking a reading at each of the tiny squares that we have marked out on the photograph, we can apply a value to how light or dark that square is.

“After we have digitized the photograph, we can keep the values for each point on the photo in computer memory and save them for later manipulation. Let’s say that on one small portion of the photograph we end up with a pattern like this.”

Kiyohara took out a pencil and drew a diagram on a pad of paper.

777777777

777577777

333333333

333333333

“Remember, this pattern represents a very small section of the photograph, perhaps the size of the head of a pin. You’ll see that we have a row of darker colors here, represented by sevens, right next to a row of lighter colors, represented by threes. We have computer programs that look through the patterns and find situations such as this. Our assumption here is we are looking at the edge of something, a straight edge against a lighter background. Based on that assumption, we would adjust the one dot which is out of place, here.”

He put his pencil down on the 5 that broke up the string of 7s.

“Our working assumption is that this five is a flaw, a problem with the photograph and that what is really represented here is a straight line, so that all these values should be seven. Therefore, we would darken this single dot to a seven. We would go through the entire photograph looking for these types of flaws and make the dots lighter or darker, depending on what the surrounding values look like.”

Kiyohara smiled. “That is the science portion of it. Now the art comes in. We have someone sit in front of a screen and look at these patterns. He can look at the entire photograph or he can zoom a section up, to look at the individual dots that make up a section. Using a light pen and a keyboard, he can lighten or darken dots to enhance a particular section of the photograph. The computer programs do surprisingly well in enhancing the photographs on their own, but sometimes you also need a human eye to look at the patterns to see if they make sense. Some things, such as vegetation, don’t have regular, sharp-edged forms, and it’s hard to program the computer to do a completely accurate job.”

He placed his finger on one of the faxes. “This, however, is a steel sword. Fine geometric shapes, hard edges. It should come through photo enhancement very nicely.”

“How long will this take?” I asked.

“I don’t think it will take too long. Perhaps one hour, perhaps two hours. Would you like to wait or would you like to come back?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to wait. I’m quite anxious to see what the results are.”

I spent a pleasant hour sipping green tea and looking at car brochures until Kiyohara returned. He handed over an enhanced photograph of one of my faxes and said, “Is it good enough for your purposes?”

I looked at the enhanced photograph and smiled. “Perfect.”