The Toyotomi Blades

23

In the story about the tourist and the matchbook, the taxi driver ignored the hotel logo on the front of the matches and focused on the name of the match company. It was a plausible but wrong assumption. I had done the same thing.

Junichi Sekiguchi could be lying. I’m sure in his business he’s learned to lie rather well. But what he said rang true, and I was sure I saw surprise when I asked him about the Toyotomi blades.

When I identified the two men, the police said they were involved with right-wing politics and the Nippon Tokkotai. But because I saw no connection between me and Japanese politics, I ignored that association. Instead, I jumped on the Yakuza connection that the two men shared, and just focused on that, assuming the Sekiguchi-gummi was interested in me. I still couldn’t understand why a Japanese political group was interested in me, but the warning in the park provided me with the thing that linked us: the swords.

I met Gary in the lobby and we walked out of the Sekiguchi-gummi headquarters together.

“You weren’t up there long, bruddah,” Gary said.

“About fifteen minutes. It was long enough to learn that I’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”

“What you mean?”

“I mean I’m stumped about why those two guys have been chasing me all over Tokyo. I don’t think the connection is the Yakuza anymore. It involves some kind of radical Japanese political group, but I don’t understand why they’re interested in me, except that it involves the swords in some way.” I stopped and looked up at Gary. “You’re not Japanese, but you are from the islands. Do you know what ongiri is?”

“Sure, dat’s da kine obligation, right?”

“Yes. It means I’m in your debt now because of what you’ve just done for me. You didn’t have to go in there with me. It could have been dangerous and you’ve put yourself out for me.”

“Hey, it’s no big deal, bruddah. I wanted to see what dis place is like. I couldn’t even fit in da elevator. Ain’t no sweat ‘bout me helping you. Don’t get no pilikia wrinkles over it.”

It took me a second to translate pilikia to worry. In its way, Hawaiian Pidgin was sometimes as foreign to me as Japanese. “It wasn’t just nothing. Look, if there’s anyway I can help you in the future, you just call me.” I took a slip of paper from my pocket. “This is my phone number and address in Los Angeles. If there’s anything I can ever do to help you, just call. I owe you now, big time.”

“Naah,” Gary said, but he took the paper and put it in his pocket.

We went to the van we came in and Gary climbed into the back, pretty much filling up the space there. I climbed into the passenger seat next to the driver, and Gary said, “You want to go to the hotel?”

“If you could drop me off at the Nissan building in the Ginza that would be great. I have an appointment there this morning.”

“No sweat.” Gary gave some instructions in halting Japanese to the driver and we quickly made our way from the Tsujiki district to the nearby Ginza.

As soon as I got to the Nissan building I knew there was going to be good news. There was a camera crew from News Pop, as well as Junko, waiting for me. Junko informed me that Nissan had asked the crew to come down and videotape the meeting we were about to have. No one calls in a camera crew to admit defeat.

In the lobby I not only met Kiyohara, but Kiyohara’s boss. Another good sign. Now that the work was successful, the big boss wanted to show up for a little airtime. He made a flowery speech in the lobby to me, all in Japanese. I smiled and nodded appreciatively, even though I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was saying. Junko’s terse translation was that he was saying he was glad that Nissan could apply its technical prowess to help solve this mystery. I was glad, too, but frankly I was more interested in seeing what the results were. Even I could figure out that the ten-minute speech in the lobby would be reduced to a five-second clip of us shaking hands if it made it to the show.

They took us up to the seventh floor of the building and into a beautiful conference room, complete with wood paneling and artwork on the walls. The other conference rooms we had met in were austere and crowded hovels, but there’s nothing like the remorseless little glass eye of the television camera to cause people to show their best. The TV crew set up in a few minutes and we were soon rolling tape again. Around the wood conference table were the members of Kiyohara’s team, all polished and dressed up in their best clothes. They seemed to have happy expressions on their faces, and I was dying to see if my reaction to their results matched their obvious pleasure.

But first the big boss gave another five-minute speech in front of the assembled team and the newly set up camera. At last Junko told me that he was turning it over to Kiyohara to explain the results. “Finally,” I muttered under my breath while still keeping a smile on my face. Both Junko and Kiyohara, who were close enough to hear me, smiled.

“You must be anxious to see the results of our efforts to match the patterns on the blades with our computerized map of Japan,” Kiyohara said. He reached over and an assistant handed him four large sheets of paper. “These are maps with the results of our search. We had four areas that had a match of over sixty percent. With only five of the six blades available, the best match we could theoretically come up with was eighty-three percent, so we considered anything over sixty percent to be a very good match.

“We did further research and we discovered that two of the maps matched against temples that were built after 1650.” He grabbed two of the papers and moved them to one side. “Since the treasure must have been hidden before the final defeat of the Toyotomi in the early 1600s, we reasoned that they couldn’t be the temples shown on the blades. We know from the dates on the handles the blades were forged in 1614. That leaves us with these two possible locations.” He shoved the remaining two pieces of paper over to me. They were computer maps drawn on a plotter. Modern roads and mountains were drawn in color on the maps, along with the location of major buildings and temples. Superimposed on each map was a red pattern of temples, mountains, and streams, which represented the patterns found on the blades. The match between the red blade patterns and the map features was not exact, but they were both remarkably close.

“This map is a location to the east of Osaka. This second map is to the north of Osaka, near Lake Biwa. Lake Biwa is now a resort area, but it’s also an ancient part of Japan. Hideyoshi Toyotomi built or repaired bridges and temples there, including Enryaku-ji temple, which is one of the temples we matched on the map.

“Both areas seem very good prospects. One is close to the Toyotomi’s main castle in Osaka and the other is near an ancient place in Japan with ties to the Toyotomis.”

“This is great,” I said, and I continued with effusive praise for Nissan, Kiyohara, Kiyohara’s team, and even Kiyohara’s boss. What the hell, I thought, I’d include the old windbag along with the deserving. Kiyohara returned the compliment, praising my ideas on how to match the blade patterns with one blade missing and how to try all the possible different sequences that the blades could fit together. All this mutual praise was part Japanese custom, but it was also heartfelt, at least on my part. I was so much further ahead of where I thought I’d be when I accepted the challenge and I wouldn’t look like an idiot on the upcoming show. My ass was on the line and now it was saved. Or, in Japanese terms, I had saved face. I don’t know which anatomical part is correct, but I was pretty happy from top to bottom.

As the News Pop crew was packing up I asked Kiyohara-san, “How did you handle that mysterious line on my blade?”

“We didn’t know what it was, so we just ignored it.”

I thanked Kiyohara again and walked over to Junko, who was supervising the camera crew’s breakdown of the lights.

“So what’s next?”

“I suppose we’ll scout out the locations on the two maps and send camera crews to get film if we think it warrants it. Why?”

“I’d like to go with whoever looks over the site at Lake Biwa.”

“You know something,” Junko said.

“Yes, I think I do.”

“Another hunch?”

“More than a hunch. I think it’s likely that the treasure is buried at some place indicated on the third or fourth blade, because that’s the center of the map. The third blade has some type of rock in the shape of an M in the dead center of the blade, so if that’s accurate, I think we can pinpoint the probable location of the treasure pretty closely.”

“But why do you want to go to Lake Biwa?”

“You know that long line on my blade? The one we were trying to figure out?”

“Yes.”

“Kiyohara-san didn’t use that in his computer match because he couldn’t figure out what it was, either, but now that I’ve seen the Lake Biwa map I think the line represents the lake shore. Kiyohara said the Toyotomi were active at Lake Biwa?”

“Yes they were. There are several shrines and bridges built by Hideyoshi at Lake Biwa. I’m not a historian, but I have visited the lake and know that much.”

“The Osaka site is closer to the Toyotomi base of operations, but if I was going to hide an emergency cache of treasure, I’d want to place it away from my main base, not next to it.”

Junko got excited. “Look,” she said, “can you do me a favor?”

“What is it?”

“Don’t tell anyone else what you think about the Lake Biwa site. I want to be the one who goes there, and if Buzz finds out that it’s likely to be the treasure site, he’ll pull strings to get me sent to Osaka while he goes treasure hunting. I want to make sure the reverse happens.”