The Toyotomi Blades

29

The brightness of the lights, the ordered confusion of the crew, and the small confines of the News Pop studio were beginning to feel familiar to me. For the last couple of days News Pop had been on an advertising blitz, hyping the show and the discovery of the Toyotomi treasure. The show had gotten considerable press coverage in the Japanese media. So had I.

Mariko and I had been on sightseeing trips to Asakusa, Yokohama, and Kamakura, courtesy of News Pop, and some people recognized me on the street. A few of the braver English-speaking souls even came up and asked me if I was the Sansei detective, and after the first couple of times, I got tired of explaining I wasn’t a detective and I simply said yes. I even signed a couple of autographs! In Los Angeles, I’m a total nobody. Here in Tokyo, the TV show was making me a minor celebrity. It was a weird metamorphosis, made stranger because it happened in just a few days.

Mariko and I were both going to be on the show. The length of the show was extended another thirty minutes as a special on the discovery of the Toyotomi treasure. Because of the composition of that “treasure,” I learned one thing about fame. It doesn’t necessarily mean fortune. Museum experts were talking about trying to restore some of the clothes to put on display, but that restoration process was actually going to cost somebody a lot of money. A treasure that takes money out of people’s pockets is not the kind of treasure that makes its discoverer wealthy.

On the night of the show, the lady who did the makeup for the show finished and left the makeup room. Mariko glanced out the door to make sure she was gone, then hurriedly picked up some blusher and an eyebrow pencil and changed the line of her eyebrows slightly and added a few more highlights to her cheeks. She took a sponge and blended it expertly so that the highlights looked natural. As an actress, she was used to doing her own makeup and she knew the difference between TV makeup, stage makeup, and the kind of makeup people commonly wear every day. I have to say that her little touches did make a definite improvement.

I suppose a real hard-boiled detective at this point would have made some crack about dames always having to look good on camera, but seeing the improvement that Mariko made, I asked her to adjust my makeup, too. She smiled, and with a few quick expert swipes with a sponge and the use of a couple of bottles on the makeup table, she had me looking my best, too.

She finished just in time. As she put the sponge down on the table, Sugimoto appeared at the door to take us to the greenroom. I walked next to Sugimoto and said, “Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“After the thugs hit me in the park, you knew about it even though Junko didn’t tell you. How?”

Sugimoto looked puzzled and said, “The producers called me in and yelled at me about it. After Junko told them about the incident and your need to get out of Tokyo, they said it was my responsibility and that I should have walked you back to the hotel or taken you there in a cab. That’s how I knew what was going on.”

“And why did you appear at the village, even though you were supposed to be scouting out the other location in Osaka?”

“I went to Osaka and found out that the center of the map is a housing tract. Even if the treasure had been there, I don’t know how we could have dug up peoples’ houses trying to find it. And to be honest with you, I knew that you had gone with Junko up to the Lake Biwa location. Junko and I have a sort of rivalry going because we both have good language skills and we’re often going after the same kinds of stories. I thought she was trying to do some sneaky trick on me by taking the Lake Biwa site and taking you with her. I decided to tag along and bring a cameraman, too. What I suspected was true and the scouting trip turned into a treasure hunt. I was glad I was there with the cameraman to capture the police action in the mountains after Professor Hirota left you. That’s got to be some of the most exciting footage on tonight’s show. Not to mention the footage we shot with lights inside the cave where the treasure was.”

Sugimoto deposited us in the greenroom. Mr. Sonoda was there from Kyoto and he greeted us warmly. We had already had a conversation earlier that evening, but he still greeted me with the enthusiasm usually reserved for an old friend. I appreciated it. There was also some professor from Tokyo University who was an expert in restoring textiles. Unfortunately, the professor didn’t speak English, although Mr. Sonoda translated as the professor thanked me profusely for providing him with a treasure trove of clothes.

Sonoda-san said the professor thought it would take ten or fifteen years to restore all the clothes found in the cave. I suppose that if the professor was good at his work some day the contents of the cave really would be a treasure, in terms of a glimpse into the courtly clothes of the early seventeenth century.

When they took Mr. Sonoda and the professor to the set, Junko joined us in the greenroom and gave us a running translation for the show. She didn’t do that the first time I was on the show, and I was amused to see that even she was giving us the VIP treatment.

They opened the show with an interview with Sonoda-san, where he repeated the story of the Toyotomi blades to set the historical scene of what was to follow. He speculated that the treasure might have been stolen in ancient times, maybe even by the Tokugawas, who could have used the money to defeat the Toyotomis who hid it. He explained that in ancient times, expensive clothing was very valuable, and it was often a favorite gift bestowed by a lord to a vassal. All the clothes in the cave were unique, valuable pieces that, four hundred years ago, would have been as precious as gold or silver. He said this would explain why the clothes were left in the cave even if the gold had been stolen in ancient times. It would be too easy to identify the clothes because they all had distinctive patterns, and this would tip off the Toyotomi that the treasure was gone.

Then they showed a film piece made up of the footage Sugimoto shot around the cave and in the mountains. It showed how wild and rugged the location was. The footage inside the cave showed several gray-colored bales of cloth sitting on the cave floor, rotting away.

After the film clip, they interviewed the professor from Tokyo University. He had some still shots of some of the clothes he was working on initially. They looked dirty and brown and rotted away, but he assured the audience that he would be able to restore many of them to their former glory. To prove it, he showed some pieces of cloth he had restored and the colors were nice and vibrant. The professor seemed extremely excited about all the garments that he would have to examine over the upcoming years.

They cut to commercial and Junko left to prepare for translating for Mariko. After she left I said to Mariko, “You and Junko seem to have called a truce.”

“As we were preparing for this show, we had a chance to talk.”

“About what?”

“None of your business.”

“Come on, that’s not fair.”

“She was talking about how hard it is to be a woman in Japan, especially if you’re part of a minority. I can relate to that, being raised in Columbus, Ohio. I told her we knew she met someone at the village.”

“You told her that?”

“Yes. She was shocked. She didn’t know if you’re really some kind of master detective or just a plain snoop. I told her you were just a guy buying potato chips in a town too small to hide anything.”

“Who’s the man?”

“He’s the technical director on the show. They’re having an affair.”

“Why did she hide him?”

She sighed. “He’s married. It’s hard for a Korean to have a relationship in Japan, even if she wants to hide the fact she’s a Korean. A Japanese will check your family history, and if he sees you’re a Korean, he or his family will probably discriminate against you. She claims he wants to get a divorce from his wife, but he hasn’t yet. He met her at Lake Biwa because they could spend a night together. His wife was off visiting relatives. She didn’t want Sugimoto to see them because she thought Sugimoto was there to poach on the story and didn’t want to give him any ammunition by revealing she’s having an affair with a married man. That’s why she hid and that’s why she didn’t mention Sugimoto to us the next morning. I feel sorry for her. This guy is probably handing her a line about leaving his wife and she’ll end up as just another sad story about a single girl seeing a married man.”

I was sorry, too. Not because of the probable fate of Junko’s love affair, but because I found myself just as prejudiced as the Japanese majority. I thought she had a Yakuza connection because she was Korean. It was stupid. I get outraged when I encounter this type of thinking back in the States, especially when it’s directed at Asians, but as soon as I found myself in the majority, I slipped into the ready comfort of a stereotypical prejudice. It was a sobering lesson, and one I’m not proud to admit to.

An aide came to get Mariko, and Sugimoto joined me in the greenroom to translate. I realized it was the show’s producers who probably ordered the VIP treatment for me, not something Junko had done on her own. After a few commercials for some kind of vitamin drink, they started showing a piece about the Nippon Tokkotai. It discussed their past involvement in radical, right-wing causes that were designed to return Japan to a militaristic country. It also showed a red-faced spokesman for the group denying any knowledge of the efforts to use the treasure to further their political agenda.

Then the show ran clips from news shows that showed the capture of Kim and his companion, Honda. As Hirota had predicted, the police were able to set up a roadblock and an amateur video cameraman happened to be on hand to get footage of a bloody Kim being pulled from a car. They ran a second clip of a serious police spokesman announcing that Kim had confessed to the murder of Ishibashi, the student. Unlike the Matsumoto case, I have no doubts that this confession is true. I do have suspicions about how the Japanese police were able to obtain a confession so quickly, though.

They showed some film of the Japanese police combing the mountains by Lake Biwa. Having seen Hirota’s ability to disappear into the forest, I wasn’t surprised the Japanese police couldn’t catch him on foot. I was surprised that even bringing in helicopters to help search the area didn’t unearth a clue about where Hirota had gone, however. It was as if he had turned himself invisible.

Watching the piece, I wondered about Hirota and where he was at that moment. I was curious if he was still in the mountains, hiding someplace and living off the land. Or perhaps he had already found his way back to civilization and had started blending into society. If I was Javert, Hirota’s escape would bother me. But, unlike the fictional detective in Victor Hugo’s classic, I felt no need to pursue him until every last demand of the law was settled. I figured the books between us were balanced and closed. Maybe Sonoda-san was right and my view of the law is more Confucian than Western.

Then it was Mariko’s turn. She did great. Her stage training really showed. In fact, Nagahara-san and Yukikochan commented on what wonderful presence she had on camera. I could see that pleased Mariko, and it pleased me, too. Then more commercials and it was finally my turn. The grand finale.

They rushed me into my seat and fitted me with the earphone so that I could hear the translation. When they got back from commercial, they introduced me and they immediately went to a clip that showed me entering the Nissan building and working with Kiyohara-san and the rest of the Nissan crew to develop the computerized maps we used to find the treasure. After the clip they cut back to me and the interview. Nagahara-san and Yukiko-chan started peppering me with questions about how I solved the mystery, what happened when they were shooting at us in the forest, and what Hirota said to me during our final confrontation.

Before going on camera, I had sworn that I would try to be suitably modest. After the events of the last few days, I figured that I would have to carry my head onto the plane resting in a wheelbarrow if I didn’t watch it. By acting modestly in the interview, a strange thing happened. The more modest I became, the more effusive the two anchors were with their praise. It was as if my modesty gave them permission to lay it on thick when they talked about me and what had been accomplished. It was a valuable lesson and one that taught me the old adage about less is more.

During a lull in the conversation, Junko whispered to me through my earpiece, “Keep it up, the producers are loving it.”

As the show came to a close, Nagahara-san said to me, “So what are your future plans?”

That was a good question, and one I hadn’t planned for. Most of the questions were about the mystery, and I had either been told or could anticipate what they were. This gave me a chance to work out some reasonably cogent answers. This was one I hadn’t thought of, so I just answered from the heart.

“Well, first I’ll return to the United States. It’s been a joy to come to Japan, and it’s an experience that every Japanese-American should have. A part of me will always be Japanese because it’s in my blood. But like most people in America, visiting the home of my ancestors has reminded me of the sacrifices my parents and grandparents made to make a new home in America, and I realize I am truly an American.

“Before the show I talked to Mr. Sonoda, and he made a very generous offer to buy my sword. I’m sure he’s offering more than it’s worth, but I’m going to take advantage of his generosity because the money will allow me to pursue something I’ve been toying with for a couple of months.” Mariko was in the back of the studio watching my interview. She couldn’t understand the question because she didn’t have an earpiece for the translation, but she could understand-my answer.

“When I get back to California, I’m going to investigate what it will take to make me a licensed private investigator. If I can qualify, I’m going to use Mr. Sonoda’s money to pursue that goal.” I glanced over at Mariko. She wasn’t shaking her head yes, but she wasn’t shaking her head no, either. That’s a start.