Rising Sun: A Novel (35 page)

“See you, Willy.” I rolled up the window, and started driving down the hill.

“A little faster wouldn’t bother me,” Connor said.

“Sure,” I said. I stepped on the gas.

In the rearview mirror, I saw the Weasel running for his Mercedes. I took the turn faster, tires squealing. “How did that lowlife know where to find us? He monitoring the radio?”

“We haven’t been on the radio,” Connor said. “You know I’m careful about the radio. But maybe the patrol car phoned in something when we arrived. Maybe we have a bug in this car. Maybe he just figured we’d turn up here. He’s a scumbag. And he’s connected to the Japanese. He’s their plant at the
Times.
Usually the Japanese are a little
more classy about who they associate with. But I guess he’ll do everything they want done. Nice car, huh?”

“I notice it’s not Japanese.”

“Can’t be obvious,” Connor said. “He following us?”

“No. I think we lost him. Where are we going now?”

“U.S.C. Sanders has had enough time screwing around by now.”

We drove down the street, down the hill, toward the 101 freeway. “By the way,” I said. “What was all that about the reading glasses?”

“Just a small point to be verified. No reading glasses were found, right?”

“Right. Just sunglasses.”

“That’s what I thought,” Connor said.

“And Graham says he’s leaving town. Today. He’s going to Phoenix.”

“Uh-huh.” He looked at me. “You want to leave town, too?”

“No,” I said.

“Okay,” Connor said.

I got down the hill and onto the 101 going south. In the old days it would be ten minutes to U.S.C. Now it was more like thirty minutes. Especially now, right at midday. But there weren’t any fast times, anymore. Traffic was always bad. The smog was always bad. I drove through haze.

“You think I’m being foolish?” I said. “You think I should pick up my kid and run, too?”

“It’s one way to handle it.” He sighed. “The Japanese are masters of indirect action. It’s their instinctual way to proceed. If someone in Japan is unhappy with you, they never tell you to your face. They tell your friend, your associate, your boss. In such a way that the word gets back. The Japanese have all these ways of indirect communication. That’s why they socialize so much, play so much golf, go drinking in
karaoke
bars. They need these extra channels of communication because they can’t come out and say what’s on their minds. It’s tremendously inefficient, when you think about it. Wasteful of time and energy and money. But since they cannot confront—because confrontation is almost like
death, it makes them sweat and panic—they have no other choice. Japan is the land of the end run. They never go up the middle.”

“Yeah, but …”

“So behavior that seems sneaky and cowardly to Americans is just standard operating procedure to Japanese. It doesn’t mean anything special. They’re just letting you know that powerful people are displeased.”

“Letting me know? That I could end up in court over my daughter? My relationship with my kid could be ruined? My own reputation could be ruined?”

“Well, yes. Those are normal penalties. The threat of social disgrace is the usual way you’re expected to know of displeasure.”

“Well, I think I know it, now,” I said. “I think I get the fucking picture.”

“It’s not personal,” Connor said. “It’s just the way they proceed.”

“Yeah, right. They’re spreading a lie.”

“In a sense.”

“No, not in a sense. It’s a fucking lie.”

Connor sighed. “It took me a long time to understand,” he said, “that Japanese behavior is based on the values of a farm village. You hear a lot about samurai and feudalism, but deep down, the Japanese are farmers. And if you lived in a farm village and you displeased the other villagers, you were banished. And that meant you died, because no other village would take in a troublemaker. So. Displease the group and you die. That’s the way they see it.

“It means the Japanese are exquisitely sensitive to the group. More than anything, they are attuned to getting along with the group. It means not standing out, not taking a chance, not being too individualistic. It also means not necessarily insisting on the truth. The Japanese have very little faith in truth. It strikes them as cold and abstract. It’s like a mother whose son is accused of a crime. She doesn’t care much about the truth. She cares more about her son. The same with the Japanese. To the Japanese, the important
thing is relationships between people. That’s the real truth. The factual truth is unimportant.”

“Yeah, fine,” I said. “But why are they pushing now? What’s the difference? This murder is solved, right?”

“No, it’s not,” Connor said.

“It’s not?”

“No. That’s why we have all the pressure. Obviously, somebody badly
wants
it to be over. They want us to give it up.”

“If they are squeezing me and squeezing Graham—how come they’re not squeezing you?”

“They are,” Connor said.

“How?”

“By making me responsible for what happens to you.”

“How are they making you responsible? I don’t see that.”

“I know you don’t. But they do. Believe me. They do.”

I looked at the line of cars creeping forward, blending into the haze of downtown. We passed electronic billboards for Hitachi (#1
IN COMPUTERS IN AMERICA
), for Canon (
AMERICA’S COPY LEADER
), and Honda (
NUMBER ONE RATED CAR IN AMERICA
!). Like most of the new Japanese ads, they were bright enough to run in the daytime. The billboards cost thirty thousand dollars a day to rent; most American companies couldn’t afford them.

Connor said, “The point is the Japanese know they can make it very uncomfortable. By raising the dust around you, they are telling me, ‘handle it.’ Because they think I can get this thing done. Finish it off.”

“Can you?”

“Sure. You want to finish it off now? Then we can go have a beer, and enjoy some Japanese truth. Or do you want to get to the bottom of why Cheryl Austin was killed?”

“I want to get to the bottom.”

“Me, too,” Connor said. “So let’s do it,
kōhai.
I think Sanders’s lab will have interesting information for us. The tapes are the key, now.”

Phillip Sanders was spinning like a top. “The lab is shut down,” he said. He threw up his hands in frustration. “And there’s nothing I can do about it.
Nothing.
”

Connor said, “When did it happen?”

“An hour ago. Buildings and Grounds came by and told everybody in the lab to leave, and they locked it up. Just like that. There’s a big padlock on the front door, now.”

I said, “And the reason was?”

“A report that structural weakness in the ceiling has made the basement unsafe and will invalidate the university’s insurance if the skating rink comes crashing down on us. Some talk about how student safety comes first. Anyway, they closed the lab, pending an investigation and report by a structural engineer.”

“And when will that happen?”

He gestured to the phone. “I’m waiting to hear. Maybe some time next week. Maybe not until next month.”

“Next
month.
”

“Yeah. Exactly.” Sanders ran his hand through his wild hair. “I went all the way to the dean on this one. But the dean’s office doesn’t know. It’s coming from high up in the university. Up where the board of governors knows rich donors who make contributions in multi-million-dollar chunks. The order came from the highest levels.” Sanders laughed. “These days, it doesn’t leave much mystery.”

I said, “Meaning what?”

“You realize Japan is deeply into the structure of American universities, particularly in technical departments. It’s
happened everywhere. Japanese companies now endow twenty-five professorships at M.I.T., far more than any other nation. Because they know—after all the bullshit stops—that they can’t innovate as well as we can. Since they need innovation, they do the obvious thing. They buy it.”

“From American universities.”

“Sure. Listen, at the University of California at Irvine, there’s two floors of a research building that you can’t get into unless you have a Japanese passport. They’re doing research for Hitachi there. An American university closed to Americans.” Sanders swung around, waving his arms. “And around here, if something happens that they don’t like, it’s just a phone call from somebody to the president of the university, and what can he do? He can’t afford to piss the Japanese off. So whatever they want, they get. And if they want the lab closed, it’s closed.”

I said, “What about the tapes?”

“Everything is locked in there. They made us leave everything.”

“Really?”

“They were in a hell of a rush. It was gestapo stuff. Pushing and prodding us to get out. You can’t imagine the panic at an American university if it thinks it may lose some funding.” He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe Theresa managed to take some tapes with her. You could ask her.”

“Where is she?”

“I think she went ice skating.”

I frowned. “Ice skating?”

“That’s what she said she was going to do. So you could check over there.”

And he looked right at Connor. In a particularly meaningful way.

Theresa Asakuma wasn’t ice skating. There were thirty little kids in the rink, with a young teacher trying in vain to control them. They looked like fourth graders. Their laughter and yells echoed in the high ceiling of the rink.

The building was almost deserted, the bleachers empty. A handful of fraternity boys sat up in one corner, looking
down and punching each other on the shoulder. On our side, up high, near the ceiling, a janitor mopped. A couple of adults who looked like parents stood at the railing, down near the ice. Opposite us, a man was reading a newspaper.

I didn’t see Theresa Asakuma anywhere.

Connor sighed. Wearily, he sat on the wooden bleachers and leaned back. He crossed his legs, taking his ease. I stood there, watching him. “What are you doing? She’s obviously not here.”

“Have a seat.”

“But you’re always in such a rush.”

“Have a seat. Enjoy life.”

I sat down next to him. We watched the kids skating around the perimeter of the ice. The teacher was shouting, “Alexander? Alexander! I’ve told you before. No hitting! Don’t you hit her!”

I leaned back against the bleachers. I tried to relax. Connor watched the kids and chuckled. He appeared entirely at ease, without a care in the world.

I said, “Do you think Sanders is right? The Japanese squeezed the university?”

“Sure,” Connor said.

“And all that business about Japan buying into American technology? Buying professorships at M.I.T.?”

“It’s not illegal. They’re supporting scholarship. A noble ideal.”

I frowned. “So you think it’s okay?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think it’s okay at all. If you give up control of your own institutions you give up everything. And generally, whoever pays for an institution controls it. If the Japanese are willing to put up the money—and if the American government and American industry aren’t—then the Japanese will control American education. You know they already
own
ten American colleges. Own them outright. Bought them for the training of their young people. So that they can be assured of the ability to send young Japanese to America.”

“But they already can do that. Lots of Japanese go to American universities.”

“Yes. But as usual, the Japanese are planning ahead. They know in the future it may get tougher. They know that sooner or later, there will be a backlash. No matter how diplomatically they play it—and they are in the acquisition phase now, so they’re playing it very diplomatically. Because the fact is, countries don’t like to be dominated. They don’t like to be occupied—economically or militarily. And the Japanese figure some day the Americans will wake up.”

I watched the kids skating in the rink. I listened to their laughter. I thought of my daughter. I thought of the four o’clock meeting.

I said, “Why are we sitting here?”

“Because,” he said.

So we sat there. The teacher was rounding the kids up now, leading them off the ice. “Skates off here. Skates off here, please. That means you too, Alexander! Alexander!”

“You know,” Connor said, “if you wanted to buy a Japanese company, you couldn’t do it. The people in the company would consider it shameful to be taken over by foreigners. It would be a disgrace. They would never allow it.”

“I thought you could. I thought the Japanese had liberalized their rules.”

Connor smiled. “
Technically.
Yes. Technically, you can buy a Japanese company. But as a practical matter, you can’t. Because if you want to take over a company, you first have to approach its bank. And get the agreement of the bank. That’s what is necessary, in order to proceed. And the bank doesn’t agree.”

“I thought General Motors owns Isuzu.”

“GM owns a third of Isuzu. Not a controlling interest. And yes, there are isolated instances. But overall, foreign investment in Japan has declined by half in the last ten years. One company after another finds the Japanese market just too tough. They get tired of the bullshit, the hassles, the collusion, the rigged markets, the
dangō
, the secret agreements to keep them out. They get tired of the government regulations. The runaround. And eventually they give up. They just … give up. Most other countries have given up:
Germans, Italians, French. Everybody’s getting tired of trying to do business in Japan. Because no matter what they tell you, Japan is closed. A few years ago, T. Boone Pickens bought one-fourth of the stock of a Japanese company, but he couldn’t get on the board of directors. Japan is
closed.
”