Tokyo Zero

by Marc Horne

  "Why do they… you do this? Is it religious?" I asked

  "For some this is the cult. For others it is a fist smashing a face. For Maruhashi it is handshakes in back rooms and the smell of chemicals. For some it is a child's cartoon that's fun to watch. To some it is a joke, to some it is terror. The cult must needs be large enough that man cannot see it or else he will notice it."

  "Doesn't that hamper recruitment? The invisibility factor?"

  "No-one joins the cult to be in the cult. They hope to use the cult. For that you only need to be able to 'grab the elephant's tail.'"

  "What's your story?"

  "Pretty long!" and he laughed a smile open in his face and that was that. I laughed too, then looked at the dancers again and felt like laughing some more. Honda joined me, keeping it discreet with his powerful facial muscles.

  Eventually, the dancers started handing out leaflets, the circle burst and spread like a virus might… fragments moving into the host body. We took this opportunity to approach the church which looked like the grafting of an elegant white American Gospel church onto the usual skyscraper. No obvious tight security : we were able to walk right up to a front desk in a small, wood-paneled lobby that had nothing in it except a rack of periodicals in many languages and aforementioned desk.

  "The master is waiting for you," said a small woman who was at the desk. She just seemed to appear from nowhere.

  Chapter 18

  1. (a)

  Ko Samsara was born Keizo Matsuoka in the small fishing town of M____ in 1949. His father was part owner of a small fishing boat and continued to trade much as he had before and during the Great East Asian War. Fluctuating prices were a way of life for people in the village and they all chipped in to help each other in times of need, sharing their meager goods.

  In this life of survival and moments of warmth, the greatest worry on the mind of Jun Matsuoka was the future of his son, who had been born with two hideously deformed feet, almost like fins, that made normal walking, and certainly the operation of a fishing boat, impossible. It preyed on his mind day and night. Finally he decided that it would be in his four-year-old son's best interests if he sent him to live with relatives in Osaka and learn the trade of gold leaf making, which was all in the hands. Shortly afterwards, the crying infant was torn from his mother's arms and dispatched by train to the big city.

  Later a villager asked Mr Matsuoka why the child had not been educated in the craft of basket weaving right there in the village.Jun's reply was a long lasting silence on the matter and all other non-business topics until his death eight years later when his boat was swamped by the wake of a vast whale. Two opposing answers to the question became popular in the village : one was that the sight of his son repulsed him so much that he had to banish him. The other is that it was a vast and idiotic oversight on the fisherman's part. It is generally agreed, and a testament to the spirit of this simple fisherman, that there was no monetary motive involved. Samsara's still-living mother has never been questioned on the subject.

  The Osaka suburb where Samsara grew up was little damaged by the war. As such, little attention was paid to the area by the occupying powers during reconstruction. It is unlikely that Samsara grew to hate the US, or to live daily with the post-war realities of a firestorm-ravaged nation directly. Theories, therefore, which seek to link the later apocalyptic visions of the grown man to the sufferings of his nation seem to have little grounding. If anything, the Japan he knew was a nation that revived and grew and technologized at an astounding rate. A new, somewhat Western, nation built on hard work and clever imitation. In a later interview Samsara is quoted as saying "After the war we ran from one demon to another. The demon of war lay slain, and atop the corpse was the radiant giant of technology. We followed him with busy hands, plucking all the secret mechanisms from the universe on which we stood… like a secret source of firewood that is in fact the planks of the ship upon which you sail." Clearly it is the recovery rather than the destruction that haunted him as a youth. Religion was a very sore subject in post-war Japan and only in recent years have the men of Samsara's generation enacted a revolution in that field.

  The distant Aunt with whom Samsara spent his childhood was a no-nonsense businesswoman who instilled the virtues of thrift and of having a trade. Samsara shared with two cousins, rough and tumble boys who thought little of throwing the deformed youngster into the river to form a (somewhat obvious) visual pun for the entertainment of their friends. The sensitive newcomer was never able to form anything like a friendship with them. Later one would say "When he first arrived he was just a funny looking baby… like a pet. But like an exotic pet that grows too big and becomes a great nuisance or even a menace… well that was Keizo."

  School was the usual Japanese torture. Long hours, persistent… almost Jehoval… testing. Grueling mathematics imposed on young minds erasing color. The only color in Keizo's life was gold, which sometimes lingered under his fingernails as he stared down at them alone during rare unsupervised play periods.

  Gold was no mystery or magic to Samsara. It was just a hot metal that he had to toil over every night. He would melt it in a hot bowl that had turned his hands to calluses and then spread it to sheets with unexpected dexterity and then his uncle would shout and point out the tiny flaws that meant this gold was suitable only for the papers of the prefectural government and not for the lucrative export market which had only recently reopened and to which all of Japan had turned with thirst.

  Several attempts have been made to link this early experience with the symbol of wealth and the Samsara Cult's later thorough absorption of the financial assets of its members. Two schools hold dominance. One asserts that having seen so much gold pass through his fingers as a child, Samsara was unable to rid himself of the desire to defraud those in his trust - he simply couldn't resist the temptation of the money that he came across in the process of his legitimate religious crusade. The other school asserts that Samsara began to view money as worthless, a raw material that is exploited for other ends. He took the money because he knew that it would allow him to advance his overpowering politico-religious objectives. As no one has been able to pin down a solid financial benefit to the gas murders of hundreds of Tokyoites the second theory is the default. Someone suggested that the gassing might have been part of an elaborate blackmail. Some people like that theory… it is tidily hypothetical. Interestingly enough, the continued debate has yet to dissolve the reality of Samsara's actions.

  Schoolmates of Samsara during those difficult childhood years have little to say about him. Such is often the case with the physically deformed, who provide a ready made description of themselves and require little explanation like figures in the Commedia Dell'Arte (see Rugolini, 1965 : La Deformata nel Teatro)

  It is clear that the minor everyday oppressions of his life were borne with no outbursts or obvious resentment. Fading photographs show the child invariably smiling in his usual position kneeling at the front of the family grouping.

  The only rebellion he made was the collection, day by day, of the gold that gathered beneath his fingers. It seems unlikely that he knew as much at the time but it was this slowly accumulating stash that allowed him to leave Japan at the age of twenty in search of enlightenment at the Roof of the World.

  At eighteen, Samsara suffered a strong bout of Glandular Fever, a disease known in the West as 'the kissing disease' - a theory surely disproved by the entirely unkissed virginity of the deformed Japanese teen.

  The disease laid him low and took from him the effortless resilience and energy that had propelled his crutches around town on countless tedious errands and had carried untold pounds of precious metals around the family home. Weakened by the disease almost to the point of being bedridden, Samsara became possessed by the desire to improve his body to normality and beyond. Yet the idea of pumping his penguin-like lower limbs in weightlifters' exercises was ridiculous even to their owner, and baseball (the only non-combat sport in Japan (and a
n obvious ruse)) was equally out of the question.

  Yoga enjoys an unusual, almost taboo, status in Japan, whose Zen mentality encourages transcendence of the body even in its martial arts with their abstract katas. How it came to the attention of Samsara is unknown, but it was through an obscure set of texts gifted to the local public library that he attained mastery in its gymnastic dimensions. He has spoken of the sense of inner strength, balance and dignity its static stretchings gave him even before he approached any of its mystic dimensions.

  At twenty, he headed for Shambala, the "mythical" city beyond time where the secret skills of levitation, telepathy and transformation were held. His later claims to have mastered these skills were the basis of his multinational empire but are of course impossible to verify, as Samsara refused to display his skills before any but the initiated. Still, his journey is a remarkable one both for its boldness and the physical rigor of such a trip for a motion-disabled young man. Despite ones rational denials of such things as vision of the universal umbilicus and completing the circle of time a million times combining microscopic variations of the gods' carelessness… it was quite a hike!

  Samsara never returned to Osaka, and his foster family showed no apparent emotion over his departure. "We both did our duty," is all his aunt has ever said on the matter. It is reported that firebombs have on two occasions been thrown at the Osaka-Matsuoka residence, but the ineptitude of the assaults point to the actions of some affronted Osaka Samsara groupie stirring themselves from their soiled futon after a gripping chapter of one of the many Samsara comic-book biographies rather than concerted cultic attack.

  Instead, upon his return from Tibet, which we would document in more detail if were not for the thoroughly mythical nature of all printed resources (including an encounter with England's King Arthur), Samsara headed for the capital city of Tokyo. It was 1972 and the bubble economy was beginning to raise its meniscus. The "hobby" was the newest status symbol… an indication that one had some time of ones own… a commodity rarer than Tokyo real-estate. If driving around ones own house was the entry level, Yoga was executive.

  So, when not working in the kitchen of a curry shop, Samsara (still Keizo at this time) would offer private tuition on the mysteries he had uncovered during his travels. A variety of fairly well-off business people and wives began to spread the word about the marvelous insights of the softly spoken chef who seemed to almost read ones mind and to be able to move surprisingly large distances without uncrossing his legs. Samsara began to make very reasonable amounts of money from his practice and soon he put down his spices forever and opened up a small office on the 9th floor of an office building in the meaningless Nippori district of East Tokyo.

  After a year of teaching, Samsara held what was eventually to be known to devotees of the "Path of Forgetting" as "the Night of the Destruction." It is known that a tea-cup was dropped at this gathering of thirty members at the Yoga School, but this was (of course) not the 'Destruction.' One member explained it thus: "The Master realized that the past was holding the group, the nation and the world back. He told us that the future was already making plans for us… Armageddon. We had to make plans to escape its Destruction by destroying our links with the past and developing a strategy for surviving the forthcoming change in the way humans related to this world, this launch pad to the great universes he had been teaching us about."

  Samsara claims that the vision of destruction came to him in meditation in Tibet: he saw the clear direction of the world under the dominance of uncontrolled science. But it is likely that he developed his delusions much closer to home.

  This strain of thought is one that dozens of expensive English-language paperbacks in the Maruzen bookstore in Tokyo's Ginza describe as being essentially Japanese. Titles ranging from "Japan:Lazy Bastards" to "Suicide Ninjas: Japan's Appetite for Destruction", written by authors each possessing at least a year or two of actual experience in Japan, are convincingly close in agreement that Japan is based upon a catastrophic mentality born from the nation's propensity to suffer natural disasters and greatly exacerbated by the nuclear attacks and similar destructions inflicted upon them during the latter days of WWII. It is indeed unthinkable that such a cult could have been born elsewhere in the world (the Cult's later spread to over 16 nations is a very different thing.)

  The Cult gathered enthusiastic followers almost immediately, yet its future was in doubt. The group ran into antipathy from those two pillars of Japanese culture the Keiretsu and, of course, the Yakuza.

  The Keiretsu, big business, soon began to notice that various medium and high-ranking members of their group were developing ties to a group that didn't play by the age-old rules of the blue-suited ruling class. Several prominent business-men were sent to Hawaii, or sent on unrealistically long ski-schools in the mountains of northern Hokkaido after becoming members of the Cult. However, Samsara realized that the interference of the Keiretsu was something that he would be able to survive. He was able to gather cash from widows and his eventual plan was to recruit university graduates and scientists to develop the weaponry that would allow the Path of Forgetting to bend world history and forge a new regime of post-apocalyptic enlightened despotism.

  Determined to resist, Samsara was surprised when Tokyo property magnate, the dashing and worldly Toshiro Maruhashi came to him with a proposition. He would set up a cover organization of Western Arts appreciation to be known as the Young Man's Guild of Civilization. Ostensibly a gathering of fans of Classical culture, this would be a respectable club for young men to join while secretly practicing the mystic art of yoga. Maruhashi claimed to be a convert to the cause following a prophetic dream of himself as the last man on earth living under the dominance of man-made demons. It is also theorized that he realized that the cult would soon become a powerful third force in Japanese society, and wanted to mold it as a kind of private army. Maruhashi had traveled extensively in the West, although it is reported that he never felt as comfortable there as his fine marbles and the devil-may-care line of his furniture suggested. This slight exile from Japan, and a fanatical egotism, may have led him to reject the idea of the minor role a self-made man is forced to play in Japanese, group-oriented, culture and given him the idea to set up his own clan, or better to subvert an already exploding birth within his culture. After the attack, many disturbing hints began to emerge about Maruhashi's plans for his fellow countrymen.

  The yakuza proved harder to deal with. Ardent traditionalists, they considered the cult un-Japanese. For no other reason, they began to victimize people seen leaving Cult gatherings and demanding protection money from the few school that Samsara had set up. In the end, Samsara found that the best way to pay them off was by using some of the young chemistry students he had just recruited to cook up bathtub-fulls of amphetamines. The Yakuza described it as junk, but it came so easily and in such great quantities that soon an agreement of sorts had been reached between the two groups. What originally began as a reaction to a threat soon became part of the Cult's M.O. : Samsara ordered the production of a full range of mind-bending psychedelics to accelerate cult members' flight from reality.

  As the nineties drew to a close the Path of Forgetting had been transformed beyond all recognition. Tens of thousands of members in five nations, weapons and drug production facilities across Japan, high ranking connections in government, TV series and comic books, a huge temple and almost complete immunity from interference by any branch of the traditional order keepers in Japanese society.

  It is against the background of these transformations and the increasingly urgent tone of Samsara's theme of shaping the apocalypse that the formation of terrorist cells with the objective of targeted, experimental mass-murder begins to make horrifying sense.

  2. (b)

  No-one is sure where the master was born (close up of a baby, wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes surrounding by a pulsating halo of yellow light) nor exactly when. All that is known is that he was born in the middle of this
century to prepare us for the next.

  (Large headed children pound down a cobbled street waving sticks and crying out like seagulls. Backing them up is a cute round faced youngster pulling himself along at great speed on a pair of crutches. His tiny feet drag along the dusty path.) "hey.. hey gang… wait for me ." Life was hard for the compassionate young man, who began to feel himself being left behind by the childish gang whose company he was forced to keep. Yet at the same time he began to feel that maybe he was the one leaving them behind. (Fade to a rapid sequence of zoom outs taking us far above the city of Osaka/ The Island of Japan/ Asia / Our terrestrial sphere/ Solar System / Galaxy/ to a mote of light in the young master's enraptured gaze.)

  (A storm rages.. snow is driven horizontally past the camera. A small figure can barely be made out in the distance. It is the Master, now showing the first signs of what will someday become his trademark beard. Eyes closed against the wind, his crutches half buried in the shifting surface, we hear him mumble… ) "Great Lord Buddha… guide me through your test. I have the strength, but you must give me the wisdom."

  A vision of revolving spheres of light and a great booming voice says "Welcome to Shambala" The silhouetted figure of The master appears from a great white light nimbus: slowly a magical, extremely glimmering city made of birdlike and spherical structures can be seen. The master walks forward and finely penciled angels begin to float down around him "I am ready for your test!" he shouts enthusiastically. "You have already passed the test" is the reply from a thousand melodious voices.