“You want to see the package, the Shinto object?” my father asked, peering back at me through the open car window. “Go to your room, unpack, and I’ll bring it to you.”
In the tiny guest room, I stacked my luggage in a corner. I noticed my father’s high school graduation picture hung on the wall. In the picture, he looks just like me: slender with long, straight, blond hair, and a high forehead. He gazes out from behind the round eyeglasses that were popular in the 30s and 40s.
Through the open window, I heard him closing a door, then shuffling across the gravel toward the house.“He’ll want answers,” I thought. “What am I going to tell him?” Then I remembered the letter.
It had arrived two weeks earlier, while I was photographing Germans in a bar for a magazine article. It was sent to me care of my friend Wolfgang and was written in clear, legible handwriting—but in an English so awkward that I had to read everything twice. Now, I pulled it out of my suitcase to refresh my memory.
“I am a friend of Juan Li,” it began.
“He gave the letter that you have a interest to put god. I know that everything prepares by God, even in each our meeting. I am very glad that God bless you by your interest in this putting. The story of the putting is very long, I will explain you someday.…”
The writer ended his letter by asking whether he should send the god to West Germany or to Norway. It was simply signed “Kazz.”
I had written back, acknowledging receipt, saying that the “god” should be sent to Norway.
As my father entered the room, I put the letter away, still not sure what to say.
The “god” was in his hands. It was packaged in cardboard, which was covered with Japanese symbols. As I reached for it I noticed that it cost 6,000 yen—more than $30—to send by airmail. I tore the cardboard away. Inside, a bricklike object was wrapped in white cloth imprinted with more symbols. There was a letter, but I folded it and put it down next to me.
“Well?” My father stepped back into the doorway. I lifted the god up and down. It weighed as much as a small barbell. What part of the curious story would he believe? I’d never even heard him use the word “God” before. I placed the god on the floor.
What did Juan tell me about the project? I took a deep breath, struggling to remember details.
“Be patient,” I told my father. “I know this will all sound strange to you.”
He leaned heavily against the door, clearly not patient at all. I spoke quickly, first describing the dinner party, then the Shinto priest’s doomsday vision, then his “instructions from God,” and finally the priest’s act of breaking the Sword of Heaven into 108 pieces and encasing the pieces in stone. I told my father the little I knew about Shinto, and when I was finished I picked up the god.
“And that is a piece of the sword?” my father asked.
“Seems so.”
“Go on,” my father said.
“That’s all, at least all I can remember.”
“But who sent you the package?”
“A man named Kazz. I don’t know much about him either. He is a friend of Juan, the guy at the dinner party who told the story and got me involved.”
“And what do you know about Juan?” my father asked.
“Not much,” I confessed. “He travels a lot. He’s very knowledgeable about the Orient. I think he sells antiques for a living. But I’m not really sure. I just met him.”
“So we have a story you heard from someone you briefly met, who heard it from someone else?”
“Yes,” I said, a bit sheepishly .
My father was silent. Then he asked,“And this priest. Who is he? He went to all this trouble because of a nightmare?”
Now it was my turn to be silent.
“And this group, the followers of the teacher, who are they?”
“I don’t know. I just thought it was a great story. I didn’t know it would come to this,” I said, pointing to the god.
My father’s face was impassive. His look reminded me of when I was fifteen years old, trying to explain American football to him, which I played but he never watched. I trailed off; he nodded and left without a word. Leave it alone, I thought, it’s too late. His world has always been one of logic and rational thought, not of spirits or gods or football.
I picked up the heavy object, lay back down on the bed and found the letter that had come with it. It was brief, just like the previous one. It said that I should not take the god into the bathroom because that was considered “unclean,” and that I should place it where I wanted, but preferably in water, the source of life. Again, the letter was signed simply “Kazz.”
The god sat in my bedroom for a week while I helped my father repair the leaky workshop roof and prepare the house for winter. We worked together in the strained, compromised fashion of fathers and sons. I found fault with the way that he did things, and he found fault with all that I did.
One morning I went to chop wood, wondering why he insisted on so much wood, and found that my ax was covered with frost. Every day the sky grew grayer and colder. Then, one morning at breakfast a week after I arrived, it began to snow. The long, dark Nordic winter had arrived. As my father watched the flakes stick briefly to the kitchen window, he said, “Time to go back to California.”
After his matter-of-fact proclamation, he went back to reading the morning paper. I saw the headline and reached across the table and pulled the paper from him. The story was about massive peace demonstrations in West Germany, with 100,000 people in Bonn marching against the proliferation of tactical nuclear weapons. I figured my friend Wolfgang was there.
“A neighbor asked about the Shinto object,” my father said suddenly. “The guy at the post office must have talked. I told her your story. What are you going to do with it?”
I dropped the paper.
We had ignored the topic since his initial grilling, and I figured that he had dismissed the entire thing as another wild fantasy of an idealistic son.
I told him I was thinking of taking the god back with me to West Germany.
“Use your head,” he said. “What about customs?”
Of course, he was right. As I passed through foreign customs, “God” in a heavy cardboard box might look a bit suspicious. I could show the inspectors that the parcel was not full of drugs or explosives, but I’d still have to spend time explaining what would surely sound like a crazy story.
“What do you think, Dad? What should I do?”
“You know the lake where your great aunt owns a cabin? It’s surrounded by a national forest, and fed by an underground spring. Since Shinto worships nature, put it there.”
He pushed away from the table, stood up, pulled his wool cap over his ears, and with a determined stride headed to the door, leaving me surprised that he had shown some interest in my story after all.
A few days later I hiked with my father out from the small town up to the lake. The snow had been replaced by a light drizzle that made the green pine needles glisten like jewels. Our steps released pungent odors of moss and dried grass. A few birds dove for cover as we passed.
I stopped while he yanked on a tangle of vines growing in the path. Tossing them to one side, he moved on. I waited a moment.
“Dad,” I said, catching up with him, “There’s more to the story. I didn’t tell you everything.”
“Now what?”
“When Juan Li told me the story, he mentioned some odd things. In Taiwan, just as he was placing a god in a lake, a furious storm stopped, as if by magic. He told me he saw a photograph of a god with a strange glow surrounding the case. This may not be as simple as tossing a stone in the lake.…”
“Son.…” my father interrupted.
“Not that I believe it.…” I fell behind him again.
We came to a narrow path that led to my great aunt’s small wooden cabin. The rustic structure was perched on a huge slab of granite jutting deep into the middle of the lake. My father checked to see that the windows, boarded
up for the winter, were secure. As he did, the sun broke through the clouds. The granite under his feet sparkled.
I walked to the edge of the granite where it abruptly dropped six feet into the lake. Motionless water perfectly reflected the surrounding trees. I unwrapped the white cloth from the stone. My father insisted on taking a photograph of me and the stone god. I protested, but only briefly.
I pulled back my arm, then heaved the stone god high in the air, over the granite, past the shore, and into the lake. It made a splash no different than a common stone; concentric waves of water rushed toward shore. The water that shot up in the air seemed to explode like fireworks. As each ring came toward me, the mirror image of the trees was disturbed, making the water look like an Impressionist painting.
I took pictures until the first wave hit the shore, thinking that Kazz and his group would appreciate this record of the placing of their god.
When my father asked me what I would do next, I really didn’t know what he meant.
“After Germany, you mean?” I asked.
“No, I mean with the Shinto thing.”
“That was it,” I said. “They only sent one. I’m finished. Maybe I’ll write a story about it.”
He nodded.
On the way back into town my father’s step seemed lighter. He was more talkative.
“Those Vikings, your ancestors,” he said, “they also believed spirits dwelled in nature. They were connected to the earth. They also respected the elders and tradition.…” His voice trailed off. We passed through the rest of the forest in a comfortable silence.
That evening a group of curious boys gathered on our porch. Somehow the story that the Shinto god had been placed in the lake had spread rapidly through the town. I hadn’t told anyone; it must have been my father. They asked questions: Where exactly had we thrown the object? Were we sure it was stone and not gold? I told them what I knew about the Shinto priest’s vision and his struggle for peace. The young Norwegians listened intently.
As they left, I followed them to the road and heard them talking with great excitement. A few were already making plans to dive for the object come summer when one of them, the smallest, protested. “But just think,” he said, “if war comes we’ll all be protected. We must leave it.”
I went back to tell my father what they had said, but he was already asleep.
chapter 2
Shinto gods arrive at my home in San Francisco.
In 1983, a group of scientists including the noted astronomer Carl Sagan proposed the nuclear winter theory, which hypothesized that the smoke from the fires following a nuclear war would darken the skies for months, interrupting the normal flow of life on earth and wiping out the human race. Groups such as the Physicians for Social Responsibility, led by the Australian-born pediatrician Helen Caldicott, and the Union for Concerned Scientists, were tireless in bringing the message that winning any nuclear war was impossible because the earth would be so contaminated that survivors of a nuclear war would envy the dead. They used photographs of victims from Hiroshima and Nagasaki as proof that little could be done in the face of radiation poisoning. The massive antinuclear weapons demonstrations occurring in Europe now exploded in American cities such as Boston, New York, and San Francisco.
After I returned to California from Norway, I wrote to Japan and sent Kazz the pictures of the placement of the god. He replied that the lake was a fine place, and thanked me for the prints. The project was going slowly, he wrote; only 34 of the gods had been placed, and the world situation continued to worsen.
I tracked down our mutual friend, Juan Li, and told him about the placing in the lake.
“Perfect,” he said, without surprise.
Encouraged, I told Juan of my plans to write a story for a local newspaper about the project. Even though I still doubted that throwing a stone in a lake would make the world safe, I had good feelings about the project. It had brought me closer to my skeptical, rational father, even if just for a few moments, and had reminded him of a world of connections and respect he had not found in America. It had also given at least one scared Norwegian boy the confidence that people from a faraway land were concerned about peace. I wanted to share my positive experience with others.
“Maybe the story will generate some support for the project,” I explained.
“Good idea,” Juan Li replied. He was moving from San Francisco to Toronto—he was always, it seems, traveling somewhere—but he promised to stay in touch.
The writing of the newspaper article came easily. I described the priest’s vision of a “network of peaceful energy” and the afternoon with my father at the lake in Norway. I mentioned Kazz, Juan’s mysterious friend, who had become my link with the priest and his other followers. I sold the article to the San Francisco Examiner’s Sunday magazine, California Living. With its circulation of more than one million, I figured someone would read the article and offer to help Kazz and his teacher.
My part in the project was done.
The newspaper article appeared three months later, on a beautiful spring day, which made the storm that it created all the more strange. On May 16, 1983, I went biking in Golden Gate Park, forgetting that the article was scheduled for publication. Several hours later, I pedaled back to my house, a turn-of-the-century Victorian that I shared with two roommates. The light on my answering machine was blinking, madly signaling at least a dozen calls. As I dragged my bike into the basement, I wondered what was going on. I didn’t usually get calls on Sunday.
Before I could play the messages, the phone rang. It was a friend from Palo Alto, who wanted to tell me that he was at a picnic where people were talking about my article. Most thought the project was a great idea, but one older man had come apart. He had been stationed at Pearl Harbor, and all he could remember were the kamikazes—winds of god—barreling from the sky.
“This guy said the Japanese pilots were wacko, totally insane,” my friend recounted. “And he said their passion came from their devotion to the emperor and to Shinto. He said connecting Shinto with peace was a joke.”
After we hung up, I played back my messages. They were all from friends who had seen the article, which ran as a double-paged spread with two of my photographs. Most just wondered if there was anything they could do to help, but there were a few skeptical comments, and those were the ones that stuck in my mind.
I returned one phone call to a friend who asked me jokingly,“How do you know there are only 108 stone gods?” He suggested that the Japanese were producing gods like Toyotas or Minoltas. When I admitted that I had no proof or corroboration for the story, my friend—who had lived in Tokyo—said, “The Japanese are masters at keeping things vague. They do it purposely so they can fit things to meet their own needs.” He didn’t say it directly, but he implied that you couldn’t trust them.
Another friend reminded me on the phone that the practice of Shinto was outlawed in this country during World War II. If a Shinto shrine or other object of worship was found at places like Manzanar, a detention center for Japanese and Japanese-Americans in remote southeastern California, punishment by United States government officials immediately followed. In San Francisco, a Shinto shrine was torn down at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. “As far as I know,” he said, “it’s the only time the practice of a particular religion has ever been outlawed in the United States.”
A friend of a friend was offended by the implied object worship and totemism, and cited the biblical account of Moses and the golden calf: Do not make idols or set up an image or a sacred stone for yourselves, and do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it. I am the Lord your God. “Thousands of years of progress, and you talk about worshipping stone gods!” she said. “What about the other pagan practices, like human sacrifice? What do you think of that?”
My friends weren’t the only ones reacting. On Thursday an Examiner secretary called. “What should I do with this batch of mail?” she asked. “I’ve never se
en so many letters in response to an article.” Some came from as far away as Oregon and Alaska.
Unlike some of the frank comments from friends and acquaintances, the letters were all positive. No one brought up kamikazes, emperor worship, or totemism, or blamed Japan for yet another global conspiracy. An American Indian from a Cheyenne tribe in western Oklahoma noted the similarities between Shinto and his beliefs, and wrote: “The way of my people is to respect the earth, placing the good of the whole group before yourself…although we have different names for our gods, I believe we are all one people who pray for, work toward, the same goal—peace.”
One letter was from a man who had a private sanctuary, a spring, in his backyard where he offered to place a god. Another was from a person who, because he practiced yoga and was a vegetarian, felt he had the prerequisites to help. One woman was so desperate to get in touch with Kazz and his group that she had called directory assistance in Japan trying to find his number.
The offers of help were nice. But I found myself feeling oddly irritated just the same. Isn’t it a little desperate, calling directory assistance? And isn’t it a bit selfish, wanting to put a god in your own backyard? Did they think my article was an ad in the personal section? An offer to write in and get a spiritual fix?
Finally, I made copies of all the letters offering help. I put the originals in a large envelope and mailed them to Kazz. No reason, I decided, to grow possessive of something that wasn’t even mine. I was sure Kazz would be happy to see all the offers of help.
He was not.
Seven days after I sent Kazz the package, I received a letter from him. It was most direct. “I am very surprised at the writing because I thought our work is not open to the public.”
Not open to the public? Juan Li had encouraged me to write the article. In my first letter to Kazz, I had told him that I made my living publishing stories and photographs. What did he think I’d do?
The Sword of Heaven Page 2
