“Do you speak English?” I asked the boy.
“Yes, a little. I live on the tip of the island and go to school in town.”
“What’s your name?”
“Alwadi,” he said, smiling easily.
He must have been only eleven or twelve years old, but he acted much older, as children often do in Third World countries.
I asked him about the kidnapped Japanese tourists, thinking it would give us something to talk about other than the usual.
“Sure, everyone knows about that.”
“Do you know the people who did it?” I asked, prodding him, thinking he might like to brag.
He shrugged and shook his head.
“Why did they do it?”
“My father used to tell me stories about the Japanese during the war when they occupied the island. They weren’t very nice. He was very happy when the Americans liberated us.”
I made up some story about wanting to dive for shells. Then I asked if he would take me to the middle of the channel in his boat.
“It’s very deep. The current is strong,” he cautioned.
“Five dollars,” I said, knowing it was a fortune to him.
He waved me toward his boat.
In the middle of the channel as our boat swayed and tossed in the strong current, I unwrapped the cloth that covered the Japanese stone god. I looked at Alwadi and was surprised to see fear on his face. He had quickly figured out that I wasn’t interested in diving for shells. But why was he scared? His face begged for an explanation.
I said, without much thought, “It’s a memorial. I’m doing it for a Japanese friend. His father was killed here during the war.”
He didn’t believe me, and his look of fear turned into a look of terror. I could have been holding a bomb and gotten the same effect.
Maybe I should have just told him the truth. Instead, as I hesitated, I launched into a farcical imaginary dialogue. Alwadi, this is a Japanese god. Yes, this stone that I’m holding. Surely you believe in such things as stone gods. It’s called the Sword of Heaven and supposedly a piece of an ancient sword is embedded inside. A broken sword. But don’t get me wrong. It may be broken but it’s powerful. How powerful? You should have seen what happened in Florida! Anyway, I’ll place it in the water—right here between the islands, the islands your people call the dagger and the heart.
Do you get the symbolism? Dagger and heart? You do? Oh, good.
But there’s more. This will bring peace to your land. It will end war. Maybe it will even rid you of your dictator Marcos. You’d like that, right?
Yes, I know, the god is from Japan. I understand, that might be a problem. But the Japanese are human too, you know. They make mistakes. They’re sorry for what happened during World War II. At least, the ones that I know are.
Me? A Japan apologist? No, no. I’m just a photojournalist, following a story. Okay, I admit, I’ve stepped over the line. Not much detachment or objectivity here. Guess I’m human too.
Alwadi’s eyes remained locked on mine as I continued my unspoken monologue. The fear in his eyes cut through to my core being.
Your face! Please don’t look that way. Please don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you. You’re too young to be scared. It’s not good for you. Fear is insidious. It’ll numb you. It’ll keep you from fully enjoying life, from participating in it. You won’t be able to make decisions. It’ll keep you from loving. You’ll never absorb the good when you are filled with fear. Don’t be afraid of me. Don’t be afraid of anything. It’ll screw you up.
My internal remarks continued, full of guilt and confusion as well as truth. It felt like an eternity, but it was only a few moments. My final thought before I tossed the stone overboard was that the project had now driven me completely crazy. I said sharply, “Let’s go.”
Alwadi didn’t speak to me again. But later I saw him talking to a group of elderly men and pointing at me. The easy smiles were gone. I had no idea what Alwadi told them or what they were thinking. I only knew I wanted to get off the island as quickly as possible. How was it that I ended up spreading fear when I wanted to foster peace? I wondered whether the problem was inherent in the project, or rather might not lie within me. Perhaps I could find some answers in Japan.
chapter 11
At the teacher’s house in Osaka.
“Hiroshima did not die. The waters of the Ohta River flowed clearly through its seven channels. The pure and limpid water was very beautiful. I wanted to become that water, because water knows neither pain nor sorrow. The clear stream of the Ohta washed away the suffering from my heart. By letting my heart merge with the water, I have been able to feel some of the happiness I felt before.”
—Hiromi Sakaguchi, a 5th grade student who lost his parents and four siblings to the atomic bomb
It was a four-hour flight from Manila to Tokyo and then a two-hour bus ride from Narita airport to the Asia Center Hotel downtown where Donna and I had stayed a year and a half earlier. It was raining and cold, quite a contrast from the torrid weather of Manila. “You are lucky,” Kazz said on the 13th of June when I called. “We are having a private ceremony at the teacher’s house on Saturday night. Please come and visit. It will be very different from the last ceremony you saw.”
Since it was only Thursday, that meant I had all day Friday in Tokyo. I would use the day to see what I could find out about Kazz and his group.
The man at the Tokyo press information office was busy but intrigued by my question.
“Not too many foreigners are interested in Shinto,” he said. He motioned me to the back of the room. “Let’s try the library and see what we can find in English.”
“Frankly speaking,” he said after we found translations of a government-sponsored religious survey, “young people like myself aren’t very interested in Shinto either.”
“Here,” I cried, pointing to an official government report. “This is the group I was telling you about. Tenkokyo, located in the Yamaguchi prefecture.”
“There are more than 145 Shinto groups,” observed the press officer. We both read that Kazz’s group was considered one of the traditional sects of Shinto (kyoha Shinto), but that only meant it was founded between 1868 and 1945. The categories were based on chronology rather than doctrine. There was also Shrine Shinto (jinja Shinto), which came into existence prior to the modern era, and New Sect Shinto (shinkyoha Shinto), covering postwar groups.
Shinto, according to these reports, provided fertile ground for a wide variety of ritual and myth. Some of the sects were founded simply on the vision of one person, who received inspiration either directly from a kami or from devoting his or her life to strict religious training and practice. During the sixteenth century, a man named Hasegawa Kakugyo espoused climbing Mount Fuji as a religious act and inspired the Fusokyo sect, which even today is active in organizing religious expeditions up Mount Fuji.
Hirayama Shosai, a nineteenth century government magistrate, believed that purification came from ascetic exercises such as standing under a cold waterfall. Based on these beliefs, he founded a popular sect known as Taiseikyo.
Many of the holy Shinto leaders were women such as Deguchi Nao (1836-1918), the founder of the Omoto sect, whose divine revelation called for nothing less than the reconstruction of the world and the creation of an ideal society.
Persecution of sects by the government was rare, but it happened. Onishi Aijiro, for example, was a charismatic Shinto leader at the turn of this century who quickly received the wrath of the government when he denied the emperor’s divinity. Japan, he wrote, was on its way to another world war and annihilation. Along with a thousand of his followers—mostly military officers—he was arrested, tried, and jailed for his radical ideas.
“There are also over 80,000 registered Shinto shrines in Japan,” I read aloud from another report. In Japan, any thing or any place can become a shrine: a single tree or an entire village or an entire mountain are preserved as long as they have a kami nature. A
simple rice straw rope wrapped around a stone or a tree may be the only marker needed to show that an object is sacred and the dwelling of a kami.
The most important Shinto site is the Ise Jingu Shrines, part of which is dedicated to the Sun Goddess herself. It has been a sacred site for more than 1,300 years and remarkably, is rebuilt every 20 years regardless of its condition with no change whatsoever in design or construction materials. The next rebuilding was scheduled for 1993 and again in 2013.
“It doesn’t say much more about Tenkokyo, the group you are interested in,” said the officer. “What’s so special about it?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out.”
In truth, my visit to the press information office comforted me. So much of the project was surrounded by mystery. The fact that the group was officially recognized gave me something concrete to grab onto, and I was at least thankful for that.
On Saturday, Kazz and I embraced at the Osaka train station. Despite our frequent misunderstandings, I felt we were actually becoming friends. Our ongoing communication helped, but I think deep down we both accepted the ideas that fate had brought us together and that we were participants in something much larger than either of us.
We drove in silence from the Osaka train station through the late-afternoon traffic to the teacher’s suburban house. After our first meeting a year and a half earlier, I knew better than to barrage him with questions, and somehow I also felt more comfortable in the silence.
This time, though, it was the teacher who was interested in what I said. After politely asking me about Donna and my trip to the Philippines (he was only mildly curious about the placing there), he asked about Florida. I had written Kazz about the placing, and sent him the newspaper clippings of the tornado, but the teacher wanted me to repeat all the details. He listened intently while I recounted the story of the shark teeth, the mix-up with my ticket, and the tornado. But before I could ask him what he thought of the deaths of two people, he showed us to a room in the back and excused himself. He had to prepare for the ceremony. His wife and a housekeeper entered and brought us tea and melon.
When the teacher returned a while later, I tried to talk with him, but other people were filling the room, and the teacher turned his attention to them. Soon, there were about twenty people in the small tatami mat room in the back, greeting one another enthusiastically. They discreetly removed their street clothes and donned white robes. The teacher’s wife and helper served tea and light snacks. Kazz was busy talking in Japanese to the others, so I moved back to the wall, watching and listening.
The teacher left again for a few moments, and this time returned dressed in a simple white robe. He waved us to a room off the front room, which housed a shrine much like the one I had seen on my first trip to Mount Katsuragi, only smaller. It was recessed from the main room on a stagelike platform. Hanging over the miniature wood temple was a straw rope with short strips of paper folded into zigzag patterns. At the base of the temple were offerings of rice, water, and salt on wooden stands, and to the side were white paper streamers used as purification wands.
Stuck to the wall was a map of the world, and like the globe I had seen on my first visit, the map was full of tiny pins with red heads. The teacher took out a pointer, placed it on the map and began talking to the group kneeling on the wooden floor in front of him.
“The pins are where gods have been placed. Now he is telling about your placing of the god in Florida,” whispered Kazz, who sat next to me. “Very interesting. He says that where you put the god was exactly in the middle between North and South America. It is also where the god world meets the human world. He says the tornado occurred because of this meeting of heaven and earth. Go! He is calling for you.”
Kazz gently pushed me forward. All I recognized was my name when the teacher talked, but when he finished the group clapped and then bowed. I felt as though I were in school and receiving a reward for something I had said or done—only I wasn’t quite sure what it was I was being rewarded for. I faced the group, returned their claps and bows, and returned to the back of the room. I realized in a rush that all these followers knew about the project.
The teacher went to the shrine, and everyone turned toward him. The fluorescent lights were turned off, and he lit candles. In the eerie glow, I looked at Kazz and barely recognized him. He had closed his eyes and pulled a huge sword from a sheath. Where did the sword come from? He raised it high over his head and waved it. It was a real sword, razor sharp, the kind that cut and hurt and killed. It wasn’t broken. It wasn’t metaphorical. Kazz looked like a furious samurai fighting a bloody battle. I looked around and saw other warriors waving their just-as-real swords in the flickering light. They chanted words that I could not understand.
“What the hell?” I muttered to myself. “This is nuts.”
The smiles were gone, replaced by pained, agonized looks. The tempo and volume of the chanting increased. I glanced nervously at the distorted faces that surrounded me. I smelled sweat. I checked my tape recorder to insure that it was working and snapped pictures of the oblivious participants. At the back of the room, the women waved smaller daggers with the same intense look on their faces. I later learned that what looked like daggers were holy objects in daggerlike form.
The teacher sat near the altar, his eyes closed and his chin slightly turned up. He was mumbling and seemed far away from the events in the room. Suddenly someone in the back blew a whistle, and everyone lowered their swords. A quiet chanting ensued. The sound reminded me of a bubbling stream, and I was momentarily calmed. But then, several minutes later, the whistle blew again. The swords were raised once again in the air, accompanied by more frantic yelling and waving.
This was repeated four times and lasted about 25 minutes in all. Afterward, following a brief break in which people sat exhausted on the floor, names were called by a participant in the front of the room. One by one, people went forward and placed leafy branches as offerings at the door of the wooden shrine. I heard my name called, and when I went to the front of the room, I did everything wrong. I was so bewildered by everyone’s transformation into warriors that I knelt in the wrong place, offered the branch backward, and placed it in the wrong pile. I managed to get a bow and a clap in before I returned to the back of the room and turned toward the teacher.
“Tonight I went to Russia,” said the teacher, his voice once again commanding all of our attention. “I saw a dark cloud over the Kremlin. Your chanting broke the cloud, and God’s breath came through. It was a very difficult fight, and we didn’t get through completely. I saw the Kremlin in ruins and a temple being built to replace it.”
How unlikely, I thought. The Soviet Empire has existed for more than 65 years, through my lifetime and my father’s lifetime. It would take a nuclear war to destroy it, and I didn’t think the teacher meant he had initiated such a disaster. The Kremlin replaced by a temple? The Soviet Union officially disavowed all religious beliefs. It would take a major philosophical shift for that to happen.
After the teacher’s description the participants disrobed, dressed, and, in another room, struck up easy, relaxed conversation.
“What was that all about?” I asked Kazz when he finally joined me.
“We call it a fighting ceremony,” he replied. “We meet once a month.”
“Just these people? No one else from the group I met last time?”
“A few more. But only the most powerful. The teacher always travels different places. This month it was the Soviet Union, last month it was China. He has traveled to the places where the gods were placed, taking with him the collective energy of the group. We are his soldiers, battling the bad spirits that engulf the earth.”
“Where do you go?” I asked. “Your face…”
“It’s like a dream. I have little memory,” Kazz said. “I don’t know.”
Kazz was anxious to leave for home. Once in the car he was unusually talkative. He told me he and his wife Tazuko had reconciled th
eir problems and were living together again. His three daughters were now very happy. Everyone was sorry that Donna wasn’t along and that I could only stay for a couple days. He was excited for me that the teacher had singled me out for my placing in Florida, and that I should consider it an honor. And, finally, he said, handing me an envelope, “The teacher gave me this to give to you.”
As I reached for the envelope, my mind was filled with the image of the powerful warriors waving real swords, battling an invisible enemy. I opened it and found several ten-thousand-yen notes—about five hundred dollars.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“For your help. Travel is expensive, no?”
I quickly slipped the money back into the envelope and pushed it into Kazz’s lap. I felt confused. I knew the Japanese are fond of giving presents, but this was excessive, although I could certainly use it. I felt I didn’t deserve it.
“Please find a way to give this back to the teacher without insulting him. It’s just not the way I do things.”
chapter 12
A miniature replica of the original Sword of Heaven.
Don’t you understand what I’m tryin’ to say,
An’ can’t you feel the fears I’m feelin’ today?
The Sword of Heaven Page 10
