Dancer looked ready to snap at him again, but Patron, the sleeves of his oversized denim shirt flapping, stopped her. To Kizu this action was yet an- other of Patron's gestures he'd perfected over time.
"In the past," Patron said, "both Guide and I believed that only through our own deaths would we be able to send out a clear message for people to repent. The idea of occupying a nuclear power plant and using it as a nuclear weapon that didn't need a delivery system was based on this. When our shock corps went into action, it would mean that Guide and I were going to die- together with these young people who, through their actions, repented, cleansed their souls, and were headed toward rebirth.
"However, what would we do if-in this suffering world-some people decided that they alone would survive? Realizing that what we'd said and done was being used to justify this erroneous way of thinking, we did the Somersault. This new church we're starting, however, is not at all like that."
At this point Dancer, who was there to support Patron physically, skill- fully took over. The three men seated behind the TV crew seemed about to protest-not at Patron's words but over the reporter's attitude--but Dancer raised her hands to stop both them and the reporters and helped Patron to his feet. By the time Ogi announced that the press conference was over, the two of them had already disappeared down the darkened hallway.
Kizu watched as Ikuo stepped in to smooth things down among the three men as they shouted at the dark-skinned reporter, who had been the sole interlocutor at the press conference. Freed by Ikuo's intervention, the re- porter walked over to talk with Kizu.
11: WAKE MANIA WITHOUT END (II)
1
In the end, the indomitable reporter talked Kizu into going with him to a coffee shop on the road back to the station from the office. The owner of the shop, busy brewing some coffee through a siphon, took their orders and slipped back behind the antique counter, while the reporter turned to Kizu and reintroduced himself.
"I originally worked for an economics trade paper, but soon after I shifted over to a regular newspaper I began covering the story of those men; in my first article I called them the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of new religions. Using the names the people in the church used at the time, the Prophet, tall and thin, was Don Quixote, while roly-poly Savior was Sancho Panza. But my editor complained that readers would get confused unless I called the founder of the church Don Quixote, so they reversed the names.
"I'm not just saying this to butter you up, but I find it interesting that you also, as Patron's new adviser, are a fairly large-boned man."
Without any indication that he was absorbing this, Kizu asked a ques- tion of his own. "Have you been gathering material on the two men all this time?"
"In our paper I'm mainly the one who covered them."
"I'd like to help you as much as I can," Kizu said, "but I don't have a lot of background knowledge. Could you fill me in on Guide's childhood and the background to his joining the religious movement? I've been asked to take over his job)-only a part of it, of course-but it bothers me that I know next to nothing about my predecessor."
The reporter's dark skin and features put Kizu in mind oiakprasu tengu, a legendary goblin with a crow's beak.
"Guide was born in Nagasaki City," the reporter began, as he stared back at Kizu, "and as an infant survived the atomic bombing. His mother died; his father, an army doctor, was at the front; he was rescued by his uncle, also a physician, who came back for him in the chaos following the bombing. A dramatic sort of childhood, I'm sure you'd agree. His family had been Catholic for generations, and Guide was baptized as an infant. He ended up leaving the church when he was in high school, though, when he read in the paper that a famous Catholic man of letters was granted an audience by Emperor Hirohito. That was enough reason for him to bid Catholicism adieu.
"Guide admitted this was a childish reaction, but at the time he con- cluded that he couldn't continue in his faith. This relates to the dilemma that's been around since the Meiji period, when Christianity swelled in influence at the same time that nationalism came to the fore. You know the old saw: Who is greater, Jesus Christ or the Emperor?
"As a young man, Guide decided that Christ could never have real authority in this country. So he spent the following years cut off from the church, entered the science department at the university, and became obsessed with a new idea-that it was exactly in a country like Japan that Jesus Christ must appear in the Second Coming. Guide started attending Protestant churches with only one goal in mind. When he found a minister who was open to him, he would confront him: Who is greater, Jesus Christ or the Emperor?
"Our country's Emperor was no longer the god people thought he was before and during the war. The new constitution defined him as a symbol of the state, with no actual power. This is what the minister told Guide. Stub- born young man that he was, though, Guide insisted: Who is greater, Jesus Christ or the Emperor? And this led to a falling-out between him and the Protestant church.
"His dream was for Jesus' Second Coming to take place in Japan so he could finally answer the question of who was greater. But since it didn't look like Christ was going to appear, he came up with the radical idea of people creating a substitute with their own hands.
"In Guide's heart, then, someone like Patron was necessary, and from early on he had the idea of creating that sort of figure. I think the explanation for the two of them getting together might lie in this, don't you think?"
"I can see you're a real reporter, since you've cut right to the core of what I've been concerned about. You've given me a lot to think about concerning Guide's background," Kizu honestly admitted.
I
The reporter smiled, a friendly, shy smile.
"Saying I'm a real reporter also points out my weak points. When I in- terviewed Guide he explained things in great detail. He's quite well read and had some interesting ideas. One concerned the nature of symbols, which came from something he'd read by a Jewish scholar. The work he read discussed the Star of David, the symbol of the state of Israel. Some people insist that the Star of David calls to mind the Jewish people's road to the gas chamber and that a new symbol of life would be more fitting for a new country. After re- viewing these arguments, the scholar insisted on the exact opposite interpre- tation. For his generation, the Star of David was a holy symbol born of their suffering and death. And precisely for this reason, it's valuable to light the path toward life and rebuilding. Next, in somewhat cryptic language, he wrote that before ascending to the heights the road descends into the darkest abyss, and what had been a symbol of utter humiliation thus achieves greatness.
"Using this scholar's work as a reference, Guide began to have doubts about whether the symbolic Emperor for Japan and the Japanese defined in the postwar constitution was like the sort of symbol the Jewish scholar had discussed. What Guide and others were searching for was a holy sign or sym- bol for their generation created from suffering and death, something they could hold up as lighting the way to life and regeneration.
"I couldn't write this in my article, but that's what I concentrated on.
Right after I heard this, however, Guide and Patron did their Somersault.
'Everything we've said and done has been one big joke,' they said, as their parting shot. I was thoroughly disappointed, even angry. In other words, with the Emperor greater than Patron, this would be just a repetition of the same old cycle the Japanese people have experienced since the creation of the Meiji constitution.