Bribe Beast 01 - I. Snow in AfricaI

Someone says snowfall in Africa is not merely a myth. I left Japan in the early summer of 1984, heading to the southern part of the African continent. The further south you go in Africa, the cooler it gets. When you fly across the equator, the seasons flip. Although it wasn't snowing when I landed at O.R. Tambo International Airport, the wind was cold.

It was my own father who sent me to Johannesburg, which at the time was considered to have the highest rate of heinous crimes in the world. My father was born into a Kyoto family lineage that had been wealthy until before the war. My grandfather, my father's father, was the youngest of nine siblings from a well-known temple in Kyoto. It's likely that several of the nine siblings died of illness or in the war. My great-grandfather was the head priest of the now globally renowned temple K, but among his siblings were Shinto priests as well as military personnel who were executed after the war ended. My great-grandfather, the youngest, did not become a monk but a painter instead and converted to Christianity shortly after World War II, leading to his disownment by his family. As a result, the family into which my father was born fell into extreme poverty, igniting my father's intense hatred towards poverty.

My father advanced to a university in Kobe but had to drop out soon due to extreme poverty. I've heard that after leaving university, he joined the Japanese Communist Party and became active in its activities. The Public Security Intelligence Agency of Japan has stated that the Japanese Communist Party is still a subject of investigation under the Subversive Activities Prevention Law today. Perhaps realizing that being active in the Communist Party did not enable him to escape the poverty he so despised, my father resigned from the party and started to put serious effort into business.

My father and his associates earned money by collecting notebooks and scraps of paper inscribed with corporate secrets from the trash cans of business districts, creating a "newspaper" filled with confidential information, and selling it to the business rivals of those companies who wanted to know these secrets. In the 1960s, it occurred to no one to shred paper data to protect a company's secrets. In that generous era, corporate secrets were virtually nonexistent.

My father was an atheist, or rather, he despised religion. A major reason for this was my grandfather's conversion from Buddhism to Christianity, but also because my grandmother was a descendant of the hidden Christians of Kyushu. This heritage affected not only my father's siblings but also my half-brother. My father was the eldest of five siblings, one of whom was involved in founding a new religion based on the Old Testament in the Denenchofu area of Tokyo. When I went to university in Tokyo, this uncle often visited me, bringing along followers and his family members.

In Japan, Aum Shinrikyo became exposed in the media and, in 1995, carried out the subway sarin attack. Until just before the attack, I was impressed by the specifications of a computer called Mahaposha, which was loaned to me for a certain job, and I ended up recommending this Mahaposha computer to all my work colleagues. Nearly ten people bought it, but it turned out to be a computer that Aum Shinrikyo followers were assembling and selling at remarkably low prices. Then, when the terrorist attack occurred in 1995, the Public Security Intelligence Agency started contacting those who had purchased Mahaposha to question if they had any connection with Aum Shinrikyo. All of the colleagues who took my recommendation were also interrogated by the public security.

However, despite being the very person who recommended Mahaposha to everyone, I never once was contacted by the Public Security. It might have been because my uncle was an executive of a different new religion, and I had been marked since my student days. I have a half-brother who, while at a university in Kyoto, joined the Unification Church and was matched with a spouse at a mass wedding ceremony.

(To be continued)