Red Shark

Tokugawa greeted the others and was escorted into a conference room, which doubled as a museum. Preserved artifacts from the Pacific War — swords, bayonets, grenades, Arisaka bolt-action rifles, Nambu pistols, and sunburst flags — were displayed in glass cases. A battle scene painted in oils covered one whole wall. The work glorified determined Japanese troops and civilians turning back an American amphibious assault, one that never materialized, on the beaches of the Tokyo Plain in 1946. It was titled Defeat of America.

The other members took seats and sat stiffly and silently around a huge, black conference table while a servant set at each man’s place hot tea and sweet, sticky rice cakes. Tokugawa stood at the glass curtain wall, looking out at the ugly granite edifice that had once been the headquarters of Japan’s Imperial Army. Like his colleagues, Tokugawa believed that the spirit of the Imperial Army and that of its leader, General Hideki Tojo, still dwelled there. To most Japanese, the building personified the malignancy of Japan’s wartime savagery and was therefore hated.

Tokugawa rolled back the calendar, changing the scene outside to early summer 1945: Instead of sleek Toyotas and Hondas clogging Tokyo’s streets, he saw jinrickshaws and, overhead, not fat 747s but formations of silver B-29s raining devastation on a mammoth scale. His memory of the carnage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that was then yet to come made Tokugawa shudder.

He surveyed Tokyo’s smoggy, disordered skyline and saw a nation long risen from the ashes of war, poised now on the cusp of world domination. How easy to forget that the war had ended his father’s life and the lives of thousands of men like him. Sadly, for the generations of Japanese born after the surrender, the Pacific War was as unimportant in the scheme of things as the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and his Black Ships in 1853.

But for Tokugawa, the war and Japan’s defeat burned in his mind as brightly and as fiercely as if it had happened yesterday.

Hatoyama spoke to Tokugawa’s back. “The members have asked me to speak on their behalf.”

Tokugawa turned and faced the six of them.

Hoshino, almost ninety, a millionaire investor and survivor of the New Guinea campaign. He’d served under the command of a general who, after the war, had been executed for atrocities his troops had committed against Australian and American POWs.

Satsuma, late seventies, chairman of Daiwa Properties, Ltd., a holding company. He was that rarest of breeds, a shamed kamikaze pilot who had lived only because the war had ended before he’d been able to sacrifice himself for Hirohito.

Yukawa, sixty-year-old playboy multimillionaire owner of Nippon Image, Inc., publisher of lurid tabloids. He was the son of a war criminal executed for the mass murder of Filipino women and children in Manila. Many of the victims, the court said, had been burned alive.

Fukuda, fifty-year-old investment banker, grandson of an army officer convicted of killing American POWs forced to build a railroad through the impenetrable jungles of Burma.

Ishigari, sixty-five-year-old magnate, owner of IKE and J-Global shipbuilding. He was a nephew of the notorious General Homma, “Tiger of Malaya,” hanged for committing atrocities against civilian and military prisoners.

Hatoyama, grandson of an army officer hanged for ordering the ritual beheading of three captured Doolittle fliers shot down over Japanese-occupied territory in Kiangsi Province, China.

Hatoyama tugged his cuff links and said, “As you know, Iseda-san, the situation in North Korea presents both potential problems and potential opportunities for Japan. I refer, of course, to the trade and defense agreements under consideration by the United States and Japan.”

The agreement had sprung from a bruising trade embargo and heightened tensions between Washington and Tokyo over the enormous trade deficit the U.S. had rung up. The defense agreement negotiated to solve the problem, if approved, would permit the deployment of an American-designed theater-missile defense system on Japanese soil. The system was supposed to blunt any threat posed by Chinese and North Korean ballistic missiles.