On the Fifth Day (32 page)

"That's unlike him," said Thomas.

"Yes. He seemed anxious, troubled, even," said Kumi.

"When I asked him about it he said he'd tell me later, when things were clearer to him. He didn't talk about his work or why he had come. I let him be, because I suspected some of it was about us. I hadn't seen him for five years, remember, not since . . ."

"You left me," said Thomas. "Yes."

Kumi looked away, chewing the inside of her cheek as she did when restraining herself.

"So unless it really was all about
us,
" he said, using that last word as if it were a kind of in-joke, "then something hap

pened between his decision to leave Italy and his arrival in Japan. He seemed quite happy according to the people who met him in Naples. What made him so 'troubled'?"

"It would help if we knew exactly where he went when he left Tokyo," said Jim, who had been staying on the conversa

tion's perimeter in case it became too personal.

"I think I know," said Thomas, "though I don't understand why."

CHAPTER 68

Outside the NHK studio in Kofu, Thomas joined a huddle of foreign journalists clambering off a bus, held up his passport and an old library card as the throng moved through security, and took a seat at the back. They were shown a five-minute video showing the layout of the site and listened to an elderly local archaeologist who explained the significance of the find. The translator was poor and clearly made no attempt to pass 239

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

along the more technical details, but the archaeologist was clearly excited, and that set the tone for the afternoon. When the foreign journalists--mainly Australian, Dutch, and German--were shown into the press conference proper, the place was already packed with locals, and the podium was surrounded by microphone stands and halogen lamps. Some of the major papers--
The Yomiuri
and
Asahi Shimbun
in particular--had at least five people in their teams, poised with recorders and cameras of all kinds, and every staff member of the TV station seemed to have abandoned their other duties to see Watanabe.

"Are the Beatles back in town?" said Thomas to a reporter with a toothbrush mustache who wore a
New Zealand Herald
badge on a cord round his neck.

"This guy's bigger," he said. "Or he will be soon. Or he wants to be."

He smiled wryly at his final modification and then started taking pictures. Michihiro Watanabe had just walked in. The room virtually exploded, flashbulbs going off so fre

quently that the brilliance was almost constant. A wave of ap

plause swelled around the room, and all but a handful of the journalists--mostly foreigners--were beaming and cheering. It was a sportsman's reception, a rock star's. For an archaeologist, Thomas thought, he looked like one too. He was thin, but well muscled, his arms roped with vein and sinew. He was perhaps fifty, but looked ten years younger, and his black hair was spiked with gel. He wore gray-lensed shades with a hint of blue, and a close-fitting designer T-shirt with a metallic sheen. His manner was understated, but com

fortable, and he smiled easily at the cameras.

"Michihiro Watanabe, the thinking Japanese woman's crumpet," whispered the New Zealander.

Thomas watched the way the station's women grinned girl

ishly and needed no translation of
crumpet.
Watanabe took control of the proceedings, chatting ami

ably, making the occasional self-deprecating joke, and nod

ded to an assistant at the back who showed PowerPoint slides 240

A. J. Hartley

of the dig on a screen behind him: a few charts and diagrams, but mainly stills of the tomb, its contents, the neighboring--as yet unexcavated--tomb, and, of course, the great man him

self, peering at the ground, pointing things out to his team, and generally looking casual, clever, and in control. The trans

lator added a running commentary, stumbling over dates and--Thomas suspected--editorializing freely as the core el

ements of the find were laid out.

"Contrary to previous belief," he said, "this demonstrates the presence of non-Asian foreigners in Japan in the middle Kofun period--about AD 600--and strongly suggests that they were early Christian missionaries."

Everyone in the room knew this already, but it still caused a ripple of excitement, as if they had needed to hear it live to make sure, or that they had half-expected Watanabe to retract the outlandish claim. For the last four days, the site had been the source of the best stories of a scientific nature to hit Japan in years. Information had been carefully regulated, trickling out in teasing sound bites, the site and Watanabe's lab facility close by kept under tight security. This was understandable given the scale of the find, but it also smacked of carefully or

chestrated marketing.

Finally, with the air of a conjurer who had saved his best trick for last, Watanabe produced a Perspex box from under the podium containing a partial skull with the lower jawbone sepa

rate but intact and an ornamented silver crucifix. The crowd pressed forward and the wall of camera flash began again.

"The Japanese skull has very rounded eye sockets," said the translator, as Watanabe showed comparative diagrams. Even to Thomas's untrained eye, some distinction was clear.

". . . as did its Kofun forbear. The eye sockets of a European skull are clearly oblong, identical to those of the remains from our site. The long bones from the burial also supply evidence that the bodies originated in Europe, though these bones are considerably more fragmentary. A Japanese Kofun femur is noticeably straighter along its length than the European. As you can see, the examples from the grave are quite curved."

241

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

Questions followed, mainly in Japanese, mainly softballs that Watanabe took some pleasure in stroking out of the park. Yes, there is evidence of Eurasian connections during the first and second centuries between Rome and Han China via the silk road. Yes, the Great Wall of China was--after all--built to keep out the Hsiung-nu--the same Huns who were besieg

ing Rome. Recent DNA evidence suggests that a skeleton in Sian, China, that is more than two thousand years old is al

most certainly European. The great ecumene between China and Europe was the realm of militant nomads who surely af

fected both cultures, and there may have been express contact with Japan via the Siberian kurgan. When all came to all, the lack of prior evidence was not a good enough reason to assert that there could not have been contact between East and West, between Europe and the farthest shores of Asia. There are also the famous blond mummies of western China . . . It went on for some time and gradually deteriorated into

"human interest" questions about how he stayed motivated, his work ethic, his "genius" for the shocking speculation that no one else was prepared to make but which was the only one to truly fit the facts. By the end, it was clear that this was less an inquiry into his finds than it was a canonization of the finder. The only sour note came from the New Zealander.

"Is it not true that the Jomon predecessors of the YayoiKofun Japanese have misled people before into speculating on a Caucasoid background?"

The audience turned to the foreign press corps and mur

mured among themselves as the question was translated into Japanese. Only Watanabe remained unflappable.

"We are confident," he said in English, smiling at the sur

prise that this strategy produced in his audience, "that these bones show clear European origin in ways absolutely different from Kofun Japanese bones."

"Even though the survival of Kofun bones is compara

tively rare?" the reporter shot back.

"Not so rare that there can be any dispute about what they look like," said Watanabe. "But to be absolutely sure, we are 242

A. J. Hartley

subjecting the bones to every available test, including smallscale measurement of the craniofacial details, which will then be run through a computerized data-evaluation system based on known examples. The data will be processed by an inde

pendent analyst."

His smile never wavered, but his gaze drifted to the gradu

ate student beside him, and Thomas felt sure that something passed between them. The student lowered his eyes as if in reverence.

The applause at the end was more than polite, more than enthusiastic. It was, again, slightly frenzied as only receptions of celebrities are.

"Get used to it," said the New Zealander, leaning in to Thomas. "He's not going away any time soon."

In a profession generally known for its dustiness, Watan

abe was clearly a star, one who had always had a flair for deal

ing with the media. Now he had a real find to match the pizzazz of his personality.

"Why is it such a big deal?" said Thomas.

"Every Japanese kids' textbook will tell you that Europe

ans didn't come here till 1543 when a Portuguese boat ran aground on the southern tip of Kyushu. Francis Xavier--or
Saint
Francis Xavier, depending on your persuasion--arrived, Bible in hand, six years later. If Watanabe is right, all that goes out the window. You have Christian evangelists deep in the Japanese heartland seven hundred years earlier than any

one suspected. It's big news, all right. Certainly big enough to keep Watanabe's highly polished smile on our TVs for a long time to come."

"I don't think I get it," said Thomas. "I mean, I understand, but I don't get the hoopla."

"It's partly him," said the New Zealander, zipping up his camera bag and nodding toward the platform party. "He could find a Coke bottle in his yard and make it sound exciting. But it's also them."

"Them?"

243

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

"The Japanese. They don't like being late arrivals at the important events. For the most part they take from whatever religion they want when they want. Buddhists worship at Shinto shrines on certain festival days, and have Christian-style wed

dings like they see in the movies. But Christianity is where it's at, and the Japanese like to be at the heart of whatever is cool. Jesus is cool, apparently. And if they can rewrite history to discover that Christianity has actually been around here about as long as it has in the rest of the world--and a lot longer than it has in America--so much the better."

He smirked, mirthlessly, and Thomas saw in him a familiar type of disgruntled ex-pat, himself a minor celebrity by sheer virtue of his foreignness but always a little on the outside of the culture in which he had chosen to live.

"See you at the next one," said the journalist with mock jauntiness.

As he walked away, Thomas looked back to the platform party, where Watanabe was still being photographed and fawned over by the local NHK anchorwoman. She nodded and smiled in vociferous agreement, and Thomas felt a stirring in himself of the New Zealander's bitterness, a stirring rather like memory. He watched them, Watanabe in his designer shades and all other eyes on him. Except one.

It was Watanabe's assistant, a young, sallow-faced Japa

nese man in his early twenties, a graduate student, formally dressed, his hair was parted on the side. He was darker skinned than most of those around him and could have passed for Korean or even Malaysian. His gaze was fixed on Thomas, his expression unreadable, though there was a hint of some

thing behind the studied blankness, and when his attention fi

nally strayed back to Watanabe, Thomas thought he saw a hint of unease.

Thomas took a couple of steps forward and something very strange happened. Watanabe was in full flow, delighting all with his homey, quirky brand of academia, when he suddenly stopped midsentence. His audience waited politely, and 244

A. J. Hartley

someone giggled, thinking this was part of his performance; he tipped his sunglasses down his nose till he was peering di

rectly out at Thomas. Then he became quite still, and Thomas, feeling the oddness of the moment, did the same. The rare glimpse of Watanabe's eyes prompted a flash of someone's camera, and in that brilliant splash of light, the ar

chaeologist looked cautious, even wary. The audience looked from him to each other, still smiling awkwardly, and then, slowly, like a theater audience that realizes that the show is go

ing on in the house behind them and not on the stage, they turned to Thomas.

There was a moment of complete silence, and then the sallow-faced graduate student was talking again, pulling at

tention toward himself, so that finally even Watanabe turned, and the smiles that had grown strained and fixed broadened again. Almost immediately, a security guard appeared at Thomas's shoulder with the translator who was asking to see Thomas's credentials, using his body as a screen to block out the platform party, and begin shepherding him toward the door and out.

CHAPTER 69

"They knew me," said Thomas. "How do you explain that?

Watanabe and the other guy, the graduate student, they recog

nized me the moment they saw me."

Kumi was back from her Tokyo meeting, back, she said, without further explanation, for the weekend. They had rented three rooms in a traditional hotel or
ryokan
in Shimobe, a vil

lage beside a river a few miles outside Kofu. It was quiet and just picturesque enough to make the idea of three tourists stay

ing there plausible, but small enough that any strangers asking 245

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

about them would stand out as much as they did. A local train could have them in Kofu in a matter of minutes or take them up to the mountain shrines of Minobu.

"How did they react to you?" Kumi asked.

"That was the weird thing," said Thomas. "Watanabe looked uneasy, even scared."

"It can't be because of what you've learned," said Kumi with a casualness that brought color to Thomas's cheeks. "We don't really know much of anything."

"You're working on that, are you?" said Thomas, his voice a little strident in the tiny, six-mat room, with its sliding paper-covered
shoji.