Midnight and the Meaning of Love

  Not knowing the Japanese culture and beliefs, I was at a loss for answers about my wife’s family. So I picked the book up and read on.

  “… Shiori Nakamura appeared out of nowhere like a sudden breeze.”

  As an investigative author, I was certain that each human life has a definite history. I was determined to uncover the truth about the cold and calculating nemesis of America and American expansion. After several attempts to interview Naoko Nakamura’s relatives failed, I attempted to interview his closest friends, acquaintances, and business associates. When these avenues were also closed, with each of them refusing to meet to discuss, in person or over the phone, any aspect of Naoko Nakamura’s life, I turned to pursuing the truth by way of interviewing Naoko Nakamura’s enemies and disgruntled underlings. The following chapter represents the documented conclusions of seven years of tireless research and travel.

  Naoko Nakamura, a die-hard nationalist, whose life efforts were toward building a self-sufficient, financially and politically independent Japan, free from American occupation and American military air bases and control, as well as a Japan with its own sovereignty protected by its own well-trained and militarily equipped army, was having difficulty convincing top Japanese business elites of his credibility and, furthermore, bankability. Existing major Japanese corporations and their CEOs and executives were already in both formal and informal financial working relationships and alliances with American corporations. Even some of the most conservative Japanese corporations were in “secretive subcontracting and consulting relationships” with American consultants, experts, managers, and companies. Japanese corporate giants and executives did not trust that Naoko’s philosophy and method of “independence,” along with the elimination of the American corporate presence and inroads into Japan’s economy, would be fruitful.

  Nakamura therefore began covertly courting business alliances and contracts with former enemies of Japan like China and North Korea. Under his new motto and banner of “Asian Solidarity,” Nakamura formed the Pan Asian Corporation, rumored as having been funded in part by monies obtained through his Yakuza connection. In the process of promoting his newly formed corporation’s business, he traveled throughout the Asian continent, representing himself not as the staunch Japanese-only, pro-Japanese military guy but with a new face of the Asian-friendly business tycoon who wanted to help all Asian countries to distance themselves from dependence on and domination by America and American businesses.

  Naoko won big by brokering an exclusive car manufacturing deal with the government of Thailand, which gave Toyota the exclusive right to design cars for Thai citizens’ purchase. The Thai government gave Toyota, through a deal brokered by Nakamura, unfair trade advantages and in turn taxed American-manufactured cars at the rate of 300 percent, making the American vehicles unaffordable to the people of Thailand. As the nation of Thailand moved from bicycles to motorbikes and motorcycles to “tut-tuts” to cars, Naoko Nakamura’s Pan Asian Corporation won big confidence in the Asian business region, big benefits, incentives, and great wealth. It was this deal that won Naoko Nakamura acceptance by influencial CEOs, who then began to trust Nakamura at least as a broker of lucrative deals.

  It was in North Korea, however, that Naoko Nakamura discovered his wife-to-be, Joo Eun Lee.

  I put the book down, thankful that the author was about to get to the point. I was interested in the whole business-building thing though. I thought there was a real simple way for the author to break it down, if he really wanted the reader to understand it. Naoko wanted to make paper in his country and use his power to protect his nation and people and family. He wanted America to get the fuck out so he and his crew could be the heavyweights on the block. He wanted the old boys who had been running things to team up with him and run the enemy out. That’s how I understood it. I did have to, however, look some words up in my dictionary. They were clandestine, nationalist, conservative, sovereignty, covertly, staunch, and broker. I looked them up, wrote the definitions down in my notebook, and continued reading about my wife’s parents.

  Joo Eun Lee was the daughter of a North Korean government official who controlled printing and the North Korean propaganda machine. His business was printing North Korean–approved books, manuals, and pamphlets for the North Korean educational system. However, his reputation was tarnished when his wife suddenly defected to South Korea, leaving behind two daughters, one of whom was fourteen-year-old Joo Eun Lee.

  Joo Eun was a fan of great books and authors from all around the world. She led a sheltered life in a protected environment. Her best friends were books that her father kept hidden and locked in the basement of his home as part of a private, secret collection of world literature. It is believed that the influence of these books spurred Joo Eun to take the uncommon and bold step in a Communist country of becoming a “free thinker.” She wrote her first book, which was more of a pamphlet, at age fourteen. It was titled Omahnee, which simply means “Mother” in the Korean language. Using her father’s privtate printing equipment, she and her best friend printed out the pamphlets and had them secretly circulated and distributed. The well-written, scholarly ten-page anonymous letter printed in the pamphlet caught on like wildfire. Some say it was because of the political argument that Joo Eun raised in her writing as she spoke to her anonymous mother about freedom, family, and national loyalty all being the same concept. Others say the pamphlets became popular because they were “forbidden fruits.” However, the most compelling reason for the popularity of the pamphlets among North Koreans young and old, male and female, military and civilian, was the provocative picture of a young, perhaps fourteen-year-old naked Korean girl on the cover, lying on the floor in the fetal position with her newly blossomed breasts and curves and a full flow of long, straight black hair concealing her face.

  Omahnee was only the first of Joo Eun’s famed underground writings. She went on to publish twelve pamphlets in total, all following the same format of politically charged, passionate, and scholarly arguments enclosed in a cover displaying an attractive young teen, a long-haired girl naked and faceless, striking a highly seductive pose.

  A pamphlet entitled One Womb, Joo Eun’s twelfth publication, is rumored to have landed in Naoko Nakamura’s far-reaching hands and moved him so passionately that he had to have the then fifteen-year-old anonymous girl for his own. In this, her final political pamphlet while living in North Korea, Joo Eun wrote and argued passionately that North and South Korea are born of the same womb, sisters of the same mother. She used the metaphor of two sisters, bound by blood and love and life, who got into a heated argument. One sister got married to an “outsider” (an American) and allowed the outsider to prevent the sisters from ever forgiving each other or making amends. The two sisters therefore became strangers to one another, forsaking their true blood relationship and one of them bonding only with the stranger instead. Joo Eun argued heatedly that no matter what, despite all arguments and disagreements, the depth of the sister’s relationship and sister’s destiny will forever be entangled and intertwined and inseparable because they share the same blood, the same language and culture, and because they emerged from the same womb. She argued convincingly that North Korea and South Korea on closer inspection also share the same enemy. Joo Eun accused the American stranger of augmenting a hatred between sisters and pursuing the complete isolation and elimination of one sister, namely North Korea.

  It is the photo on the cover of One Womb that caused the rage, however, and led the free anonymous underground pamphlet to triple its printing. The attractive teen on the cover was photographed naked and sitting with her legs opened on the edge of a simple wooden chair. The young girl’s head was down, disguising her face. In Joo Eun’s signature style. Her long hair was hanging from her head and flowing down, finally intermingling and resting in her vaginal hairs.

  Naoko Nakamura, according to an undisclosed source, paid 1 million yen ($100,000) to a North Korean agent to identify the girl on the cover.
He then paid 1 million yen to another North Korean man to capture her.

  Fifteen-year-old Joo Eun Lee arrived in Osaka, Japan, by sea on the dark waters of the dark night.

  No source has confirmed or documented what happened between Naoko Nakamura and Joo Eun Lee once she arrived in Japan. However, on her sixteenth birthday, Naoko Nakamura married her at his Kyoto home. Sixteen is the legal age for females to marry in Japan.

  On Joo Eun Lee’s first public sitting, she was presented by Naoko Nakamura as his new wife, a sixteen-year-old Japanese bride whom he introduced as Shiori Nakamura. Months later, the couple announced the birth of the daughter who would be their only child, Akemi Nakamura, born at midnight at their Kyoto home on December 31, 1970. Perhaps her entrance into the world was clouded by the Japanese New Year celebration, which is the most important holiday of their year. It marked a new beginning for the couple as well as ushering in the financial high point of the Pan Asian Corporation.

  Both of my sources of the above information were murdered in Japan on separate dates and in separate places and by different means. Both of my source’s murders remain unsolved. This information, therefore, cannot be corroborated at the time of this book’s publication. However, as an author, I testify to these facts, which I obtained against a wall of cultural silence, and as an outsider, a gaijin. My written and secretly recorded interviews with both of my sources for the above information remain secured at the time of publishing. This first publishing makes those interviews a matter of record.

  Mind-blowing, that’s how I felt about the unauthorized biography, Never Surrender. I looked up the words nemesis in my English dictionary and gaijin in my Japanese dictionary. The new words I was learning danced around in my mind.

  “Captured at fifteen …” In what month of her fifteenth year was she captured? She was still in North Korea when she published her last pamphlet at fifteen, the book said. It had to take some time for it to be distributed, read, and discussed and for Nakamura to get hold of it as well. Then she was captured and brought to Japan but not married until sixteen. Did he go into her before their wedding? Joo Eun gave birth to my wife Akemi “months later.” How many months later? I asked myself.

  Murder, I thought to myself. Men will murder to protect their land, women, beliefs, and profits. However, Nakamura was not an honorable man. He wasn’t driven by any true beliefs. He believed only in himself and what he wanted at the moment. He took by force, what should never be taken by force, a woman’s heart and a woman’s body. He was so far from the truth that he would not even allow his wife to keep her name. Why? In the Sudan a woman will always keep her name, the name of her father and the name of her father’s father. We are a country of fathers. We are all traced through our fathers, and no one will think of taking that away from a woman. Even after a Sudanese woman’s marriage, she is still identified through her father. I began considering, What are the consequences in a nation of fathers when a person has a father who is corrupt, without faith or boundaries or limits?

  Then my mind returned to murder. The author’s two sources were both eliminated. Pushing the puzzle pieces around, I figured that these were the same two guys that Nakamura paid the money to, to get his hands on Joo Eun. He made agreements with them, signed them, and paid out the proper sums. Then he merked them. I was realizing this was his style. He comes in the form of business. He makes agreements as though his word is bond, like any true man’s word is bond. Then he doubles back and betrays his own word and signature and agreement, the same way he did when he signed the marriage papers for Akemi and me. He gave his word, printed his word, and then doubled back and kidnapped his daughter, the same way that he had kidnapped his wife! Deceitful motherfucker! I thought to myself. Then I breathed some to erase my anger.

  Returning to the few remaining pages of the chapter titled “Mysterious Marriage,” I continued to read on.

  Joo Eun Lee’s or Shiori Nakamura’s loyalty to her husband Naoko Nakamura was solid and impeccable. During their first year of marriage and her pregnancy, she was seen only at selected high-profile social gatherings with her husband, where she was reportedly joyful, polite, alluring, and silent aside from introductions, greetings, and small nicities.

  Readers and fans of her anonymous free pamphlets were not given any new writings from Joo Eun until five years later. Her new pamphlets, published as small, thin, softcover books, were not anonymous and were not free. They were written, published, and advertised, and sold under the name Shiori Nakamura. After a careful and thorough analysis of the writing style, the word usage and placement, the passion and the philosophy driving the work, England’s famed historian Robert Barringer concluded that Shiori Nakamura’s books and the underground North Korean pamphlets do indeed share the same author, with an acknowledgment of an identifiable maturing as well as philosophical and intellectual growth.

  Shiori Nakamura, the author, debuted as a young Japanese mother, convincing other mothers who read her letters, stories, and poems that women are the key to national security. She argued that if new mothers raised their children with an unreserved, unconventional love and emotion, a new and more compassionate generation would emerge and seize the reins of power. A more compassionate, loving, loved child will put forth a more compassionate philosophy, politics, and policy, thus saving nations from war and death and hunger and disease and chaos. She taught that only this new philosophy would save Japanese mothers from their depression. Shiori’s writings elevated the abnormally conservative and servile posture of the traditional Japanese woman. She issued controversial writings that were broadly discussed and debated. She emphasized a more balanced, well-learned, and peaceful global community. She delivered a best-selling manual called How to Raise Strong, Feminine, Knowledgeable Daughters. When she was not writing or offering her annual reading, she was an at-home wife and mother completely dedicated to the raising of her one child, reportedly in the manner which she described in her work.

  Naoko Nakamura allowed her. Extremely clever, he knew well how to make maximum use out of each piece and person in his kingdom. He believed that his wife’s philosophy was not in conflict with his “Pan Asian” philosophical face, from which he benefited financially over many years.

  Shiori Nakamura would read her work publicly only once a year. She appeared demure and lovely, speaking well-polished and perfect Japanese. She refused all interviews, nor would she answer questions.

  Shiori Nakamura died tragically young at the age of twenty-eight from brain cancer. This author sympathetically submits that it must have been difficult and debilitating for her to live a life of secrets, particularly a secret identity, which may have complicated her health in the end. Her daughter, Akemi Nakamura, is noted throughout Japan as a young artistic genius to watch for.

  Below is Joo Eun Lee’s last poem, which offers subtle hints of her evolution and beliefs and secrets and sorrows and joys. The young North Korean woman having emerged from a Communist country, makes overtures to God in Sufi-like implications and pays homage to life and love. The first and only slight disagreement with her husband is hinted at here in the lines she penned. Perhaps Joo Eun saw her life’s end approaching.

  Hananihm

  People who love are different from everybody else.

  People who feel are more fortunate than all.

  Rich men who buy and grab up things are just moving them around.

  They have bought these things with money, which they can never own.

  A mother with life in her womb is the one who is truly wealthy.

  A newborn in the arms is beyond oil in one palm and pure gold in the other.

  Father says that there is no God, so that I might worship him.

  But something is moving in the atmosphere …

  Not for viewing, but for sensing and being changed by.

  That I can feel. I am certain.

  My first love was the sky. Who created that?

  My second love was my mother’s eyes that revealed a refle
ction of me.

  My father had a house of great beauty built for us all.

  But who created the mind, the memory, and the imagination?

  I’d sit in the soil surrounded with no walls just to talk to that ONE, even without words …

  Diamonds are lovely, but sound is lovelier.

  Roller coasters are thrilling. My clitoris clothed in my vagina is more, more, more.

  Why turn on the lights when we can lie under the glare of the moon?

  Why listen to the call for war when we can make love?

  He wants revolution, but I want passion revolving in my soul.

  A man invented the fan, but who created the wind and caressed it into a breeze

  Then converted it into a storm?

  A cloud holds the water, yet both clouds and water were created.

  Impress me not with castles, cars, or clothes. I’d rather meet the Maker of rain—

  But would be content with simply being showered while lying in the grass

  Facing a darkened sky pregnant with thunder and leaking lightning.