Cult X

  “Please do what I say.”

  The leader looked up at Takahara as if the gun weren’t even there. Then he returned to sucking on the woman’s lips.

  “I will record you. I have a script here. You will read it. We are going to carry out an attack. You will be our figurehead. I am in charge now. I took over this cult while you were drowning in women.”

  Takahara was sweating copiously. He had never been this close to the leader. He was so close that he noticed the smell coming from the leader’s skin. His breathing was heavy. He felt a pressure bearing down on him. What is this pressure?

  “. . . Oh.”

  “Do you understand? You can do what I say, or I can kill you. Either way is fine with me. Will you call your helpers from the other room? If you do, I’ll just kill you. You have no choice.”

  “Takahara . . .”

  The leader moved his face. Takahara knew he couldn’t shoot the leader in the back of the head.

  “Don’t move. I’ll shoot.”

  “Takahara.”

  He didn’t pull the gun away from the leader’s head. But the leader’s head moved. And the muzzle grazed the back of his head, his ear, his cheek. Takahara’s heart beat so fast it hurt. The gun was pressed into the leader’s cheek, twisting the flesh. But the leader acted as if it weren’t there at all.

  “I’ll shoot.”

  “Takahara. Have you ever seen the true shape of god?”

  The space around the leader grew cold.

  “What? No. How could I?”

  “Oh . . . I have.”

  The leader looked at Takahara blankly. The muzzle of the gun dug into his cheek.

  “Under the right circumstances, at the right time, god will appear . . . And after you see god, even when the particles inside you are replaced, god will stay with you for a certain amount of time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Watch . . . I will give you strength.”

  He felt a shock to the heart. Matsuo had told him the same thing. His heart felt like it would burst.

  “And what should I say?” the leader asked.

  “What?”

  “Your script. Did you give up on that already?”

  His hands shaking, Takahara took out the script. In that moment, the gun strayed from the leader, but Takahara didn’t notice.

  “Ah, I see.”

  The leader looked at Takahara. Takahara panicked, but turned on the recorder. The leader began to read.

  “You have all worked hard to secretly carry out my will. Now it will all begin. Go! Spread my will around the world. My friends! You are all part of me, and I am part of you. You who rush to battle, you are my pride. We will soon follow you!”

  The leader put down the script, and began sucking the woman’s lips again, hollowly. The lips of that woman who might just be dead. It was then that Takahara realized somewhere in the corner of his mind that she was the Cupro woman who had come on to him. He noticed, but Takahara did not have the energy to feel anything.

  “Leader . . . What . . .”

  “Hm?”

  “What are you?” Takahara found himself asking, as he gripped the recorder. He himself didn’t understand what he was asking. He had completely forgotten about his gun. “What are you?”

  “If you’re finished, get out of here,” the leader said lazily.

  Takahara left the room. He had no memory of getting in the car, but there he was, gripping the steering wheel, out of breath. He stepped on the accelerator and left the building’s parking lot.

  It will begin tomorrow.

  10

  Ryoko Tachibana woke up on the concrete floor.

  At some point, she had fallen asleep. She wasn’t sure if it was light or dark outside. Was it almost tomorrow?

  What’s happening outside this room? Is he locked up? I have to get out of here fast. I have to let the police know where this place is.

  But she had no way out. It didn’t seem like anyone was coming. I thought they’d at least bring me food.

  “If friendly aliens ever come to the earth, I’m sure they’ll be surprised by how good humans are at creating poverty,” Takahara always used to say. He really cared about the world’s poor.

  But his compassion did not come from virtuousness. He cared most for the starving, and that was because of his personal experiences.

  Before they’d become siblings, he had starved. He hadn’t just experienced the psychological pain of feeling hungry while staring up at the lights of wealthy people’s houses—he had been completely starved, locked up in a tiny room with no food at all for a long time. He hadn’t spoken often with Tachibana about that. When they finally found him and he was taken to the hospital, he was in critical condition. He had digested all of his own muscle; he was on the verge of death. It was a miracle the doctors were able to save him, that he hadn’t lost his eyesight or suffered from brain damage.

  Sometimes he would throw up when pictures of famines were broadcast on the news. It wasn’t because of his passion for others so much as from the pain that came when he was reminded of the terror he had actually experienced.

  “Why do poor countries exist? Why do countries full of starving people exist? It’s because rich countries want them to be poor.”

  When she listened to him speak, it became clear to her that the world was carefully producing poverty as part of its system. She’d heard him talk about it so many times she remembered most of it verbatim now.

  “First imagine that some natural resource—say, crude oil—is discovered in a country in Africa. If the king of that country grants the right to extract that oil to a rich country, then their relations will continue as usual. But if they refuse, then we, the rich countries, will gather up all that country’s poor people and get them to form a rebel group. They’ll arm them and start a rebellion. The media will call it a ‘popular uprising’ against ‘dictatorial oppression.’ Many people will die in the rebellion and many children will become orphans. That country will become even poorer. The rebels we support will eventually defeat the king, and make one of their own the new king and start a new government. And then we get the oil. And it’s more helpful if the new king and government are full of corruption instead of truly concerned about their own country’s poor. You want a king you can bribe, so you can get his oil easily.

  “Let’s say, for example, the king of a certain poor African country is worth five trillion yen. That’s an absurd amount of money. Let’s say the total population of that country is around sixty-six million people. And backing that king is a powerful Western country. If that country has oil, it could be rich, you’d think. But that’s only if the country’s government and government agencies function properly. Once that country finds crude oil, it will run headlong to dependence on that oil. The country’s currency will drastically rise in value, and all its exports aside from oil will receive a death blow. When they extract the oil, they have to pressure it to the surface. They’ll run it through pipelines and attach valves, but that will cause a lot of damage to the surrounding environment, and many fields will be ruined. Countless farmers will be left without a livelihood. And the increase in jobs that comes from harvesting crude oil is actually far lower than that created by manufacturing. Only those who work with refined oil will suddenly start making money. The rich countries just want to get their hands on oil for a slightly better price. They’ll drown the government and agencies that own that crude oil in bribes.

  “But eventually the country’s poverty will become a global issue, and there will come support. It’s called Official Development Assistance. ODA money comes from rich countries’ taxes. Of course businessmen in those rich countries work behind the scenes with these ODAs. To give a simple example, let’s say an international organization gives an enormous public donation to a poor country. It’s not uncommon for that d
onation to become pocket money for the country’s top officials and the people who work in the agencies below them, and never make it to the pockets of the poor. There’s data on this. Of the money a certain country’s finance ministry earmarked for medical clinics for farmers, less than one percent of that expenditure actually got to the clinics. There are also cases where those large donations conveniently wind up in the banks of rich countries. The poor country has to withdraw the money from them. And of course, those banks turn a profit.

  “As long as poor countries keep existing, it’s easy for rich ones to create ODAs. Often they are public businesses. I wish I could believe even half of these ODAs actually do their job, but that’s often not the case. For example, Company A uses money from an ODA to do something in a poor country. Poor people will get the leftovers, but Company A will take at least half the profit. That’s what these public businesses called ODAs are about. The system guarantees that some percentage of the money winds up in the hands of wealthy private businesses. One could say that just by existing, these poor countries allow ODAs to make a profit.

  “Let’s look at farming. It’s actually a lie that we don’t have enough food. If we distributed the present amount of food we produce to everyone in the world, we’d still have too much. Rich countries pay their own farmers huge subsidies. Because of these subsidies, wealthy countries can easily export the food they produce at low prices. And that food winds up in Africa. African farmers can’t compete in terms of prices with these cheap products produced by wealthy countries. Why do rich countries protect their farmers with subsidies? The reason is simple. It’s a vote-getting machine in election time. All countries want to raise their own food production rate in case of war. But they also know that exporting this cheap food they subsidize to Africa hurts African farmers. There’s a trick here, too. Those African farmers will start growing other crops instead. The rich countries want to make poor Africans grow things that are useful for them. Like coffee. Or chocolate. They’ll get them to produce vast quantities, which lowers the prices, so their own industries can import those products cheaply. The cheap things we get in our own country come from the unfair wage systems in these poor countries. People starve in Africa because they can no longer farm to sustain themselves. African farmers should have the power to grow their own food. But instead they get buried under manufactured poverty.

  “Poverty is produced deliberately by wealthy countries. But in the past few years, things have changed. In some African countries, a middle class has gradually begun to emerge. Instead of just using Africans as cheap manpower, wealthy countries have been looking for another world market, and they’ve tried to force Africa into being a consumer society as well. We’ve yet to see if it works, if it will help with the eradication of poverty. If they want Africa to become another world market, then Africans will have to become wealthy. But if businesses run off to drain them of all they’re worth, Africa will be forever impoverished. Now’s their chance to change.”

  Takahara grew passionate once he started speaking.

  “The main problem is businesses in wealthy countries. If we can control their reckless behavior, then, theoretically, starvation will vanish from the face of the earth. It’s fine for these companies to try to develop poor countries to make a profit. Not all businesses can be charities. But it’s no good if they don’t imagine success for the poor countries as well. That’s why we must send watchdog agencies to oversee these multinational businesses. NGOs are too weak to monitor them on their own. If a country wants to use an ODA, then they should also send another agency to watch them. Then we’ll have them report the results in the mass media, and also to the Diet every year. What is that business doing over there? Are its activities hurting the local people? Businesses will have to pay attention to their image. The businesses can appeal to the public as trying to end poverty. If the economy that provides their profit is also tied to work to end poverty, things will move quickly.

  “Of course, it’s unrealistic to ask rich countries to stop subsidizing their own farmers. If they did, African farmers would be able to compete in international markets. But at least we should stop exporting our subsidized foods to African countries. Then African farmers could eventually start rebuilding the industry to feed themselves. Africa’s food self-sufficiency rate would increase.

  “We should create an international law that when rebellions occur, both rebels and government must make public where they got the weapons and funds they’re using. If we do that we’ll find out which wealthy nations instigated the uprising and are controlling it. We’ll see who’s really behind that fight.

  “It’s a lie that the Internet will connect the whole world. In the poor villages where they really have important things to say, there’s no Internet. So we have to create a system in which people everywhere can say when and where problems are occurring. Those who say that providing the infrastructure for such a system will take too long, that it’s unrealistic—they don’t know anything. After all, guerrillas in the mountains already use the Internet and satellite cell phones. If we tried to do it, we could. We need sites like Wikipedia—proper, detailed public pages, for everyone in the world, so everyone can hear everyone else’s voice.

  “We must introduce an international tax. We can use the money from taxing the profits of the global economy outside national borders to solve the world’s problems. This already started in part of the EU with their carbon tax on airlines. If we could tax financial institutions just a tiny, tiny bit, we would have a huge amount of money to spend on the poor.

  “Total fair trade. Fair trade certifies that products weren’t produced under inhumane conditions by overworked employees. That they were produced fairly, and that employees were properly paid. It helps reduce poverty, but the system still has to be perfected, and it hasn’t spread very far. Instead of leaving it up to small, local grassroots movements, we should use our taxes and require television commercials. It may be difficult for local television stations to demand commercials from international corporations, so the government will have to make it mandatory. In Japan’s case, NHK should be broken into two. NHK is run on money collected from the public, and even though it’s supposedly independent from politics, it tends to lean in favor of whoever’s in charge. Of course, that’s because that bent is also the bent of the people who elected that government. Since NHK is unlikely, then, to broadcast attacks on the government, I want it split in two. One half would be the NHK we have now that plays safe, public programs. Of course, there’s great value in that. And the other one would be like a more progressive BBC, a radical public broadcast that picks up the provocative scoops. It would cover the crimes of businesses—their criminal pursuit of profit. I want a powerful media agency that has nothing to do with business advertising.”

  When Tachibana had listened to him talk, she’d thought it was all just the beautiful fantasies of a young man who wanted to end poverty. But she also doubted herself. People died—they starved to death, were worked to death by rich countries, died by gunfire. And in this world, we call the actions of those who try to stop that death cycle fantasies.

  He used to say he wanted to be a writer. But at some point he stopped writing. “I gave up on writing stories,” he said. “Instead, I’m going to write my own life. I’m going to act. I’m going for the root of it all. I’m going to change the world.”

  He worked for many NGOs, and expanded his network. He had a way of looking down on people, and he was very proud, but he was also genuinely smart. He gradually grew famous in the world of NGOs.

  Of course, there were many problems with his theories. For example, sending agencies to monitor multinationals in Africa. Since those agencies acted on moral and ethical principles, they had no strength to fight. They’d lose to the companies with no morals or ethics, who just wanted to consume the resources of those countries.

  Let’s say a well-intentioned company tried to begin developing some
resource in Africa. They’d sign contracts with local businesses. They wouldn’t bribe government agencies or those in top positions at local companies. They’d improve working conditions and work to help improve the local infrastructure. But if the local businesses and governments weren’t also well-intentioned, they’d find all that a waste of time. They’d simply hand those resources over to someone else who didn’t pester them. In Africa, there are actually many cases of this occurring.

  When Tachibana had told Takahara that, he just smiled. “I simply have a vision,” he said. “Executing the system—that’s a job for the people who can create something so detailed.”

  It was true, most of the world’s problems were created by businesses. And they were behind all the world’s conflicts.

  But gradually Takahara had changed. He stuck to his principles, but he started searching for radical ways to make things happen. He took a long trip, and when he returned he didn’t talk about it much, but Tachibana saw his passport and knew he’d passed through several African countries.

  He didn’t tell her why, but he had suddenly gotten interested in this religion. Unlike many of the believers, who were sucked into the cult by Sawatari’s charisma, Takahara had sought out Sawatari deliberately, only pretending to adore the man.