Finally he opened it again and slipped out the contents.
Inside was a confidential memo on the old Nippon, Inc. letterhead, unsigned but obviously authored by Matsuo Noda, a top-security document that had been clocked in at a document station at Tsukuba Science City. How had Allan Stern stumbled onto this? Had he stolen it? Picked it up by accident? It was in Japanese, so how could he have sensed its real import?
American ingenuity, he told himself, defied all understanding. The memo, which outlined the timetable for a massive scenario, had been the first step of a long path of discovery leading Kenji Asano to indisputable proof of Matsuo Noda's real objective. Allan Stern must have had this translated or somehow intuitively guessed Noda's plan. And then . . . Allan Stem had tried to warn MITI. Why? Out of past regard for Dr. Yoshida, former head of the Institute and a close friend?
Stern reportedly had vanished the same day this envelope was postmarked. Noda had acted, but not swiftly enough.
Who at MITI had been the original recipient of this memo? Maybe, he thought, it no longer mattered. There was only one real way to stop Dai Nippon. . . .
At that moment his phone buzzed. As he punched the button, his flustered secretary announced that an in-flight call was waiting, channeled through MITI's satellite security link. It was the president of Dai Nippon, International.
[CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE]
Tsukuba Science City can be awe-inspiring or a specter, depending on how you choose to look at it. The time was Wednesday morning, and Tam and I were viewing the place through the tinted windows of Matsuo Noda's personal DNI limo, the black Nissan she knew so well. From the vantage of an elevated freeway packed with rows of sleek Hondas and Toyotas sparkling in the cold December sunshine, we could see the silhouettes of cluster after cluster of modernistic concrete towers, an urban complex of a hundred and fifty thousand souls rising above what was, only a few short years ago, mostly farms. Be that as it may, take my word for it that nobody's growing radishes there today. Science City, nestled in the foothills of Mt. Tsukuba some fifty kilometers northeast of downtown Tokyo, represents a government investment, including the industrial park once the site of Expo '85, of over thirty billion dollars.
Tsukuba is holy ground, the place of heroes, where kamikazes once trained for their suicide missions against the American fleet. Now it is one of the largest research centers in the world, with almost ten thousand scientists and fifty separate laboratories and scientific institutes. As we neared the first complex, I tried to make sense of all the Dali-esque curved buildings that housed Japan's new brain trust. From the outside you can tell something is going on, but it seems secretive and proprietary. It is. The thing I had to keep reminding myself, though, was that none of this was for military boondoggles. It was aimed dead-on at industrial technology. E.g., there's research here on high-energy lasers all right, but they're not intended for zapping some hypothetical Soviet satellite; they're part of the world's largest laser-radar telescope, which can project beams out more than thirty miles to analyze air quality. In short, the work here was applications-oriented, practical, and—get a firm grip on your wallet— commercial.