Hardy leaves on scraggly trees caught the low sun, fluttering in the wind like forest sprites, alive and aglow. The hike up Fuji had begun.
An elite VTR contingent led the way along a pleasant tree-lined path, falling more or less into formation single file. Collin wasn’t the only one wondering why the trail went down before going up, but eventually it went up and pretty soon he was too winded to inquire further.
They plodded along a winding path of ash, pummeled pumice and natural black lava. At junctures where the surface was steeply uneven, there were staircases carved into the rising terrain and reinforced sidings guarding against falling rocks. There were patches of paved surface and smooth steppingstones here or there, and sometimes a metal rail to grab onto while climbing the steep bits. It was more than a cakewalk but less than a serious climb, a series of lightly inclined steps, crunching on lava most of the way.
As they marched into the monotone world of rock and pebble, the only significant color left in the landscape was below them. The low-lying sun cast upon the verdant lowlands a rich play of tint and hue, interspersed with pockets of blue shadow. In the distance far below the slope gave way to a flatland of vineyards and fields, a patchwork of earthy colors, yellow, green and brown. Distant forests, clinging to the remote ring of surrounding hills like lichen on a rock, absorbed the late afternoon sun. Somewhere in the misty distance was Tokyo.
As Nakayama once said, or was said to have said, that is to say, as the rewriter best remembered him having said, since he himself had had a hand in teasing out the precise words in English:
“The paramount mountain in the east is the perfect place for a lighthouse to light the floating world of the human condition.”
A serviceable bit of propaganda, to which Collin jauntily appended the phrase, “From Purple Mountain to Shining Sea.”
And it was true in a fashion. Fuji offered prime real estate with a view, overlooking the Tokyo-Yokohama megalopolis in the haze of the day, and the brightest swath of man-made light on the planet at night. That’s what Tower Power, yet another VTR-copyrighted buzzword crafted by yours truly, was supposedly about. If one sought to erect a communication tower of unparalleled height and superb reach, a better base could not be found elsewhere in the east. But Shinto superstition had deemed the slopes of Fuji sacred, an attitude that was as incomprehensible to the atheistic captains of commerce as the idea of putting a tower on Fuji was to the anonymous old man and his tree-hugging army.
During quiet interludes on all-night shifts at VTR, the easily bored rewriter had taken to surfing the net plumbing the news behind the news, thumbing through tabloids to while away the time. SPT propaganda always made for a fun read because the editorial line was calibrated to be diametrically opposed to VTR. He knew better than to believe every word he read, but even if only every other word were true, there was nothing to be complacent about. According to SPT reports, Tower Power was a cover for a surveillance station that could intercept half the airwaves of East Asia.
Collin had asked his coworkers about this and other such things, and it usually provoked nervous laughter. This indicated to him that the other side’s propaganda was not without a grain of truth, just as Nice News was not entirely false.
Like the time that “top secret” internal memo from Nakayama’s office about the electromagnetic pulse problem had crossed his inbox of rewrites-to-be-rewritten. Whether the hot document in question was a leak or a plant, he did not know and did not ask. He gave it the usual spit, shine and polish, nothing special, and zapped it to Miki’s office with one fell swoop of his hand, accidentally spilling his coffee in a moment of uncontained over-caffeinated excitement.
The following day his computer was scrubbed and his desk was cleaned out, and it wasn’t because of the coffee. Then and there the rewriter was asked to sign, actually re-sign, the VTR confidentiality agreement, which made it hard to ask probing questions, but naturally served to pique his interest.
SPT somehow got wind of the pulse story and ran with it. VTR’s official reaction was to denounce the SPT report on Tower Power as a misunderstanding based on a rewriter’s error, a contract employee’s mad raving, and the two tabloids foolish enough to run the spiked story in the first place were denied advertising and subsequently closed down, though their ultimate unhappy fate might have been related to things other than the Tower Power incident because the tabloids were also fierce critics of Nakayama’s business empire, regularly accusing him of tax violations.
The electromagnetic pulse story was whitewashed, drawn and quartered, until there was almost nothing left to go on, but the mutual rancor between VTR and SPT remained. Each side accused the other of spreading malicious lies and at every opportunity. In their daily newscasts, VTR and SPT each threatened to broadside the other, paralleling their reports about frequent near-collisions of opposing ships at sea. It wasn’t until Miki rose to the occasion, inviting a select crew from SPT to join her and the folks at VTR for a peace-making photo op, that the mutual mudslinging abated. The desperate state of Sino-Japanese relations called for desperate initiatives, which was the genesis of this risky off-season hike on the hill in the first place, even before the spring snows had melted.
Diplomatic tensions were not without an upside, though. In a way, the fact that a non-Japanese speaker could land a juicy job at Japan's flagship station was thanks to China, which didn’t want to do diplomacy in Japanese any more than the Japanese wanted to do diplomacy in Chinese. The residual linguistic legacy of imperial America and colonial Britain had left economic losers like Collin with the opportunity to play a part in an Asian information boom conducted mainly in his native tongue, if only because it bore an air of neutrality.
In the white-knuckled, nail-biting zero-sum game as Japan saw it --the Chinese liked to refer to the contest for domination as a win-win game-- failure to dominate meant submission. To lose control of the sea-lanes was bad enough, they couldn’t afford to lose the airwaves too. Things looked placid enough on the surface, but worries ran deep. Chinese vessels now plied the Pacific like hungry carp crossing a pond, and there were more and more of them by the day.
Meanwhile Japan manufacturing was in a slump. Sometimes it seemed the only thing Tokyo still manufactured with unbroken zeal, besides manga and anime, was electromagnetic radiation in the from of television product, and hot air though it was; the revenue flow was real. As long as happy advertisers could sell happy products to happy consumers, the future was not without hope.
Part of Collin’s disenchantment with working at VTR, besides having to work while he still had a job, and not having a job after he was fired, was that rewriting didn’t make a dime’s difference when it came to making things right. Worse yet, in the battle for turf he had been supplying word junkies on both sides. No sooner did he finish polishing one of Nakayama’s moronic, neon-loving nationalistic diatribes than he was quietly called upon to counter it, polishing the immortal words of the neon-hating old man of the mountain.
One only had to sit still and think things through –no easy task in the sexy, swinging city that never slept-- to realize something was afoot. The rusticated naturalists were throwing down the gauntlet at the pixilated, titillated, ad-addled, enchanted floating world of Tokyo where the women flowed like wine.
Sometimes less was really was more, though one had to be poor or borderline poor like a struggling rewriter, to make the most of a little. But to sip on nothing but bitter tea while trying to keep afloat in the juicy, drunken, money-driven life of the Big Mikan was a challenge more worthy of a monk than a man.
It was a truism that real world reality didn’t sell well on TV, for the unvarnished truth tended to have a dull and drained look when put face to face with the compelling, colorful realities of consumer TV, but the fun-house mirror known as Nice News was so getting so distorted, he didn’t know for sure what to believe anymore.
So he started to screw with the news, not out of high moral dudgeon, not to save the world, but to amuse himself and mess with the man, to fend off the boredom between punch-in and punch-out. For the longest time he thought himself immune to VTR’s reality-enhancing charm, but imperceptibly he had begun to fall victim to the tall tales they told, some of them rewritten by his own hand. He embraced the latest commercial trends with undisguised relish and imbibed with astonishing vigor and vim the overflowing cups of delusion.
One of his former co-workers in the English polishing department, a gaijin with attitude named Barberini, had been a good friend and would have remained a good friend had Collin not been named as his good friend's replacement. “The Barbarian,” as the fellow American rewriter was affectionately known, had been the reigning resident polisher on the 23rdfloor until he had crossed words with Chairman Nakayama and left in a huff.
Barberini was gone in body but not in spirit, his lingo lived on. Nowhere with more éclat than the name of the show, Nice News, and its advertising legend, “No News like Nice News.”The jingle had a nice ring to it, it clung to the tongue like a lollipop. Producing no news in the name of niceness was no mere jingle but the highest, hidden aspiration of Nakayama and the neon-nationalists who wanted to whitewash their plunder on the land.
Collin had nursed doubts about these things for a long time, but he had been too caught up in the Tokyo crush, too busy losing his way on the primrose path in search of celestial beauty to do anything about it. Sure he had done his share of tea caddies and come up with a few hit slogans, but in his heart of hearts he knew there were no bragging rights in erasing the news and replacing it with jingles. Ka-ching!