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strike against the university. Some student-believers on other campuses came to join
his organization, and for a while, under his leadership, the faction became quite large.
Then the university got the riot police to storm the campus. He was holed up there
with his
students, so he was arrested with them, convicted, and sentenced. This led to
his de facto dismissal from the university. Eri was still a little girl then and probably
doesn’t remember any of this.”
Fuka-Eri remained silent.
“Her father’s name is Tamotsu Fukada. After leaving the university, he took with
him ten core students from his Red Guard unit and they entered the Takashima
Academy. Most of the students had been expelled from the university. They all
needed someplace to go, and Takashima Academy was not a bad choice for them. The
media paid some attention to their movements at the time. Do you know anything
about this?”
Tengo shook his head. “No, nothing.”
“Fukada’s family went with him—meaning his wife and Eri here.
They all entered
Takashima together. You know about the Takashima Academy, don’t you?”
“In general,” Tengo said. “It’s organized like a commune. They live a completely
communal lifestyle and support themselves by farming. Dairy farming, too, on a
national scale. They don’t believe in personal property and own everything
collectively.”
“That’s it. Fukada was supposedly looking for a utopia in the Takashima system,”
the Professor said with a frown. “But utopias don’t exist, of course, anywhere in any
world. Like alchemy or perpetual motion. What Takashima is doing, if you ask me, is
making mindless robots. They take the circuits out of people’s brains that make it
possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George
Orwell depicted in his novel. I’m sure you realize that there
are plenty of people who
are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don’t
have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to
do. You never have to starve. To people who are searching for that kind of
environment, the Takashima Academy may well be utopia.
“But Fukada is not that kind of person. He likes to think things out for himself, to
examine every aspect of an issue. That’s how he made his living all those years: it
was his profession. He could never be satisfied with a place like Takashima. He knew
that much from the start. Kicked out of the university with a bunch of book-smart
students in tow, he didn’t have anywhere else to go, so he chose Takashima as a
temporary refuge. What he was looking for there was not utopia but an understanding
of the Takashima system. The first thing they had to do was learn farming techniques.
Fukada and his students were all city people. They didn’t know any more about
farming than I know about rocket science. And there was a lot for them to learn:
distribution systems, the possibilities and limits
of a self-sufficient economy, practical
rules for communal living, and so on. They lived in Takashima for two years, learning
everything they could. After that, Fukada took his group with him, left Takashima,
and went out on his own.”
“Takashima was fun,” Fuka-Eri said.
The Professor smiled. “I’m sure Takashima is fun for little children. But when you
grow up and reach a certain age and develop an ego, life in Takashima for most young
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people comes close to a living hell. The leaders use their power to crush people’s
natural desire to think for themselves. It’s foot-binding for the brain.”
“Foot-binding,” Fuka-Eri asked.
“In the
old days in China, they used to cram little girls’ feet into tiny shoes to keep
them from growing,” Tengo explained to her.
She pictured it to herself, saying nothing.
The Professor continued, “The core of Fukada’s splinter group, of course, was
made up of ex-students who were with him from his Red Guard days, but others came
forward too, so the size of the group snowballed beyond anyone’s expectations. A
good number of people had entered Takashima for idealistic reasons but were
dissatisfied and disappointed with what they found: people who
had been hoping for a
hippie-style communal life, leftists scarred by the university uprisings, people
dissatisfied with ordinary life and searching for a new world of spirituality, single
people, people who had their families with them like Fukada—a motley crew if ever
there was one, and Fukada was their leader. He had a natural gift for leadership, like
Moses leading the Israelites. He was smart, eloquent, and had outstanding powers of
judgment. He was a charismatic figure—a big man.
Just about your size, come to
think of it. People placed him at the center of the group as a matter of course, and they
followed his judgment.”
The Professor held out his arms to indicate the man’s physical bulk. Fuka-Eri
stared first at the Professor’s arms and then at Tengo, but she said nothing.
“Fukada and I are totally different, both in looks and personality. But even given
our differences, we were very close friends. We recognized each other’s abilities and
trusted each other. I can say without exaggeration that ours
was a once-in-a-lifetime
friendship.”
Under Tamotsu Fukada’s leadership, the group had found a depopulated village that
suited their purposes in the mountains of Yamanashi Prefecture. The village was on
the brink of death. The few old people who remained there could not manage the
crops themselves and had no one to carry on the farm work after they were gone. The
group was able to purchase the fields and houses for next to nothing, including the
vinyl greenhouses. The village office provided a subsidy on condition that the group
continue to cultivate the established farmland, and they were granted preferential tax
treatment for at least the first few years.
In addition, Fukada had his own personal
source of funds, but Professor Ebisuno had no idea where the money came from.
“Fukada refused to talk about it, and he never revealed the secret to anybody, but
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