Rain Fall by Barry Eisler Page A

successfully in randori. Next time I’ll know not to underestimate the risks you’re willing to take to gain a submission.”
    I already knew that. “Where do you practice?” I asked him. “I haven’t seen you here before.”
    “I practice with a private club,” he said. “Perhaps you might join us sometime. We’re always in search of judoka of shibumi. ” Shibumi is a Japanese aesthetic concept. It’s a kind of subtle power, an effortless authority. In the narrower, intellectual sense, it might be called wisdom.
    “I’m not sure I’d be what you’re looking for. Where is your club?”
    “In Tokyo,” he said. “I doubt that you would have heard of it. My . . . club is not generally open to foreigners.” He recovered quickly. “But, of course, you are Japanese.”
    Probably I should have let it go. “Yes. But you approached me in English.”
    He paused. “Your features are primarily Japanese, if I may say so. I thought I detected some trace of Caucasian, and wanted to satisfy myself. I am usually very sensitive to such things. If I had been wrong, you simply wouldn’t have understood me, and that would have been that.”
    Reconnaissance by fire, I thought. You shoot into the treeline; if someone shoots back, you know they’re there. “You find satisfaction in that?” I asked, consciously controlling my annoyance.
    For a moment, I thought he looked oddly uncomfortable. Then he said, “Would you mind if I were to speak frankly?”
    “Have you not been?”
    He smiled. “You are Japanese, but American also, yes?”
    My expression was carefully neutral.
    “Regardless, I think you can understand me. I know Americans admire frankness. It’s one of their disagreeable characteristics, made doubly so because they congratulate themselves for it ceaselessly. And this disagreeable trait is now infecting even me! Do you see the threat America poses to Nippon?”
    I regarded him, wondering if he was a crackpot rightist. You run into them from time to time—they profess to abhor America but they can’t help being fascinated with it. “Americans are . . . causing too many frank conversations?” I asked.
    “I know you are being facetious, but in a sense, yes. Americans are missionaries, like the Christians who came to Kyushu to convert us five hundred years ago. Only now, they proselytize not Christianity, but the American Way, which is America’s official secular religion. Frankness is only one, relatively trivial, aspect.”
    Why not have some fun. “You feel that you’re being converted?”
    “Of course. Americans believe in two things: first, despite everyday experience and common sense, that ‘all men are created equal’; and second, that complete trust in the market is the best way for a society to order its affairs. America has always needed such transcendental notions to bind together its citizens, who have come from different cultures all over the world. And Americans are then driven to prove the universality of these ideas, and so their validity, by aggressivelyconverting other cultures to them. In a religious context, this behavior would be recognized as missionary in its origins and effect.”
    “It’s an interesting theory,” I allowed. “But an aggressive outlook toward other cultures has never been an American monopoly. How do you explain the Japanese colonial history in Korea and China? Attempts to save Asia from the tyranny of Western market forces?”
    He smiled. “You are being facetious again, but your explanation is not so far from the truth. Because market forces—competition—are what drove the Japanese into their own imperial conquests. The Western nations had already taken their concessions in China—America had institutionalized the plunder of Asia with the ‘Open Door.’ What choice had we but to take our own concessions, lest the West encircle us and gain a chokehold on our supplies of raw materials?”
    “Tell me the truth,” I said, fascinated despite