Choto Temple Ch. 01

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*****

My name's Dan Zander. I've been working as a journalist since I graduated from college. For a long time I covered local news for local newspapers, basically hopping from one sinking ship to the next.

Fifteen years ago I got a break, and for a while now I've been in the jet set, working for Rolling Stone. Traveling around the world, reviewing concerts and festivals, interviewing rock stars. Tough job, but somebody's gotta do it.

It was probably my eighth trip to Japan. I'm guessing. But I think that's right. Mostly I'm going back and forth between countries in the English-speaking world. The US, the UK, Germany, Sweden, places like that - where everybody speaks English, where the folks who write the hits live.

Lots of folks writing hits in Japan, of course, but they're in Japanese, and they're not hits outside of Japan. So they send me to Japan now and then to do this occasional fucking Orientalist kind of thing - "aren't these Japanese musicians exotic and insular" is the angle they're looking for. "My, they play their instruments well, but they don't seem to have many original ideas." People eat that shit up.

The fact is that everybody's ripping everybody off in the music business, but if Japanese rock stars rip off English rock stars, it must be because they're Oriental and thus unable to come up with an original thought, unlike everybody else who is so fucking brilliant. It's all bullshit, and I try not to play into it too much, but if you've ever worked in this business you know that that doesn't matter - the editors do what the editors do. They'll make your shit shine how they want to, once you've provided for them the raw materials.

Anyway, point is I don't come to Japan that much, so every time I do, it feels a bit new. Which is a nice feeling. It's too easy to get completely cynical. Anything fresh is good. My assignment was also something different.

Actually fairly unique. I don't have any plans to start my own magazine or anything. I guess I'm not wildly ambitious, not looking for the next rung up the ladder anymore. But if I were a younger reporter with such ambitions, I'd probably have been freaking out right about now.

I was on an assignment to go to the mountains of Yamaguchi prefecture to interview Robert Zerzinski, aka Donor X. The closest I had ever been to Yamaguchi was probably Osaka. Which is nowhere near Yamaguchi. Rock stars don't live in Yamaguchi. Japanese rock stars, as a rule, seem to grow up near a US military base in Okinawa, and then they move to Tokyo to be famous.

But Donor X, as he is still better-known than by his real name, lives in Yamaguchi, so that's where I was going. He's not a rock star, either. But his life is about as rock star as would be possible to imagine, if you remove the electric guitar and the touring from the equation.

The trip from Tokyo to Fukuoka to Yamaguchi felt like a trip through time as well as space. First of all, anyone who thinks Paris or London or Beijing are the most fashionable, cosmopolitan cities on Earth, has clearly never been to Tokyo.

Just stand on any train platform in the city, and it's like being on the fucking catwalk - one shockingly beautiful young woman after another walking past, each centimeter of her body immaculately put together, each movement of her body as graceful as you could imagine, regardless of the height of the heels.

Even there at Narita airport, quite a ways from the actual city, in what was recently hotly-contested farmland, it was easy to see who was from Tokyo and who was just transiting on to some other Asian destination - which a lot of people at Narita are doing.

I mean forget about the obese Americans, you can spot them a mile away. But just between the Asians you can see it: If there's a piece of clothing that doesn't quite fit perfectly, or something that looks a little too shiny, or someone's walking who doesn't seem 100% at ease in very high heels, invariably, they're Chinese or Korean or Filipino or something else. They're not from Tokyo.

The Tokyo women are easy to recognize. If they seem to have achieved an inhuman degree of physical perfection, if they move within the space around them as you imagine an angel might, if an angel were on Earth trying to blend in with the regular people, then they're almost definitely from Tokyo.

Then flying from there most of the way to the other end of Japan's main island, it's like turning back the clock about fifty years. Not that I was even alive fifty years ago. (At least not quite.) For the most part, heels, tight jeans, leather shorts paired with long stockings, women dressed up as Lolita, none of that kind of thing was in evidence.

In fact, you just didn't see many young people at all. They say Japan is an aging country, and now, for the first time, I could see what they meant.

Among the middle-aged and elderly majority of the local population there was a refreshing lack of obesity. In fact, I realized with some discomfort as I looked around at my middle-aged peers as I boarded the Shinkansen at Fukuoka airport, my lack of a flat stomach, along with the fact that I don't have black hair, made me really stick out. But compared with Tokyo, folks around here looked like they had just thrown on whatever frumpy sweater their mother gave them for Christmas last December.

I didn't have much time to get used to my new surroundings before I reached the mountain outside of the ancient port town of Hagi, home to Donor X and his Temple of Purification. I had taken a cab from the train station to the parking lot at the base of the mountain.

The parking lot was an incongruous mix of local people with little knapsacks on, clearly dressed for a day hike in the woods, and beautiful young Japanese women, mostly very young, dressed in a variety of outfits, with a clear emphasis on light-colored dresses. Sort of adult versions of the kinds of simple dresses that very young girls can often be seen wearing in the warmer weather back home in the US.

It was a crisp day in early spring. But in Japan, young women almost never let the weather get in the way of whatever they want to wear. And clearly, these women were going for the Innocent Look. Though, in typical Japanese fashion, beneath the Innocent Dresses could be seen the sorts of stockings that somehow smacked of something less than innocent.

I had heard that the Temple was on the top of the mountain, and that the only way to get there was on foot. So rather than traveling with my usual four-wheeled suitcase, I had taken a backpack for this trip.

I did a lot of backpacking as a teenager. Exactly none since becoming a journalist. Though I kept my old backpack, fantasizing occasionally about doing that thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail that I aborted one summer in between my first and second years of college, when I sprained my ankle after slipping on a wet rock somewhere in western Massachusetts.

People in the parking lot were coming and going in different directions. Several of them were heading up the hill. All the signs were in Japanese, and I knew better than to try to ask anyone a question in English. That just tends to make Japanese people nervous, but with no useful results. (They all study English in school for ten years or so, but almost none of them actually learn how to speak the language for some reason, it turns out.) I just followed the crowd.

Partway up the mountain the trail came to a Y-shaped intersection. All the locals in their practical clothing went to the left, and all the young women went to the right. I followed the women. One of them noticed me following the group, turned full around, smiled a beautiful, shy smile, and, with a twinkle in her eye that looked as if it had been added by a touch-up artist, said, "hello."

She was practicing her English. I knew this drill. Respond as expected and it'll be OK.

"Hello," I responded.

She lagged from the rest of the group to walk closer to me. She seemed unusually bold for a girl barely out of high school. I liked her immediately for that alone.

"How are you?" she asked me.

I knew that was going to be the next question, and I knew the response she expected. It's pretty much the same in any country where you know people don't generally speak much English, but they want to give it a shot.

"Well, and you?"

She looked momentarily puzzled. "Well?" she repeated. "Ah, so, well! Well. Sorry. I'm fine."

Fine, that's what she was expecting me to say. That's how the conversations go in her textbooks. She continued, as if reading from her high school English textbook.

"Where are you from?" she asked me.

"New York," I responded. Actually the suburbs of Connecticut, but nobody knows where that is, and New York is nearby. "And you?"

Again she looked slightly flustered. And you apparently wasn't in the textbook.

"Where are you from?" I carefully clarified.

"Ah, so," she smiled, "I am from Fukushima prefecture," she answered. "All of us," she said, motioning to the group of young women just ahead of us.

Of course, I realized. They all came to this place from Fukushima. I had read up about the whole thing, but my short-term memory isn't what it once was, and details get foggy quick. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask her, but I didn't want to be too direct, and I also didn't want to use words that she wouldn't understand. Which seemed to be most of them.

All I could think of to say then was to ask her again how she was doing, but in a way that hopefully might invite a bit more of a response.

"You are fine?"

She understood what I meant with this question. It was clear from her face, which took on an ever-so-slightly troubled hue. A lot of people from Fukushima aren't so fine, and that had a lot to do with their presence here, we both knew.

She started answering in Japanese. "Watashi, ah, sorry, English, English." She giggled slightly. "I am a little nervous," she eventually answered. "I am sorry, my English is very bad."

Before I had a chance to figure out what my next extremely simple sentence would be, we had arrived at a very hefty stone wall, one that had either been built recently, or was very well-maintained if not. There was an entrance with an iron gate.

A man in an official-looking green uniform was there to greet us. He was holding a tablet computer. He said something in Japanese. Then, noticing the foreigner, he added, in English, "identification, please."

Everyone aside from me took out their Japanese ID cards. I fished out my passport, showing it to the man. He carefully checked each ID off of a list of names he evidently had there on his tablet, and approved each of us, gesturing toward a pair of young women, also wearing official-looking green uniforms.

They said something in Japanese, too, and began to pat down each woman very thoroughly. When it was my turn, one of the women asked, "OK?" But I could tell the pat-down wasn't optional. And I didn't mind anyway.

As the pat-down was happening, I was thinking that while this kind of treatment might be normal in many parts of the world, in Japan it was virtually unheard of. Even at the airports they hardly ever pat anyone down. Billionaires don't generally have this level of security.

Certainly rock stars don't, I knew that for sure, from first-hand experience. They might live in a fancy apartment where visitors had to check in with someone on the ground floor before using the elevator, but there was never even a pretense of a security pat-down or anything like that.

Thinking these thoughts, it was then that I happened to look up, and noticed the guard tower. A guard tower! I don't even recall seeing guard towers outside of prisons in Japan, for fuck's sake.

After passing through the security and climbing the tree-lined path further up the hill, I looked down at the stone wall we had walked through. I could now see the top of the wall, and it was covered with barbed metal spikes.

I saw orange trees, and remembered that this place where the Temple of Purification had been built had once been an orange grove.

Walking another few hundred feet up the trail, the foliage opened, revealing what appeared to be a small, alpine village that wouldn't be out of place in Switzerland, except for the traditional Japanese architecture. The buildings must all have been built at the same time around eleven, twelve years ago, and the wood they were built of still smelled like it was freshly-milled. The deep red ceramic tiles that made up the roofs of each of the buildings in the village glittered a bit in the sun.

Each house featured a spacious courtyard in front of it. They also featured the kind of thick wooden beams you see at the entrances to shrines throughout Japan, with Japanese characters at the top of each one. I had no idea what the Japanese writing said, but each building had differing characters, and it appeared that each building served a different purpose of one kind or another.

Standing in the middle of the village were several women, who clearly worked for the place, or were members of the Temple, or however these things worked. They weren't wearing uniforms, but they had a professional air about them.

They were gesturing towards two different buildings. As they did this, the young women in the group I was following bowed, and split up neatly into two different, smaller groups.

Each group headed to a different large, ornate house. One of the women who had greeted them walked up to me, bowing again. I bowed, too.

"You're here to see Robu-san?"

Initially I wasn't sure what she was talking about. I was sure my first thought didn't make sense, and she wasn't making some kind of reference to the black American communist songwriter, popular in the 1930's, Paul Robeson.

Then it occurred to me that "san" was just the suffix denoting respect that comes at the end of everybody's name, unless they're a child or a close friend. And "Robu" was their pronunciation of "Rob." The Japanese add vowels to things - they don't like words that end with a consonant.

"Yes," I replied, after thinking that all through for a possibly inappropriate length of time.

"Please follow me."

I did. I'd have followed her anywhere. Her eyes glistened, and her body was an impossible combination of what can happen when nature's generosity is combined with athletic inclinations.

She was dressed in a toned-down way, with soft colors. Clothing that seemed appropriate for the crisp weather, that completely covered her body. But it was all slightly elastic stuff, framing her gentle curves, lean muscles, and unusually large breasts, especially by petite Japanese standards.

The year now is 2021. Donor X hasn't given an interview in ten years, since a year before he left the US to move to this remote mountain in Japan. Few journalists were given access to this place, and rumors abounded about what went on here.

The place, and Donor X, in general, wasn't a regular feature of the serious news media anymore. But he and this Temple of Purification continued to be a regular topic in the tabloid press in the US and Europe.

Sex sells, even if they don't have much new to talk about. There's always the occasional sighting, the occasional visitor or client or whatever willing to talk. Mostly they apparently don't, and for the most part the Japanese media isn't much interested in the place either anymore.

In the tabloid press in the US in particular, the coverage generally alternated between two themes.

On the one hand, scintillating stories of Donor X's unbelievable fantasy lifestyle - having sex every night with a different young Japanese woman, when he's not getting his daily massage while soaking in the nearby hot springs and eating sushi while reclining in his yokata, smoking opium.

The other theme is about some aspect of the cult-like quality of the Temple of Purification.

I guess you can't judge someone's cult membership status based on some facial expressions, body language and a few words, but the woman I was following didn't feel like a typical cult member to me. She seemed demure, in a culturally appropriate kind of way, but not lacking in confidence. She didn't have a thousand-mile stare or give off a beaten-down or protein-starved kind of vibe.

She was leading me down a yellow brick road. Up til now the place had had a traditional Japanese look to it, red and brown being the dominant colors, so the yellow bricks stood out.

"A yellow brick road?" I asked the woman.

She looked back at me and smiled.

Replying to my question with one of her own, in what I now gathered was very fluent, mildly-accented English, she asked, "do you like the Wizard of Oz?"

"We're not in Kansas anymore?"

"I think we're pretty far from Kansas," I said.

She seemed lost in thought a moment, then she came to.

"I'm so embarrassed, I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Keiko. I work for the Temple."

"I'm Dan," I said, lamely.

"You're a journalist? We don't get many such visitors."

"Robu-san is not a fan of journalists, I hear."

The man's last interview was about a year before he left for Japan. My editor told me he had agreed to give this interview, now, because he was being paid a lot of money for it, basically. Which he was apparently planning on giving away to some foundation.

He apparently also agreed to it because he was told that it was going to be a thorough, multi-part interview that would give him a chance to go into great depth - not the norm these days with any kind of media. Robu-san was reportedly hoping to be able to set the record straight about some things, and he felt that long-format would tend to paint him in a kinder light.

My editor, on the other hand, had agreed to pay the big bucks partly because it had been a decade since the guy had talked to a journalist. But also on the condition that I have access to him for several hours a day over the course of several days.

And on the further condition that he would share lots of sexually explicit details about his very unusual, very sex-intensive life. Since becoming Donor X, anyway.

Keiko took me to a small house. She opened the sliding door. Inside was what looked like a guest house for visitors.

"You'll stay here during your visit. Robu-san's house is just a little further. Would you like some time to freshen up before I take you to him?"

"No, that's OK," I said as I put down my backpack, removing from it my MP3 recorder, notebook and pen.

Keiko led me to a two-story house, and up a small staircase to another sliding door. She walked into a small living room, equipped with a couch and two overstuffed easy chairs, surrounding a coffee table.

"Please have a seat. Robu-san will be with you shortly."

Keiko went somewhere and came back with a large glass bottle. She opened it, and it made a fizzy noise.

She poured two glasses of sparkling water, and gingerly placed the bottle on the table beside the glasses. She bowed as she walked through the sliding door to the outside staircase, closing the door behind her.

I relaxed in one of the chairs for a couple minutes before another sliding door opened. I immediately recognized the face of Robert Zerzinski. A face that pretty much anybody who wasn't living in the woods without electricity would recognize. Especially if they were old enough to have been reading tabloids or watching celebrity gossip shows on TV ten or eleven years earlier.

Behind him was a beautiful Japanese woman who looked to be around 30 years old, and was dressed in a bath robe that was hanging loosely, as if it might be about to fall off of her. The inner shapes of her breasts were clearly visible, as was her stomach, down to her little belly button. Around her shoulders, long black hair fell, scattered in such a way that you could tell she had recently been lying down.