Authors: S. Michael Choi
“No.
That is impossible.
I will not go back to
China
.”
“Okay.
But then if you would rather be a working person here rather than a university student in
China
, I think you have to commit to finding work commensurate with a high school degree.
You have to work in a restaurant or something; I'm sure I know somebody who can help you.”
Suddenly tears are brimming in Shan's eyes.
“How did this happen, Litchie?
I was getting top grades in
Waseda
University
.
I always getting top marks.”
I do sympathize.
“I don't know.
I almost feel like I am missing one important piece, that it's staring me right in front of my eyes.
But I don't have unlimited resources, Shan.
Money comes from somewhere.”
Tucker agrees to help Shan with his one final request—to get a letter sent out to some British NGO that Shan found on the Internet—a non-profit committed to helping reform the Japanese legal system.
It doesn't sound promising, but we're certainly not going to get that involved in Shan's problems—not with him lying through his teeth at people who gave him a place to stay, and not after we've seen some documents the Embassy has dug up about Shan stealing from his employer and installing illegal-access software on Waseda lab computers.
He seems really rough-edged; really uncouth.
And he did have a knife, somebody remembers—some U.S. Marine combat knife that he purchased on the Internet.
God knows where it went.
Shan gets out of jail—his first stint—roughly in May or June.
Things now start to get far more complicated than before Shan does clearly go to jail, but given the efficiency with which everything is run in the country, as well as the politics of Sino-Japanese politics, it’s hard to imagine that he is actually tortured (as he claims) or that he endures prison violence in a country known for its ritualized displays of form rather than street-level thuggery.
What’s clear is that from the beginning point, it’s going to be a battle of unequals.
Shan is one simple half-coolie Chinese scholarship student; Commissioner Charles Henry Monroe LeFauve is the senior trade commissioner in the Division of International Trade, United States Embassy in
Tokyo
.
The outcome is never in doubt—it's just things are going to be a little complex.
Fresh out of jail, head shaven, an ugly scar on his cheek (“I cut it shaving.”), Shan Le leaps into action with all the restless energy of an over-talented under-prepared university student.
The letter—several letters—go out to various non-profit groups, political officials, semi-tangentially related random organizations (a scam human-cloning company; two or three diploma mills), and somehow out of this Shan hits pay-dirt.
Jury Trial, a British NGO of unknown background, decides to jump in; they already have an office in downtown
Tokyo
.
“Did you know that 99% of people arrested by Japanese police are convicted, and that after one hundred forty years after exposure to modern jurisprudence,
Japan
still doesn’t have a trial-by-one’s-peers criminal court system?”
Shan’s mail-a-lawyer, the London-trained barrister and smartly-cut corporate-attired individual with a mad, crazed gleam in her eye on a Thursday afternoon after Shan convinces me to attend his first meeting with the group starts lecturing me on Jury Trial's position.
(He thinks he will have greater prestige with a Westerner accompanying him to his meeting.
Jury Trial itself is nonplussed, neither positive nor negative.)
“Simon Arner, a
UK
citizen, was convicted and sentenced to 38-years in prison because somebody hid a sachet of ecstasy pills in his luggage upon his arrival in Narita.
A young promising university graduate who loses the rest of his life because he can’t even provide evidence in his defense to a group of fair-minded, community-oriented citizens!”
I don’t know if I will ever understand these single-minded, single-issued crusaders who seem so absolutely certain about their one fixed idea that they approach it with such maniacal enthusiasm.
Jury Trial also has another lawyer on staff, an older Jewish gentlemen with rheumy eyes and arthritic; he makes cynical little remarks and cracks jokes about Shan but otherwise remains silent; he is a social observer.
“Shan, tell us what happened with this woman.
Why is she coming after you?
“You should see the university!
They come in with four police officers, each carrying kendo stick!
It is humiliation!
In front of all my dormitory mates!”
“That isn’t the question.
What is your explanation for Dominique’s behavior?”
“Dominique is hating me!
She is liar and criminal!”
This is the problem.
This is the problem.
For all his bluster, all his yelling and screaming, Shan is completely unable to come up with an explanation for why Dominique is behaving the way she is, whereas the other side is able to come up with if not compelling, at least consistent, series of events; they are able to come up with a story that even if unprovable and relying on hearsay, assigns motivations to all parties involved. Claim: Shan and Dominique had coffee together. Claim: Shan and Dominique were going out. Claim: Shan pulled a knife out on Dominique. Fact: Dominique showed up crying and hysterical at the embassy. Who can poke a hole in this story?
And so the lawyers meet; they nod their heads; all sides trade point for point, but theirs is the firmer narrative.
Shan is a dork, beyond dorkiness. If he just says, 'look I pulled out a knife,' it's 30 days, maybe a letter in a file. People at Waseda are even trying to help him. But he's pig-headed, stubborn. He offers no explanation why Dominique would make up charges against him, although insists and insists and insists that she's making up everything out of whole cloth. LeFauve brings out “Rihanna Paciano,” a three-hundred pound pock-marked monstrosity, dispatched from
Washington
as special “Gender Affairs Officer” directly from the State Department.
“It’s simple, actually.
Shan is a degenerate, primitive, Neanderthal male, one who hands out with notorious womanizers and alleged drug-users; he wanted Dominique LeFauve, his advances were rejected, and so he pulled out a knife.
This is criminal behavior.
He is clearly a near rapist!”
“Shan, did you date Dominique LeFauve?
Did you go to a café with her?”
“No, I never do such thing.
This is impossible.
I don’t even drink coffee!”
Silence fills the conference room.
“Shan, your point is not a refutation of Dominique’s claim.
It’s like somebody says, ‘I saw Shan at McDonald’s last week.’
And you respond, ‘But I don’t even eat hamburgers!’
Okay, maybe you don’t.
Maybe you went there to eat salad.
And maybe you went to a café to drink tea.
Don’t bring up irrelevancies!”
“Dominique LeFauve is convicted drug-trafficker.
I have the photocopy of her past!”
Paciano straightens in her seat.
“This is protected information!
Irrelevant to topic at hand and protected by generally regarded principles of victim shield laws.”
“Victim?
Victim?
Who is victim?
She is only accuser!”
“Okay; okay, we will use this terminology.”
The meeting dissolves into cacophony.
All sides are arguing at cross-purposes; all sides are fixed and rigid in their thinking, with bulging eyes and single-issue hot buttons.
And the meeting, a one last attempt at compromise, is the last one they ever have; from here on out the process is entirely acrimonious.
Now I know what human garbage is!
From a women's college in
Oregon
direct to the halls of power in
Washington
D.C.
, with a completely gender-obsessed crazed feminist three-hundred pound view of the world, Paciano calls me in to try to intimidate me, but I stonewall her, too; she gets less out of me than even Fannet.
“You better watch your back!
We're taking this guy down. Maybe we'll burn you too!”
"Do your worst Paciano. Nobody's charging me with anything."
"We can change that lickety split, Ritchie! Dominique's actually said some interesting things about you, too!"
What monsters!
Maybe Shan could have pulled it off.
Maybe had he been willing to work the system with a little more sophistication, he could have shot holes a mile wide in Dominique’s story, cast doubt on her confused and internally-inconsistent version of events, (take a look, anybody can see them) but the die is cast.
If there’s some wavering at the diplomatic mission about how to play the cards, with Shan’s complete intransigence and his completely hostile approach to genuine compromise-finding, there is finally a hardening of sentiment, and the Chinese Embassy, never more than mildly concerned (and sending a representative only because Shan is, after all, a Waseda student), finally signals they will not stand behind their citizen; he too apparently loses favor with them, sending an email in which he accidentally appends a file of his plans to wreak “woe and justice” on the LeFauve clan; this doesn't go over well with the polite mandarins of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Waseda student or not.
The tide begins to turn against Shan; Jury Trial brings me in.
“Okay, this is the plan.
We need to bring out Dominique’s prior arrest.
We need to press hard for a complete dismissal of charges based on absolute lack of evidence.
We can’t afford to lose even one administrative point.”
“So we’ll sign the first memorandum on separation of the two; standard boilerplate.”
The British lawyer looks at me curiously.
“This is all for you, though, isn’t it? You don't need to be involved anymore, nobody's calling you to the stand.”
“Yeah, yeah.
See you later.”
Shan comes out to the hallway to see me off.
“You go enjoy your day?”
“Oh no, now LeFauve wants me to testify at his lawyer’s office.”
All at once he is tense; his shoulders are immediately locked into position and he stares at me with steely eyes.
“Joking!
I can’t stand them!”
“No joke like that.”
The paperwork, signed almost off-handedly, proves to be critical in the end.
Buried in the boilerplate is a provision that Shan not visit complainant’s “school or workplace.”
But Dominique is taking Japanese classes at Waseda for two bloody weeks; he becomes guilty as charged that very evening, when he returns to his dorm.
Sixty day sentence.
Much has been written about Shan, Dominique—but LeFauve senior, although as maniacal and pig-headed as the rest, isn’t entirely a demonic figure.
Actually given paranoia about future events, I do a lot of digging into his past, and his story is not without justifiable pathos; he, too, will be burned and cut to pieces, and the tragedy of it is only that it had to happen abroad; he couldn’t function in the only where he could.
Quick summary?
Think: Catholic upbringing, only Black over-intellectual in the Republican machine; just a beautifully Japan-only specialist variant of it; a potential to get somewhere in the party or in government, but it has to be kicked out here; it has to go to war this year.
“We need to launch a total war here!
We need total shock and awe!
This is my only daughter!
This is my baby!”