A Tale for the Time Being (43 page)

Dear Ruth (if I may call you that),

I was delighted to find your email in my inbox, and I must apologize for taking so long to reply. I do, of course, remember you from your visit to Stanford. Prof. P-L in
Comparative Literature is a good friend of mine, so you need no further introduction. Unfortunately I was just leaving for sabbatical at the time of your residency and was unable to attend your
talk, but I trust that I will have the pleasure of hearing you read from your next book soon.

Now, in regard to your urgent query, while I feel I must still exercise some discretion regarding information told to me in confidence, I think that I can be of some
help.

First, I agree that it seems likely that the “Harry” who authored the testimonial on my website is the father of the Nao Yasutani whose diary has somehow come
into your possession. Mr. Yasutani was a computer scientist, working at a large information technology company here in Silicon Valley back in the ’90s. I suppose you could say we were
friends, and he did indeed have a young daughter named Naoko, who could not have been more than four or five years old at the time when I first met him.

I hasten to say that I am using the past tense not from any knowledge of their outcome or fate, but only because I am no longer in touch with Mr. Yasutani and so our
relationship has, regrettably, receded into the past. As you may be aware, he moved back to Japan with his family shortly after the dot-com bubble burst. After that, we corresponded
sporadically by email and by phone, but little by little we fell out of touch, and it has been several years since our last exchange.

Now, let me tell you something of our acquaintance. I met Mr. Yasutani at Stanford in 1991, about a year or so after he moved to Sunnyvale. He came to my office late one
afternoon. There was a knock at the door. Office hours were over, and I remember being slightly annoyed at the interruption, but I called out “Come in” and then waited. The door
remained shut. I called again, and still there was no response, so I got up and went to the door and opened it. A slight Asian man carrying a messenger bag was standing there. He was dressed
somewhat casually in khaki pants, a sports jacket, and sandals with socks. I thought at first that he might be a bike courier, but instead of handing me a package, he bowed deeply. This
startled me. It was such a formal gesture, at odds with his casual dress, and we are not accustomed to bowing to each other at Stanford University.

“Professor,” he said, in slow, careful English. “I am very sorry to disturb you.” He held out his business card and bowed again. The card
identified him as Haruki Yasutani, a computer scientist at one of the rapidly growing IT companies in the Valley. I invited him in and offered him a seat.

In stilted English, he explained that he was originally from Tokyo and had been headhunted to work on human-computer interface design. He loved his work and had no problem
with the computer end of things. His problem, he said, was the human factor. He didn’t understand human beings very well, so he’d come to the Psychology Department at Stanford to
ask for help.

I was astonished, but curious, too. Silicon Valley is not Tokyo, and it would be natural for him to be suffering from culture shock or having problems relating to his
co-workers. “What kind of help do you want?” I asked.

He sat with his head bowed, gathering his words. When he looked up, I could see the strain in his face.

“I want to know, what is human conscience?”

“Human consciousness?” I asked, not hearing him correctly.

“No,” he said. “Con-sci-ence. When I search for this word in the English dictionary, I find that it is from Latin.
Con
means ‘with,’
and
science
means ‘knowing.’ So
conscience
means ‘with knowing.’ With science.”

“I’ve never quite thought about it that way,” I told him. “But I’m sure you’re right.”

He continued. “But this does not make sense.” He pulled out a piece of paper. “The dictionary says ‘A knowledge or sense of right and wrong, with a
compulsion to do right.’ ”

He held out the piece of paper for me to see, so I took it. “That seems like a reasonable definition.”

“But I do not understand. Knowledge and sense are not the same thing. Knowledge I understand, but how about sense? Is sense the same as feeling? Is conscience a fact
that I can learn and know, or is it more like an emotion? Is it related to empathy? Is it different than shame? And why is it a compulsion?”

I must have looked as baffled as I felt, because he went on to explain.

“I’m afraid that even though I am trained in computer science, I have never felt such a sense or feeling. This is a big disadvantage for my work. I would like
to ask you, can I learn to feel such a feeling? At my age, is it too late?”

It was an extraordinary question, or rather barrage of questions. We continued to talk, and eventually I managed to piece together his story. While his company was
primarily involved in interface development for the gaming market, the U.S. military had an interest in the enormous potential his research might have for applications in semi-autonomous
weapons technology. Harry was concerned that the interface he was helping to design was too seamless. What made a computer game addictive and entertaining would make it easy and fun to carry
out a massively destructive bombing mission. He was trying to figure out if there was a way to build a conscience into the interface design that would assist the user by triggering his ethical
sense of right and wrong and engaging his compulsion to do right.

His story was moving and tragic, too. Although he claimed not to understand matters of human conscience, it was precisely his own conscience that led him to question the
status quo, and which would cost him his job later on. Needless to say, technology design is not value-neutral, and military contractors and weapons developers do not want these kinds of
questions raised, never mind built into their controllers.

I did what I could to reassure him. The very fact he was asking these questions in the first place demonstrated that his conscience was in fine working order.

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “That is not conscience. That is only shame from my history, and history can easily be changed.”

I didn’t understand and asked him to explain.

“History is something we Japanese learn about in school,” he said. “We study about terrible things, like how the atom bombs destroyed Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. We learn this is wrong, but that is an easy case because we Japanese people were the victims of it.

“A harder case is when we study about a terrible Japanese atrocity like Manchu. In this case, we Japanese people committed genocide and torture of the Chinese
people, and so we learn we must feel great shame to the world. But shame is not a pleasant feeling, and some Japanese politicians are always trying to change our children’s history
textbooks so that these genocides and tortures are not taught to the next generation. By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.

“This is why I think shame must be different from conscience. They say we Japanese are a culture of shame, so maybe we are not so good at conscience? Shame comes
from outside, but conscience must be a natural feeling that comes from a deep place inside an individual person. They say we Japanese people have lived so long under the feudal system that
maybe we do not have an individual self in the same way Westerners do. Maybe we cannot have a conscience without an individual self. I do not know. This is what I am worrying about.”

Of course, I’m paraphrasing here, remembering what I can of that stilted conversation many years ago. I don’t recall how I answered, but the exchange was
mutually satisfying and resulted in further conversations and eventually in friendship. You can see how this inquiry into notions of individual self would lead to, among other things, the topic
of shame, honor, and self-killing, which was the subject of the letter that caught your attention. My own interest in cultural influences on suicide, while initially prompted by the activity of
suicide bombers in the Middle East, was informed over the years by my exchange with Mr. Yasutani. He always asserted that in Japan, suicide was primarily an aesthetic, not a moral, act,
triggered by a sense of honor or shame. As you may or may not know, his uncle was a WWII war hero, a pilot in the Tokkotai, who died while carrying out a kamikaze mission over the Pacific.

“My grandmother felt so much pain,” Harry said. “If my uncle’s plane had a conscience, maybe he would not have done such a bombing. For the pilot
of the
Enola Gay
, it is the same thing, and maybe there would not have been a Hiroshima and Nagasaki, too. Of course, technology was not so advanced then, so such a thing was not
possible. Now it is possible.”

He sat perfectly still, studying his hands in his lap. “I know it is a stupid idea to design a weapon that will refuse to kill,” he said. “But maybe I
could make the killing not so much fun.”

Toward the end of his stay in the Valley, Mr. Yasutani was having trouble with his employer, which was unwilling to jeopardize its relations with the military and
investors on account of one Japanese employee’s tortured conscience. They asked him to refrain from pursuing this line of research, but he refused. He was dropped from his project team.
He grew anxious and depressed, and while I do not have a clinical practice, I counseled him as a friend. The company fired him shortly after.

That must have been March of 2000, because less than a month later, in April, the dot-com bubble burst and the NASDAQ crashed. He came in to see me and told me that
he’d had most of his family’s savings tied up in the company’s stock options, and that he’d lost everything. He was not a practical man. In August of that year, they
moved back to Japan, and I didn’t hear from him for a while.

The following year, I decided to make some of my research available online and I launched my website. A few months later, I received an email from Harry, an excerpt of
which you read online. It was a beautiful and moving cry for help, and I corresponded with him for several months after that by email and also by phone. It was during that time that I asked if
I could post his comments on my website, and he said if I thought it would help others, I could have his permission. I felt strongly that he needed professional counseling, and I suggested the
names of a few clinicians in Tokyo. I don’t know whether he followed through on that or not. I suspect not.

I lost track of him after the September 11 bombings. It was a busy time for me, as world events prompted much media interest in my research. I recall we may have had one
exchange a few years later, but around the same time, a virus obliterated my computer files and much of my archived email, including those from him, was lost. I wanted to contact him after the
earthquake and tsunami, but I discovered I no longer had his email address. I consoled myself with the thought that he and his family lived far from Sendai; however now, after hearing from you,
I feel motivated to try to track him down.

You mentioned some letters in addition to the diary belonging to the daughter. If these contain any information that might help me locate Mr. Yasutani and his family, I
would appreciate it if you would share it with me. I would like to ask, too, what it was that led you to be concerned for the daughter’s well-being. You said you felt it was a matter of
some urgency. Why is that?

Finally, I would also be interested to know how the diary and letters found their way into your possession, but that is perhaps a story for another time.

And speaking of stories, I trust you are working on a new book? I look forward to reading it, as I enjoyed your last one very much.

Sincerely yours,

etc.