White Matter

Graeme - Junko's story

I said Kurt will be the first, and in the sense that matters he will. But he isn't the first to be offered up as a possible sacrifice to our cause. That honour goes to Junko, though with the crucial difference that her decision to tilt at martyrdom is a voluntary one.

Among the three of us at the heart of our scheme, it is Junko who is putting herself most at risk. She is the only one about to break any laws; the one for whom discovery could be life-destroying. The one whose role, should we ever be successful, will never be made public, will never get the credit it unquestionably deserves.

It's only natural, I suppose, to wonder what coin we could be paying her in, that she should choose to take these risks purely for our benefit. And as for my own role in placing her in this situation - and any 'credit', or rather holding to account, that might be my due - well, all I can say in my defence is that, I did what I had to do.

I can't tell Junko's story without first mentioning Shigeru - the third of our conspiracy - and the events of some four years ago when I first became acquainted with the pair of them. I had been aware of Shigeru for some time prior; not personally, but through his work, as a co-author named on a series of academic papers describing neurological scanning techniques, the back ends of which contained frustratingly vague references to interpretational algorithms whose significance was only extractable from between the lines. Written, in other words - given the narrowness of our field - in a code that perhaps only I of all the world could have broken. The hidden message was a simple one: we need to talk.

Somehow I knew - neuroscience is a small world - that this name on the author list, Shigeru Matsumoto, was the one responsible. When a conference to be hosted in Tokyo provided the opportunity, I packed my things and caught a flight to Japan.

We met over coffee, between conference sessions. No small talk, just an immediate rapport. Within five minutes it was clear to me that this precise, quiet-spoken young man was possessed of an intense enthusiasm for his subject, and that our research overlapped to a much greater degree than our published work had suggested. By the end of intermission I had accepted an invitation to spend a week working alongside him, untroubled that this would require me to extend my stay and give up a part of my summer break.

The Yamazaki Laboratory, where Shigeru held a postdoctoral appointment, was affiliated with one of Japan's top research universities. When he observed in passing that he would first need to clear my visit with his supervisor, I assumed this would be a mere formality.

Unaware, then, that I was on probation, my first act on arrival was a visit to Professor Yamazaki, the lead author of those aforementioned papers and the gatekeeper to Shigeru's work. He was to be found, Shigeru explained, not in the Yamazaki Laboratory itself but in an office all his own. This segregation was perhaps just as well, given that the Professor was something of an anomaly for Japan: rude and opinionated.

It is a theory of evolutionary science that any symbiotic relationship of cooperation for mutual benefit will open up a niche for a freeloader, a parasitic organism that extracts benefits without contributing any value to the arrangement. The symbiosis in this case was the Japanese social custom of formal politeness. The benefit Yamazaki gained was harder to define, possibly nothing more than his own amusement or gratification. It's true that he got his name on some critical papers in an up-and-coming field despite contributing little more than administrative support, but then this was a privilege due his status and something that would have come his way regardless of how he treated his co-workers. He must have found something in it, though; it was rare for him to be anything less than abrupt. The tenure system of employment and the Japanese custom of sensei deference allowed him to get away with behaviour that would be called workplace bullying elsewhere.