Alaska (169 page)

I think they'd prefer to trade with Japan, their wood, their oil, their minerals for whatever we can supply in return.'

The group, most of whom had motored up to Tamagata before breakfast, relaxed in the sun, munched sembei and drank tea. One of the men, who taught geography as a parttime consultant to a university, said: 'I don't want to play the big geopolitician, but that map back there . .. Could we take 1032

another look at it?' When they were seated as before, he continued: 'We and China enjoy a lucky advantage in our potential dealings with Alaska. But look at how close Alaska is to Soviet Russia! At these two little islands, which don't show on this map, the two superpowers are about a mile and a half apart. If commercial air travel were permitted between the two areas ... up here where the two big peninsulas jut out, maybe sixty miles apart, you could fly it in maybe ten minutes.'

'What's your point?' Oda asked, and the man said: 'I think we can predict that Alaska and the Soviet Union will always be suspicious of each other. No trade, no amity possible. Also, what Alaska has, Siberia also has, so they are not natural trading partners. On the other hand, what Alaska has is what we need, what Formosa and Singapore need, not to mention China.'

'Your conclusion?'

'Build the pulping plant. Send our tankers to ... What's the name of the island?'

'Kagak. Old Aleutian word, I believe, meaning something like rich horizons.'

'Send our tankers to Kagak. But while we're doing so, let's not overlook the copper mines, the oil which in common sense ought to come our way, and anything else that great empty land will be able to provide in the future.'

Now Oda took command: 'For some time it has been clear to me that the role of the Third World nations is to provide the technologically and educationally advanced nations with raw materials at a fair price. Allow countries like Japan and Singapore to apply intelligence and mechanical skill to those materials and pay for them by sending back to the Third World countries our finished products, especially those that they will never have the ability to invent or manufacture for themselves.'

When several young men well informed on international trade protested that such a simplistic exchange might not be indefinitely possible, Oda pointed to the calculator his financial expert had been using: 'Watanabe-san, how many controls on your computer, which as you others can see is about the size of a large playing card?' It took Watanabe more than a minute to summarize the wonderfully intricate capabilities of the thirty-five keys on his hand-held calculator: 'Ten keys for the digits and zero. Twenty-five others for various mathematical functions. But many keys can provide up to three different functions. Grand total: thirty-five obvious keys, plus sixty-three hidden variable functions, for ninety-eight options.'

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Oda smiled and said: 'When I bought my progenitor of Watanabe's miracle gadget, it offered me ten numerals and the four arithmetic functions. It was so simple that it could be handled by anyone. But when you add eighty-eight additional function keys, you move it forever beyond the capacity of the untrained, and most Third World citizens will be in that category. They'll have to rely on us to do their thinking, their inventing and their manufacturing.'

'Just a minute,' one of the team protested. 'I visited the University of Alaska at Fairbanks on our last visit. They have scores of students in engineering who can handle bigger computers than Watanabe's.'

'Exactly!' Oda agreed. 'But when they graduate they'll have to find jobs in what they call the Lower Forty-eight. Their absence will leave Alaska a Third World nation, and let's remember that. Courtesy, assistance, modest stance, listen more than talk, and provide at every turn the help Alaska needs. Because our relationship with that great untapped reservoir can be magnificently helpful, to both of us.'

It was on these principles that Kenji Oda and his wife, Kimiko, who knew Alaska from the inside as it were, moved to the island of Kagak north of Kodiak to establish the big United Alaskan Pulp Company. Significant was the fact that the word Japanese

appeared nowhere in the title or the printed materials of this firm, nor were Japanese workmen involved in building the large and complicated plant which reduced Kagak spruce trees to a liquid pulp for tankering across the Pacific to Japan. And when the plant was ready for operation, no Japanese crews appeared to slash down the trees, and only three Japanese engineers settled in Kagak to supervise the intricate machinery.

Kenji and Kimiko did take residence in a modest house on Kagak Island, and they did rent a modest office in Kodiak, to which highly skilled technicians from Tokyo flew in from time to time to inspect and supervise procedures. After the first few months, at an enterprise which involved some nineteen million dollars, there were only six Japanese on the scene and at least half the ships that ferried the pulp to Japan operated under some flag other than the Rising Sun, for if the great industrialists of Japan were determined to take over the development and utilization of Alaska's raw materials, they did not want to be flagrant about it or generate local animosities.

In such behavior the Odas were exemplary. Kenji performed no act which drew adverse attention to himself, but many which added to his sober reputation in the Kodiak community. Was a string quartet to be invited in from Seat-1034

tie? He contributed at a level just below the three leading local citizens. Were local literary lights producing a fine outdoor spectacle about Baranov and the Russian settlement of the Aleutians and Kodiak? As a paper expert he contributed all costs for printing the programs. On two occasions he invited leading Kodiak officials to fly with him and Kimiko for a vacation in their wooded village at Tamagata, and on another occasion he underwrote the expenses of two college professors from the University of Alaska at Anchorage to attend an international conference in Chile on the Pacific Rim. As a result of such contributions, he and Kimiko became known as 'those fine Japanese who have such a creative interest in Kodiak and Alaska,' and someone listening to that assessment would add: 'And they both climbed Denali, which is more than we can say for any of the Americans hereabouts.' But during his absences from the pulp mill at Kagak, when he was not vacationing at Tamagata or attending conferences in Chile, Oda was quietly probing into the remote areas of Alaska, seeking out sites like Bornite, where copper might be found, or Wainwright, which had rich seams of coal. Once he heard of a distant mountainside in the northwest arctic whose assays looked as if it might contain promising concentrations of zinc, and after shipping to Tokyo samples of ore taken from various spots in the area, he arranged for a ninety-nine-year lease on a vast area. When questioned about this on his next visit to the research headquarters of his family's operations at Tamagata, he said frankly and with as honest an assessment as he could muster: 'Japan does not want to ”take over” Alaska, as some critics suggest. All we want is to do with the other raw materials what we're already doing so successfully with wood pulp at Kagak. And let me stress, in case the subject comes up when I'm not available, Alaska profits from our present deal equally with us. It's what you might call the perfect relationship. They sell raw materials they haven't the capital to develop themselves and we get the raw materials which we can process and on which we can earn substantial profits.' 'Can we do the same with Alaskan lead and coal and zinc?' 'Better. Their bulk is smaller, potential profits greater.' The wise men of Japan contemplated this for some minutes, for this was the way in which their island empire no raw materials, excessive manpower, super excessive brainpower functioned, but then one older man, who had experienced the great revulsion the world had expressed toward a similar Japan in the 1930s, asked quietly: 'But why should the United States allow us to operate in this manner?' and Oda gave the only sensible explanation: 'Because they started 1034

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back in 1867 when they bought Alaska with the idea that the area was worthless, and in the first half century of ownership they totally ignored what they had, unable to perceive it as having any real value. Those injurious misconceptions persist.

They contaminate a nation's thought processes. And it will be well into the next century before the leaders of America awaken to what they have in their ”icebox.”In the meantime, Alaska must always be visualized as part of Asia, and that brings it neatly into our orbit.'

And on this very day when the Japanese were laying their far-ranging plans to utilize the unattended riches of Alaska, similar industrialists in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore were reaching the same conclusions and taking comparable steps to bring Alaska into their orbits.

THE SECOND ASIAN INTELLECTUAL WHO WAS Contemplating Alaska with assiduous care in these days was a man of sixty-six who lived in a small village south of Irkutsk on the way to Lake Baikal. There he had assembled a treasury of family papers and imperial studies relating to the Russian settlement and occupation of Alaska, and with the encouragement of the Soviet government, was making himself into the world's unchallenged authority on the subject.

He was Maxim Voronov, heir of that distinguished family who had provided Russian Alaska with able men and women leaders, including the great churchman Father Vasili Voronov, who took as his wife the Aleutian Cidaq and who left her to become Metropolitan of All the Russias.

Now, in the later years of his life, still slim and erect but with a shock of white hair which he combed back with his fingers, this Voronov had retired to the Irkutsk of his ancestors, where he presided over Russia's outstanding collection of data on her Aleutian discoveries and her governance of Alaska. Since he knew more than any other Russian about these subjects, he certainly knew more than any American, and in the course of painfully analyzing the historical record, spending the years 1947 to 1985 in doing so, he reached certain interesting conclusions which had begun to attract the attention of the Soviet leadership. During the summer of 1986, when the weather in eastern Siberia was almost perfect, a team of three Russian foreign policy experts spent two weeks in protracted discussion with Voronov in which Alaska was kept in constant focus. The three men were all younger than Maxim and they deferred to his age and scholarship, but not to the interpretation of his data.

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'What would be your conclusions, Comrade Voronov, as to practical timetables?'

'What I'm about to say should be of crucial importance to your thinking, Comrade Zelnikov.'

'That's why we came to see you. Please proceed.'

'Barring unforeseen disruptions of the greatest magnitude, I cannot see a propitious moment arising much before the year 2030. That's forty-five years down the road, and of course it could be longer.'

'What's your thinking?'

'First, America will probably remain strong till that time. Second, the Soviet Union will not yet have acquired the superiority in either strength or moral leadership to make the move practical. Third, it will take Alaska about that many years to fall so far behind that our move will be both sensible and inviting to her. And fourth, the rest of the world will require about that long to accommodate itself to the practicality and historical justification of our move.'

'Will your studies, the basic groundwork, that is, be in better shape in 2030?'

'I won't be here, of course, but whoever follows me will have been able to refine my studies.'

'Have you a successor in mind?'

'No.'

'You better find one.'

'Then you're prepared that is, Moscow thinks enough of this . . .'

'It's vital. The pot's far on the back of the stove, as they say in America, but it must be kept quietly bubbling. Comrade Petrovsky could be alive in 2030, and if not he, somebody else.' Petrovsky smiled and said: 'Let's suppose that I am still alive. What sequence of thought should I be pursuing in the interval?'

Patiently, slowly and with great conviction Maxim Voronov spelled out his vision of the future relationship between the Soviet Union and Alaska, and as he spoke his visitors from Moscow realized that through eight generations the Voronovs of Irkutsk had never ceased thinking of the Aleutians and Alaska as an inherent part of the Russian Empire.

'We start with the fact, not the assumption, that Alaska belongs to Russia by the three sacred rights of history: discovery, occupation, established governance. And by the right of geography, because Alaska was as much a part of Asia as it was of North America. And by the fact that Russia gave the area responsible government 1037

when we had it and the Americans did not when they took it over. And most persuasively, we have proved that we can develop our Siberia creatively while America lags far behind us in developing her northernmost part of Alaska.

'In their discussions of the future the Americans have invented a highly applicable word, the scenario, borrowed from the theater. It means an orderly scheme governing how things might work out.

What we now require is a Soviet scenario whereby we can regain the Alaska that is rightfully ours and do it with a minimum of international disruption.'

'Can there be such a scenario?' Comrade Zelnikov asked, and Voronov assured his listeners that there not only could be, but that there was an actual plan which would bring Alaska back into the Russian orbit.

'We use two great concepts, Russia in the historic past, the Soviet Union in the present, and there is no discontinuity between them. They are one moral entity and neither is in conflict with the other. I shall use the word Russia when speaking of the past, the Soviet Union when referring to the present or future. Our task is to bring Alaska back into the bosom of timeless Russia, and our Soviet Union is the agency through which we must work. The scenario is simple, the rules governing it implacable.

'First, in the decades ahead we must never disclose our objective, not by word or deed or even the most casual thought. If the United States government learns of our design, they will move to block us. I discuss these plans with no one, which is why I have no indicated successor. You three must keep your own plans just as secret.