Superheterodyne

I was already regretting coming up here. The 4th year classrooms were located in the Annex, one floor above Matsui-sensei’s classroom. The main school building hadn’t been built to house 4 years worth of classes, and so the 4th years had been exiled to the old annex building. The classrooms didn’t see much use nowadays; most 4th years were just here to retake 3rd year classes or else take the bare minimum distribution requirements to fly by another year before being kicked out into the harsh world of working adults.

Kanamaru, Hosoya, and Ootake were all here already. They had quietly slipped out of Mr. Matsui’s class the second The Internationale had started playing, and now they were huddled in the corner of the otherwise empty classroom. Hosoya and Ootake were playing some kind of competitive rhythm game on their phones. Kanamaru was the first to spot me at the entrance.

“FreshieeeeEEE!”

He stood up, arms wide as if to welcome me.

“Just the man I wanted to see!”

I didn’t like the way he stressed the beginning of every word. It was like a greasy simulacrum of what a charming person would sound like when greeting an old friend. I had never directly interacted with Kanamaru before.

“What is this about, Kanamaru? Ootake told me you had some kind of scam going on, but was being cagey with the details. Just tell me so I can-

Kanamaru interrupted me before I could finish my preemptive rejection.

“Straight to the point! I like that. Please, Freshie, call me Jun, or Junichi. It’s only appropriate for real business partners to have that kind of intimacy.”

Yeugh. Kanamaru was laying it on way too thick to be remotely charming.

“I don’t think I will. Why’d you get Ootake to pitch for you? He wasn’t really selling me on it- whatever it is.”

Ootake looked offended, but Kanamaru shushed him.

“My colleague-” he gestured at the simmering Ootake- “simply didn’t want to interrupt your, shall we say, fantasizing.”

Crap. Kanamaru had been watching me close enough to tell that I wasn’t really paying attention to the class despite how far forward I was sitting. Did he know about Sayu- I mean, the girl I was watching, too?

“Thanks for the consideration.” I looked at Ootake. I wasn’t being sincere, and he knew it. I turned back to Kanamaru.

“Right, so what is this? Ootake said you were offering 270,000 yen for a quick job. That’s a lot more than your scams usually go for.”

Kanamaru didn’t seem to be offended that I had called him a scammer twice. In fact, a sly smile had broken across his face.

“Oh, just some basic capitalism. I have identified a very important good that a certain group of very, VERY desperate buyers would pay a lot of cash for. I’m talking markups greater than 1000%.”

“Is this drugs? This sounds like drugs.”

Kanamaru didn’t seem the type to go into hard criminal enterprises while still technically in school, but he and Ootake had been so evasive up until now that I thought their euphemisms must have been cover for something seriously sketchy. I half expected him to be caught off guard by my direct accusation. Instead, Kanamaru seemed to relish in it, his sly smile widening to a cheesy grin.

“Only the greatest drug of them all…” he said, with a flourish.

“...Mass. Media.”

. He pulled out what looked like a small metal box from his pocket. It was small enough to fit neatly in the palm of his hand. He shifted his grip to pinch it between his thumb and index finger and extended it out to me.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

On closer inspection, it wasn’t just a featureless metal box. The top cover appeared to be made of stamped steel, and had a small logo on it that read STELEFA in a strange, retro-futuristic font. Not a brand name I had heard of.Some electrical gibberish had been written below - something about “line impedance” and the symbol for Ohms, but it was too small for me to see clearly. A tangle of wires poked out one of the sides, and the other side had what looked like an old coaxial screw output.

“Looks like a piece of old electronics junk.” That was my honest assessment.

“Exactly-” he said, slamming it down on the table. It looked sturdy enough to withstand the blow. He continued. “-but much like moi-self, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.”

Eeugh. Kanamaru was beyond just exuding sleaze now- he was reveling in it, like a pig in a mud pit.

“So how is this going to make a thousand percent markup anywhere?” I asked. Now it was starting to sound like a more normal scheme for Kanamaru. This was some sort of tech-recycling gig which would involve a lot of manual labor that he would be foisting off on some dumb schmuck like me.

Kanamaru’s face grew solemn. He walked towards the window, straightening himself out. He pulled open the shades that were now blocking out the early evening sun, revealing a panorama of the wall and the brutalist apartment blocks in the North beyond. He clasped his hands behind his back.

“Freshman. Did you know the North still uses analog television?”

The North did seem like a technological backwater, but analog TV signals had been off the air in the south for something like 20 years. Were they really that far behind?

Kanamaru continued his faux-inspirational monologue.

“Just imagine what it must be like living there. All those housewives, craving their soaps. All those poor idolaters who don’t even know that Junko Miyamoto is finally spoken for…”

Junko Miyamoto was a famous idol who had ended her 25-year singing career last year in a very public, very scandalized wedding to a TV producer. Some of her long-time fans had been so extreme as to burn old merchandise of hers on hearing that the eternal idol wasn’t so eternal after all. Some poor sap in the north might still harbor fantasies of trying to marry someone who they didn’t stand a chance in hell of ever even meeting.

 Why did that sound so familiar and sting so much?

“Freshie, have you even seen the crap they put on Northern TV? It. Is. Dire.”

Kanamaru’s analysis was correct. I had seen a Northern TV program once, when I was staying at my grandparents’ house in the country one summer. They had an old analog TV that could only get channels from the North, since it was too old to have a digital tuner. I remember a program called “The Great Pioneers.” It was a low-budget tokusatsu show that felt like a played-serious parody of the Rangers show. Pioneer Red and his comrades Pioneer Blue from the Soviet Union and Pioneer Green from East Germany fought against Uncle Sam, John Bull, and UberAlles, stereotyped villain versions of America, the UK, and probably West Germany. Instead of the usual fare of plastic toy belts and walkie-talkies, the show seemed to be promoting a youth organization called the Young Pioneers. Unlike the heroes, they didn’t seem to be fighting capitalism. It just looked like they were going camping.

 I got as far as seeing John Bull kidnap a bus full of middle-eastern schoolchildren before my father turned the TV off and admonished me for watching that “commie brainwash crap.” He bought a new TV for my grandparents the next day. From time to time, intercepted clips of the show would be posted for people to laugh at or use in a political argument on the internet. Seeing it with a modern screen really drove home how terrible it looked. It rivaled old monster movies from the 50s in terms of rubber suits and puppets.

“So what is selling them a bunch of old TV tuners going to do?” I asked, back on topic.

Kanamaru turned around and looked directly into my eyes.

“That’s just the thing. These aren’t any old TV tuners. Each one looks exactly like the analog TV tuners produced by the Nagano No. 2 State Electronics Factory, but contains a complete digital tuner inside - perfectly disguised.”

He picked up the device from the desk he had slammed it on and began pacing back and forth as he continued his explanation.

“People in the North were buying old digital tuners to upgrade their TVs, but Uncle Yoshi started catching on and sending the goons after them. Kind of like the NHK guy, but he has two guys with guns ready to haul you off to the gulag if you have any unauthorized modifications on your state-sanctioned TV set.”

So that made these harmless pieces of junk contraband in the north. That explains how something so worthless-looking could be marked up so much and still sell. But something was still missing from Kanamaru’s explanation.

“So, how are you getting these to your ‘desperate consumers?’”

Kanamaru stopped and turned back to me. That cheesy grin was back.

“I’ve got a guy in Chiba. He’s the distributor. He buys them wholesale from me.”

Chiba was in the North.

“But they’ve gotta be inspecting the mail, right?”

Kanamaru once again looked me in the eyes. There was something menacing now in that gaze.

“That’s where you come in, Freshie.”