Yamanashi is the setting where the Pioneers’ rural community and the breakaway Dawn take shape, and where an armed confrontation between the Dawn and police leaves a history that Aomamé later traces. The prefecture’s countryside is not a passive backdrop: its depopulated settlements make communal land available, its restricted domains frustrate oversight, and its mountains shelter both agricultural life and armed organization.

Rural Settlement and the Pioneers

Fukada’s group sought an almost deserted village in the mountains of Yamanashi, where aging residents and farms without successors had left land and houses available at very low cost. The group acquired farmland, homes, and plastic greenhouses. The local government provided a subsidy on the condition that the community keep cultivating existing fields, and the group also received favorable tax treatment in its early years. Fukada had a separate source of funding, but even Professor Ebisuno did not know where that money came from or what its nature was.

Under Fukada’s initial direction, the Pioneers’ agricultural operations became established. The community’s flexible system of units, however, accompanied an eventual split into distinct factions. The militant faction, centered on former Red Guards trained by Fukada, treated agricultural settlement as preparation for revolution. Its members maintained farming activities while holding to the view that they would take up arms when the time came.

The Dawn and Armed Confrontation

The breakaway radicals relocated within Yamanashi and pursued farming while training with weapons. Their relationship with neighboring farmers deteriorated over access to a small river on Dawn land. The waterway had long served the surrounding area as a shared irrigation source, but the Dawn denied local residents access. The dispute persisted for years before a confrontation at the group’s barbed-wire boundary led to residents being assaulted. When Yamanashi Prefectural Police sent officers to execute an arrest warrant for assault, a gunfight broke out.

Aomamé later searches newspaper microfilm at a ward library for reports of the fighting, which had taken place in autumn three years earlier near Lake Motosu. She recognizes that the Pioneers’ domain, described to her by the Dowager, lies in the same mountains. She allows that the connection might be coincidental but distrusts coincidence, especially because the Dowager had alluded to a serious matter. Her archival search turns the prefecture’s past into a possible clue to the present threat.

The reports describe three police officers killed in the opening exchange and two others wounded. The extremists disappeared into the mountains with their weapons, prompting a large police search across the surrounding heights. A heavily armed Japan Self-Defense Forces company was also flown in by helicopter. Among the militants who refused to surrender, three were killed and two seriously wounded; one of the wounded men died in hospital three days later, while the report did not clearly establish what happened to the other. Four more men, unhurt or only slightly wounded, were arrested. The newspaper account included an aerial photograph of the scene, a rough map, photographs of the dead officers, and images of the special airborne unit in camouflage with scoped rifles and compact automatic weapons.

Professor Ebisuno confirms to Tengo that the armed clashes with police in the mountains near Lake Motosu were the work of the Dawn. That confirmation connects the faction’s revolutionary purpose to the violence recorded in the reports: the farming community that had served as a cover and preparatory base had produced an armed confrontation on Yamanashi soil.

Religious Status and Restricted Access

The Pioneers later received official approval in Yamanashi to register as a religious corporation. The change gave the group a formal religious identity and made police investigation inside its domain extremely difficult, since entry could be treated as an infringement of constitutionally protected freedom of belief. The account attributes the group’s strong legal position in part to its lawyers; local police were not equipped to challenge it effectively.

The difficulty of oversight also appears in reports about the community’s children. Many children of members initially attended the local elementary school but stopped after a period of time. When the school pressed for attendance, the group replied that some children found school difficult and said it provided their education itself. Teachers, however, reported that many children seemed psychologically troubled: they became quieter and less responsive as they grew older, and eventually stopped attending. Since outsiders were refused entry to the Pioneers’ domain, teachers could not see what happened to children after they disappeared from school. The prefecture’s history of restricted access thus extends beyond the police investigation of the armed group to an unresolved concern about children’s lives inside the community.

Narrative Significance

Yamanashi binds together two forms of enclosure. The Dawn uses remote mountain terrain and an agricultural settlement to shelter revolutionary preparation; the Pioneers’ later religious status places their domain behind legal and physical barriers to scrutiny. In Aomamé’s present investigation, the archived account of the Lake Motosu fighting offers a way to connect those hidden spaces with public violence. The prefecture is therefore both the geography of the group’s rise and the evidentiary landscape through which its history becomes legible.