Tanaka investigates Shatterhand and entrusts Bond with resolving the threat

Tiger Tanaka’s dealings with Dr Guntram Shatterhand begin as a security inquiry into a celebrated foreign botanist and become an attempt to stop a mounting succession of deaths that the law cannot readily address. Tanaka tracks the project from its official approval to the Castle of Death’s reputation as a destination for suicide; when his own agent is incapacitated and dies after investigating it, he turns to James Bond, explaining that he had been waiting for Bond to arrive as an honourable solution.

An apparently legitimate undertaking

Shatterhand entered Japan legally in January with his wife, Frau Emmy Shatterhand, using Swiss passports. He described himself as a horticulturalist and botanist specializing in subtropical plants. His references from Kew Gardens and the Jardin des Plantes were imprecise, but his reputation offered enough reassurance: those institutions described him as an enthusiastic amateur who had financed expeditions and contributed collected plants. He also proposed spending a million pounds on a garden stocked with mature, rare specimens, and promised that Japanese specialists could use it for study and research.

The scale of the offer helped secure official support. Japan granted Shatterhand an unusually generous ten-year residence permit, while agricultural authorities facilitated the importation of his plants. Tanaka’s department made routine inquiries and sought assistance from the Central Intelligence Agency because it had no representative in Switzerland. The resulting clearance found Shatterhand financially powerful and legally established, though it could not verify his standing as a botanist. In Tanaka’s account, the checks made him appear harmless: a wealthy resident pursuing a project that might benefit Japanese science.

Shatterhand selected a remote, semi-ruined castle in Kyushu, near Fukuoka. Its massive surrounding wall promised privacy, while the roughly five-hundred-acre volcanic property offered geysers and fumaroles whose heat could sustain tropical vegetation. Builders and decorators restored the estate; plants arrived under broad customs clearance, and Shatterhand and his wife moved in. Tanaka later recalled that the local police chief had reported a troubling detail: Shatterhand recruited his staff exclusively from former members of the Black Dragon Society. At first, however, the castle’s privacy and its owner’s evident patronage gave the arrangement a plausible explanation. Tanaka distinguishes the Society’s ruthlessness from a political cause, describing its members as operators for hire rather than as a force acting from ideological conviction.

A garden becomes a public danger

The decisive change in Tanaka’s view is not a proven act of violence by Shatterhand but the transformation of his garden into what Tanaka calls a garden of death. He tells James Bond that Shatterhand provides people with an opportunity to end their lives, while carefully revising the simpler claim that the doctor persuades them to do so. Tanaka puts the toll at more than five hundred Japanese in just under six months. His account presents the garden as a destination assembled from natural hazards: poisonous plants and fruit, Russell’s vipers, and volcanic fumaroles, among other dangers.

Tanaka describes how the journey itself becomes part of the attraction. Visitors can travel by the Romance express to Kyoto, cross the Inland Sea, take a local train from Beppu towards Fukuoka, and continue along the coast to the castle. Within the grounds, a walk among beautiful groves gives way to a lethal gamble over what a visitor might encounter. The contrast between cultivated beauty and fatal risk makes the garden more than a setting: in Tanaka’s telling, its designed richness turns death into an apparently available choice.

The official response reveals the limits of Tanaka’s authority. Police barricade the road, and legitimate visitors such as botanists need passes, yet people determined to reach the castle evade controls by crossing fields and marshes or climbing the walls. Shatterhand’s skull-and-crossbones warnings and a helium balloon whose streamers threaten prosecution fail to deter them; Tanaka says the warnings instead work as advertisements. Publicity increases the danger, and Tanaka insists that the authorities must stop the accumulating deaths even as he acknowledges that Shatterhand’s botanical project remains formally defensible.

Investigation without a charge

Tanaka’s frustration rests on a gap between suspicion and proof. Shatterhand can present himself as the benefactor of a rare plant collection, complain that trespassers damage valuable specimens, and cooperate with investigations while refusing to abandon the project. He offers to build a research department to extract plant poisons and provide them to a medical research centre, since some poisons can become useful medicines when diluted. Each proposal reinforces the public-spirited appearance of his enterprise and makes a direct legal remedy harder to justify.

Yet Tanaka identifies circumstances that make the doctor’s apparent puzzlement difficult to accept without further inquiry. When ambulances are called, he says, victims are already dead; some are recovered as calcined remains from fumaroles, although the reported hazards might have left others blinded or otherwise injured. Shatterhand suggests that victims suffering blindness or amnesia may have fallen into the fumaroles by mistake. Tanaka does not claim this explanation proves guilt, but sets it against the scale of the deaths and the repeated pattern that has brought the garden to public attention.

A month before speaking with Bond, Tanaka sent one of his best men into the grounds under orders from the Minister of the Interior, who was acting under the Prime Minister’s instructions. The matter had become a subject of public debate. The agent was to enter, observe, and report. A week later he was found on a beach near the castle, blinded, delirious, and severely burned across the lower half of his body. He recited a haiku about pink dragonflies above graves until his death. For Tanaka, this failed mission makes the threat immediate while leaving its mechanism obscure: his investigator has paid with his life, but the inquiry has not produced a straightforward case against Shatterhand.

The appeal to Bond

Tanaka’s explanation of the crisis also turns on competing interpretations of suicide. He recounts the case of an eighteen-year-old student who, after failing a university examination for the second time, placed his head beneath a pile-driver. Tanaka presents the death as an act of expiation for the dishonour brought upon the student’s parents and ancestors; he says the family and neighbours could regard it as restoring face. James Bond challenges that account by contrasting it with British responses to examination failure, in which a person might adjust expectations and try again. Tanaka answers that, for those he describes as old-fashioned, offering one’s life can be understood as the most sincere apology.

Tanaka extends his argument with a figure of 25,000 suicides a year and examples of spectacular deaths at Kegon Falls, Mihara volcano, and railway lines. These are his explanations to Bond, not an independent account of every Japanese person’s beliefs. Their importance to the investigation is that they frame the garden’s victims not simply as people encountering hazards, but as visitors drawn by a social meaning Tanaka describes as honourable or restorative. The authorities face both a practical obstacle—Shatterhand’s apparently lawful project—and a public crisis that cannot be reduced to the question of whether the doctor personally killed anyone.

When Bond asks how the matter became Tanaka’s responsibility, Tanaka explains that he had acted at the direction of senior government figures and that the failed investigation left him with no satisfactory course. He says he did nothing beyond apologizing to his superiors and waiting for an honourable solution. He had not summoned Bond by name as the only possible agent; Bond might have been someone else. Nevertheless, Tanaka’s revelation makes their relationship operational: he has brought Bond into the matter because the existing inquiry cannot explain or stop what is happening. The partnership begins not with a solved case, but with Tanaka’s accumulated evidence, his awareness of its limits, and the arrival of an outsider expected to take the next risk.