Tsujigiri

Ryūzō sat with his legs folded under his body looking at the sword in the waning light. It was beautiful - more beautiful than anything he had ever seen. He narrowed his gaze as the last of the Sun's rays washed over the striking-edge of the blade, dousing the room in a flash of light, as if the sword's spirit were filling the room.

Beside him, Genpachi gasped. "Amazing..." he whispered under his breath.

Ryūzō nodded silently. Amazing was just the word. The old bladesmith, the man that had served Ryūzō's family for generations, had achieved perfection with this sword. It was no wonder that he had died so suddenly after the blade had been forged. There was nothing left in this life for him to do, now, no greater feat for him to achieve.

"What will you do now?" Genpachi asked softly.

Ryūzō reached out and took the sword in his hands, but said nothing. Even in the deepening darkness, the blade glowed like it was made of pale fire. He ran his thumb along the broad side of the blade. It felt alive under the tip of his finger as if it were touching him back.

"You have to test it," Genpachi said, breaking the silence.

Ryūzō turned to look at his friend. "Yeah," he said. "You're right. But it's dark already. We can go out tomorrow and test it in the fields."

"Why wait?" Genpachi asked. "Darkness is the perfect time to test a new sword. It's at night that all the ogres, demons, and foxes come out, disguised as humans. You can try the sword against some of them. It would be silly to use it on bamboo and melons! A sword like this should be put to use killing ogres, not cutting plants."

"Hmmm," Ryūzō said, eyeing the blade. "I suppose you're right."

"Of course I am," Genpachi said confidently. "I've seen my uncle do it when he has a new sword."

"Alright," Ryūzō said. "Let's go."

Ryūzō sheathed the sword and the two boys went out into the night. The moon hung low in the sky, a silver sliver casting a faint glow on the empty streets. They walked toward the center of the town, to where Genpachi was sure there would be more kami than on the outskirts where they had come from. After cutting up and down a few allies, the finally came across what appeared to be a young woman in a colorful yukata.

"There," Genpachi hissed. "There's one!"

"That's a woman," Ryūzō said, squinting in the darkness.

"Why would there be a woman out at night, alone, with nobody to watch over her?" Genpachi asked. "That's not a woman, it's probably a fox out looking for someone to trick."

"Ah," Ryūzō said. "I see your point."

He strode toward the fox and called out: "Fox! Stop where you are."

The woman turned around, a surprised look on her face.

"I am Ogasawara Ryūzō!" he said, puffing out his chest. "I have a new sword that I need to test, and  since I see that you are up to no good, I have decided to test it on you!"

The woman looked at the boy, a confused look on her face, but before she could reply, Ryūzō drew the sword and, with a flash like a bolt of lightning, made a single, fluid cut. She stared at the boy in horror for a brief moment before her head toppled from her neck and landed with a thud at Ryūzō's feet. A fountain of blood sprayed into the air and then her body crumbled to the ground. Ryūzō stifled a satisfied grin and re-sheathed the sword.

"Wow!" Gepnachi whooped, running up behind his friend. "I've never seen such a cut before!"

"It was like the sword had a life of its own," Ryūzō said. "It went through the fox like nothing, like it was moving through the air."

"You have to try another one, something more difficult," Genpachi told him. "The body, this time. Let's find an ogre. Killing foxes is easy. Let's find an ogre next!"

The boys ran down the alley and turned at the first intersection they came to. As the rounded the corner, they crashed into a large, roughly dressed man.

"Out of my way!" the man spat, swatting at the boys.

"An orgre!" Genpachi squeeled.

"What did you call me?" the man growled.

"Ogre!" Ryūzō announced. "I am Ogasawara Ryūzō! I have a new sword that I need to test, and since I see that you are up to no good, I have decided to test it on you!"

The man screwed up his face, staring at the boy in confusion, but before he could do anything else, Ryūzō drew his sword and, with one fluid movement, brought it across the ogre's large belly. The ogre stumbled back for a couple steps, his mouth chewing silent words before his torso separated from his lower body and fell to the ground with a loud, wet thud. The ogre's massive hands grabbed at where the lower half of his body should have been, tangling themselves in his own stinking intestines, as his eyes darted about wildly. After a moment, he gave a violent shiver, and then seemed to die suddenly.

"Incredible!" Genpachi said, running over to look at the dead ogre.

Ryūzō held the blade out in front of him, examining it closely. "It went through the ogre like it was nothing," he said. "It was even easier than with the fox. It was like the blade was being drawn through him, like it wanted to kill the ogre itself!"

"So cool!" Genpachi said, staring at the sword. "A sword like this needs a name! What will you name it?"

Ryūzō looked at the glade, glimmering scarlet in the night. This wasn't just any sword, he realized. It must have its own soul. It must be alive. "Onikiri," he said at last.

"Onikiri," Genpachi repeated.

The two boys looked at each other, then nodded somberly, feeling that they had just entered into a silent pact with the sword.

"No more testing," Genpachi told Ryūzō after a moment. "It's time we put Onikiri into service."

"I agree," Ryūzō told his friend. "Let's rid this town of ogres and foxes. I don't care if it takes all night!"

Ryūzō sheathed Onikiri and the boys took off together, running as fast as they could.

Zero Tolerance

"Please!" she cried. "Please, no! Please don't!"

"M'am, if you don't let go of the child, we'll have to take her by force," the officer told her, taking a step toward the mother and her wailing toddler.

"Please!" she cried, clutching her daughter to her breasts. "You can't take her from me! You don't know what we've been through! Please don't!" She fell to her knees, her arms around her child, tears streaming down her face. "Please let us stay together, please don't take my baby."

"Hold her down, Armando," the officer told his partner.

The two men descended on the woman. They were large men with strong arms and rough hands. One of them applied pressure to the woman's wrist, easily breaking her grip, then twisted her arm behind her back. The woman shrieked in terror as pain shot up through her arm and shoulder.

"NO!" she screamed in desperation. "DON'T TAKE MY BABY!"

The other officer dug his boot into the woman's thigh as he jerked the crying child from her free arm.

"POR EL AMOR DE DIOS!" the woman screeched, "NO!"

The officer holding the woman down wrenched her other arm behind her back and then handcuffed her. She tried to get to her feet, but the officer yanked her down so that she fell flat on her face.

"No, no, no..." she sobbed into the dirt. "Please... no..."

"Armando, you keep an eye on her," the officer told his partner over the sounds of the child crying. "I'm going to put the kid in the truck."

"Alright," Armando said, putting a boot between the woman's shoulders to hold her down.

The woman listened in defeat as the sound of her crying daughter faded into the distance. Her body shuddered as she cried, the pain in her heart overwhelming like a black fire burning deep inside her chest. The sounds of her daughter's cries became softer and softer. After a few moments, she couldn't hear her child at all. She held her breath, straining desperately for any sound of her baby, but all she could hear was the sound of her own heart pounding in her ears. She felt a wave of panic wash over her.

"Armando, please," she whispered in Spanish. "Please don't let them take my baby."

"What did you think would happen?" the officer snapped in English. "You broke the law. You came into this country and broke the law, and you were stupid enough to bring your kid with you."

"I had no choice," the woman choked, "I had to come, and I couldn't leave my baby. Please, Armando, please let us go. I will take her back to Mexico, and I will never try to cross again, I promise! I swear on my own life, on the life of my daughter, we will never come back! But please, please don't take her from me."

"That ain't gonna happy, lady," Armando said flatly. "We've got laws in this country, and it's our job to enforce them."

"Please," the woman cried, desperation and panic coloring her voice. "Please, Mr. Armando, please just let us go and we will never come back. Please don't take her from me. I can't bear it. I can't be without my baby." She paused for a moment, fighting the feeling that she was going to collapse in on herself. "We are just a mother and her child," the woman said after a moment. "How could you take a child from its mother? How could this be a law? How could you do something so terrible as this?"

"We're just following orders," the officer said.

House Flippers

The two perennial complaints about California real estate are that it's both too expensive and in short supply. This objective, observable reality fits neatly into the established dogma of economics; as supply dwindles, prices inevitably rise. Likewise, the expense and supply narrative fits neatly into the polarized ideology of American politics, with each end of the spectrum shaping an emotional, sometimes compelling argument from a very narrow set of "facts". But economists, politicians, and talking heads, in general, all fail to understand both the broader picture and the ugly details of the housing situation in California. The powers that be seem incapable of wrapping their heads around the systemic inequity of profit-oriented cash buyers over families financing a home to live in, and the solutions that politicians propose completely miss the mark. In other words, house flippers are fucking up the housing market in California and everyone trying to "fix" the problem is only making it worse.

There are two big schools of thought, aligning more or less with political religiosity, on how to address housing costs in California. The reaction on the left is to build "affordable" housing. Democrats, and others that have a vested interest in pandering to the working poor, like to push the idea that California is inherently too expensive for anyone to live in without giving any reason for the high prices save for some vague dog whistling about one-percenters. And this makes sense because making promises to subsidize the largest item in most familys' budgets is a winning strategy. But in effect, low-income housing institutionalizes poverty, creating ghettos where poorer people are shoved into and forgotten. Low-income housing doesn't address the root cause of why housing is so expensive in the first place, and it necessarily segregates society into groups of haves and have-nots - a move with far-reaching implications that affect a person from birth to death (public schooling, criminal and police activity, food scarcity, job opportunities, infrastructure, mental and standard healthcare, etc).

On the other hand, the reaction on the right is to slash regulations so that, or so the argument goes, housing can be built quicker and more economically. Republicans and others with a vested interest in the financing of massive real estate developments (commercial and residential) like to pretend that there are literally zero properties for sale and that the only solution is a mad building spree on every square inch of land in the entire state - especially lands with some environmental significance. As with the Democrats, this is a move that panders to a specific voting block and does nothing to address the root cause of high housing costs. First and foremost, there is always housing on the market. There exists NO large city with exactly ZERO houses, condos, townhomes, or multiplexes on the market. Secondly, ignoring environmental and zoning regulations is a short-sighted move with long-term costs likely to outweigh any short-term economic gains. Examples that come to mind include building developments on floodplains, in regions prone to drought and fire, or entire cities below sea level.

The problem isn't that there aren't enough homes on the market, nor is the problem that the real value of homes is out of reach of the average Californian. The problem in California real estate is speculation and house flipping. The problem in California real estate is that cash buyers with no intention of living in the homes they purchase are taking homes from families, doing a nominal amount of superficial work on the home, and then putting the homes back on the market at super-inflated prices. The market should be able to correct for this, right? Prices are too high, a surplus exists, so that should drive prices down. The reason that the market is failing to stop this sort of behavior is that there is a critical mass of flippers that are doing this; they're over-paying for properties and then over-pricing them when they put them back on the market. In essence, flippers have created a sort of monopolistic hive of assholes that, while not necessarily colluding together, are still fucking everything up for the rest of us.

I'll give my own anecdotal experience as an example. I spent nearly two years looking for a home for my family. It was incredible to watch the market heat up, with prices rising literally by the week, far outpacing our own income growth - because who the fuck has an income that grows with each passing day? I would lose every bid that I made, sometimes by bidders that would come in at over $100k over asking. It was insane. But the most unbelievable part came when, one to six months later, I would see the same houses back on the market, freshly painted and with a price tag $50k to $150k over what the home had been bought for only a few months before. In some cases, houses would literally sell for twice the price they had gone for less than six months before.

The reason I had so much trouble buying a house wasn't that inventories were low, in fact, as I've already said, there are always homes for sale. Nor was the reason that I don't make enough money. Our household income is far above average, even in California. I have few expenses and a healthy amount of savings. I could easily afford a home that was reasonably priced. The reason I had so much trouble buying a house was that flippers, with tons of cash, would swoop in and pick up properties, give them a paint job and a granite countertop, and then dump them back on the market at an astronomical price that I couldn't afford... but that another cash buyer would gladly pay to repeat the flipping process again on the same property. The home buying process is set up to favor people with cash, people that will over-pay, and people that are well connected in the industry - in other words, the market is set up to reward speculation and disadvantage real home buyers.

At one point, I was talking to a real estate agent at a house showing and I started to complain to him about cash buyers scooping up reasonably priced homes and flipping them for insane prices. His advice to me was something along the lines of "you can be angry at the market and never get a home, or you can go with the market and make some good money by buying and selling properties". He was completely missing the point. I'm not a house flipper. I didn't want to flip a fucking house. I wanted a place to live in, where my kids could run around in the yard and develop fond memories of their childhood. I wanted a home, not an investment. But in this country, in this state, in this market, it seems that everyone has been hard-wired to look for a get-rich-quick scheme. Everyone is hustling to cash in, and those that are cashing in are ruining it for the rest of us by exploiting weaknesses in the bidding process and driving up prices.

In our current system, we have a perverted dichotomy of both unrestricted capitalism and heavy-handed, ineffective government intervention which ends up simply institutionalizing poverty and not addressing the root causes of the problem. Liberals want to shove all the poor people into projects while conservatives want to milk every last penny from this state's natural bounty and fuck the consequences. Meanwhile, economists are sitting back, twiddling their thumbs, assuring everyone that the market will find an equilibrium, ignoring the human factor that's running the train straight off a cliff.

If we want to fix the cost of housing in California, or anywhere else, then we need to end the practice of house flipping. Homes should be bought by families that intend to live in them, not by assholes that are only looking to turn a profit.