The Ultramarine Uniform
She might have quietly put the uniform on if left alone, but there was something so insufferably meek about her attitude that it irritated me a little. I sat cross-legged on the bed and spoke up with my back straight.
"I'm afraid there's been a mistake."
"A mistake? What mistake could I possibly have—"
"What if you've put on weight in the meantime?"
"Put on weight? Me? Well, I've never really thought about it..."
"A year is plenty of time to gain weight. You weren't exactly at an age where you'd grow any taller, so you didn't—but flesh can swell. The uniform was measured last year, which means it might not fit anymore. It's a shame, but you should really take it back. I'll see to it that a new one is tailored properly, with fresh measurements."
"But, um, ah, well, let me just see..."
I had only meant it as a light joke, but Hui-yeong sprang up from her seat and strode straight toward me. She gripped both sides of my waist with her hands.
"There's no flesh here at all? Your waist curves in nicely, and your stomach... it's too firm to be fat..."
"What do you think you're doing right now?"
I was still in my sleepwear, and the fabric was thin enough that I could feel her palms against my sides as if nothing lay between them. She wasn't squeezing hard, but that was precisely what made the touch feel so strange.
"Ah—wait, could it be, unnie? If it's not your belly, then maybe your chest grew in the meantime? You had almost no curves when I saw you last year, and if that's the case, then the measurements definitely need to be—"
Her fingers began creeping up along my ribs. I let out a long sigh and seized both her wrists. Her grip strength was a bit greater than mine, but in this position I was pressing down from above—gravity was on my side.
Unable to push her hands any higher, Hui-yeong stopped somewhere around my sixth and seventh ribs. I tilted my face slightly away from hers and glared at her nose.
"Would you like a headbutt?"
"I'll have to decline. I'm scared you might actually flatten it for real. I think the bridge has already sunk a little."
Hui-yeong hastily pulled her hands away from my body. Wondering if her nose really had been bent out of shape, I gave it a little tap with my finger. The proud line of that haughty nose hadn't lost a thing. It had all been an act.
"Looks fine to me."
"Ah, ahaha... right, I was joking, unnie."
Blushing faintly, Hui-yeong retreated a step. Paying her no further mind, I rose from the bed and walked over to the desk. When I lifted the lid of the white box stained with the Vice Minister of Military Affairs's blood, I found an ultramarine uniform, neatly folded, made of quite luxurious fabric.
On the jacket, resting at the very top of the box, my nameplate had been affixed in plain view. Written in Chinese characters: Jayanghwa. My Japanese surname, Ajisai, rendered in hanja.
"Yanghwa as a name—it's, how should I put it, rather unusual? Not what you'd expect for a girl's name."
"Why? It has the character for 'flower' in it. I think it's a lovely name, myself. It probably only feels strange to you because there aren't many people with the surname Ja in Joseon."
If I wore this, people would assume I had been Korean from the start—or that, even if I had once been Japanese, I had become fully naturalized to Joseon. Not that it much mattered...
"Well, fair enough. Though—Vice Minister, there's something I'd like to ask."
"Ask me anything you like, unnie."
"How much police power does the People's Republic of Korea actually have available for maintaining order across the country?"
A sigh was the first answer to my question. She probably couldn't bring herself to say out loud that it was vanishingly inadequate. When I saw Hui-yeong hesitate, I pressed on.
"I looked at the government organization chart yesterday. The Police Ministry isn't independent, is it?"
"...Police affairs are being handled under the Police Bureau of the Ministry of Security."
"And the position I'm being offered is Investigation Squad Leader of that Police Bureau?"
"It's called squad leader, but in practice it amounts to running the whole bureau. Just as I, the Vice Minister of Military Affairs, am currently acting in place of the Minister. We did offer the bureau chief's seat to Jo Byeong-ok, hoping to win over rightist figures, but he refused to cooperate with the Preparatory Committee for National Foundation—so now we're obliged to appoint someone from the left."
"Appointing a leftist as chief of a bureau under the Ministry of Security would put Minister Kim Hong-il in an awkward position, wouldn't it? The honorable Minister fought in the National Revolutionary Army as one of Chiang Kai-shek's men."
"That's exactly the problem. Figures from the Korean Communist Party already have their eyes on the police powers, but the Chairman worries a great deal. With so many rightists already bound to the Shanghai Provisional Government and the American diaspora, if the Joseon cabinet tilts too far left, the neighboring powers will look on us sourly. And if support for the cabinet drops, a whole cascade of secondary problems follows from that..."
"Which would also raise the odds of Kim Won-bong's faction—tied to the Chinese Communist Party—gaining influence over domestic politics."
"Precisely. The Chairman leans friendly toward the left, yes, but he wants the Ministry of Security and the Police Bureau staffed with a measure of rightist appointments to keep the balance. And with the top posts of the Ministry of Military Affairs more or less forced to fit Japan's designs as it is, the police appointments have to be handled all the more carefully. The bureau chief's seat is vacant."
So, to sum it up, this was the situation.
If they tried to hand the police ministry post to the rightists living in the country, no one was leaping to accept it. In my view, entrusting it to the officers returning from Manchukuo might actually be the most sensible option—but stocking the police leadership of a brand-new cabinet with former Manchukuo army officers would hardly look appropriate.
Depending on how circumstances unfolded, there could come a point where figures who had committed acts of collaboration—unavoidably, for the sake of building a new nation—had to be brought into service. Considering how this government had come into being at all, the purging of collaborators that even the world I once lived in had never managed could hardly be expected here.
Still, mixing pro-Japanese figures into the top posts of a newly founded government had to be avoided as much as possible. Was there such a shortage of people that they would take in the likes of No Deok-sul wholesale? Compared to men like that, a pure-blooded Japanese like Ajisai Mizuko might actually be the cleaner choice. The same went for Manchukuo-born soldiers with records in the Gando Special Force.
"Perhaps Ajisai is actually the cleaner option"—the judgment itself was by no means impossible. Judging from the guards' reactions when I was briefly imprisoned, my reputation among Koreans wasn't uniformly bad. Even so...
"Even so, we can't very well hand the police ministry over to a Japanese woman with no blood ties to Korea whatsoever. Your previous rank wasn't even police chief—it was senior patrol officer. And you're far too young. So our government's position is this: we'd like to give you a fairly high rank within this otherwise empty Police Ministry, and have you help fill the staffing gap in the Ministry of Security."
"Is there no pushback within the government?"
"Plenty of it. Mostly from the left. But that opposition stems from the Minister of Security's own history of anti-communism, so you won't have to weather the political storms yourself or step into the spotlight, unnie. The Chairman trusts General Kim Hong-il, and the General decided to bring you in fully prepared to handle problems of that scale."
Then a thought occurred to me, sudden and unbidden.
"Does Hong Sa-ik really have to be protected?"
"...What do you mean by that?"
"You know he's a problematic appointment. It was Yamamoto's pressure. If Hong Sa-ik himself felt his safety was threatened, and that became his excuse to refuse the post..."
"...Then they'd demand Lee Jong-chan's appointment, or Chae Byeong-deok's. Yamamoto Isoroku has plenty of cards to play. And remember—demanding their preferred figure for the Minister of Military Affairs is the weakest card Japan can use. Provoking Japan is dangerous. If a leftist harmed Hong Sa-ik and the Japanese government demanded harsher terms on the grounds that we'd injured a lieutenant general of the Imperial Japanese Army, a great many people would be put in a terrible spot. This government was born the hard way. We don't want it shaken—not yet."
"If a government is that easily shaken, then the independence itself is a contradiction."
"I know. Do you think anyone doesn't know this independence is riddled with contradictions?"
Hui-yeong bit her lip hard.
"And yet... no—precisely because of that... we have to build an army. If we must raise a Joseon army regardless, then we need the people who gained real combat experience in Japan. Hong Sa-ik, Kim Seok-won, Lee Jong-chan, Chae Byeong-deok—we can't carelessly throw any of them away. Even the Minister of Security, who fought more fiercely against the Japanese army than anyone, agrees."
As she spoke, her eyes were darkening again, taking on black like ink spreading through water. I was slowly coming to understand that whenever she truly poured something out, her gaze grew darker than usual.
She was an odd woman, but the heart she put into doing her duty seemed genuine. In that case, I'd best not carry my own strange provocations and stubbornness too far.
...Fine. I'd cooperate. It wasn't as if there was anything else I could do.
"All right. I'll try the uniform on, so go outside and wait."
"Oh—no, it's fine, I can stay right here while you—"
"This place is a shoebox. There's no partition or screen."
"That's exactly why it's fine even without one... um, we're both women, aren't we? You don't really mind that sort of thing, do you?"
For a moment I'd nearly been moved by her dedication to her work, but apparently this woman's true nature was, indeed, a pervert's.
"Women together is no problem. A woman who tries to feel up my body without permission is the exception. Get out, now. I'm drawing the curtains too, so don't even think about any funny business!"