Sudden Independence
The People's Republic of Korea had stumbled into its independence all at once. Though whether that deserved to be called independence—or merely the granting of "self-governance"—was another question.
Apparently Yamamoto Isoroku, in order to wind down the Sino-Japanese War and sit down with Li Zongren, had to cough up either Korea or Manchuria. I had no way of knowing the details of the talks, but the result was that the Empire of Manchuria survived while the annexation of Korea was rescinded. Viewed one way, it was a shrewd choice: with Manchuria in hand, Japan could keep a measure of influence even after letting Korea go, and since the parting had been a peaceful one, interference of the kind Britain kept up over her dominions would surely continue as well.
They had not managed to seat a pro-Japanese figure at the head of the cabinet. When the Government-General moved to withdraw, Lyuh Woon-hyung—who took the chairmanship at the head of the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence—was not a man to bow easily before the Japanese. And yet, having recovered national sovereignty through a Japanese "compromise," a certain propriety had to be observed. Evidently Yamamoto had seen fit to 'kindly advise' that Hong Sa-ik be appointed Chief of the General Staff.
What kind of cabinet the People's Republic of Korea assembled afterward. How the pro-Japanese officers who had served in Manchuria made their way home. And what became of them once they did.
I had plenty of burning questions myself. But whatever I managed to learn here, and however I learned it, only one truth kept growing clearer: I would never fit into this world.
My name is Ajisai Mizuko—born in 1920, twenty-five years old, a mere patrolman assigned to Jongno Police Station under the Police Affairs Bureau of the Government-General of Korea. Before I fell into this absurd world, even my sex, my name, and my nationality had been different from what they were now, but by this point that meant nothing at all. I had dropped into twentieth-century Korea, in the thick of a world war, three years ago. When I was twenty-two.
Some days I wondered whether my life might have offered some other choice. But when I opened my eyes, this was the body I found myself in. Hanging in my room was a crisp-pressed uniform announcing that I was already a patrolman. Working out the situation took a while—but it didn't take an eternity.
Most likely, I concluded, I had simply been possessed: thrown into the body of some stranger in some strange world. I hadn't prepared for it, hadn't even imagined it. But when something that ridiculous crashes down right in front of you, adaptation is the only recourse you have.
The body of Ajisai Mizuko was, in a word, a human weapon. The flesh itself was so steeped in combat that when danger struck, it felt as though the body moved on its own and slammed the other party flat before I could think. When I drew the military sword on a whim and gave it a test swing, the blade's arc came out clean, without a single wasted motion in it.
My pistol marksmanship was the most accurate in the station. Minami Jiro came to watch me fire in person and showered me with praise, saying he had never seen anyone, even back in the home islands, handle a Nambu pistol with such precision. It didn't make me feel particularly good.
At around 168 centimeters, she stood very tall for a woman—taller than most of the men around her. The muscles in her arms and legs didn't show on the surface, but under the hand they were firm. And honestly, if one had to be a woman, the chest was nothing to get excited about... soft enough, perhaps, but not much worth holding. Considering the rest of this body's 'specifications,' I decided I was lucky it wasn't solid muscle.
Her face wouldn't have been called a great beauty, but given that I wandered around in an era before modern cosmetics had developed without a trace of makeup, the underlying potential had to be considerable. At first I marveled that the Japan of 1942 would recruit a woman in her twenties as a patrolman; about a month in, I was marveling in the opposite direction—however conservative the country, why on earth was it letting a human weapon like this loiter as a rear-area cop instead of shipping her off to the front?
Of course, that was a tremendous stroke of luck for me. The police under the Government-General did perpetrate their share of repression against the colonial population, but set against what was happening on the battlefield, it amounted to nothing. On the Chinese front, the Imperial Army sprayed poison gas about as casually as water, or massacred the residents of occupied territory without any reason at all.
I couldn't claim nothing of the sort happened on Korean soil, but the situation stayed under control. Nothing ever arose that required me, a senior patrolman of Kyeongseong, to kill anyone. If anything, I had become the icon of Jongno Police Station—a mannequin trotted out to advertise the police presence and feed the propaganda machine.
So I exercised my strength and my martial skill less in real combat than in theatrical little public displays. This is the Empire of Japan—even our policewomen possess such terrifying prowess... That was the pitch. It suited me fine. I settled into that reality and made myself comfortable.
The more famous I became, the freer my movements grew. Unlike my early fear that the mood around me might force my own hands to carry out repression against my "ancestors," almost none of the work assigned to me was the sort that would earn the residents' direct loathing. Ajisai Mizuko had to remain an object of fear; remaining an object of resentment would be inconvenient. Someone, it seemed, had made precisely that calculation.
And so, under one pretext or another, I was quietly able to slip small kindnesses to the residents wherever my hand could reach. I lived alone, so I needed little money, and the war had never washed up on the peninsula's shores, so there was little danger in it either.
The only thing worth watching was the news. 1942. By my knowledge, this was an empire with three years left on its clock. When those three years ran out, two atomic bombs would fall on Japan, and the Soviet Union would annihilate Manchukuo and drive south.
The Empire of Japan would surrender unconditionally, and after that... would come the chaos of the postwar years. I let the days drift by on thoughts like that. If I had been some heavyweight independence activist positioned to stop the division of Korea, then yes, I would have tried something—but what exactly could anyone accomplish from my situation, at my rank?
It was obvious the answer was nothing. All I had to give was petty kindness, or hypocrisy. Ajisai Mizuko had nothing but the strength of two arms and two legs; in truth, she had no power whatsoever.
But when August came and "that battle" was fought, the news that reached me left me stunned.
The Combined Fleet, it said, had sunk three American aircraft carriers and five cruisers, while Japan's losses amounted to a few destroyers lightly damaged. Even so, I assumed it had to be a lie cooked up to reassure the imperial subjects. Yet amid the frantic scrambling to siphon troops from the Japanese garrison army in Korea for the coming occupation of Hawaii, I realized the victory bulletin from Midway had been no lie.
No one moves an army in earnest just to fool the public—not when they hadn't even managed to occupy Pearl Harbor. That they had driven the Americans out of the Philippines I could accept; but then victory reports kept coming in from Indonesia as well, one astonishment after another. The Combined Fleet, it appeared, had seized complete command of the seas between Southeast Asia and the Japanese home islands, won several fleet engagements, and made considerable headway against the resource shortage into the bargain.
By that point, I had to suspect a different possibility.
It turned out I hadn't stepped into history at all. The world I had fallen into was—yes—the fabricated chronicle of some Japanese right-wing idiot. A world where the battleship Yamato was so utterly invincible it blasted American carriers apart with its main guns on sight, where the Imperial Army swatted aside the pathetic Chinese forces a hundred to one, and where the Soviet Union was in the end attacked by Japan and destroyed. I came to believe I must have been dropped into some trash novel or manga along those lines.
Which explained why I had no grasp whatsoever of how this world was supposed to run. Naturally—I had never so much as touched a Japanese rightist's fabricated chronicle. I might conceivably have picked up a "national-wank" novel where my own country inexplicably came out on top, but I had no reason to care about a neighboring country's chauvinist media.
If that were so, I reasoned, the army would surely be riding high too. If this world had been authored by some Japanese ultranationalist, its ending would be the Continental Conquest Operation: the Imperial Army subjugating China, rolling on through Burma and India, and rising as Asia's hegemon. And in a world as absurd as that, being reborn as a Japanese woman might not be such a bad hand after all.
But that expectation was betrayed in its own strange way. Word came that the army in China had run up against a ferocious defense at Wuhan and could not push inland, and that the Army Ministry was preparing a withdrawal to the coast—and a negotiated peace.
Such was the state of things in early 1944. Troops that should have gone into China were being posted to the Pacific islands instead, Admiral Yamamoto's winning streak had raised the navy's voice inside the cabinet, and apparently far too many resources were being devoured keeping the Pacific supplied. The China situation was, if anything, worsening—the Empire, they said, had been driven onto the defensive by Nationalist counteroffensives.
It made no sense. If you were going to write a fantasy chronicle in the first place, why not write one where Japan soundly beat China? If you wanted adversity, the Soviet Union was sitting right there. In a story bizarre enough to have Japan annihilating America at sea again and again, no reader was going to quibble over Japan faring a little better in China.
Which meant I might have to withdraw my earlier hypothesis.
Perhaps this place—
was it no world of a Japanese nationalist's fabricated chronicle after all?
Was it something else—something even more absurd?
That absurd trajectory reached its zenith with Korea's sudden independence.
Chiang Kai-shek died, and Chen Gongbo's Nanjing government proposed unification to Li Zongren's Wuhan government. Li Zongren answered that the Wang Jingwei puppet regime erected in Nanjing was no legitimate government of China, and that he would recognize nothing short of a one-sided unification.
Yamamoto Isoroku accepted it. Japan began talking in circles, cooking up one muddled story after another. The official line went something like this: Japan had attacked China in the first place because of the KMT–Communist cooperation—because Chiang Kai-shek and Zhang Xueliang's crowd had joined hands with Mao Zedong's communists to throw the world order into confusion, leaving Japan no choice but to strike.
Li Zongren, holding the reins of state in Chiang's stead, answered in kind: if Japan withdrew from the continent, China would take it upon itself to actively exterminate the Communist bandits. Taiwan, it seemed, never entered into the terms. Korea did. About Manchukuo, the Japanese government could at least bluff its way through—insisting that the Empire of Great Manchuria was simply an independent state in alliance with Japan, hardly something Japan could abolish at its whim. But Korea had been treated as Japanese territory.
To make peace with China and concentrate on the war against the Allies, Korea had to be made independent in some form or another.
In 1945, the People's Republic of Korea was inaugurated. A population of twenty million. An armed force—police included—of three thousand. Half the cabinet were socialists, half nationalists. Some were fascists, some communists. And a considerable share were stranded overseas, in no position to come home. Half of a half-assed government.
Even so, it was independence, at least in name. Countless Japanese who had stayed on Korean soil, afraid of what might be done to them by Koreans swept up in the fervor of liberation, boarded the ships for home.
We "patrolmen" were no longer in any position to remain, so we too had to go back. The men around me pulled long faces, wailing that the moment they set foot in the fatherland they would surely be conscripted to plug the manpower shortage. The station chief thundered at us to consider service to the fatherland an honor—but then, that was an easy thing for a man too old to serve as a common private to say.
I was packing my things too, half-wondering whether I really was bound for Japan like this. But the chief of Jongno Police Station summoned me in person and put a stop to my packing.
He said,
"Ajisai, you will be staying in Kyeongseong. The Korean government has asked to have you handed over when we withdraw from the peninsula. The Government-General has approved it. I don't know what it's about, but staying here won't be any worse than going back to the home islands. So then—when you have the time, pay a visit to the Government-General."