East Asian Welfare Center (2)
Katsu Kaishu was said to have “never once drawn a sword in his entire life.”
Of course, ordinary decent citizens go through life without ever drawing a sword, too.
But his homeland was Japan.
A country where schools sprang up all over the imperial capital, teaching people how to shove a weapon in just the right way to kill someone efficiently.
You might ask if there weren’t plenty of kendo dōjō even in modern times, but that was because a sword was basically useless against a modern army. Joseon, too, had allowed bows to be manufactured, traded, and carried freely.
In those days, the power, meaning, and use of the “sword” were nothing like they were in modern times. It was closer to a culture that encouraged bomb-making, if anything.
And among those sword schools, Katsu Kaishu had earned the license of menkyo kaiden in the old-school Jikishinkage-ryu.
In other words, he was “better than his master.”
So if it was true that Katsu Kaishu had never drawn his sword, it meant he was so skilled he could make an opponent understand the gap between them without ever needing to unsheathe it.
The Sakamoto Ryoma beside him would, in later years, even come looking for Katsu Kaishu to kill him—something that didn’t need much concern, since Japan had always been like that—but the story went that Kaishu had inspired Ryoma and taken him as a disciple. Still, since that account came from Kaishu himself, the reliability of that shin-ken tale was a little suspect.
And now Katsu Kaishu had drawn his sword without even realizing it.
The legend of Suishinshi Masahide, a blade that had never once left its scabbard in its entire life, had been shattered absurdly early.
It couldn’t be helped.
Not only that axe, but the vile aura pouring off the man before him was anything but ordinary.
As a fellow swordsman, Katsu Kaishu could tell.
That man has definitely killed people with his own hands. Not just once or twice, either.
It was as sharp as the Yakuza profiling Lee Uk’s brother Wonbeom had done on Taesu’s first day in Ganghwado.
Katsu Kaishu took the stance of Jikishinkage-ryu and raised his sword high.
He had a weighty mission tied to his country and his clan. He could not die here.
* * *
Taesu was at a complete loss.
“Why the hell did that bastard draw his sword the second our eyes met?”
Didn’t I always tell you about Neo-Confucianism? Nature shapes custom. The nature of the Japanese has been like that from birth.
Even Kim Sangro, standing nearby, was saying the same thing.
“The books say that if the Japanese didn’t like something, they’d suddenly pick up a sword and go around acting like pirates. Since that man appears to be the leader, if only Dobansu cuts him down, the rest will surrender.”
Taesu fell silent.
It was starting to seem as if he had fallen into Joseon, yes—but Joseon as seen through the lens of a Japanese shōnen manga world.
Should I try some battōjutsu or something?
Unfortunately, Taesu had never studied any old-school sword arts.
Sure, like that battōjutsu guy, he’d drifted aimlessly until luck handed him a beauty with a home, but the similarities ended there.
Taesu looked at his axe.
Just rush in and split his belly open. That idiot’s exposing his whole torso and holding his sword up like a banner.
He’s not doing that because he’s an idiot. Unless I have a gun, no matter how I attack, he’ll bring the sword down faster. That’s what martial arts are.
Hmm. I’ve only ever spent my life reading books in the mortal world, so I wouldn’t know. Still, that sword looks very expensive. That man may not be ordinary.
Then Taesu remembered the mountain spirit’s other specialty besides matchmaking.
It’s expensive?
Almost certainly. If you took it, it’d fetch a pretty penny.
Of course Taesu wasn’t making the same cutthroat calculations as the mountain spirit.
If a man carried an expensive sword, then he was clearly rich.
And if he had come by boat, then he was surely connected to foreign trade—or at least some sort of merchant activity.
Taesu wanted to settle this by talking.
There was just one problem.
Katsu Kaishu could not speak Joseonese, and Taesu could not speak Japanese. Not really, anyway, and bakayarō wasn’t likely to help much.
Ha Jeong-il, from a family of interpreters, was with Yi Ha-eung in town, not here. And even if Ha Jeong-il’s family specialized in Chinese rather than Japanese, that still wouldn’t help.
The usual solution in moments like this was written Chinese, the lingua franca of East Asia, but that was even harder.
Not that Kim Sangro, who was probably the only man here capable of writing Chinese characters, was itching to witness Dobansu’s ultimate art of the Park Axe Style.
If Taesu turned to Kim Sangro asking him to write something down, he might get split in half on the spot. Taesu could already feel it: the battle had begun.
No choice.
In the end, the only language the two of them shared was the one humanity had used before the language centers of the brain even existed.
* * *
The mountain spirit could read Taesu’s mind with more accuracy than simple intuition allowed.
He said, sounding wronged, [Hey. You were going to do it my way in the end anyway, weren’t you?]
Taesu didn’t answer.
Instead, he drove off the ground with his axe in hand and leapt in.
Katsu Kaishu, who stood just over 150 centimeters tall like the average Japanese man of this era, felt as if he were watching a beast charge him.
Especially in terms of speed. The charge of a feline predator was faster than the pull of a trigger, which made it hard to handle even with a gun.
But the secret art of Jikishinkage-ryu was not something to be compared with crude firearms used by peasants.
“Haaat!”
Jangseom-like downward strikes were not exclusive to the Satsuma Jigen-ryu. Swordsmanship itself was, in essence, the equivalent of a straight punch in hand-to-hand combat.
Bakirabara Genkichi, a junior in Katsu Kaishu’s Jikishinkage-ryu line, had once split a helmet in a single blow with a fierce downward cut.
As his senior, Katsu Kaishu could not afford to be outdone.
A lightning-fast strike came down.
To an untrained eye, the sword tip had already sliced through its target and descended beyond it. It could not possibly be blocked.
The sandy ground exploded.
“Damn it!”
He had cut the earth, not a person.
Katsu Kaishu couldn’t believe it.
It was like a professional boxer missing his punch entirely.
Did I make a mistake?
It was a mistake, all right. A seasoned swordsman like Katsu Kaishu was too accustomed to the limits of inertia that the human body could endure.
So he had never imagined that, the instant Taesu reached him, Taesu would plant a foot as if cracking the ground open and change direction by ninety degrees.
The burst of sand just now hadn’t been Suishinshi Masahide splitting the earth—it had been Taesu’s leap.
Taesu, having slipped past to Katsu’s right, stopped at once and turned his body. The violent landing and twist of that massive frame looked almost like a car drifting through a corner.
Then Taesu, now facing Katsu’s right side, casually brought his right-hand axe down.
The sword, which had just been hurriedly lifted, returned to the final posture of a downward strike.
Taesu immediately drove up his left knee and swung.
Katsu was short already, and his posture had now lowered slightly as well. At that height, there was exactly one thing in range.
With the sound of a gourd cracking open, the face of the famously handsome Katsu Kaishu was smashed into ruin.
* * *
Things turned out just as Kim Sangro had said, thankfully.
Once the leader fell, the rest of them all dropped to their knees and prostrated themselves. Slightly different posture from Joseon people, though.
Phew.
I really didn’t want to do something this life-threatening.
The mountain spirit spoke with lazy cheer.
[You greedy bastard. In the end, you just wanted to get that sword safely, didn’t you? If it were your axe, it could have cut through a Japanese sword no matter how sharp it was.]
Idiot. That would only be possible if I could actually hit the sword with the axe.
Since I knew how he was going to attack—and because, just like when I fought the British navy, my dynamic vision itself had improved—I was barely able to dodge it.
But if I was going to face a master armed with a weapon, I couldn’t rely on an ex-class axe alone.
If I tried exchanging strikes with a sword while using only the axe, I would’ve been finished in fewer than three moves. I really needed to find a master of axe technique as soon as possible. If such a thing existed.
If not, maybe I’d have to learn something more mainstream, like swordsmanship.
With those thoughts, I examined the Japanese sword I had taken.
It wasn’t a weapon commonly used in my homeland.
If you wanted to kill someone, a sashimi knife was a hundred times better: no blade-carrying license required, no police watching your every move, and it could be hidden anywhere. Though come to think of it, that was a Japanese blade too, wasn’t it?
Still, when both sides are carrying cold weapons, a long sword is a terrifying thing.
I realized that now, painfully. Back on Cheonggyesan, when I’d dealt with guys carrying daggers, my axe skill had been enough.
Looks like I can still level up.
What do you even want to do with a talent for killing people? Learn your letters, for heaven’s sake.
It’s not my fault. Your age is just too savage.
Then the person I had sent returned.
Yi Ha-eung, whom I had summoned, had come back with him, along with Ha Jeong-il.
* * *
Originally, Taesu had planned to have Kim Sangro write it out, but instead he called for Yi Ha-eung.
He didn’t want Kim Sangro discovering that he possessed “scholarship comparable to Chusa.”
Of course, there was no way Yi Ha-eung could imagine that he, a royal family member, had been called for such a reason.
He thought Park Axe had naturally relied on Ha Jeong-il’s interpreter lineage, and that pleased him.
In truth, Park Axe didn’t even need to step in here. The stranded ship was an official matter.
But Park Axe had deliberately called Yi Ha-eung.
That was a signal that Park Axe, too, needed him—and that he did not consider the sedo court under Kim Jwa-geun to be important.
And Yi Ha-eung was able to live up to that expectation.
“As it happens, Ha Jeong-il’s family is in the Japanese interpreting line as well. I brought him along because we were headed south and might run into Japanese. But who’s the leader?”
Taesu pointed to Katsu Kaishu, still not yet awake.
Yi Ha-eung nodded with the expression of a man who had seen too much.
Byung-ju An, who had been knocked senseless by Taesu in Kaesong, had since suffered the aftereffects badly enough to go on a losing streak in the recent beautiful-boy war, to the point of considering retirement from the boy-loving industry altogether. That man probably wasn’t getting up any time soon, either.
Yi Ha-eung gave Katsu Kaishu a single sympathetic glance.
There was not yet any long friendship between Yi Ha-eung and Katsu Kaishu in history, but merely meeting that man was enough to awaken pity in anyone with a conscience.
“Then...”
Yi Ha-eung looked around.
But the rest of them just seemed like ordinary sailors.
Then Sakamoto Ryoma stepped forward hesitantly and wrote on the ground.
I am in his service.
Yi Ha-eung, who knew a fair amount about foreign customs, nodded.
He was probably the boy’s beloved companion, or something of the sort, and since he himself had An Byung-ju, the beautiful-boy hunter, under his command, he wasn’t particularly prejudiced.
In any case, there was no reason for Yi Ha-eung to conduct written Chinese with a mere page. He called Ha Jeong-il over.
“You interpret.”
What Ha Jeong-il learned from questioning them was, for now, not directly related to Joseon.
Indirectly, though, it was another matter.
* * *
At this point, Katsu had been studying rangaku, or Western learning, for some time now. Taesu probably would have been better off trying English instead.
With that background, he would later rise through the shogunate’s naval offices and eventually become the first Minister of the Navy.
But at this time in Japan, the image of a rangaku scholar was, in a word, “What the hell is that, you nerd?” Katsu Kaishu’s status was high, yes, but it was hard to rise by relying on Western studies alone.
The reason the shogunate hired a man like Katsu was simple: the American slave nation’s Black Hawk Down had come crashing in.
And when the United States itself was later hit by that bizarre, novel-like 9/11 terror attack, it hurriedly hired military novelists who had always been mocked as gun nerds. If aliens ever really invaded in the future, Earthlings would probably have to call in UFO channelers.
But now, with six full years still to go before the Black Ships entered port in 1853, that history had arrived a little sooner.
And there was only one reason history would change.
“I heard that the ships of France and England came to Joseon and there was military conflict. Originally, our country and Joseon would inform one another of dangerous Western ships, so we were on our way to Tsushima to ask after the situation.”
At least the first part was true.
Joseon and Japan, at this time, had a kind of mutual alert system.
The official tributary envoys had ceased under King Sunjo, but that didn’t mean exchange between the two countries had ended.
Messengers, officials, smugglers, gangsters, and prostitutes still came and went busily through the Waegwan at Dongrae and Tsushima.
So when Western ships appeared, they informed the other side. Even during the Byeongin Yangyo, Joseon had sent related reports not only to China but to Japan as well, though for different reasons this time.
Yi Ha-eung, however, sneered at the idea of seclusion.
What sort of island was Tsushima? A nest of lies that had made its living for centuries by forging Joseon-Japan diplomatic documents.
Even now, they were swindling the shogunate by lying that Joseon had prohibited trade at Dongrae—which it hadn’t—and were sucking down tens of thousands of nyang in annual golden welfare fraud.
Honestly, with Kim Sangro’s “business” and all, East Asian welfare was too generous.
Next year, they’d even dare to claim that more than ten Western ships were approaching Joseon, and that giant lie left the Joseon court stunned for a while.
There was no way proper information would come out of Tsushima. In the first place, King Ihwan had never officially notified foreign powers of the French and British ship incident.
And the Japanese would surely know that even better.
In the end, these men had either slipped into Joseon illegally, or crossed secretly into China—where Joseon would at least have reported things honestly—to gather information there.
But that still didn’t mean he could order the boy to be made to suffer the same fate as his lover right away.
Ryoma’s words were the pinnacle of precisely measured rhetoric, stating only what was necessary.
They had already revealed that they were serving the shogunate. It would be difficult to kill them—or beat them nearly to death—on a whim.
If I respond clumsily, something terrible will happen.
At worst, Japan might catch on to the collapse of the Joseon navy and start a second Imjin War.
The question of why Japan would suddenly do such a thing was meaningless.
The sedo faction had beaten Kim Jeong-hui to a pulp on the absurd pretext that the memorial written by “Kim Jeong-hui’s father’s enemy” had been “guided by Kim Jeong-hui.”
England had invaded with no reason at all, saying that if they weren’t given food, they would kill the Joseon naval commander.
It wouldn’t be all that strange if Japan showed up next year asking why everyone here shaved their heads and didn’t wear chonmage.
That was the kind of age it was. Not a time when people fought because they had to, but a time when they fought if they thought they could win.
This was far too delicate to entrust to Kim Jwa-geun’s court.
Yi Ha-eung fell into thought, wondering how to handle them.
* * *
In truth, Yi Ha-eung was making a bit of an out-of-place assumption, as feudalists so often did.
Taesu had no intention of giving Yi Ha-eung, the king, or Kim Jwa-geun any authority over how this would be handled.
Had he run around dodging those bastards’ sashimi cuts and kicked them in the chest for them? Taesu was the sort who believed the reward for labor belonged to the laborer.
After talking at length with Kim Sangro about something, Taesu soon came back and said, “All right. Since you said you drifted here, I’ll send you back by ship.”
Author’s Note
1. In this work, some Japanese spellings intentionally do not follow standard conventions due to issues of nuance. Also, Japanese names are uniformly written using the names by which they became widely known to later generations, unless the speech is from a contemporary character.
2. The book Kim Sangro referred to is Shin Suk-ju’s Haedong Jegukgi.
3. In April 1848, Tsushima’s claim that “a dozen or so Western ships are heading north from the south” was quite possibly not a lie.
From summer to autumn that year, many foreign ships appeared across the five provinces of Jeolla, Gyeongsang, Gangwon, Hamgyeong, and Hwanghae. That means the Joseon government judged it to be a lie.
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