The Eve of the Storm (4)
June 1909.
The lingering spring chill had been rather fierce, but as early summer arrived, the world settled back into its usual mild warmth.
And the Japanese troops who appeared the moment the cold receded like a thawing snake were, in a word, utterly insufferable.
"Close protection will be handled by the Japanese army, no matter what happens."
"Suit yourselves."
"We have no confidence in the competence of the Chinese commander in charge of perimeter security. Therefore, hand over command authority to us."
"...I beg your pardon?"
"One more thing. We demand the right for our Japanese forces to conduct inspections and identity checks at Harbin and at every train station along all routes leading there—"
"Are you sons of bitches fucking kidding me right now?"
To summarize: close protection would be nothing but Japanese troops. Perimeter security? That's your job. But command would go to a Japanese commander, obviously. And since dangerous reactionaries might be lurking about, grant us the right to arrest and search any suspicious characters loitering near South Manchuria Railway stations, thanks.
A Japanese demand to be handed the intestines and the gallbladder, every last organ of it.
"I don't care about the rest, but the commander cannot be replaced. In exchange, we will 'respect' your orders. How about that?"
"...Hmm. Well, that much I can live with. Very well."
Yet Xu Shichang, who had no particular desire to stir up needless trouble, graciously tolerated everything but the command authority itself.
The Three Northeastern Provinces weren't Xu Shichang's homeland. Just a posting.
And what if the people under him had to suffer a bit of abuse? It wasn't as though Xu Shichang himself would be the one getting kicked around.
And if, heaven forbid, the Japanese bastards went on a rampage the way they had back in the First Sino-Japanese War, who knew—Manchuria, this empty stretch of nothing, might end up losing another year or two.
Every one of those factors, piled together into one enormous heap of shit.
That, precisely, was the environment we found ourselves in.
"Hmm. You are the Chinese officer, I take it?"
"That's right. Why do you ask?"
"I'll be blunt. Simply hand command over to me and no harm will come to—"
What the hell is this bastard saying right now?
A mere First Lieutenant failing to show courtesy to a Major of a foreign army—I could chalk that up to bad manners and let it slide.
It wasn't as though this were the cosmopolitan twenty-first century. This was the imperialism-soaked twentieth.
"Lieutenant Tanaka. Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is your command experience?"
"I've commanded a platoon."
"And now you intend to command a battalion of several hundred men?"
"Hmph. I would do a far better job than you lot, who never even attended a military academy."
In my heart of hearts, I wanted to slap him across the face.
"In my heart of hearts, I want to shoot him across the face."
"Gah!"
"Insufferable sons of bitches, the lot of them."
Zhang Zuolin was in a rare state of fury, more visibly enraged than he'd been in weeks.
"Is that bastard Xu Shichang actually a moron? Does he think this is Japanese soil?! This is OUR land! OUR Manchuria, damn it!"
"Well, he's probably thinking he just has to serve out his term and head back to Beijing."
"Fucking hell!"
Slipping away from Zhang Zuolin as he entered maximum-rage mode, I sidled over to Zhang Baochen, who had been standing silently at the side with his arms crossed, and asked casually.
"What happened?"
"Apparently a Japanese captain, young as spring grass, hurled an insult."
"What did he say?"
"Called him a bandit with nothing between his ears."
"Seriously?"
"You think I'd make that up? ...The audacity of those Japanese bastards reaches the heavens."
So Zhang Baochen was every bit as worked up as I was. Poke him the wrong way and he might just grab a sashimi knife and go carving into Japanese guts on the spot.
Every other unit was in roughly the same state.
The Japanese army swaggered around like they were some kind of superior force or superior beings, and their dog-and-pony act of insolence only grew worse with each passing day.
But I was calmer than I had ever been.
If you were to personify the phrase "a still mind mirrors clear water," the result would be me.
"Grrrrgh, Major! How can you act like it's nothing when you're looking at those bastards?!"
"Leave it. Don't waste your energy."
"But the Japanese—"
"I said leave it. Instead, every single piece of their thuggish behavior—write it all down as documentation, following the six principles of reporting to the letter. Who, what, when, where, why, how."
"YEEESSS, SIR!!"
After all, the moment Ito Hirobumi took a bullet and dropped dead, these bastards would be stripping off their uniforms and marching straight into oblivion.
So I quietly kept my mouth shut and, like Han Byeong-tae snitching to the teacher about Eom Seok-dae's misdeeds, diligently scribbled every last outrage onto my secret ledger.
Back in the modern twenty-first century, whenever I studied An Jung-geun's Harbin uprising, one question always nagged at me.
How on earth did an assassination of such a towering dignitary actually succeed?
Simple.
Just station the Russian gendarmerie—people the Japanese couldn't communicate with—at close protection, the Japanese army at medium range, and the Chinese army at perimeter security. Done!
Even American and British forces, who spoke the same language, bickered and backstabbed each other through every joint operation. So imagine mixing in men who couldn't understand a single word each other said.
Was that joint security operation ever going to function properly?
And to pour salt on the wound, the Japanese army threw every tantrum imaginable, driving their likability rating into a bottomless underground shaft in real time.
Which is why I could forgive it all, gladly and with a whole heart.
Bastards.
October 1909.
Tanaka Seijiro, director of the South Manchuria Railway, stood there in a full suit and necktie and stared at the Imperial Army officer beside him, thinking—despite being Japanese himself—is this really, REALLY okay?
"I say. No matter how I look at it, isn't this security far too lax?"
"Oh, come now. Bureaucrats have the ways of bureaucrats, and soldiers have the ways of soldiers. A professional in one field ought to know how to respect the experts in another."
"No, even so, this is a bit much."
Respect was one thing, but this was just a goddamned mess.
The Russian officer stood with his hands clasped behind his back, eyeing them with an expression that said, go on then, handle it yourselves and see how that works out. As for the Chinese officers, they had flat-out lain down and were picking at their ears.
He was, by any measure, a sane man—a graduate of the Law Faculty of Tokyo Imperial University who had even studied abroad in France—yet he could not understand even one-millionth of how things had come to this.
"You assured me the security would be airtight and flawless, did you not?"
"The Russians lost to us and yet remain an utterly insolent breed, you know. Nothing to be done about them."
"That's not what I'm asking! Why on earth are the Chinese like THAT?!"
"The Chinese are all lazy, decadent, and disorderly, so it's hardly surprising."
This is madness.
It felt like talking to a rock. A rock shaped like a person.
He tore his gaze from the human-shaped rock and looked at Nakamura Yoshikiko, his fellow director of the South Manchuria Railway.
"Director, what do we do?"
"Ah, well. I certainly didn't expect it to be this bad."
"You two keep whispering over there—what are you saying? I told you not to worry about the security!"
Leaving the yelping Imperial Army officer behind, the two Mantetsu directors approached the Russian officer standing off in the distance.
"Good day to you. (Здравствуйте.)"
"Hmm? You speak Russian? Every Japanese soldier I've met so far has insisted on speaking only their own tongue."
"...We need your help."
"Your own Japanese officers say they need nothing."
"Those men aside, we need the assistance of your forces."
"Hm. Let's hear it."
Tanaka opened the briefcase he always carried, drew out a map of the Manchurian railways, and pointed with his finger.
"Caigou Station cannot be secured by the Japanese forces alone. Please lend us a small detachment."
"Caigou?"
"It is the relay point where trains departing from Tiehling, Liaoyang, Lushun, and Fengtian converge. One must pass through here to reach Harbin, the site of the conference!"
A station where most of the routes overlapped.
Which meant, in other words, that illegal Koreans could pour in at any time, did it not?
"I will send you one gendarmerie platoon. We must protect Finance Minister Kokovtsov himself, so I cannot spare more than that."
"...Thank you."
The two Mantetsu directors racked their brains.
"Come to think of it, whatever schemes these illegal Koreans hatch, His Excellency Ito would have no reason to step outside the train station, would he?"
"True."
"And the Koreans can't very well wait around at the station indefinitely—they'll be lodging at inns or the like nearby."
"True."
"Then let's do this. Block every single lodging in the vicinity and keep His Excellency Ito inside the railcar at all times. Wouldn't the danger simply vanish?"
"Block the lodgings?"
"What if we lock the doors from the outside? We open them once the train departs. Hotel, motel, inn, whatever—if every door is locked from the outside, how could the illegal Koreans possibly come out?"
What a world we live in!
What of the violation of personal liberty and commercial rights?!
And this wasn't even his own country—it was a foreign one, no less!
But Nakamura Yoshikiko, the senior of the two, set his jaw and began.
"...Truly, a Tokyo Imperial graduate with foreign study is a different breed. The future of Mantetsu looks exceedingly bright!"
"Haha, you flatter me!"
That's right.
Personal liberty, commercial rights—in 1909, the world simply wasn't developed enough for such luxuries to matter.
And so the world hurtled toward October 26, 1909.
Pyotr Semyonovich Choi.
In Korean, Choi Jae-hyung.
A local official of the Russian Empire, and one of the most renowned magnates of the Primorsky Krai.
Having begun working at whatever jobs came his way from childhood in the Primorye, he amassed an immense fortune supplying military provisions to the Imperial Russian Army—and then poured every ruble earned through the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Russo-Japanese War, without the slightest hesitation, into the independence movement.
Hong Beom-do's Sanpodae, An Jung-geun's Korean Righteous Army, and the rest of the Yeonchu volunteer forces all ran on his lavish patronage—and whatever anyone might say of him, he was a patriot who genuinely yearned for Korean independence.
His hair gone white at the temples, he took the four men's hands in his own calloused, iron-strong grip, one pair after another, and implored them.
"The future of Korea rests in your hands."
"Fear nothing. Four sons of Korea have gathered here—could we fail to catch a single foreign devil?"
An Jung-geun eased Choi Jae-hyung's worries with a kindly, warm-faced smile.
And so the four of them—An Jung-geun, Jo Do-seon, Woo Deok-sun, and Yu Dong-ha—departed the Primorsky Krai and set out for Harbin.
"Now then, Dong-ha, how old did you say you were?"
"Seventeen this year, sir."
"Hahahaha! Why, the future of Korea looks very bright indeed."
"The papers say Ito will confer with the Russian Finance Minister in the outskirts of Harbin."
"In that case, it might not be Harbin itself?"
"They say he will pass through Caigou Station regardless."
"Then Do-seon, Deok-sun—you two will set your ambush at Caigou."
"And what of you, Jung-geun? Wouldn't it be safer to finish it for certain at Caigou Station itself?"
"Putting all your eggs in one basket can end in disaster. I'm going on to Harbin."
"...Very well. Godspeed to you."
"And to you all."
After they had scattered to their posts, An Jung-geun, left alone, slipped into a room lent to him by an overseas Korean he had contacted in secret and took out three pistols to inspect them.
Two Belgian-made M1900 automatic pistols that Choi Jae-hyung had procured for him.
And an American Smith & Wesson revolver, given by that army officer who had somehow been aiding him with both money and materials all this while.
Having finished checking all three weapons, An Jung-geun stared out through the thin windowpane, fogged with condensation.
In the glass, lit by the flicker of a tiny candle, his own face looked back at him.
"What are you staring at like that?"
"Hm? Oh, nothing. I was just thinking there are still houses awake at this hour."
Hands clasped behind my back, I walked the streets of Harbin.
The faint smell of kerosene drifting from houses with their oil lamps lit, mingling with the cold night air as it settled over the town—that uniquely Harbin streetscape, I committed to memory, piece by piece, with my own eyes.
"Nothing's going to happen tomorrow, right?"
"Who knows. I'm no prophet—how would I know that?"
Just for tonight, the pistol tucked at my hip felt heavier than ever against my side.