The War of Hearts and Hands
Overview
Dai Nippon Teikoku refers to the Empire of Japan up until the reconstitution at the end of the Pacific War. It lasted from 1868 until 1947. The surrender came in 1945.
The phrase "Hakko ichiu" (Universal Brotherhood, All Eight Corners of the World) translates into either of these, depending on direct and romanization.
*Above information was gathered from Wikipedia
AN: ONCE AGAIN. NO BUSINESS POSTING NEW THINGS. Everything will be updated in the next week/week and a half as things calm down and break starts for my little one. Thanks to everyone that has reviewed my stories (any and all!) and given me such wonderful feedback. I hope that you enjoy this piece. I'm still hung upon on WWII and the conflict of war itself, so let me know what you guys think.
This is kind of like a prologue of sorts. Kind of short, too.
Enjoy!
` Jiru
Morning came like the wind after a storm, it was quiet, so very calm as the dawn drew its knowing blues and golds on the horizon. They peeked through window slats, peering with hazy eyes at the particles of dust that abounded in the air. It reached the time-tested full length mirror, in which had been his mother's.
There, in the ghostly light, he peered into the blackness of his pupils. He pulled at the collar on his newly pressed uniform. Everything seemed tight, constrained by the small buttons leading towards the folded points of his collar.
This was the day that his family, his country, his would be lover, would be proud. They had taken his head of hair and cut it to his scalp. He no longer looked like the man he had always been, or honorably noted in his long line of samurai blood. He looked like a man in the city, clean cut and ravaged by the inequities of Western influence and modern ways of life.
Yet, as he brushed a calloused hand through his short hair, he frowned at the hardlines drawing down his jawline. The scars from playfights and kendo had brandished his chin and lip with their taut reminders. He was but a man of twenty, barely ready to let go of the wayward kiss of childhood, which still clung to him longingly.
As it were, he had been enlisted to fight for his country and leave behind the humble home he had always known. The devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still pressed in every paper, every pole, every shanty shop in the small parish of Tama. It rested outside of Tokyo to the southwest and held its own woes.
He, the man still plucking at the bottoms of his trousers, and wriggling his toes in the binds of his boots, was stilled by the death of his mother and illed by the loss of his betrothed. She had been afflicted with tuberculosis some years prior in their teens, and his mother had passed of a Western disease.
The life of Ito InuYasha was troubled.
The Great Showa and called upon all able bodies to be a part of Dai Nippon Teikoku's Hakko Ichu. There was no say in the matter and he pressed on his best face as he let them transform him into this. The only recognizable attribute was the discoloration of his eyes. One hung like a golden ring on a finger, and the other as black as the center in which it sprouted.
Swallowing, he looked away at quiet bedroom around him. All of his belongings rested on the tatami, swallowed up by satchels and marked numeral bags. The train was coming to gather him and he needed to be off. Otherwise, his first crime would be committed.
Perhaps, he would fake his own death? No one would remember him, no one would recollect a thing about him. He had been privy to keeping himself reclusive since the passing of the great women of his life.
His father still breathed, commanding in the higher ranks of the Imperial Army, as did his brother. InuYasha quelled his shaken nerves as he knelt awkwardly to grab his baggage. He was good with swords, knives, and bows. Guns, however, he had never been fond of. It was a foreign concept to pull a trigger and blow off half of a person's body.
Perhaps he was being naive, as he lowered his eyes to the warped floorboards on his long walk out the door. Everything hung like relics in a museum. Nothing had been touched in days. The kettle still sat on the counter, and his table was still lingering for his bowls to be sat upon it.
As she slid his door open, he stared at the dewy grass, the winding thrush of trees spiraling into a floral array of color. They would be dead by his return, and his heart leapt into his throat at the Jizo statues lining the pathway to town.
The dirt came in plumes as rickshaw carts flew by and people patted their hands on aprons and swept out their dirtied shops. They were all rationed, and lines formed at each entrance with brochures of stamps in their hands. All the fine kimono were replaced by paper thin yukata, some donated Western clothing and bare feet on the damp ground.
InuYasha could barely breathe by the time he made it to the stony platform at the edge of town. A few other men stood with their unified hair cuts and variants of uniforms dotting his vision. One was navy, one white, the others matching his like they were reflective.
Most of the boys still held baby fat on their cheeks, and bristled with their bags as though they were weighted by the world. It was there they all stood, eye-balling one another, finding fit disposition to be lacking on almost all fronts.
Each man was getting used to the newness of each part of them. To InuYasha, it felt like being thrown into a fire and watching yourself dissolve into some semblance of what you were. Most of them seemed more proud than he did, and it made his stomach churn with dishonor.
Adjusting a bag on his shoulder, he caught the first sights of the steel chariot steaming down the bend. He hadn't been this nervous since he fell in love. Albeit, these were two totally different things. Love was a war of hearts and hands, this was all out warfare with guns and missles.
He'd like to think that he wasn't as ignorant as people made him out to be, but it was injuriously decided that he was just about as stiff as a board. He was just a boy from the sticks, as people thought, with no formal education and a knack for carving and sword making.
He wasn't this.
With a sigh, he glowered at the off-colored and bruised train cars as they jerked and cried against the rickety tracks. His identification papers were held in hand as he fell in line behind his shorter comrades.
The heat of the train crept around his ankles, making them sweat as they were checked in and boarded by a scrawny man in a white uniform and hat. The train itself was a mish-mosh of cars from various lines that had been shut down and scraps of steel. It was full, smelling of men and cologne on some. He was lucky enough to sit near a window near the middle of the cramped space, tucking his belongings between his feet and chair.
The countryside, his home, everything seemed so foreign behind the blurs of sanded glass. He couldn't make sense of anything else. He had known for a few weeks that this day was coming, but refrained from letting it absorb. He'd drank with his friend, the only one he had, and flirted awkwardly with the women around town in a half-hearted effort to make himself feel better.
He was plucked from the world he knew and had adjusted to for a chance at keeping his country afloat against anyone and everyone that threatened it. His family had all done it before and willingly enrolled. However, InuYasha cringed when the wheels began to crank and grind against the railing, washing away his view like a dizzying rain.
A man rushed on as the train was leaving, and took a spot beside him, hunkering down with a violent force. He knew him. He'd seen him on deliveries from the city and rolled his eyes. He was burly, more muscular, darker toned. The bastard even had a five-o'clock shadow that was surely going to get him some trouble.
Eagerly, the man nudged at InuYasha pulled a smoke out of his pack with his teeth. "You look like you need one. Go on, if you want." He said gruffly, flashing a devilish grin.
InuYasha licked his lips, furrowing his brows in a spoil of frowns. "I don't smoke." He cleared his throat, eying the pack as the man shrugged.
"Suit yourself, kid." He said, laying his arm over the back of the benched seats. "It's hell from here on out. May as well get used to it, you know?" He said quietly.
InuYasha brushed a hand through his phantom hair and stared vacantly at his hand. He never knew how much of his identity had been tied to its length. "What's your name?"
"Nishi Koga." The man replied, sucking back a long drag on his Lucky's. "You? You look like you'd have some interesting name." He chided, making the best of the situation.
"Ito InuYasha." He replied faintly, disinterested in the conversation. "Where are you headed to?"
Koga reached into the bag as his feet, pulling out a pamphlet. "Let's see," He squinted, "I'm headed to Kagawagi River."
"Likewise." He said dumbly, inhaling a plume of the man's smoke into his lungs. It had been a passing thought, yet he was inclined to reach rudely and pluck a cigarette from the soft pack. Pressing the cotton between his teeth, Koga lit a match and burned the end.
InuYasha instantaneously fell ill as he suppressed a coffee. It tasted like pestilence. It tasted sweet. It tasted like the life he was going to have, as opposed to what was left behind.
"You ready for training?" Koga asked, patting the man briskly on the arm.
"Not particularly." InuYasha rasped darkly, as the train jerked around the bend. The heat was balmy, the last indication of spring filtering through the parted window. It hit his bare face like a lover's hands striking against it. He wanted to jump out and run, but as time dragged on and conversation waxed and waned, he resigned to the evening's mark of arrival.
It was behind the high-rising four acre complex that his spirit would be formed into a unified body, leaving his soul to transcend the earth without flesh to carry it. The establishment was large, concreted by monoliths and courses set behind polished walls.
It felt like walking into a prison.
All of his belongings, along with his new friend's, were numbered, checked and assigned by a colored tag. He was red. He was always red. Even as a child, he sought after the color like it was lucky. It made him sigh in relief as he shuffled in the long line of soldiers being prepared for defense.
He couldn't see over the fences, or through the dark windows lining the stoic looking building. Koga was bunking in a near by facility, as his age and starting date varied. All of his life he had wanted more than this. Perhaps it was an old way of thinking, but he had been destined for greatness and shot down by the rotten overtures of songs he didn't sing. Fate was only half of the battle to destiny and his seemed to have been made for him.
Honorably, he would serve proudly and give his breath for whatever task he had at hand. It was unjust that the task was something he didn't choose himself. And when he arrived to a tight quartered room, partitioned by small cots and militant ordained trunks around the feet of the beds, he found his number painted on the wall above.
He was now 19057.
He was curiously complacent as he sat his things down and waited. He was never on a schedule, or had any importance for the concept of time. All he knew was that as the sun began to unfurl a blanket of stars in its wake, he became withering like an old man.
His mismatched eyes hung in the hollow skin like ghosts looming in the dark. InuYasha was tired, distraught. His transformation was only comparable to a child's toes touching the foamy edges of the ocean, in which he was a drop. Nothing he did was his anymore. No choice. No idea. No life. It belonged to his Emporer, his country, his comrades.
The next few months of training would become him and he it. Closing his eyes, InuYasha lolled his head back against the wall, listening to the sounds of footsteps and excited men chanting and cheering for their country. Whatever plagued him would be swiftly removed, just like enemy forces.
The wolves are ravenous when they have yet to be fed.