Saturday, February 8th, 2014.

When I woke up, I decided to head out to the pier for a light morning jog, something I used to do a month ago when I first got here but kind of slacked off on doing now that shit's hit the fan. But that got trashed as soon as I saw Samidare standing at the pier, staring off into the sea. Curious as to why Samidare was out there, since normally she never really wakes up this early (like 0600 hours or something). It's not that Samidare's the kind to sleep in, something that Sazanami and Murakumo frequently do and sometimes Fubuki does as well. Inazuma's the one who usually gets up early like a good girl, and Samidare's like the in-between.

I called out to Samidare, but for some reason, the first time I called out to her, she didn't say anything and completely ignored me. Got a bit perplexed by that, to be honest. Normally Samidare's sharp and attentive, but I had to literally sit down right next to her and wave my hand in front of her to get her attention. She just had this super dreamy look on her face, like she somehow pulled the Pensieve out of Dumbledore's head office at Hogwarts or something.

She nearly toppled off the pier into the water when I shook my hand in front of her face - didn't know that that would've scared her so much. I quickly apologized for that, saying that I was just curious to know what she was doing out here so early like this, just randomly staring out to sea, so she took some time to explain herself.

Yesterday, as I've already mentioned, four destroyers from the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force fleet dropped off our huge shipment yesterday, and one of them was the JDS Samidare. Samidare herself had come out to the docks, and Commodore Sawatari allowed my ship girls to board the Samidare to check it out a bit. When Samidare stepped foot on the same ship that shared her name, apparently, according to her, she felt...strange. A serene, peaceful kind of a strange, something that she hasn't ever felt before. Later on yesterday, she talked about this with the other destroyers, namely Fubuki and Inazuma while they were all hanging out at Shinsengumi, and eventually their conversation ended up on the topic that these new, modern-era destroyer ships were somehow their children, or something like a lineage system or something. Fubuki had suggested that it that were to be the case, then that wouldn't make much sense, seeing that they themselves are more "modern" than even those destroyers since they're the products of this super-secret military project that compacts the size and firepower of a normal-size destroyer to the package of a human being, but then Inazuma also pointed out that they're still using the weaponry of their old selves, and that the new ships weren't the same as them in terms of weapons, specs, and ship class, even. (For example, the IJN Kongou and the JDS Kongou aren't necessarily related, since the former's a battlecruiser and the latter's a guided missile destroyer; they just happen to share the same name, as far as I'm concerned.) So yeah, you can imagine how that conversation went.

But Samidare said that she couldn't stop thinking about that ever since they had that conversation from last night. She admitted that she just quite couldn't shake the feeling that she had when she first boarded the Samidare, and that she wanted to board it again. She'd been aware that a ship in the modern Japanese navy shared the same name as her, but she didn't really think about it until now. She asked me what I thought, if I thought that these new modern-day destroyers who were named after old Imperial Japanese fleet ships were their so-called "children", or if I thought they were entirely different and unrelated ships. I answered that while it's certainly true that the modern Japanese fleet now had ships much different from the old Imperial ships after seventy-something years, maybe the Japanese Navy harkened back to the days before World War II, when Japan's power as a colonial empire was at its peak, and it possessed one of the most powerful fleets in the world, filled with the strongest and most advanced destroyers and ships of the day. And to remember its former glory, the Navy (or government, whoever names the ships) assigned many of the same names to the new ships in its modern navy. Obviously, I don't know the real reason, much less do I know the true relationship between the ship girls and the ships. But I said that it'd certainly be reassuring to think that the new-age ships were all the children or descendants of the Imperial fleet. I guess it's kind of depressing if you look at it in another way, that not all of the old WW-II Japanese ships' names were used again, only some of them.

Samidare wondered aloud what it must feel like to have a daughter.

And for obvious reasons, things got really awkward, really quick.

Samidare sensed that our conversation was getting awkward, so she tried to get out of it, but then I asked her if she wanted to see the Samidare again, to which she said yes. She didn't know why, but it made her feel kind of...wistfully happy, if that makes sense? She said it brought her a sense of peace, but in the sad kind of way, a bit of regret or remorse mixed in there that she couldn't explain why she felt. She asked me in turn if I ever had any desire or plans to have a family of my own or have children of my own, to which I replied back that as a soldier, it's better off not making any relationships or getting engaged or anything like that. Too often have I seen family men die in the military, leaving their wives and children without fathers to take care of them. I don't want that to happen, and the fact that I didn't date around or got into any relationships helps reinforce my desire not to have a family. Not only do I have enough to worry about to have the responsibilities of being a father and taking care of a family thrown onto my shoulders, but I personally don't see myself as a dad. I just don't.

Of course, I told Samidare, this didn't mean that I wouldn't marry later in the future. For now, that's a bit too early for me to think about - I just wanted to serve in the military or the navy until I was in a position to retire, and only after I retire from the military would I think about maybe marrying if I met someone with whom I could have a family with, have a family, and so forth. And I definitely don't want stupid military bullshit getting in the way of my family life if I ever do have a family; that's a guarantee for me.

"It must be nice, knowing that you have a future after you retire."

Man, I thought I've heard some depressing words before, but those ones are pretty much down there with the worst.

Samidare told me that she'd been thinking about her own situation as a ship girl. To her, everyone else's just too busy dealing with the day-to-day stuff of their lives, and that she feels that she can't really talk about deeper stuff with her friends or anyone else. Even with Houshou, who's normally very open to what the ship girls have to say about anything, Samidare doesn't feel comfortable talking about this kind of stuff. So I asked her why she chose to talk to me about this, and she said that it's partly because I'm her Admiral, and she feels that she can trust me to keep our conversations confidential from the other girls, and partly because I'm someone she doesn't really know all too well, unlike the other destroyers with whom she's good friends, but because of that, she feels that she can't talk about certain things. She said that she knew that I was perfectly okay with talking about deeper stuff, more difficult topics than the others, who apparently aren't as comfortable talking about these things.

So anyway, Samidare said that she didn't know what the future for them as ship girls held. What would happen to them if the war against the Abyssals didn't go exactly as planned? And even if the Abyssal threat is eventually dispelled, whenever that day'll come, what would happen to them? No one that she knows knew what would become of them in that situation. As you might imagine, this part of the conversation was really hard for me to handle, since I know exactly what might end up happening to them after the Abyssals are cleared out. Samidare confessed that she wanted to live a normal human life if she survived this whole ordeal - have a normal job that she'd seen other people back in the mainland have, get married, have a family, raise children, and all the normal things that other human beings do. It's not that she hated herself as a ship girl, but sometimes she got tired of being a ship girl and wanted to stop being one for a while.

She asked me if I ever felt the same way sometimes, and I answered that I indeed do sometimes. It's tough being a soldier, a naval officer. It really does suck at times. Especially given the recent conflicts that've been going on before I was transferred to Moebius Four, I'd go on seven-month long tours without a single day of leave or vacation or whatever. So Samidare then asked me how I was able to bear with it and not feel overwhelmed by the uncertainties that the future held.

I simply said I just ignored whatever uncertain feelings I had. Feelings and emotions are dangerous to a soldier. Psychologically, the definition of a soldier contradicts the essence of a human being: as a soldier, you have to expect to see friends, comrades, and oftentimes innocent people die in absurd and grotesque ways, and you're expected to learn how to kill people, take their lives without feeling any shred of remorse for doing so. Normal humans don't do things like that. But eventually there comes a point when you've done enough of these shitty things in life that you just become jaded, and you just do it without thinking after a while. After all, a good soldier is a terrible human being.

I told Samidare that the best way I found that got me over those hurdles of uncertainty that I had sometimes was just to live out my life day by day and make sure that my heart was beating every time I went to sleep and every time I got up from bed.

That sounds familiar...have I written this before? Deja vu.

I told Samidare that if she wanted to hang onto her dream of being able to live a normal human life after this was all over, she couldn't take the same route that I did. If she does, she'll have a much more difficult time being able to live such a life that she wants. I told her to keep her humanity, that it was going to be tough, but she needed to just ignore those uncertainties and go into the next day with confidence. It was all the advice I could really give her; I'm not someone to come to for advice at all, I don't think. If anyone, I told her to go talk to her other friends. After all, I told her, if friends won't talk to you if you have something you really wanna talk about, they probably aren't the kind of friends you should value the most.

But Samidare seemed to really appreciate it, the fact that I took some time to talk to her. We ended up talking until breakfast time, and we would've missed it if I didn't check my watch in time. She thanked me with quite a deep bow for allowing her to talk with me about things like this, even though all of this started from me wondering what Samidare was doing sitting out on the pier at such an early hour. I told her that she didn't need to thank me - I didn't really think I did her a huge favor or anything, we just talked. But Samidare reminded me that in a Japanese workplace, whether it be in an office or in the military, it was very rare for superior officers to socialize and hang out with their subordinates and inferiors. Even if I was American and my work ethics differed a lot from standard Japanese work ethics, it didn't change the fact that I was willing to devote my time to her.

This morning's breakfast convinced me that receiving Yamato and Akagi at the same time was not exactly the dream reinforcements we wanted. Akagi and Yamato alone out-ate everyone else combined. Mamiya and Irako basically ran through an entire two days' worth of food that the base would normally eat without those two in two hours. After wolfing down my own breakfast, Houshou and I hopped into the kitchens with Mamiya and Irako as emergency kitchen staff and helped them make even more rice, toast, sausage links, bacon, and eggs. A surprisingly Western breakfast this morning, now that I think about it, but at the time, I was just focusing everything on making food for those two. I mean, I understand that our capital ships eat a lot more than any other ship, but like, damn, if this keeps up...

So serious were Yamato's and Akagi's eating problems that I emailed Seal Team 6 about it, asking them if Yamato and Akagi were really meant to eat that fucking much, or if it was just their own appetites. I got a response earlier this evening saying that unfortunately, that's actually how much they need to eat in order to provide the energy that they need to operate at sea. I guess not everything was downscaled when they miniaturized those big ships...

After today's light amount of weekend paperwork, which again ended up having to be done after lunch because I was so busy helping Mamiya and Irako and Houshou clean out the kitchen (funny thing's that right after we got done cleaning the kitchen, we went straight back to cooking lunch again, so fuck that cleaning!), I joined everyone else at Shinsengumi for a marathon run of both Kamen Rider and DragonBall Z - y'know, the classics - that Fubuki had planned for this afternoon. Kirishima and I relocated the stereo speaker set that I had installed in my office over to Shinsengumi, and the projector and screen that I had placed an order for since the last time we screened anime at Shinsengumi arrived with yesterday's supplies, so we set up the projector using the tools from the bathhouse construction up on the ceiling and installed the screen on a section of the wall, and we were good to go. Stayed up late into the night all eating ramen for dinner (again, Mamiya, Irako, and I helped Houshou out with the ramen for a good reason), and we all chugged Ramune like it was booze.

I guess not much happened today. Maybe I wrote a bit longer than I should've about Samidare from this morning. Oh well.

Let the good times roll while they last.