Saturday, February 1st, 2014.
I'm writing this in the middle of the damn night again - so let me tell you about everything that happened today. Oh boy, I've got quite the fuckin' tale to tell.
As requested, at 0930 hours, an old MH-53M Pave Low IV heavy support helicopter touches down at our base here in Okinawa to pick me up and the bodies of Imuya and I-168 up. Their bodies were already prepared, packed up in clean white body bags and carried out to the chopper by a few JMSDF marines. When I headed out to the Six Pack myself, the girls came by to see me off, and among them, Kitakami was bawling her eyes out as she watched Ooi's body bag get loaded up. It would've been a bit more heart-breaking if Kitakami hadn't called me a retarded American.
I still haven't gotten over that. Don't expect that I will any time soon. Maybe I didn't make this clear enough in the previous entry, but I don't like being responsible for the deaths of those I give orders to, especially now that the unit I command is far different than the usual hoo-rah squad of men eager to get into a fight. But it's pointless to try to explain that I actually care about the ship girls to Kitakami.
The Pave Low, as a side note, is a military reassignment from the American military. The Pact doesn't state it specifically or require the US to have done this, but America sent Japan over some of its old military hardware, vehicles, and weapons that were outdated and no longer deemed fit for US military service to assist Japan in its effort to contain the Abyssal threat. Like FDR called it before the war, "the firehose strategy". This particular model was retired with the rest of the Pave Low fleet back in 2008...it's nice to have it serving again.
Much like the warships of old who've been resurrected to fight another day, this time against a much different enemy.
We reached the Tokyo HQ, which's located underneath the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building, or "Tocho", as the locals and employees call it. The Tokyo HQ itself's formally called the Ministry of Defense, but in reality it's actually a highly classified branch operating within the Ministry of Defense known specifically as "Bureau of Counter-Terrorism", an ambiguous name in and of itself, since it sounds like a shady organization like the American CIA or the British MI-6 when its sole function is to wage the war against the Abyssal threat. Classifications are apparently really important, as it should be with this conflict.
I asked the soldiers carrying the body bags where they would take them and what would become of the bodies, but the soldiers said they didn't know, and even if they did know, they would probably be under strict orders not to divulge such information to me anyway. I got a bit pissed off by that, on top of my growing anger on being about to meet the guy who gave me the order for the capture mission. I'm the goddamn commander of the counter-Abyssal fleet; why would they not enlighten me on what's going to happen to the bodies of my former soldiers? Hot-damn. At least in the American military, they actually do tell you what's going to happen to the bodies. At least they try to care about the young men they send out to die for them.
After we touched down, that's when I went full asshole mode. It's funny, because when I get angry, I feel like my Japanese improves about threefold - people just seemed to understand what I was trying to say. Maybe it's because my Japanese's been improved, since I've been living and speaking with Japanese people for the past month without speaking very much English at all (reading English-subbed anime doesn't really count). But whatever the case, I took the elevator down to the B.C.T. (Bureau of Counter-Terrorism), marched straight into the main office, and demanded to see the person in charge.
Now, before I get into this, I'll just say this: because I'm an American military officer under the "protection" of the Moebius Four Armament Pact, I can do something like barge into the B.C.T. office uninvited and demand to see the person in charge. By normal Japanese military law, I'm not allowed to, but the Pact gives me immunity to this because the only way I can be tried at military court is by Americans on American soil. So long as I don't do anything obviously criminal, the Japanese government can't touch me.
So they called for this fellow called Hirotaka Masakawa. I know his name from my debriefing back when I was in America about the Moebius Four Armament: he's the guy who used to work for the Ministry of Defense but got reassigned to head the B.C.T. when the Abyssal threat showed up. When he came out to see me to ask me what was wrong, I was tempted to punch him in the face and break his nose. They teach you the basics of lethal hand-to-hand combat in the military - at least, that's how I've been trained. I know how hard and where to punch a person in the face to break a nose, dislocate a jaw, or give a really bad black eye. The instant I saw him, my first instinct was to analyze the man's face to see where I could punch him to deal the most damage with one strike. If you've ever read World War Z (no, not the movie, the goddamn book), you'll remember the entry about the guy who lived his life in the zombie apocalypse doing nothing but slaying zombies, and by the end of it, once the world started to stabilize again and he went back to living in normal human society, his mind had been warped to the point where if he looks at another human for too long, he'll just subconsciously start figuring out ways to kill them most efficiently. That's what happened to me for a split second.
But I refrained...for that moment, anyway.
He tried to invite me to his office, but I refused and started calling him out. I asked him, right there in the main office in front of all the other Bureau workers, why he decided to be so stupid as to issue me an order to send my fleet out on a capture mission. I asked him if he was aware of the fact that as a direct result, half my fleet was in critical condition and could not fight for another week or two, and that two had actually been killed in action. I demanded him to give me an answer right there.
Masakawa claimed that it wasn't his order specifically. He said that the Japanese government wanted results quickly, and members of the Ministry of Defense were on his ass pushing him to do something with their fleet - my fleet. He said that he'd tried telling those members of the Ministry that if they wanted the best chance of giving orders to their new fleet, they'd have to talk to me directly, because according to the Pact, I'm technically the only one who can give orders to the ship girls for them to obey and carry out, and no one else. But they didn't want to, apparently. So I asked him why they didn't want to talk to me and instead went the circular way to tell Masakawa to tell me the orders.
He didn't answer at first, so I yelled at him to tell me. I bellowed at him and everyone else in the office that right now, someone in my fleet hates me because one of the ship girls who died was her fellow ship-sister, and that there would be a good chance that my entire fleet would place the blame of those two fatalities on me when it wasn't even I who made that kind of dumbass decision to send them all on a retarded mission like that.
So Masakawa insisted that I follow him to his office, which I reluctantly did. He brought up his email and showed me the correspondence he'd had over the past few weeks with the members of the Ministry of Defense. He opened one email in particular, and with my wavering knowledge of kanji, I could make out its meaning.
The members of the Ministry of Defense didn't want to bother wasting their time talking to an American - someone from the nation who had "imposed their military doctrine upon our country" and "deliberately demilitarized our country for nearly seventy years and re-militarized our country to fight alone against the terrorist threat". I also got the feeling that they didn't even consider me a legitimate officer, judging by the way they wrote.
Which makes sense, if you think about it. Recently, in the Japanese political sphere, right-wing nationalism's been on the rise. After the Second World War was done, with American militarist control of the Japanese government came a post-war doctrine of shame and shunning of pre-war Japanese mentality and cultural identity. For all those years until now, America's been forcing Japan to denounce themselves, to forever remain a passive country who needed to be ashamed of itself for fighting a war for its own survival. At least, that's what those right-wingers have been putting into the media. And thus, with the most recent government elections, a lot of these right-wing nationalists got elected to seats in the Diet, or the Japanese parliament, like England's Parliament or the American Congress.
While I won't get into politics because politics is not my expertise (and seriously, fuck politics), fuck those guys. It's one thing to promote nationalism and be proud of one's own culture and nation. It's another thing entirely to base it off hatred, retaliation, and racism towards people who have nothing to do with your fucking political maneuvering bullshit.
It's just inevitable, I suppose. And now that I think about it, it's not just Kitakami. I bet a whole lotta Japanese people probably dislike or hate America and everything it stands for now. Certainly the locals around the Okinawa area do, generally speaking.
I asked Masakawa if there was any way I could get in contact with those members of the Ministry of Defense, because I wasn't about to sit back and just watch my own soldiers die without being told an explanation. A fucking "capture mission" alone wasn't going to cut it. Masakawa said that my best bet was to go directly to the Ministry of Defense and try to speak to them there.
Guess what I did.
It took me about forty-five minutes to walk over to the Ministry of Defense. Admittedly, I did turn a lot of heads to me, because think about it: there's a white dude in an American military uniform, an officer's uniform at that, walking down the streets of downtown Tokyo over to the Ministry of Defense. I was too pissed off and couldn't be bothered hailing a cab or a taxi, even, to head over there. And who cares if I attracted some attention. At least my name isn't MacArthur. And those downtown Tokyo-ites don't need to know my first and middle names.
Long story short, because I don't wanna spend more time writing when it's about to be 0300 hours tonight, I called out the members of the Ministry of Defense. They dd exactly what I expected them to do: they came out to see me, apologized for any concerns that I might have, and assured me that they would handle everything better from now on. I wasn't in the mood to hammer anything into their dumbass heads; instead, I made it clear that I've halted all military action at the Okinawa base until I received a proper fleet composition.
Something tells me that they're not gonna give me shit for a "proper fleet composition".
I returned to base at 0140 hours, after everyone had gone to sleep. Stayed up this entire time doing the paperwork and shit that I'd normally get done in the morning, and here I am writing this thing.
This's frustrating. This is actually getting as frustrating as working as an officer in the American Navy - something that I never would've expected to see happen. And God forbid I send these girls on another death run.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to sound like I'm ostracizing the Japanese or making them out to be the true enemy. But it's very hard not to do that or sound like a racist motherfucker myself when it just seems like everyone who hates you happens to be Japanese.
We may as well drop another fat dad with a beer belly and his little kid down onto Okinawa if this's how things'll keep turning out...