Wednesday, February 19th, 2014.
It's nighttime. I found Samidare, Murakumo, Inazuma, Fubuki, and Sazanami, my starter ship girls, all sitting next to my bed or lying down on the floor in my bedroom, sleeping with a few spare blankets they got from somewhere.
I'm feeling well enough to write, but I have to write slowly. It's a good thing that I keep my journal and pen underneath my pillow, because I don't want to wake up the girls. They must've all been staying here at my side, waiting for me to come to again. I looked at the clock on my desk, which tells both date and time, and it turns out I've been out of it for the past two or three days.
Let me remember what happened...my mind's still fuzzy and I can't think straight...
Right, I remember now.
On Monday in the morning, with the supply drop that came in during that time, a group of government officials flew in with it. No, not government officials, guys in suits who looked like they were government officials. They didn't say if they were part of the Ministry of Defense. All I thought was that they were some kind of government official type people. But that's not the point.
They demanded to see me, so wondering what the fuck was going on, I headed out to the Six-Pack to meet them with some of the ship girls in tow, who came out with me to see what was going on too. They confronted me and demanded that I resign my post as commander of the Moebius Four Platoon and return home to America, and I asked them why I should do that, especially if the choice wasn't mine to make.
That's when they decided to pull out guns to make their point. They told me that a reason wasn't needed. If I wasn't going to make the choice myself, they would make it for me.
They didn't even hesitate. Before the ship girls knew what was going on, the guy closest to me shot me three times before the girls put them down. I remember up to that much with a bit of clarity.
Geez, that hurt. I've been shot before, so this feeling of haziness isn't new to me. But it's still annoying as fuck.
Let's see...I've been shot in the chest twice, through both lungs, more towards the bottom, and once above the right kidney. Nothing vital hit. Looks like I've used up all the luck for this year to survive without any permanent damage. No wonder I'm having trouble breathing, and I can't make any sudden movements, otherwise my body'll feel sore out of nowhere because my lungs are struggling to provide the oxygen my cells need.
Makes me wonder why I'm not in the medbay and instead in my room. Who put me here, anyway?
Someone had left a mission report file in my hands when I woke up, so after reading through it, this's what happened.
After subduing the guys who attacked me, the girls took them in and interrogated the fuck out of them to beat answers out of them. I got rushed to the medbay after getting shot - I still have blurry memories of getting carried by someone over to the medbay - where Akashi treated me. I got hit by standard 9mm cartridges, so the internal damage wasn't that bad, since it could've been a lot worse had they chosen to use .45 ACP or larger calibers.
As it turns out, those five guys weren't part of the Ministry of Defense or sent from HQ to assassinate me. Rather, they said that they were part of an extreme right-wing Japanese nationalist group known as the Zaitokukai (full name, 在日特権を許さない市民の会, or "Association of Citizens against the Special Privileges of the Zainichi").
I don't like explaining politics, but I have to in order to explain the context. Right now, Japanese right-wing extremism, in general, advocates a strong pro-Imperialist Japan political atmosphere. They want Japan to go back to the days of the Imperial Era, and especially in the context of World War II, they advocate this whole idea that "Japan did nothing wrong" during the war and the decades leading up to the war. They want to make Japan shun the whole self-deprecating attitude that was imposed upon them by the Americans after the war with the Occupation, and they want Japan to break ties with America in regards to everything from "relying" on America for military intervention (which includes eliminating American military bases from Japan, which, with the Moebius Four Armament Pact, is now a reality, something that the guys who shot me didn't realize) to enforcing revisionist views on history and changing the history textbooks. And above all, they want a strong military for Japan, as indicated in their desire to repeal Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution (which, again, already happened with the Moebius Four Armament Pact). They don't just want a Self-Defense Force, which was what Japan had before the Pact. They wanted their own legit military, and some even want Japan to be a nuclear power.
Remember, this is just broadly, generally speaking. Not all Japanese right-wing extremist groups share all the same views - it's just the stuff I've mentioned are the ones that most of them seem to agree on advocating.
Now, the Zaitokukai is one of these such extreme right groups. Specifically, they're a small minority of Japanese who campaign for the elimination of privileges granted to people living in Japan who are considered "Special Foreign Residents". Technically, I should be labeled under this as well, since that's what I am, too. But usually they target resident Koreans, since most of the people who are considered Special Foreign Residents are Korean or have Korean heritage or ethnicity, but again, other foreigners like me are included, too. Basically, they accuse those people of abusing those special privileges that they've been given by the government to have a economic and sometimes social advantage over other Japanese people.
But this's all just political hogwash to say that the Zaitokukai's a completely racist extremist group who hate foreigners, Koreans the most. In fact, I bet a lot of Japanese extreme right-wing groups are purely racist fuckers who use history as an excuse to throw hate at outsiders. I've heard plenty of stories from my coworkers back home about their own friends, coworkers and family visiting Japan, either as international students or just as tourists, and sometimes they'd be unlucky enough to come across one of these groups while they're campaigning around on the streets, and if they were seen and it was obvious that they were foreigners, those extremist guys would shout at them in bad English, "Go home, foreigner, go home!"
In loudspeakers and megaphones, too, no less.
Obviously I don't want to generalize; I'm sure that there are genuinely good people who associate with these right-wing groups not because they're racist but because they feel it's a better direction that they want to see their country go towards. Some of the points they bring up are legit: I don't necessarily agree with the fact that America forced Japan to be its bitch after the second world war; in fact, that sounds pretty terrible. So here's my little disclaimer for now.
And you start to wonder why Kitakami and Akebono and other people like them resent the fact that an American is commanding them. Little surprise.
Anyways, those guys who tried to kill me said that they were part of a specific branch of the Zaitokukai who concentrated on protests and campaigns against all the other foreigners who weren't Korean, or the "Zainichi", as the Japanese call the Koreans who have Special Foreign Resident status. They said that they were contacted by a few people in the Japanese government, and they were paid to come to our base here at Okinawa by hitching a ride on the transport helicopters disguised as government officials (their alibis were provided by these mystery people from the government) and to ask me to give up my position as the commander of the base and return home. If I refused, which I did, they were to shoot me on sight.
Well, they almost pulled it off. Too bad no one taught them how to aim for headshots.
As for these "mystery government people", those five Zaitokukai guys said that they didn't know who they were. They only talked over the phone, and they never met in person, but because they found money sitting in their bank accounts, they felt obliged to return the favor. One of those guys even said that they didn't need to have given him so much money, he would've easily come here for half the amount to kill me.
What a fucker.
According to the report, Ooyodo immediately contacted HQ about the incident, and those five guys were arrested and taken away within hours back to the mainland. HQ is apparently working on the case to see who's responsible for orchestrating the assassination attempt on me.
The report also included my medical information. I won't delve into it since it's all just anatomical lingo, but basically, it was a close call. It wasn't the closest I've been to death, but not exactly where I wanted to be if I had to get shot. At least I didn't get my stomach shot or my spine shot; now that would be lights out, gee-fucking-gee.
I can taste my breath, and it's bloody. It's not a comfortable experience, breathing air that tastes like blood. I don't really have anything else to write now, so I'm gonna get back to sleep. I have work tomorrow.