A/N:

The previous story is probably one of the more interesting ones of the short stories of this collection for a few reasons:

The original request for this story mentioned Shoukaku as the main ship girl, but instead I decided to go with Maya. I am currently taking a class here in Japan called Popular Culture and Media in Japan, and recently we watched some clips from the movie Grave of the Fireflies. In the movie, the main character remembers seeing his dad serving aboard the heavy cruiser Maya during a naval review in one scene, and because of how the request was structured, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to put the reference into this short story.

In addition, as the dialogue heavily implies, I decided to put the context of the story in an alternate universe, in which Japan in fact prevailed during the war by winning Midway instead of losing it, and then eventually going on to capture Hawaii and take the fight to the West Coast of America, as suggested with the Battle of San Francisco. I wasn't trying to seriously build up a whole new universe, but I was simply building a framework of an interesting setting that is open to reader interpretation.

And finally, I decided to try some romantic elements that I normally don't delve into, partly because, well, this story isn't rated M, it's rated T. I am by no means a romantic writer. I much prefer and am much better at writing descriptive narrative on the gritty, the messy, and the bloody happenings of tragedy. But specifically for this story, I decided to step outside that usual framework that I excel in and try something a bit more...risque, I suppose.

Thanks for reading,

-Akyuu no Joshu

I never liked the sea, to tell you the truth. In fact...I pretty much hate it.

A seemingly unspeakable truth for an Admiral, yeah, I know. I grew up on the shores of the Peninsula, in a house that's worth more than four times the average American's yearly salary in and of itself. My backyard was the ocean: all I would have to do to see it is go out to the backyard and stand on the cliffs overlooking the rocky beaches of the Golden Cove.

No, I'm lying, actually. I didn't grow up there. In fact, I can't really tell you for sure where exactly it is that I "grew up".

My family immigrated to America in 1937. I was eleven at the time, and my younger brother six. We moved to America to escape the imperialism that was on the sharp rise during the Thirties: the government, controlled mostly by militaristic politicians and lawmakers friendly with the top echelons of the Japanese military, was ramping up its pro-war and pro-imperialism propaganda, and our "glorious country" was busy sending out its fleets and armies all throughout the Pacific Theater carving its own empire out of the face of the Earth. Japan wasn't about to let the vile countries of the West conquer the entire world, not if we could help it.

Paps, my little affectionate American nickname for my intellectual father, was a cartoonist before we moved here to America. He produced newspaper cartoons (you know them better today as mangas), 4komas, and other such artistic work. We left the country because 1937 was the year when Paps decided that Japan wasn't the country he wanted his children to grow up in. I still remember the night that Paps came back from work one night in our Tokyo apartment, both furious and depressed at what he needed to do for the sake of his family, for our sake, the night that he'd made up his mind. That night was the moment that taught me that human emotions are too complex for me to bother understanding them fully. How can you be angry and sad at the same time? It didn't make sense to me. And to a certain degree, it still doesn't make sense. I'm a straightforward guy - contradicting stuff like this just pisses me off because I can't get myself to understand it.

Paps explained to me after the war about the events leading up to our fateful move to America. He told me how he remembered the Taigyaku Jiken (大逆事件), or "The High Treason Incident" that occurred on May 10th, 1910. Basically, the government found out about an assassination attempt on the emperor at the time being plotted by a bunch of political extremists and jailed the suspects, like the English Gunpowder Plot. Pap's mom, my grandmother, was a manga assistant to Kitazawa Yasuji-san, whom she called Rakuten, and she told Paps of how all the political mangas and cartoons that they used to work on had to be stopped after the incident because of the threat of jail if they produced any comic or cartoon that might seem too "politically sensitive".

The year that shit started to hit the fan was in 1925. Paps remembers this law well: the Chian Ijihou (治安維持法), the Peace Preservation Law of 1925. It used politically sensitive jargon to say that basically, if you did anything the government didn't like or want, they could by law toss you off to jail for up to ten years. Simple as that. And the way the law was worded, the government could twist it around in so many ways that they could fucking turn it into a goddamn pretzel, and they'd still bop people with it. Paps was 25 at the time, and he'd picked up his mother's trade of being a manga artist, working for various magazines, newspapers, and other print media. He was a prolific manga artist, and he was always working on some side manga in his study. I've read a couple of them, and they're actually not bad. But I can see why they were only kept as side projects; all of them had some kind of political or social commentary embedded within them, things that the government would certainly imprison him for. With the Taigyaku Jiken and the Chian Ijihou on his ass, not to mention the escalating imperial fervor of the nation being facilitated throughout the populace by the militaristic government, there was no way for a manga artist like Paps to express himself to the extent that he truly wanted. It's a regret that Paps is going to have to die with eventually, even though none of it was his own fault at all.

We finally did move at the end of 1937, like I said. The Manchurian Incident - better known as the Rape of Nanking in the West - was the final straw. Paps had friends in relatively important government positions and various reliable sources because of family connections and connections through his job, so he had a better sense of what was going on there in Manchuria than most other people in Japan at the time. He declared that he wasn't going to force himself or his own wife and children to live in a country where our fellow countrymen were massacring other people in other countries in the name of imperialism. It wasn't that he wasn't patriotic or that he didn't want to see his own country thrive and prosper, but he had been a bit opposed to Japan's expanding militarism at the time and grew more and more staunchly opposed to it as time dragged on. The Manchurian Incident was the last straw, like I said, and within a week after Paps came back home that fateful night, we packed up our stuff, sold everything we couldn't carry with us, hopped on a boat bound for Torrance, California, and sailed across the Pacific.

I remember the excitement that I felt during the boat ride across the sea. It was my first time being exposed so grandly to the middle of the vast, mysterious blue ocean. My parents always tell me how I never really knew what fear was as a kid; I'd always go around doing stupid things just for the sake of experiencing them and getting myself pretty banged up. I mean, the boat ride itself was pretty damn boring, I'll be honest. But I managed to bear with it by thinking of all the exciting things I'd be able to do and experience once we made it across and settled in a new land. I pretended I was Boken Dankichi-kun or Christopher Columbus, sailing across the grand blue ocean in search of new lands to explore and claim. My younger brother was even more annoying than I was at the time, so together, we ran around on the decks of the boat, causing lots of embarrassment and grief for our parents, being the dumb idiots we were.

But those were the days when I still felt excited to see what the uncertain future held for me. Those were the days when I was blissfully ignorant of the fact that the ocean wasn't just used for traveling and exploring, but also for destroying and killing. But how would I have known, I was just a stupid eleven-year-old kid.

We arrived just before New Year's of 1938, moving into our house at the Golden Cove. A good friend of Paps' arranged for that house to be provided for us, fortunately enough, with the help of a few associates living in Southern California at the time. Again, those were the days when getting a house in a place like the Peninsula was simple, easy, and quick. And in our case, completely free. Nowadays it's a whole 'nother story, but that's not the point. We lived there in that house, and my brother and I went off to school, learned English, and built our lives from the ground up again.

And then the FBI rolled up to our house like the fucking po-po and knocked on our door.

Executive Order 9066. February 19th, 1942, the date which will live in infamy.

But then again, no president would be willing to label his own dates as such, so we simply got screwed out of our minds.

Barely four years after we arrived to rebuild our lives in the strange as mythical land known as the United States of America, we packed up our bags again (only two suitcases and nothing else) and got deported off to Manzanar.

I remember how Paps explained to me and my brother before we boarded that bus off to the internment camp that the "trip" we were taking to a whole new place wasn't a trip at all. He said that we were going to get locked up in a place called Manzanar War Relocation Center, and when we asked him why, he said this:

"Because we're dirty Japs. That's why."

I won't ever forget those words and how he said them. For the first and only time in my life, I heard my father sound resentful.

I've heard him sound angry, I've heard him sound pissed off. But that's the only time I've ever heard him sound resentful.

Resentful at the fact that he and his family were about to suffer for the next three and a half years on the grounds that we were spies, that all people of Japanese descent were all rats and moles, spying on every corner of the West Coast for the Imperial Japanese Navy.

It's one of those moments that when you were a kid, you knew it meant something important, that it's something you need to remember for later because you don't quite understand it now. And once you're older, you look back on that moment, remember what that moment felt like, and you understand the meaning, however many so years later down the road, and wonder if you should feel bad for not understanding the importance of that moment when it had happened.

Mom was a frail woman, a true cherry blossom. She had initially opposed our move to the States, but after the Manchurian Incident, there was nothing she could do to stop our move. She always had a weak body all throughout her life because of a debilitating fever she had as a child, and giving birth to two boys had robbed her of much of her pre-marriage health. The voyage across the Pacific also worsened her condition, and finally, Manzanar killed her. The climate there was brutal, unlike the pleasant, moderate weather of the Peninsula that Mom quickly grew to love, and Mom didn't last six months. Whatever excitement I had felt going to and arriving at Manzanar died along with her. That was when I personally realized that there was no longer any reason for me to have hope in the future, much less look forward to it.

We were Japanese-American interns at an internment camp. Like the mulattoes of the centuries of slavery and like our Jewish counterparts, the abstract laws of race were imposed upon us by higher powers we had no say against and no way to deter. I didn't realize it at the time, but the word "hope" not only was never written into our dictionary - it simply didn't exist to begin with.

All these years, too, weakened Paps severely, and the death of our mother, his beloved wife from their childhood days, left him with very little willpower to forge on. We were his reasons to continue to survive at Manzanar. He didn't want us to end up like those hundred or so orphans at the Children's Village at the corner of the camp. So he picked himself up. We cremated Mom's body, put the ashes in a small tinderbox, and buried it with the graves of the other victims of the camp.

Then, on July 16th, 1945, the military guards came to our little cabin and called Paps out. By this time, Paps was working with Yashima Taro, another Japanese immigrant, using his manga drawing talent to create anti-Japanese war propaganda that the US planes would drop in leaflets over Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to demoralize the Japanese troops. Paps came back inside with the saddest face I've ever seen him have and said that I had to go with the guards. I asked why, and where to, but Paps simply said that the guards would tell me the details.

I wouldn't see either Paps or Takahisa, my younger brother, again for another four years.

I was taken to a secret US research base at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. I was informed that I was to be part of a hyper-clandestine American military project known as the Manhattan Project, and that I was going to have to be a part of it because they needed a teenage boy of Japanese descent as part of their project. And because I had skipped a few grades before our deportation and maintained those grades at the school at Manzanar, the Manhattan Project brass noticed this and pulled me into their little science project.

They told me that earlier that year, in April 1945, American PBY Catalina reconnaissance attack planes had intercepted a strange Japanese convoy headed for Sasebo Naval Arsenal down at Nagasaki. They disabled the convoy and had American destroyers patrolling the waters nearby to come and investigate the convoy, and they recovered what appeared to be a teenage human girl being transported inside a large shipping crate. The girl and the crate she was in was confiscated, and it was flown back to White Sands for the Manhattan Project to study.

American codebreakers had learned of a secret Japanese Navy research program to construct high-tech naval personnel who could wield the power of warships of their own accord to strengthen their weakening navy and their correspondingly weakening grasp over the seas of the Pacific Theater as US forces kept pushing the Japanese back towards the turf of their own country. This was first known as far back as 1943, but they weren't taken seriously because, well, just the idea of girls running around acting like warships was laughed at by every single top brass in the American government and military. So they didn't do anything about it. But in December 1944, several capital English dreadnoughts were RKO'd out of nowhere in the middle of the English Channel, and soon after, American and British soldiers fighting against German forces on the border of West Germany began reporting sights of strange, inhumanly powerful girls, mind-bogglingly beautiful and equally as destructive. They wouldn't succumb to bullets, no matter how large the caliber, and they wielded cannons on their backs like tanks. That's when the Manhattan Project was formed, for those rumors of the Japanese fleet personnel program could very well have been true after all, in a desperate attempt to try and figure out how to possibly create such soldiers like them.

In February 1945, those rumors were confirmed. Japan had built up their ship girl fleet under the codename Shin-Kantai (新艦隊, or literally "New Fleet"), and had pushed back American naval power significantly. This new Japanese fleet wasn't strong enough to completely kick out American naval presence in Imperial Japanese territory, but it was enough to buy them lots of time and lots of breathing room, for cities like Tokyo were about to get firebombed. They'd already had one huge naval battle, the Battle of Okinawa, in which the Shin-Kantai squared off against half of the entire American navy, and it lasted for almost thirty-eight hours and ended with no conclusive victor. However, the Japanese were considered the winners, because their naval yards and ports at Okinawa were, at the end of the day, still held firmly in Japanese hands, thanks to the service and sacrifice of the Shin-Kantai. Clearly, the Shin-Kantai was even match for the powerful and mighty American navy, which had up to this point soundly kicked the Imperial Japanese Navy. It was a wake-up call, that America would most likely need its own "New Fleet", and fast. But how would the American navy go about building it when they had no idea how?

Despite the alleged German ship girls' appearance in the war, they mysteriously disappeared when Germany surrendered in May 1945, and none of them were captured by the Allies before then, either, so until this Japanese ship girl was sent to White Sands, the Manhattan Project was stuck, with no resources to work off of. The Japanese had found out that their secret codes for radio transmission and communication had been broken, so they changed their comms, rendering American codebreakers ineffective, so information about the Shin-Kantai couldn't just be easily stolen off the air. In addition, even though the defeat of Germany meant that Japan was effectively fighting the rest of the war one on three, the combination of the Shin-Kantai and what was left of the Imperial Japanese Navy against the three combined navies of the United Kingdom, the USSR, and the United States, the naval skirmishes that broke out soon after Germany's surrender showed that Japan's miraculous new navy could very well hold their own and single-handedly fend off attacks from three directions. It seemed like every time the Allies' navies faced off against the Shin-Kantai, the Shin-Kantai was somehow getting stronger and stronger, as though they were getting upgraded like crazy. The sailors who were rescued from ships sunk by the ship girls of the Shin-Kantai and had seen them said that they had the ferocious looks of wild animals trapped and forced to fight for their very lives, and indeed, it would certainly be game over if the Shin-Kantai and the rest of the Imperial Japanese Navy didn't hold down the fort for their country.

The Imperial Japanese Navy got carried in the backpack of the Shin-Kantai, and everyone knew it, including the Japanese populace, courtesy of pro-Shin-Kantai propaganda.

But despite all this, Shoukaku was to be, ironically enough, America's one hope to break the naval stalemate and win the war for the Allies. I had been brought to White Sands to communicate with her and have her reveal the technical secrets of the Japanese Shin-Kantai. As it would turn out, the two of us would be vested with the power to end a war neither of us had any reason to be a part of.

And that was how I met my wife.

to be continued