July 17th, 1945. The day I met my wife.
I don't consider myself a terribly sentimental guy, but I do remember the exact moment in time when I laid my eyes on her. Shoukaku was sitting in a chair in an empty quarantine room, with bulletproof glass on all sides of the containment room. The Manhattan Project scientists had managed to figure out how to activate her, but they failed to make any more progress past that. This was where I had to come in to finish the job.
They put out a chair for me to sit in, in front of Shoukaku. I was instructed to speak with the girl, have her talk to me and tell me about the Shin-Kantai's technological secrets and background, anything relevant to the Shin-Kantai. So for an hour I sat there like a dumbass, awkwardly talking to the most beautiful girl I've ever set my eyes on, trying to get her to say something, anything. Her facial features were like Mom's: gentle, frail, and warm, very Japanese-like, but her silvery-white hair threw me for a loop, because who the hell ever heard of an Oriental person having anything other than dark brown or black hair. The fact that she never once smiled or made any facial expression other than a perpetual frown didn't help to accentuate the warm features of her face.
She was a cherry blossom petal that had somehow found itself on American soil, thousands of miles away from home. And at the time I first met her, I knew she was withering away quickly.
After that awkward hour, she finally spoke her first words to me in Japanese.
"Did they force you to come here as well?"
I nodded without hesitation. And that was the start of our very first conversation.
So we talked for another hour straight in Japanese, completely disregarding the fact that we had top military officers and scientists observing us all around us. It was my first truly surreal experience. Having a conversation with an angel of death inside a highly classified military research base, trapped inside what was more or less a prison cell and being watched by too many pairs of eyes like we were zoo animals, and neither of us gave a single shit. You'd have to be insane not to think twice about the situation as a whole.
Nowhere as insane as the people who started an entire world war, though, so I guess I'm still an okay human being.
Shoukaku told me that she was supposed to be transported to Sasebo Naval Arsenal at Nagasaki to reinforce the New Fifth Carrier Division with her fellow sister carrier Zuikaku and a few other destroyer divisions, but obviously things didn't go to plan. Since she knew that I, too, was no less a prisoner than she was, Shoukaku didn't want me to suffer because of her reluctance to cooperate with our American captors, so she asked me what I would do should she reveal the secrets of the Shin-Kantai to me. I said that I was going to honest with her; I was going to pass the information to the Americans, because I was going to do everything I could to go back to my family at Manzanar. I explained to her about Executive Order 9066, how all the Japanese Americans, traitor or not, were indiscriminately rounded up and kicked off to internment camps because of the war hysteria against the evil Japs, along with a handful of German-Americans and Italian-Americans.
Oh, my bad, I shouldn't say "indiscriminately", because it should seem that Americans are discriminatory as fuck.
I explained to Shoukaku about Mom, how when she died, Takahisa and I had to grow the fuck up and learn how to take care of ourselves. So I apologized to Shoukaku, but I already knew what I was going to do. I apologized to her because I would be the reason why Japan, her country, would lose the war, if the Americans managed to pull off what they needed to in order to turn the tide of the war back in their favor.
Shoukaku asked me why I felt the need to apologize to her. Wasn't Japan my own country, after all? Hell, I was born there, right? If I wanted to betray my own country, that should be my own decision to make, shouldn't it? Something like betrayal, something like treason - a mere apology won't ever make up for the kind of damage that a single act of treason can do.
I had to explain: I had no country. Takahisa and I inherited Paps' loss of faith in his own country, and because he had taken good care not to expose us to the imperial propaganda of the country while we still lived in Tokyo, neither Takahisa nor I felt any real devotion or patriotism towards Japan. And while our new life here in America before our deportation was great and happy, none of that matters anymore because of what Roosevelt did to us.
Executive Order 9066: February 19th, 1942, the date which will live in infamy; the date on which the lives of my family and my entire sense of patriotism were gassed to death.
I told Shoukaku that she was lucky. She was Japanese, built to fight for Japan and defend it to her very last breath if need be. She knew exactly what she needed to do, had she not been captured, she knew where her loyalties lay, she had the power of patriotism on her side, and she needed no other reason than a war on her own country to know what her duty was. Even if her cause would eventually turn out to be a doomed one, she still had a cause to fight for, no matter how futile.
I was Japanese-American. Paps had explained to us, once we left Japan, that we could probably never return to Japan, because our own countrymen would label us as traitors, unpatriotic sons of bitches who defected to the enemy just before the war if we ever did go back. So we couldn't look to Japan for a sense of identity. America was now no different. I found it impossible to feel any sense of patriotism towards a country that labeled not just me and my family but everyone of an entire ethnicity as spies and threw us like cattle into cattle ranches off in the middle of nowhere. The only patriotism I had by that point, I told Shoukaku, was the one I felt for my family, because that was all I had. I didn't care what I needed to do to ensure that Paps and Takahisa would make it through their time at Manzanar. It's not like they were in any real danger, and by that point we'd all gotten acclimated to the harsh life that Manzanar forced onto us, but the future was uncertain, and I wasn't about to let any misguided hopes impede my devotion to the safety of my family.
A rebel without a cause, then - not a nationalistic one, anyway, that was demanded of the counties during the war. But I couldn't rebel outright - I had to figure out my own way of rebelling.
So if this meant that I needed to "betray" a country that was thousands of miles away, if this meant that I needed to sacrifice Shoukaku's desire to protect her country in order to protect my family, then so be it. I told Shoukaku that she, like me, needed to make a decision. Either she could keep silent and not know what would end up happening to her but protect the secrets of the Shin-Kantai and screw me over, or she could start talking and screw herself and Japan over.
Either way, we both knew that one of us would have to get fucked before we left that containment room. I had already made my move; Shoukaku was the one who needed to respond.
As Shoukaku later told me, she felt torn between her own desire to sacrifice herself to protect the rest of her comrades of the Shin-Kantai and her pity for me, an innocent boy who had nothing to fall back on but his own family in a country that didn't want them. But eventually, she couldn't bear to ignore what was right in front of her. She agreed to reveal the Shin-Kantai's secrets, in exchange for her safety, my safety, and the safety of my family.
Shoukaku also asked that she be not forced to fight against her own comrades...something that, to this day, I'm not so sure if it was really honored or not.
Things got rolling from there. With me as the translator (they didn't allow anyone else of Japanese descent to be a part of the Manhattan Project for security reasons), Shoukaku explained everything about the Shin-Kantai: the construction methods, the genetic modifications, even down to the Shin-Kantai's new fleet tactics. She explained that in the wake of the Battle of Midway, where the bulk of the Japanese fleet, especially the carriers, got shredded and utterly wrecked, the top command of the Imperial Japanese Navy had been freaking out, because they had known how deep in shit they were after losing four of their precious carriers. They'd foreseen the American navy pushing all the way right up to Japan's doorstep, so right after they learned what happened at Midway in June 1942, they contacted German engineers and scientists and begged them to help rebuild the Japanese Navy. They promised to attack Russia as soon as the new fleet, which would be later known as the Shin-Kantai, was constructed to alleviate pressure off Germany's eastern front. At first, the Germans laughed at the Japanese, because June 1942 was the heyday of the German advance into Russia. Nothing could stop them - until Stalingrad fucked them, because Hitler ignored the lesson that Napoleon learned a century or two before: don't invade Russia anywhere near the winter. Once they lost Stalingrad and Russia was back on the offensive, the Germans realized that the Japanese's initial request might actually become a good idea, so they shipped over a team of their scientists in a U-Boat, and they got to work with the Imperial Navy staff to construct the Shin-Kantai.
Ironically enough, by sending that team of scientists over to Japan, Germany sabotaged their own Nova 6 Biochemical Weapons Program and V-2 Long-Range Missile Program by splitting their valuable pool of scientific know-how and prowess in half. When Germany surrendered and America captured a good portion of those German teams of scientists, researchers, and engineers, one of them commented how if Japan didn't steal away half their team, they most likely could've finished their Nova 6 and V-2 programs and turned the tide back in Germany's favor. But history is always 20-20, so sucks for them.
But anyway, the Shin-Kantai is a fleet of genetically modified human beings capable of wielding the power of the warships who were sunk before them. Because they didn't have time to sit around thinking of new names for the Shin-Kantai, the IJN command simply gave the same names of their former navy to the Shin-Kantai. As it turned out, there were even a few ship girls of the Shin-Kantai who served in combat alongside their full-size warship counterparts. Pretty interesting how that turned out.
With the crucial information supplied by Shoukaku, the Manhattan Project brought over the German scientists, researchers, and engineers who were captured by American forces and bribed them with full wartime pardons to have them help construct America's own Shin-Kantai, the United States Auxiliary Fleet, or the USAF. By this point, America didn't trust Communist Russia, so the secrets of the Shin-Kantai were only shared with Britain, who got to work immediately constructing a ship girl fleet of their own.
By the time that America deployed the USAF, Japan was on the verge of breaking out of the blockade that the Allies had set up around Japan. They needed to, otherwise Japan would soon be strangled to death from being choked out of vital resources that needed to be shipped into the country.
All the while I had been helping Shoukaku reveal the secrets of the Shin-Kantai to the Americans, I learned all about the Shin-Kantai's tactics along the way. The Manhattan Project team noticed this, so in November 1945, I, a fifteen-year-old Japanese American teen with no reason or desire to participate in a war that tore my family's lives apart, was given an American navy officer's uniform, the rank of Rear Admiral (1-Star) in the United States Navy and the rank of Fleet Admiral of the United States Auxiliary Fleet, the U.S.S. California (BB-44) as my own flagship, command of my own Pacific fleet squadron, Task Force 80 of the US Seventh Fleet, and the entire newly constructed USAF, all of whom were named after the entire United States navy's warships, just like the Shin-Kantai.
That was the only time I ever truly wanted to kill myself. My disgust was so thick that it was all my five senses could perceive for a while.
But thanks to Shoukaku, I didn't.
By the time November 1945 rolled around, I had spent so much time with Shoukaku that we had gotten hooked up together. It was probably inevitable, now that I look back, considering our situation then, because it wasn't like there was anyone else for Shoukaku to talk to, and anyone else for me to get close with. Shoukaku promised me that she would gladly serve me against her own country, but I didn't want her to do that. Instead, I kept her with me on board the California, and she acted as my fleet's second-in-command. The USAF was initially disgruntled by the fact that two Japanese people were going to command them, but our first battle, the Battle of Attu Island at the very last of the Aleutian Islands up in Alaska, quickly dispelled any of their suspicions that we might be traitors. The Shin-Kantai had been sent to breach the Russian blockade at the northern Japanese territorial seas, which they easily accomplished, and like how the Americans island-hopped their way up to Japan's front door, the Shin-Kantai would spearhead the way for a Japanese counter-invasion of the American Aleutian Islands, an operation they had failed a few years before. That was their plan, anyway, but the Russians notified the Americans of the Shin-Kantai's sudden presence in northern waters. And by making an educated gamble that the Shin Kantai were planning on invading into the Aleutian Islands, I ordered the USAF and Task Force 80, composed of my dreadnought battleship, six destroyers, three light cruisers, two heavy cruisers, and five submarines, up to Attu Island on an interception course. Because the Russians didn't specify how large the Shin-Kantai force that had defeated their blockade line was, I was going to play it as safe as possible and bring the entire USAF up, something that the my fellow American admirals disapproved of as a waste of resources and potential firepower that could be dedicated elsewhere.
As it turns out, 85% of the Shin-Kantai was present at the Battle of Attu Island. Both sides took heavy losses, but once the tide of the battle turned in our favor, I had Task Force 80 move in to drive the Shin-Kantai back, and I ordered the rest of the USAF to pursue and capitalize on their retreat. We managed to send them all the way back to Urup Strait. There would be no more doubts in the USAF about my or Shoukaku's abilities to lead the fleet.
The Battle of Attu Island was a critical victory; it was the beginning of the end for Japan. The little bit of breathing room that the Shin-Kantai had bought for Japan to devote all its resources to the Shin-Kantai for a chance at victory in the war, no matter how faint, was quickly choked out again once the British brought in their own ship girl fleet, called the Royal Guard Navy, or the Royal Girls, as their more famous and preferred name came to be. Once the USAF and the Royal Girls got into position and shut down every single one of the Shin-Kantai's attempt to regain control of Japanese territorial waters, it was over, militarily speaking. The USAF and the Royal Girls were even better equipped and and better constructed than the Shin-Kantai girls were, and simple math dictates that two fleets are always better than one. The grand final showdown was the Battle of Sagami-nada Sea, in which the USAF, the entire American Seventh Fleet, including my Task Force 80, the Royal Navy, and the Royal Girls squared off against the Shin-Kantai and the Imperial Japanese Navy. It was a straight-up brawl, like two tired and bloody boxers slugging away at each other, desperate to finish off the other before it was too late. Neither side held anything back, and if there was ever a time that Japan needed its young men to die like the cherry blossoms, it was at that battle.
That's the one moment in my life that I can genuinely feel proud of myself. I'm usually never proud of myself, and I don't say that just be one of those hipsters who treat modesty like it's some kind of superiority complex. I just don't have a lot of reasons that I can think of to feel good about myself. But I sent the flagship that I was on, the U.S.S. California, straight into the middle of the sea, escorted by my task force behind me, the USAF on my right, and the Royal Girls on my left. Everyone - the USAF girls, the Royal Girls who'd fought with me and my task force at several naval battles, and some of the American naval officers who grew to see me as a reliable officer and comrade, begged me to pull back, saying that my flagship would most certainly be targeted and sunk in the final battle. Shoukaku nearly convinced me to pull back, saying that I needed to look out for my family, including her. The night before the Battle of Sagami-nada Sea, Shoukaku confessed her love for me, promising that if we got out of this battle alive, she would willingly marry me and help me raise a family and a life of my own anywhere I wanted in the world.
No matter how many flags were raised on that night, it wasn't enough to change my mind. There are some things that must be done. No matter how shitty the situation, no matter what my own personal feelings are about the situation, and no matter what's happened in the past, I didn't want to be just some generic Admiral who hid behind lines and lines of warships, letting them slug out the battle and come in to claim the victory for myself. I mean, yeah, I never wanted to have any part of the war, that's for sure. But I knew that even despite that, now that I had it and there was nothing I could do about it but see it through, I was going to make the best of it and make a name for myself, just to spite everyone and everything that had ever done me any kind of injustice and give a big fat middle finger to Roosevelt and any American who thought that all Japs were spies. Like the 100th Infantry Battalion, like the 442nd, and like the 522nd, I was going to rub it in Uncle Sam's racist motherfucking face that my thin eyes and my yellow skin have nothing to do with my ability to get the job done. And if pulling an Admiral Horatio Nelson was what I needed to do to prove it, then so fucking be it.
I told Shoukaku that she couldn't possibly waste herself on a stubborn bastard like me. She ought to survive this war and go out looking for someone who would actually make her happy and not go into a battle in which he would probably get himself killed like an idiot. Shoukaku refused, obviously. She said that she'd already found that person. I jokingly told her that four months was too short a time to find the love of her life.
We had our first night battle together in my captain's quarters aboard the California, that night before the Battle of Sagami-nada Sea. I'm not one for sexual euphemisms, but that wasn't something I could ignore. But it certainly did solidify our marriage three years later.
The Battle of Sagami-nada Sea lasted sixteen hours, and we defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Shin-Kantai by driving them back into Tokyo Bay. With their once-powerful Shin-Kantai in tatters and no reliable military presence to match ours, the Emperor intervened directly and personally asked his government and military to prevent causing his people even more harm and sorrow by capitulating to the Allies.
I had become wounded in the fight, as I'd expected. My flagship was hit a few times by Shin-Kantai bomber planes, and a large chunk of shrapnel from a nearby explosion on the deck ripped out my left eye and gave me bad burns up and down my left arm and leg, but besides the loss of my eye, I wasn't critically wounded, and thanks to Shoukaku's immediate care, she saved me the use of my burned limbs. My Task Force, and the vanguard units of the USAF and the Royal Girls trapped the remains of the Shin-Kantai in Tokyo Bay, checkmating them. The Japanese Foreign Affairs Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru came aboard my flagship to sign the official surrender documents, and he expressed lament and disappointment when we met, telling me that my talent as an Admiral had been wasted assisting the wrong country, and that had I led the Shin-Kantai, there would still be hope for Japan to prosper as an international power.
I told him that I was already a traitor from the start, ever since Paps brought us over to America in 1937. Had I returned, I would've fared no differently than how I'd suffered in America at Manzanar. When I mentioned Paps' name, Shigemitsu looked shocked. He'd been one of Paps' closest friends, and he never learned of where Paps had gone off to or why.
I told Minister Shigemitsu that someone like him would never understand my own personal reasons to fight in a war that I never wanted to fight in. At the very least, he'd never be able to understand that I wasn't fighting for a country, but instead for myself and the girls whom I've commanded and led and come to respect for their own service. Maybe if he and his goddamn government wasn't so fucking imperialist all the damn time, maybe if he and his government tried to lead the country in a more honest and straightforward way than the blinding nationalistic method that'd been pumped into the country, Paps would've never moved his family across the ocean to the country of the enemy. Because then, a mere fifteen-year-old boy would never have a reason to change the course of history.
I told him to hurry up and sign the documents and get the fuck off my ship.
World War II was done. There I was, a fifteen-year-old kid in a naval uniform that so happens to give him power over an entire American naval fleet, standing on the deck of his flagship looking out at his hometown, not as a citizen, but as a conqueror, in the middle of Tokyo Bay. As resentful as I was at how fucked up my situation was and how the course of events had gone throughout the duration of the Pacific Theater, I thought that it was finally over, that I could finally go back to my family and rebuild our lives again a third time from scratch. But not surprisingly, that wasn't really the case.
But my wife, Shoukaku, was there. She never left me - and she kept me safe. She's the best wife I never thought I wanted or deserved, but she was there.
To be continued