February 19th, 1946, the end of World War II. On the fourth anniversary of Executive Order 9066, Japanese Foreign Affairs Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru signed the official surrender documents, ceasing all armed conflict.
You can twist things around and say that technically, I was the one who ended the war and freed my countrymen back in the States. But I don't like to think of it like that, it's presumptuous and stupid. It's more that history's an ironic son of a bitch sometimes.
My task force, Task Force 80, and the USAF linked up with Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur at Tokyo Bay on February 21st. There, we and a host of American commanders and top-ranking naval officers and admirals, along with a whole division of assistants, began the American Occupation of Japan, starting that year.
MacArthur congratulated me and my performance at the Battle of Sagami-nada Sea, and that President Truman had received word of my decisive last strike against Japan. I was promoted from Rear Admiral to Vice Admiral, from 1-Star straight to 3-Star, something that never happened before in the history of the United States Navy. MacArthur also stated that I had won both the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross, the two highest military decorations a naval officer like me could be awarded for wartime service. Mind you, I was already the Navy's youngest officer ever, so the fact that I was now a Vice Admiral made a huge splash in every major military in the world. I accepted the promotion but turned down the medals, saying that I refused the medals because I had no need for superfluous pieces of metal that gave me nothing important and meant nothing to me personally. I informed MacArthur that the only way Truman could convince me to accept those awards was to remove Executive Order 9066 and compensate all Japanese Americans like myself who had been deported to places like Manzanar for the past four years of their lives that their own nation had ruined for them.
I remember speaking with Doug - he was a good man who didn't judge people on the basis of the color of their skin, unlike many who shared his own skin color; a man generations ahead of his own time. He told me that while the Japanese Americans being interned would be released, he told me that there was little chance of them being compensated, that if there were ever going to be any compensation at all, they would come decades after our own times, that our children, possibly our grandchildren, would collect those compensations. He said that there would be nothing good that would come out of me refusing the awards, that it was better for me to take them than to ditch them.
Even still, I refused them in the end, and I never did receive them, either. But it doesn't matter - I'm not the kind of person who needs a momento of what happened in the past to remind me of what I've done. The burn scars and my wife are all I need to remind me of that final battle and everything that led up to it.
The only decoration I need is my insignia, the three stars that were pinned to my collar at that point in time.
Because of my special position as commander of the USAF and my familiarity with the Shin-Kantai thanks to Shoukaku, Doug put me in charge of rebuilding Japan's Shin-Kantai forces as part of the American Occupation. This was when I realized that I wouldn't be going home just yet, and when I requested that I head back to California to make sure that my family was safe, Doug denied my request, saying that the Navy brass back home and Truman wanted every capable man to lead the Occupation there in Japan. As I said earlier, I would have to stay there for another three years before I could finally head back home.
The Soviet Union, right after Japan surrendered, went dark. Britain and the US expected this to happen - obviously, capitalism and communism don't mix. The secrets of the ship girls were leaked out of the country by American defectors who managed to steal project information and blueprints from the former Manhattan Project that disbanded after the end of the war and sold them to the Russians, and our U-2 spy planes and SR-71 Blackbirds confirmed that Russia was building so many ports along their coasts that they looked like lines of dominoes from the sky, and by May 1946, our spies in Russia confirmed the Soviet Union's launch of their very own ship girl, a former Shin-Kantai ship girl who was surrendered to the Russians in reparations for the Shin-Kantai's breach of the Russian fleet in the north before the Battle of Attu Island. And by October 1946 - "Red October", as we called it - Russia was fully equipped with its own ship girl fleet.
They were known as the "Spetsnaz" (спецназ).
As soon as we got wind that the secrets behind our ship girl fleets were compromised to the Russians, the vast majority of the former Allied military commanders, me included, knew that it would only be a matter of time before the Russians had a fully operational fleet of ship girls for themselves. Therefore, I was tasked with the responsibility of rebuilding the Shin-Kantai and training them and leading them alongside the the USAF. The USAF itself was divided in half, the Pacific Fleet and the Atlantic Fleet, and the Atlantic Fleet was sent back home to defend America on the Atlantic Seaboard, while the Pacific Fleet stayed, with most of them stationed in American ports in Japan and the rest patrolling the Pacific theater.
By this point, the war known as the "Cold War" began. No one knows when it truly started - some say that it began when the Russians got their hands on ship girl blueprints, others say it started right when Japan surrendered, that there was no pause between the wars.
My Cold War began on October 27th, 1946. Our spy planes indicated that the Atlantic Fleet of the Spetsnaz was being transferred to a new Russian port at Korsakov, at the southern tip of Sakhalin Island, less than two hundred kilometers north of Hokkaido. The Americans weren't about to let Russia stick its own navy right next to a country that we were supposed to be occupying, so they had me lead the Pacific USAF and the remnants of the Shin-Kantai to position ourselves at La Perouse Strait and see what the Russians would do.
I should explain my relationship with the Shin-Kantai first before this.
Immediately after being assigned to my post, because the American Occupation prevented Japan from ever having a military of its own in the future, technically speaking, the Shin-Kantai is an illegal military organization. But because both the Japanese had a fierce sense of pride in their beloved ship girls who fought to the very end for their country and the Americans knew that the Shin-Kantai could prove to be valuable allies in our new conflict against the USSR, I instead consolidated what was left of the Shin-Kantai and the Imperial Japanese Navy and re-established them as the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. Because by technically this was a "self-defense force" that I was forming, I took advantage of the loophole in Article 9 of the new Japanese Constitution that the Occupation put in for Japan, but in reality it's a fully-fledged military like any other.
After the Battle of Sagami-nada Sea, of the original 140 or so members of the Shin-Kantai, only 37 survived the war. In addition, I discovered that the German ship girls, the battleship Bismarck, the destroyers Z-1 Leberecht Maass and Z-3 Max Schultz, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, and the U-boat submarine U-511, were being held here as refugees. The Germans had sent them to Japan with their initial team of scientists and engineers to prevent their ship girls from falling into Allied hands, or at least delay their capture. I remember the frightened looks on their faces when I first met with them, because they didn't know what was going to happen to them now that they knew they, the Axis Powers, had lost the war, and their German scientists showed a similar fear.
I informed that because of our new conflict in the Cold War against the Russians, I as an American admiral could not let them return to their home country, because if the Russians got wind of their return, they would most definitely attempt to kidnap the whole lot of them to force them to work for the USSR. Therefore, the German scientists had to work to rebuild the JMSDF in exchange for American protection and a good salary, and the German ship girls joined the JMSDF in exchange for not being sold off as military spoils of war, like Russia's first ship girl, Verniy (Верный), who, before her remodel and overhaul, was known as Hibiki, a Shin-Kantai destroyer.
With that taken care of, I reorganized what was left of the Shin-Kantai. They were demoralized - some angry, some depressed, and some who didn't care anymore. But if there was one thing they could all agree on, it was that they felt humiliated that they were defeated by two of their own: Shoukaku, a Shin-Kantai carrier who was intercepted and stolen away to reveal their secrets, and me, an Admiral of Japanese descent who they thought should have been fighting for Japan. When Shoukaku found out that her ship sister Zuikaku had managed to survive the war, being the only Shin-Kantai carrier to do so besides Shoukaku, she and I went to go visit her at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, where the surviving Shin-Kantai members were being held, Zuikaku refused to see Shoukaku. She said that she had no need to speak to a sister of hers who betrayed her comrades and fought for the enemy. Everyone else felt the same way: they didn't want to accept the fact that a traitor like me was to be their new commanding Admiral.
So I ordered everyone outside onto the middle of the airstrip. It took a bit, but eventually everyone did as they were told. I had Shoukaku stand behind me while I chewed the absolute fuck out of those ship girls.
I told those girls of the Shin-Kantai what I'd gone through the past four or five years of my life. I told them the moment I met Shoukaku, how we weren't so different from each other at that time when we met, and how Shoukaku decided to help me not because she was a traitor to her country, but because she just wanted to help me work towards securing a future for my family in an insecure world. I told them about my feelings, my reasons to fight, how I never wanted any part of this war originally, but now that I had no choice, I was going to do my job in ways that I saw fit. I told them about Mom's death, how it devastated my entire family when she died, how we, especially Paps, felt that we couldn't move forward when she died but still forced ourselves to anyway because the only thing we could do to keep on living was to move forward. I told them that losing a war didn't mean that they must also lose their will, that a defeat, no matter how big and devastating, should never be able to knock you down and keep you down forever. I told them that I, in reality, had no patriotism or political motives to do what I did. I was going to do my job, which was to lead the Shin-Kantai as the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, so that I could go back home and make sure my family could rebuild their lives again from scratch, and that I would bend the ship girls to my will if I had to. If they wanted to resent me at all, then so be it: I would be too busy resenting the country whose flag I wear on my uniform to care.
That was enough for the Shin-Kantai to begrudgingly accept my command, luckily for me and the Occupational Forces, and the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force was officially indoctrinated on February 26th, 1946, barely a week after Japan surrendered. I had the German scientist team get back to work immediately with the Japanese factories and ports and staff they'd worked with before to construct the Shin-Kantai ship girls during the war, and production of ship girls resumed once more, this time to rebuild the ship girls lost at sea in battle. I had the wounded survivors of the Shin-Kantai flown to naval arsenals across Japan for intensive repairs to get them back into fighting condition again, and by the end of August 1946, all 37 surviving members of the Shin-Kantai were fully repaired and joined by the first twenty newly constructed ship girls built specifically for the JMSDF, not to mention the German ship girls as well. By this point, our scientists, both the Germans and the Americans from the former Manhattan Project, had discovered great improvements for the ship girls, and while the Russians were busy building up their own ship girl fleet, we took the time to remodel and better equip our own and build our new ones to be even stronger. While the Russians knew what we were up to (more accurately, they had an idea that we were preparing specifically for them), both we the Americans and they knew that our ship girl fleets and navies would always be at least two legs up the tech tree, so to speak, in terms of individual ship girl strength and technological superiority. So the Russians had to resort to the one tactic they knew how to use the best: strength in numbers.
Things became even more complicated when Shoukaku told me in private that she was pregnant at the end of May, the third month of her pregnancy. As it turned out, Shoukaku had taken steps to go so far as to make sure she conceived a child with me, all the way back on our first night battle the night before the Battle of Sagami-nada Sea, in case I really did become killed in action. She'd done her best to hide the fact from me by covering up her belly and hiding the bulge, but obviously she knew she couldn't hide it for much longer than that. I was just shocked. I could understand Shoukaku's situation and decision-making, but even still, it wasn't exactly how I'd imagined I would become a father. More than anything, I talked with Shoukaku about what this would mean for the both of us. Would I be court-martialed on the grounds that I was sexually abusing Shoukaku and be relieved of my command, never to see Shoukaku again and possibly never meet my child? I was apprehensive, to say the least. Shoukaku said that she would testify on my behalf and do her best to prove that our relationship had been going on for a long time. We decided that going to talk to Doug was the best and safest idea, since we both knew that Doug was a good man.
And sure enough, Doug was more pleasantly surprised than angry that I'd knocked Shoukaku up. He said that he'd had several conversations with the Manhattan Boys, as he called the scientists from the former Manhattan Project who came to Japan to help out with the bolstering of Japanese defense forces for the new JMSDF that I'd created, about the future of the ship girls once they had no more wars to fight. Theoretically, since the ship girls are technically just modified human beings, they can integrate right in with the rest of society, and it was believed that the ship girls could reproduce in normal fashion, but obviously no one had tested that out yet. So the fact that Shoukaku got pregnant confirmed that yes, the ship girls can indeed return to society and lead normal lives and raise families after their wartime service. Doug told us not to worry about any lame court-martial - technically, this was to be treated as a capital offense, but given my crucial role as the head of the JMSDF, nothing would happen to me so long as I didn't do anything blatantly bad, or something outright treasonous. And as long as Shoukaku was willing, I was free to raise a family with her to my heart's content, but Doug reminded me that I should've probably saved this for after I'd served out my post here, however long I was going to stay here.
But that's enough backstory leading up to Red October. On Halloween of 1946, the huge Spetsnaz fleet rolled out of Korsakov Port to meet us. Later, as I would find out through spy plane reports of the event, the Spetsnaz fleet was so big that they outnumbered my fleet nearly two to one. The Russian fleet commander communicated to me by Morse code that he demanded that I remove myself and my fleet from Russian waters, to which I promptly and curtly replied that by remaining within the first thirty kilometers of the La Perouse Strait, I was within legal Japanese waters and the American protectorate boundaries, and that he should have no problem with me stationing my fleet here. After all, the Russians were the first ones to come to Korsakov; I was just simply responding to this action, and thus could not shoulder the responsibility of any attack that resulted from this stand-off. So for about forty-eight hours, my fleet, composed of the Pacific USAF, my Task Force 80, and the JMSDF stared barely five kilometers into the guns of the Spetsnaz fleet. I knew that the pressure was on the Russian fleet commander there at the bay; all I needed to do was sit there and wait for him to make a move, because whatever we did, it was crucial that we did not take the first shot, much like the Battle of Lexington that kicked off the American Revolution. I also knew that the Russian Spetsnaz never before had a live-combat exercise, so I was banking on the hopes that both the Russian fleet commander and the Russian Spetsnaz girls were itching for a fight to see what they could do and to bring honor and victory to Mother Russia.
My gambit paid off, and they fired the first shots at my flagship, the California, and we promptly responded with swift and extreme prejudice.
Incidentally, one of my commanding lieutenant colonels tried to take advantage of the chaos of the battle that followed and attempted to assassinate me while Shoukaku and I were busy coordinating the fleet attacks. Once again, Shoukaku saved my life by reacting quickly to the gun that the traitor pulled out and took the bullet to her right breast, and I pulled out my own M1911-A1 handgun and shot him dead before he could think about shooting the baby inside Shoukaku's womb. After making sure that there wasn't about to be a mutiny aboard my own flagship, I took the bastard's dogtags, stuffed it inside one of our 36cm cannons, and had the boys blast it to oblivion, and I personally kicked the body overboard. I didn't give enough of a shit about that fucker to let his family get his body back - after all, he assaulted my fucking wife trying to kill me.
We defeated the Spetsnaz after an eight-hour naval battle. It wasn't even close - the Spetsnaz fought well and valiantly, to their credit, but the facts that the Russians didn't have someone like me who understood the new tactics of naval warfare that suited the ship girls and that the Spetsnaz were a fresh fleet of newly constructed ship girls with only combat training under their belt, proved too much for them. We drove them out of American protectorate waters, but I gave them twenty-four hours to evacuate Korsakov Port before I had our JMSDF battleships Yamato, Musashi, Nagato, and Mutsu test out their new weapons.
Our German and American scientists had been working together on another top-classified weapons project related to the ship girls all the while we were reconstructing, and they managed to produce four working prototypes that they wanted me to take the time to test in a live-combat scenario. Named after JMSDF Yamato, for whom this particular weapon was first developed, the Yamato Nuclear Pulse Cannon Mk. I, or the Yamato Gun for short, allowed those four battleships to erase Korsakov Port from the face of the earth, creating a huge mushroom cloud that we all saw very clearly about fifty kilometers offshore. Fifty thousand people once lived in Korsakov - and now, because of the Yamato Cannons and the huge amounts of radiation they produced, it became - and still is - a ghost town.
I reported this immediately to the scientists, who then shared it urgently with other scientists of the Allied Powers around the world, and it was universally agreed that while we would continue to produce these fearsome weapons, they were to be used extremely sparingly and only for testing purpose, if we could help it. The scientists knew that they had developed a weapon too powerful to exist in human hands, that if this technology fell in the wrong hands, the Cold War would cease being cold for good. Therefore, the United Nations and NATO labeled all fleet personnel as WMD's - weapons of mass destruction. It didn't matter the ship type, all the girls were labeled as weapons that could destroy the world.
Even though that sure sounds fucked up, which it certainly did back then too, the girls and I quickly came to realize that it was just political jargon, political buzzwords and crap like that. Even though the Royal Girls, the JMSDF, and the USAF were henceforth known as weapons of mass destruction, it's not like the lives of the ship girls were really significantly affected, if at all, so quickly we disregarded the whole label as just political Battle of Zal Aniva Gulf, as that battle was named, secured American naval dominance in the Pacific theater against the Russians for good for at least another two years until 1948. While the Russians rebuilt their Spetsnaz fleet, they no longer dared to trespass further south than Sovetskaya. Like the Battle of Attu Island, which earned me the trust and respect of the USAF girls, the Battle of Zal Aniva Gulf secured my firm leadership over the JMSDF, so whatever ill will the original 37 survivors after the end of World War II felt towards me pretty much evaporated. After celebrating Christmas with my ship girls, we held one last goodbye party for the German ship girls (except for U-511, whom we remodeled into RO-500 and consequently decided to stay behind in Japan), and they flew back to Germany to join the launch day of the new West German ship girl navy, called the Deutsche Marine, which British scientists and German scientists who were allowed to stay in Germany following the war built up to complement the Royal Girls in defending the Atlantic waters against Russia's Atlantic Spetsnaz fleet.
As future events would reveal, that particular subordinate officer of mine, Lieutenant Colonel Ranford Lyberger, was one of an alarmingly large number of resentful and disgruntled American naval officers who were irked by the fact that a dirty Jap like me held one of the highest positions in the United States Navy. They had been waiting patiently for the past year ever since I was first given my assignment as the principal commander over the ship girls, both American and Japanese, for me to make a blunder, to make a mistake for them to pounce on and have me removed from my post so that one of their own could usurp my position and do who knows what with the ship girls. Once we returned home from the Battle of Zal Aniva Gulf, I immediately reported the assassination attempt on my life by Lieutenant Colonel Lyberger to Doug, who then passed on the info to President Truman, and I swiftly got Doug's permission to conduct a navy-wide purge of the navy's officers to weed out anyone who could be proven to have any sort of involvement with the likes of Lieutenant Colonel Lyberger. While it wasn't as cruel as the Red Purges over in the USSR, I did have every single person proven to have connections to and similar sentiments with Lyberger arrested, court-martialed, stripped of their rank, and discharged dishonorably back to the States. It didn't matter who - even Rear Admiral Percy Lowitz of the Seventh Fleet, who had received the Navy Cross for his faithful participation and leadership in the Pacific Theater during the war, got screwed, and he lost his Navy Cross because of me. It's an understatement to say that I took a lot of flak for what I did, that other people shouldn't have to suffer for what a single officer tried to do, but in a public announcement to the American military (the entire military, not just my own navy in the Pacific), I stated that no amount of military decorations, ranks, or awards could, in my eyes, cover up the disgusting attitude of racism that so many of my "fellow Americans" held towards me and all people of color serving in the United States military, because it wasn't just the Japanese Americans like me who were suffering from discrimination, but the boys in black, who've been around for way longer than my own kind have, also were getting the short end of the stick like they always did. In a statement that I would later find out was printed in newspapers across the States like wildfire, I declared,
"If I need to purge an entire division of naval officers to end this nation's unbearable amount of racial discrimination just as how my family and thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans were deported from our homes during the war, then so be it."
Naturally, this got me a whole slew of enemies, but it gained me even more allies, and my position would never again be threatened by my own comrades or countrymen.
Shoukaku gave birth to our first child, Hinotori Tomoya (we also gave him an English name, Marcus), on November 7th, 1946, after a perfectly normal pregnancy. I still get chills to this day knowing that Tomoya was born so close to the Battle of Zal Aniva Gulf, and he instantly became popular with the USAF and JMSDF girls, who were entranced by the sight of Shoukaku, a ship girl like themselves, having a baby. With their cooperation, I didn't have to constantly worry about if someone in the shadows would try to kidnap or kill my own son, and it certainly felt strange having a child of my own at a mere sixteen years of age. Sweet sixteen? Perhaps.
For the next two years until 1948, Shoukaku, Tomoya, and I lived in various ports around Japan, wherever I was needed to train newly constructed ship girls or to attend Occupation meetings and respond to any emergency calls against possible Russian threats in the Pacific, none of which actually turned out to become anything major. (The Battle of Zal Aniva Gulf was the only major conflict thus far in the Pacific against the Communists.) I sometimes had to travel out of the country and leave my new family behind to visit West Europe to review their ship girl fleets, since I was unanimously determined to be the most talented and able fleet personnel commander available - after all, I was the first one to command a fleet made of ship girls. In my Europe tour during the summer of 1947, I reviewed the Royal Girls, which was very fun and a good time, for all of the Royal Girls who survived the war met up with me, and after review, we all went out and had ourselves a jolly good time with their British commanders, all of whom were good men. I then visited and reviewed the La Royale, the nickname for the French ship girl fleet, who were constructed with the help of the British scientists. The French ship girls treated me like a god, like I was good enough to be the next King Louis XIV. It was a bit...unnerving, the sheer amount of holy respect they gave me, but I dealt with it. Then I reviewed the Deutsche Marine and reunited with good ol' Bismarck, Prinz Eugen, Z1, and Z3, and the German ship girls were super excited to see me, because those four who were with me in Japan had told the new German girls all about me and how much of a superb commander I was. I'm sure they just overexaggerated things.
Finally, when it seemed that the Communist engine in the USSR was finally showing its flaws through Russia's failing economy and weakening national morale because of all the purges and political instability following Stalin's assassination and the consequent chain-assassinations of his successors, President Truman gave me permission to finally head back to the States so that I could try to find Paps and Takahisa and learn what happened to them, if they were even still alive. Shoukaku, Tomoya, and I were flown to Zamperini Field, now known as Torrance Airport, and ironically, with the help of the FBI, I managed to learn that Paps and Takahisa had taken a bus back to the same house we moved into when we had first come to America from Japan and was living there ever since. We drove up to their doorstep, flanked by FBI agents and Secret Service, on the sunny afternoon of July 15th, 1948, about three weeks after my eighteenth birthday.
Seeing Paps and Takahisa for the first time in three years was the only thing that's ever made me cry like a little bitch. My younger brother had grown up so damn much - my only vivid memory before then was him being a stupid idiot running around Camp Manzanar chasing random tumbleweeds as they rolled across the campus. Paps looked terribly aged, as I kind of expected, sadly, but they were doing fine. I introduced them to Shoukaku, my fiance, with whom I'd already had a child, Tomoya. Paps' mind was blown all over the walls of our house when he realized that Shoukaku was going to be my wife. He just gave me a pat on my back and told me,
"Yoshihisa, you sure scored big like your Pappy."
I knew what he meant by that. Paps told me when we were younger that Paps never deserved such a beautiful- wife like our mother, Kuro, and that fortune alone had blessed him with someone like her. Given how the past few years of my life went at the point, I wasn't in a position to argue that. I don't really know quite exactly how things turned out like this. The past couple years were hard and tough, sure, but I didn't expect things to end...dare I say it, happily.
It was like it was too good to be true. Having a healthy son at the mere age of sixteen, having a beautiful wife like Shoukaku at my side who's saved my life more than once, and knowing that my father and brother had survived Manzanar and rebuilt their lives on their own while I was away -
The only thing that still nipped at all of our hearts was Mom's absence. If only she'd survived, too, it would've been the perfect fairy tale. But life is never a fairy tale, and we'd all by then accepted Mom's death.
Paps showed me and Shoukaku to the backyard, where he and Takahisa had reburied Mom's ashes. They'd dug the little tinderbox that holds her ashes from her grave at Manzanar on the last day they spent there and carried it with them back home so that at least her remains to rest in piece forever, basking in the soothing sunlight of the Peninsula that she grew to love but tragically couldn't enjoy for more than a few years at most. When I saw her grave, I took off my Admiral's naval hat, hung it on the small grave marker that Paps and Takahisa had erected, and saluted, announcing my return and apologizing out loud that I wasn't able to make it back sooner to be part of her burial.
That hat's still hanging there to this day, by the way.
Shoukaku, Tomoya, and I spent a few months there on military leave, catching up with Paps and my brother Takahisa. They told me everything they'd had to go through following their return from Manzanar: first off, the American soldiers had forced the Japanese-American interns to leave the camp, just like how they'd forced us to leave our homes to begin with, which is totally fucking absurd. Paps remembered sadly how there were lots of interns there at Manzanar who wanted to stay sheerly because of the fact that they had nowhere else to go, but he'd heard that the military eventually forced them out anyway. He and Takahisa had been given about $25 to make their own journey back to our home here overlooking the Golden Cove, and they'd come back to find the house busted in, vandalized, smashed, and just utterly wrecked. Paps and Takahisa showed me the places on the walls where they'd slapped graffiti on the walls, saying things like "Japs not welcome anymore", "The only good Jap is a dead one", and "Go back to your country, yellow freaks". So Paps and my brother, just the two of them, cleaned up this place from scratch. Takahisa quit school at just ten years old to work as a librarian' assistant at a library that had recently opened just before they'd returned home, about a twenty-minute bike ride from the house. Paps himself began working multiple part-time jobs at luxury restaurants and parks until he managed to secure himself a cartoonist's job for the Los Angeles Times, which finally helped stabilize their financial situation and allowed Takahisa to finally resume school after a year or two of homeschooling.
In turn, I explained my story with Shoukaku to Paps and Takahisa. I couldn't tell them a lot of things at the time because such info was classified still, but later, once the classification levels were lifted, I filled in the missing details for them. Shoukaku became a surrogate mother for my younger brother, who's five years younger than me.
Shoukaku and I were finally married on July 31st, 1948, Mom's birthday, in the backyard of our home overlooking the Golden Cove, so that Mom's ashes could watch us get married from the grave. The fact that Mom's birthday just so happened to be very soon to the day that I finally reunited with my family again for the first time after three years still is so unbelievable to me. It's like a movie script, like something set up so perfectly you can't find it outside of a book. But every time I say that, it seems like something, or someone, is out there, making sure things line up in such a way that it leaves a satisfied tingle in everyone's hearts.
We stayed there until the start of November, and Shoukaku and I entrusted our son Tomoya to my family on the Peninsula as we returned to active duty in Japan. The USAF and the JMSDF girls were bummed by the fact that we didn't bring Tomoya with us, since many of them had grown very close to my son. Little did they or I know at the time we returned from our honeymoon that a second one was already on her way.
For four more years until the winter of 1952, I served as the head of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, Task Force 80, and the Pacific USAF. That four-year period was a clusterfuck of a four-year period: the USSR got sold the secrets of the Yamato Cannon WMD again by American defectors looking to make some quick cash, so that was great. While we never had to fight the Russian Spetsnaz straight up again like we did at the Battle of Zal Aniva Gulf, we did discover secret shipping lanes of the Spetsnaz running right down into North Korea and intercepted them, and funnily enough, we captured Verniy, the first Spetsnaz remodeled from the former Shin-Kantai Hibiki. It was a really strange moment when I introduced our prisoner Verniy to the new JMSDF Hibiki, and they both sensed that they were the same person, sort of. It was awkward at first, but then eventually they opened up to each other and became good friends, and Hibiki was crying the night we arranged a POW exchange with the Russians to deliver Verniy back to them in exchange for one of our U-2 spy plane pilots who got captured after Russian SAM sites shot down his plane over Siberia. Shoukaku gave birth to two more children, both daughters, Hinotori Zuikaku (named after none other than Shoukaku's ship sister, English name Rebecca) and Hinotori Hiroshiko (named in honor of Shoukaku's last captain of her warship counterpart during the war, English name Amelia) during that time as well, and they, too, were doted on heavily by the ship girls.
We finally returned back home to the Peninsula once the United States and the USSR, the two strongest nations in the world, signed the SALT I agreements at the end of 1952 specifically to limit the production of Yamato Cannons being built for deployment on ship girls' equipment, and I retired from active duty to begin raising my family of the three best children in the world and the universe's most beautiful wife. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I could breathe without having to feel like something was holding my chest down. Shoukaku was really eager to further expand our family, much to my chagrin, and within another two years of returning back to the States, she gave birth to twins, both sons (Hinotori Shunsuke, English name Kenny, and Hinotori Rinnosuke, named after Paps, English name Zenny), and a final daughter, Hinotori Zuihou, named after her fellow ship girl Zuihou, whose warship counterpart served alongside her as the First Carrier Division in the war, English name, appropriately, Hope). With our home filled with six kids running around all over the place, Shoukaku and I would sometimes give each other amused looks as though to ask each other what the hell we ended up doing to ourselves. Takahisa was the big older brother to everyone, being their uncle, and Paps was quite happy with our children, since the addition of six healthy grandchildren was more than enough to make up for the loss of his own wife, my mother.
The only sad part about this happy story of mine is that we discovered that because of Shoukaku's construction as a ship girl, she hardly ever aged. By the time I was recalled back to active duty in September 1962 in response to the Cuban Fleet Crisis, I was thirty-two years old, and Shoukaku looked practically the exact same as I'd met her on July 17th, 1945. I met with several of the former Manhattan Project scientists, who've since retired from their military backgrounds and were teaching in prestigious American universities across the nation or pursuing some other educational or research-related lines of work, and they recalled that when they studied the blueprints of the Shin-Kantai that Shoukaku gave them through me, they weren't sure if the ship girls would ever age or not. They could, for all we know, live forever, so long as they're not killed in wartime. And if they ever did eventually die, their lifespans were for sure at least some ten times longer than an average human's. Before I left my home again to lead the combined Atlantic USAF, Royal Guard Navy, La Royale, and Deutsche Marine NATO fleet against the Russian Spetsnaz fleet that had managed to station itself at Cuba so that they could aim their own Yamato guns towards the American East Coast, I spoke with my wife Shoukaku quietly about the matter. It was something that she, too, had been aware of from the very beginning, when she first decided that she would become my wife, but she had ignored it as an issue she could deal with later. But that later was now. I told her that we'd have to explain to our children that most likely, their mother was going to outlive not only me and them, but our grandchildren and however many generations that will follow in the future. Before we sat our children down to talk to them about the matter, Shoukaku promised me that she would take responsibility by taking care of our family for however many generations she would live through after our children and I were long gone.
But that's all in the past now.
I'm reading the Los Angeles Times newspaper, the morning edition of Wednesday, July 17th, 1963, on the couch, reading about the finalization of the SALT II agreements signed by both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Having drawn manga for the vast majority of his life, Paps is in his study, completing the final manuscript of a side manga he's been working on and plans to publish under a penname. My younger brother, Takahisa, has married a Japanese-American girl whom he'd met at Manzanar after I left in 1945 and reunited with a few years ago and moved out of the house to build a house right next to ours, and we've all helped with building the house and finished it just last month.
Our children are away at school, without fear of being segregated or picked on because of the fact that they're Japanese. Tomoya, Zuikaku, Hiroshiko, Shunsuke, Rinnosuke, and Zuihou are growing up wonderfully, living out their childhoods like normal children ought to, instead of wasting it away first in an internment camp and then in the military. I may still be really bitter about how my life has gone, but whenever I try to make myself regurgitate that old bitterness, the sweetness of the smiles on my children as they run around the house making mischief and making my life and my wife's life hell balances it all out so that I can't really feel angry at the past anymore. To be angry at how my life turned out would mean that I would also have to deny my own children their own lives, and I can't bring myself to do that.
The living room sliding doors are open, letting in a nice ocean breeze into our house. I glance outside, and the Admiral's hat that I put on Mom's grave marker is still there, drifting lazily with the breeze. Mom is still watching over me, and that's nice to know.
Shoukaku comes in from the kitchen with a small tray of beautifully carved apples and two cups of cherry blossom tea. It's become one of her favorite hobbies to practice carving all sorts of interesting designs into the skin of apple slices, and she's gotten amazingly good at it.
She hands me a cup of cherry blossom tea, and she sits down next to me on the couch and snuggles herself next to me. I do the same with her, resting my cheek against the top of her beloved red hairband that she's worn all this time ever since I met her.
"Your sister's coming to visit next week, isn't she?" I ask. "We should really plan out where we ought to go for a weekend trip or something. You heard the kids when we told them their aunt was coming to visit, they nearly went mad and tore down the back wall."
We both burst into chuckles at the memory.
"We can let the kids decide for once," my wife says sweetly. "I know they've got some good ideas of their own."
"You sure? We're going to have to deal with six back-to-back trips to Disneyland, then."
We again chuckle together.
"It's fine, so long as the children are having fun," Shoukaku giggles. We drink our tea, and Shoukaku playfully feeds me some apple slices. The apple juice that seeps into my teeth and my tongue reminds me that today is a special day.
"Shoukaku," I say as I work to swallow the food in my mouth to talk, and my wife looks at me with that smile of hers that can outshine the sun.
"Yes, honey?"
"I don't think I've ever said this in the eighteen years we've been together, but..."
Shoukaku tilts her head.
"What? What did you never say?"
I grin at her.
"Thanks for being my wife, Shoukaku."
And with that, I put a quiet kiss on her forehead.
Not even the blushes I saw on her face when we were having night battles could match the one on her face right now.
"So you remembered..." she finally gets herself to speak.
"For once, yeah. Sorry that...I never remembered before. Now that everything's over and done with, I've had the luxury to take the days one at a time."
Shoukaku shakes her head.
"Thank you, too," she says with her eyes glistening with tears, "for being my husband."
Shoukaku falls asleep in a nap with her head on my shoulder as I continue reading the paper, but I soon put the newspaper away and hold her hand as I, too, close my eyes for quick nap. I can feel our wedding rings rubbing against one another as Shoukaku grasps my hand tightly, the warmth in her hand seeping into mine.
I wonder when it was that I first realized this, that if "hope" doesn't exist in my dictionary, all I have to do is write it back in, so that even if I can't use it, my children can.
But I couldn't've done it alone. Shoukaku was the pen that I needed to write - both in the dictionary and in the history books.