It was true fortune that Arakawa and I met one night on a brisk, late summer day on the campus of Berkeley University. The Harvard of the West had retained its prestigious allure even through the grave economic challenges America faced in the 20s and 30s, becoming a beacon of Western intellectualism from shore to shore of the Pacific's breadth, receiving ample exchange in both professors and students from the universities of Tokyo and Beijing. For eighty years, the States had been both earnest ally and foremost rival to the Empire of Japan, and while the ascension of the Germans in the Far East had tempered relations some as the Tiger looked towards the Krauts, even cocooned within Berkeley's oaken walls and doors did I notice tension rising between the students of adversarial nationalities.
There was one place, however, where such conflict could subside, if only for the mollifying aura of quiet: Bancroft Library. There, with azure beams of light shuttling down through the tall glass panes hanging overhead, and the polished, varnished planks of wood making up the shelves, did the tranquility soften the imperial rivalries brewing over the horizon between us like storm clouds over a clear plain. It was within the library that silent conversations loudened in our minds, arguing about surplus labor theory with Marx or military economics with Sun Tzu; on the worth of man did we drabble on with Hegel, and on the intransigence of the familial hierarchy too did we unearth and undermine with Confucius. The passing of the pages became a ritual act of purification each night, like each sentence was a prayer, each chapter a hymn, and no more dedicated a disciple of print did I find than a one Aoi Arakawa.
I still remember the way her glasses notched into her ears, and that, for the sake of respecting American customs, she traded in her fusion ensemble for a decidedly more Western-fitted and -formed brocade ensemble, the blue of its hem taken straight from the fabric of Old Glory. She was sitting at the same table as me, her nose stuck in Voltaire's Candide, her eyes rapt with the Enlightenment zeal emanating from the pages. I put down my Emile and looked over towards her, sensing a kindred spirit but not quite knowing how to broach into her space.
"'So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.'"
"'I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.'"
We chuckled. She gently put a hand on my hand, and smiled, affirming the intellectual bond we'd consummated.
"To think, you Americans boast about being all high and mighty and powerful yourself, and yet you so ape the traditions of your forebearers in Europe. How crass!"
"So says the woman whose nation molded itself on Chinese statehood and thought. Perhaps we share in the obsession over others; the copycat is our calling card," I mused, the smile not leaving my lips.
From that point on, we persevered through the trials of academia together, as the whole of Berkeley joined in on the geopolitical discussion over the triad of various holdings in the Pacific, the student body letting their nationalities sing in heated arguments. By the trees on the campus green, at the geometric lines of tables in the cafeteria, in lecture halls within and without our professors' knowledge, and even from the balconies overlooking the wide expanse of Alameda County our voices contested the crises of the day.
"America must assert herself! Domestic troubles mustn't interfere with the prerogatives of foreign policy," an acquaintance, James, always trammeled forth with patriotic zeal.
"If East Asia is to have any semblance of native stability, it will not come from Japanese domination! A strong, united China will counterbalance Japanese hegemony while providing the means for liberation elsewhere in the region," Jingguo, an exchange student from the University of Beijing, argued with equal intensity but the geopolitical tact to match.
"It is German interests that have long kept wicked forces at bay in the Orient," Hans, an import from the Berlin academy with a thick Prussian accent, tried his best to declaim. "You may not like the supremacy of the Kaiserreich, but with it, the balance of power remains untouched, and the allure of the West can make its full inroads into Asian cities."
Arakawa and I always made insightful comments of our own, of course; when we had the floor, at least. Our ideology was never inflamed by national sympathies—at least, not consciously, though we'd read enough of Jung to know that there may very well be greater forces at play for us—as we set out to carve for ourselves a philosophical state, a mental property, where such disputes weren't settled by borne guns or raised flags but rather what one took out of the world. Our books and essays became our anthems; our conversations, the laws of the land. Call it hyper-rationalism, call it cultural relativism, or any matter of expletive what-have-you, in the polarized powder keg that was life in our world, we found salvation in the abstractions of a literary universe, which could somehow douse the flames of our own. Expanding the realm of human experience, we thought, could lessen individual biases, and forge an understanding of the trials of others, not processed by screams and shouts alone.
When we all graduated, the quintet of us, despite lingering squabbles over matters of doctrine and principle, found a community resourceful in wit and lush with food for the mind. And, knowing that America was quickly becoming unsafe for our dignified kind, with the rioting of the Longists and the Red Guard pouring over into California's cities and streets, we thought time away from our temporary home would do us best; not like Uncle Sam had the time to worry about us when he was off treating the political maladies that plagued him.
"Josephine! Have you gotten your tickets yet?"
Arakawa put a hand on my arm, brimming with vim, having accosted me outside the airport with our luggage already stuffed in enough dollies and briefcases to make the traders in Shanghai blush. It was the beginning of a new age of travel, the '30s, and with the silver shine of the planes waving in and out of the runway each day, their engines roaring into the stars like aerial lions, I thought it the perfect mode of transport to catalyze the passage of technology and ideas westward, in a flash.
"Indeed I have! Whom do you take me for, a loafing vagabond?"
I laughed then, even though I knew that there were likely to be several would-be expats onboard, looking for a way out of the country's mounting troubles, even with no money to pay the safe haven's fare. The women, men, and children would sneak in by hiding in large luggage containers and printing counterfeit plane passes, praying for their path to a sanctuary of work and goodwill.
I closed my mouth swiftly, sighing. Perhaps I too wanted to escape the foibles of economic exploitation, though not directed at me, rather the very discussion of it upsetting my dignified philosophical proclivities. 'Practical application' had its own ways of being manipulated for my own gains, I supposed, but still, I didn't speak up, hoping to clear away the images of empty bellies and tattered clothes from my mind's eye.
"The plane's almost gone already. Get your bonnet and your briefcases over here, lest we be forced to take the next cruiser line!"
I paled. She knew seasickness was my worst enemy, attacking my constitution and my vigor like the plague. Thank God for the Wright Brothers, I admitted to myself; the air would be our fiefdom over the next few days, our vassals the clouds and particles themselves.
And, looking out the window over the course of the trip many times, the Pacific Ocean blue became our muse. The sapphire hue of its complexion revealed trails of marine life scuttling and crawling below, with the occasional rocks jutting out from its surface like spears, and small islands filled with greenery populating the otherwise clean slate of water. The largest mass of water on the planet, it was now the nascent battleground of world powers, each jockeying for control over its wide expanse—this playground for the newest dreadnoughts and submarines alike.
In the West, the German East Asian General Administration had supplanted Anglo-French control in Indochina, Malaya, and Borneo, extracting huge reserves of rubber from the plantations to power their modern motorized military, with an astute level of German pragmatism that was as efficient as it was backbreaking on the native populations. German hegemony required that its colonial empire stretch from the jungles of Benin to the Solomon Islands deep into the ocean, for not only the exploitation of resources but also the power projection of German influence. The East Asia Squadron patrolled the South China Sea all the way to the captured ports of Tsingtao and Tianjin, offering them a foothold in the rich Chinese markets for German investment, as the ailing carcass that was the Qing Dynasty became resuscitated by German defibrillators. It was in China that the German industrial machine found its largest market and cemented its sway across the world, with Clausewitz's classics and Faust volumes read alongside the Analects and Journey to the West in the Qing court. Universities at Nanjing and Chongqing taught tens of courses on German language and history, from the fall of Rome to Alaric's armies to Bismarck's proclamation of the German Empire, and the triumphant march into Paris of 1918 that ended with the black tricolor hoisted over the Tower.
In the South, meanwhile, the last remnants of the British Empire made base in Australasia: the wholly artificial union of Australia and New Zealand to consolidate British power in the region. There, authoritarian governor William Birdwood crushed Syndicalist revolutions and union uprisings with the force of the Dominion army, the dockworkers at Canberra and Sydney forced back into their labors at the end of a rifle. From its roots as a penal colony, Australasia became its own bastion of European civilization in the East, its extermination and subjugation of the native peoples the historical way-through for the establishment of a new dominant culture. Rather than Japan's complementation of East and West, and Germany's use of local nobles and royals to attain power, Australasia saw itself, however dimmed by general strikes and liberal denunciations of the Birdwood regime, as a white light in a sea of dark and yellow colors.
And in the East, taking a page from its former overlords across the pond, the Americans took stock of their most recent empire, ranging from the harbors at Manila to the naval bases at Guam and Pearl Harbor, reaching to the sandy shores of Los Angeles, where many a Japanese American had cultivated their lives. It was in the Pacific where America had its first true taste of empire: Commodore Perry fired American imperial ambitions out of his cannons, and through a brusqueness so well-endowed to his people, forever opened the doors to Japanese trade—and Japanese power.
Indeed, I could feel the ocean-wide tension thousands of feet above, like the seas were quaking the inner metal of the plane's hull.
"Do you think it'll ever happen?" Arakawa's face turned from its place on the Book of Five Rings, and looked at me, puzzled.
"A war stretching the Pacific, I mean. Surely the economic interests of two industrial nations make it impossible? The markets that would be lost…"
"That much is true," she responded, though with a finger to her chin; "as long as they wouldn't outweigh the Arisaka and Garand sales, nor the profits made by the munitions companies.
And that's not even considering conflict over access to China, Josephine.
Really, there aren't many things men in this world won't use as an excuse to kill each other."
I smiled, in the same way a woman smiles when she hears the death of an estranged lover: with contempt as the veil for a sadness in the dignity of men.
Things were brewing back home. I worried for my family, and if the family business—a small yet liberally devoted publishing house—would get caught in the crossfire. Either by the propagandistic hijacking of the far right, or the outright destruction by my friends on the left, for the sake of the gains of nationalization. The election was growing nearer, the years feeling like decades, the months like years, the weeks like months, and it almost seemed to me that with this foreign incursion, I was saying goodbye in a way, and only hello to the tensions that lie in a place so divorced from my own personal constructs.
But nevertheless, flew I did, an American swan, looking down on the prey and predators below with such a keen interest—even as I thought myself protected from the seedy vultures circling around me.