The most important aspects of this restructuring was that it was meant to increase efficiency, decrease redundancy… and, most importantly, be—in the long term—cheaper.
It was the Finance Department's job to make that happen.
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Tax Bureau:
Internal – collect taxes for Konoha and the Daimyo within Konoha
External – offer missions to collect taxes on behalf of Fire nobility
Since Konoha's founding, Finance had been tasked with dealing with the mess that was the Capital's tax structure as well as Konoha's own convoluted—could it even be considered a system? Was it functional enough for that?
And now—
Well, several months ago now—
They'd gotten permission to rework the system.
Totally.
They'd started, because it was the only way to start, with Nara Shin.
It had taken the entire summer, most of fall—technically wouldn't go into effect until the dawn of the new year—but the Daimyo had agreed: he would not tax Konoha's residents directly.
Konohagakure as a whole would pay the fee, and could find that money however they wished.
This was—
Well, it wasn't totally unthinkable; The Land of Wind actually used a very similar system for the various peoples that inhabited it.
But it was novel for Fire. A test case.
So it was time to finish scrambling through their complete overhaul of Konoha's internal tax system.
They could not screw this up.
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Banking Bureau:
Internal – regulate and monitor the banking industry, insure deposits
External – offer missions to investigate banks
The Banking Bureau—or what was now the Banking Bureau—had already restructured.
It had restructured years before, when Yamanaka Sakura had put forward her groundbreaking work on how she believed banking worked, about how she believed it could be stabilized, could be trusted.
And now they were raking in the benefits.
Konoha's banks worked.
Through the wars, through Kiri's destruction, through the byoki attack, through the flight from Konoha, through the restructuring, through Iwa and Kumo's attacks—
Konoha's banks worked.
And that was not normal.
Bank runs were normal.
Lost money was normal.
Fear, distrust was normal.
Just that summer Konoha's spies had reported that one of Suna's major banks had loaned too much, had triggered a bank run—
Had collapsed.
Konoha's banks, they didn't do that.
Everybody wanted to take credit for why Konoha wasn't seeing more people leave, wasn't seeing more fear. (There was fear. There was absolutely fear. But then… no one fled. No one packed up. That was the weird part.)
The Banking Bureau, they thought they had a pretty good argument that it was they who allowed Konoha to remain stable.
Money was money.
You needed it to eat, to have a roof over your head, to live.
And the Banking Bureau, they were the reason why Konoha's residents and other bank users felt so secure trusting that their money would still be there tomorrow.
Other Bureaus, other Departments could hog the gossip all they liked. The Banking Bureau knew the truth.
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Budget Bureau:
Internal – monitor Konoha's expenses, form budget options
External – offer missions to investigate and create budgets
Everyone expected the Budget Bureau to be taking center stage on the restructuring, but it was all they could do to pump out the prospective budgets everybody expected to receive.
They had greater concerns, at the moment, than making sure they addressed all possible futures.
They had to address all existing decimal points first.
Or, more specifically, they had to address why numbers weren't adding up.
At all.
They'd checked with the Hokage; they'd had all of ANBU scrambling to double check their own records.
It was clear: someone had been siphoning from the Health Department.
The next question was who.
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Next to Finance, the Infrastructure Department was a vital part of maintaining continuity between the new system and making sure the new system was, in fact, better.
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Construction Bureau:
Internal – set infrastructure and building standards and rules, including safety rules; make sure that construction is in in compliance with Konoha standards and rules; construct public infrastructure, roads, and buildings; maintain public buildings, roads, and infrastructure
External – offer missions to build infrastructure and buildings
They'd decided to call Erigami's device an 'inventory box'. You put things in box A, and they appeared in box B.
As long as the things weren't, and had never been, alive.
Which was a bit of a hiccough, what with the initial planning revolving substantially around food, but really—
It wasn't surprising that Konoha had decided to build a very, very large building just outside the city walls, just to hold all the inventory boxes there was demand for.
And that was now the job of the Construction Bureau.
In the past, this would have been put up to the Research Department, who would ask the Infrastructure Department for loads of advice, enough that it was as if they were doing all the work—but it was officially the Research Department's building, and therefore could only be a Research Department project.
And now—
It wasn't.
It was their project, theirs alone, and they had control over it.
It was true, of course, that they had to work with the specs from Erigami about what was necessary, and more specs from Security about what needed to be done to ensure safety—
But it was theirs.
And there had never before been faster construction progress, not when the building was for another Department.
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Public Housing Bureau:
Internal – operate housing for shinobi and their families
External – offer temporary housing at Konoha and specific Konoha outposts
The chuunin housing complexes were half-empty.
The jounin housing complexes were even worse off.
So, so many were plowing forward, trying to make the best of things—
But sometimes, reality had to sink in.
It was better, probably, than overcrowding, but—
Well, it wasn't even as if there was a war to fall back on, to explain the emptiness.
There were only the past wars, the byoki.
There was only Konoha's recent history leaving its mark.
The newly established Infrastructure Department Research Office had decided to use the empty apartments to test reusable seals for temperature regulation, water filtration, and cooking, so that was something, but—
The quiet was a bit too disquieting to ignore.
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Of all the restructuring, the most hyped up was the Health Department—not so much the Public Health Bureau, or the Research Office, but the Hospital Bureau, and what new medical care might be on offer.
…the hospital administrators had tried to make it very clear that the restructuring would mostly just be changing behind-the-scenes things, things to do with paperwork and recordkeeping, but that hadn't stopped people from hoping.
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Hospital Bureau
Internal – operate the hospital, provide free medical care to Konoha residents
External – sell medical care, including premium medical care to Konoha residents
Shizune was too young for paperwork.
There had to be a rule somewhere, about that.
Have you not finished puberty? Then you don't have to deal with filing forms.
(She knew she'd signed up for this. She did. It was just that she hadn't thought, really, about just how many trees she'd kill.)
She wrote treatises about her aunt's work, about her own take on the problem.
About possible solutions.
About what other cities, nations, great nations did in their own medical situations.
And then—
It had happened.
The Hospital Bureau had been formed.
Medicine was now tracked, couldn't just go missing without explanation.
The emergency room now had an entirely new prioritization system.
The Maternity Ward had been entirely redesigned.
And Shizune—
Was still a genin.
Which was fine, really; she still had a lot to learn.
But it also—
Now she was filling out the forms she'd recommended, working in the hospital she'd helped design.
It still felt so unreal.
And it still felt like such a letdown.
She hated forms.
Everyone else wasn't exactly thrilled about the added red tape, but they'd dealt with that by passing it on to the newbies.
To her.
She hated forms.
(It didn't help that they gave her more forms than any other newbie. She wondered why that was.
(It didn't take much wondering, really.)
Shizune hated paperwork, but—
She'd live.
And she'd do it happily, because she got to see the benefits right before her very eyes.
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Public Health Bureau
Internal – create and distribute vaccines, investigate causes of poor health, provide mental health aid, provide abuse aid
External – sell vaccines
There was one benefit to the new attacks: vaccination propaganda.
During the chuunin exams everyone had heard of Konoha's healthiness, the empty beds they had in the hospital and its Kaiso outpost.
And then the non-Fire residents had gone home, or turned off the radio, or left the bars after listening to the traveler's stories—
And faced their own, far different, reality.
And months passed, and the plague began to quite literally die out, and—
And then their hidden villages began fighting Konoha.
Not to get the vaccines, not to steal their research information—
But out of fear.
Out of fear of a village that had not attacked first once since the hidden village was founded.
And that—
Wasn't great for morale.
Would've been better if the hidden villages could lie, but the comet shooting into space had been seen across the northern hemisphere, and then all the responding shinobi had come home, had not been able—or even tried—to hide how shocked they were by what they saw, by what they'd had to fight against.
By how many died.
And yeah, in theory that was a reason to go to war, but ninja died all the time.
Hundreds, thousands of people had been killed by the plague.
And Earth, and Wind, and Lightning—they hadn't purchased vaccines from Konoha, said the price was too high.
Hadn't gone to war for the same reason.
But a handful, maybe a few dozen shinobi died, and suddenly war was a perfectly viable option.
Suna, Kumo, and Iwa might have been pushing against Konoha's borders quite effectively—
But they were losing the propaganda war.
And Yamanaka Sakura, she swore that was the one that mattered.
And Konoha, they swore that Yamanaka Sakura was right.
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The new Justice Department had four courts, one bureau, and one research office. Really, the courts weren't changing much; the judges were given a few more punishment options, and there was a greater focus on ensuring minimal recidivism, but the courts were more-or-less unchanged.
It was the Detention Bureau that was being formed anew.
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Konoha Civil Court
Internal – adjudicate legal disputes and disagreements
External – offer adjudication for a price
Konoha Criminal Court
Internal – adjudicate criminal cases
External – offer adjudication for a price
Konoha Antitrust Court
Internal – investigate and adjudicate anticompetitive cases
External – offer investigation and adjudication for a price
Konoha Bankruptcy Court
Internal – adjudicate when a person is seeking relief from indebtedness
External – offer adjudication for a price
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Detention Bureau
Internal – confine convicted persons, prisoners of war; work to prevent recidivism
External – confine persons for a set period for a cost
Of all the changes, the changes to the juvenile system were greatest.
The prison was now in Konoha, for one, not buried away in the forest like most adult prisons still were.
This change, and why Yamanaka Sakura had pushed for it, had knock-on effects, too: people could now visit their imprisoned loved ones, see them in person, talk to them, give them love and comfort.
And then there was the ability to 'earn' time out for good behavior: as much as twelve hours a day could be spent freely within Konoha's walls, a part of society while still serving out their sentence.
And then there was the school that was established within the prison, the ability for well-behaved kids to attend classes at the Academy.
It was still a prison.
It was still monitoring.
It was only established for juveniles.
But it also treated prisoners as humans, and that was a novel concept.
Yahiko stood in front of the juvenile prison, looking up and up and up at the rows and columns of windows.
Wondered.