Empress of the Sun, Ch.1
1 Storks and Butterflies
by Sally Oh
(copyright 2016, Patricia Ormsby)
September 2116
The morning sun illuminated a soft blue September sky, shimmering across Puget Sound with the promise of another sweltering day ahead. Cedar-covered islands beckoned in the distance. Their shores were all tangled masses of fallen cedars, decaying and eroding slowly in the surf, but on nice days like this it was possible to row a boat across through the driftwood and debris, and dock it among the fallen trees. By tying it to a stout polished branch of a well-chosen giant, while bearing in mind the prodigious tides here, you could walk up the trunk into the forests, where huckleberries and thimbleberries grew profusely in the cool shade, and lots of blackberries waited in any sunny clearing.
From the middle of this blue sky came a faint but deep drone unlike anything that had been heard in this region since the wars following the dissolution of the old U.S. empire.
Weather-beaten farmers in their fields cast worried looks overhead, squinting into the pastel depths to locate the vanishingly small silver object that produced that dreadfully haunting sound.
Children ran for their mothers; fishermen, roofers and recyclers stopped what they were doing and cast puzzled looks at each other. There had been rumors of an important visitor arriving from Japan at some time in the coming weeks.
One of the young carpenters working on a new extension upstairs of the “Fashions & Notions” tailor and fabric shop in downtown Neverwet, Washington (formerly Everett) went bolting down the makeshift stairs, calling, “Henry! Henry! Yeh gotta git up’ere and see this!”
“Just give me a minute, Josh, and I’ll be with you,” said Henry, squinting at the needle he was attempting to thread on his sturdy steel foot-pumped sewing machine. Finishing that, and laying aside the silk fabric he’d been working with, Henry straightened his lapels, and with the stern frown that, together with his severely central-parted greased and well-trimmed hair, always belied his easy-going nature, he climbed the crude wooden steps up onto what had been the roof of his shop and stepped out from under what was becoming the new roof.
“Look up in the sky over there, will yeh.”
“By golly! That has got to be an airplane!” exclaimed the astonished gentleman.
“Well, we figured as much,” said Josh excitedly, “But who do yeh think? You know the Japs, Henry. Dyeh think it’s the Japs?”
“Japanese, Josh, Japanese!”
“Dyeh think it’s the Japanese?” said Josh, ignoring the rebuke.
“Well, let me get a good look…” Henry brought up his monocle and squinted through it at the tiny object far away. Then he ran downstairs and came back with a sturdy pair of binoculars.
They could see it was just one airplane, not an invading force. No escorts. Really rather lonely looking, laboring through the vast blue space.
“Josh, we really do not know who it is at this point,” explained Henry. “The Japanese have not flown anything more impressive than a microlight for decades, so it would be highly doubtful. Let me look at it again…no. Just an obscure marking… New England, now. They might. On the other hand, though, the Japanese could have revived the art out of necessity. You realize what that would mean.”
“They figured out cold fusion!!”
“No, that’s not what it means, Josh,” said Henry as he continued to watch the airplane. “Hmm, it’s turning this way. Still can’t tell. Might be Canada. Cross-Pacific flight is for all practical purposes, dead.”
“But what if it is the Japanese?”
“Oh, well, Josh,” said Henry, passing him the binoculars. “It would mean the Japanese are getting stomped, and that’ll be their prime minister, defense minister, possibly even the emperor.”
“The emperor! That’d be so swell! Will yeh meet ‘im?”
“I don’t think so. They’ll make their stand down in Seattle for a while under heavy guard and anonymity. For that reason, I would expect them to be coming by ship, just like everyone else.”
As the aircraft came lower and closer, they could see it was a heavy keeled seaplane. The red hinomaru under its wings flashed as it banked.
The entire town of Neverwet Washington had turned out to watch by then. The plane slowly turned back, deepening its somber droning further and further as the pilots throttled back, intensifying menacingly as it come lower and lower, until finally it turned back over the sound, banked one last time, and came skimming across the water just above the waves. The engines’ droning stepped one degree lower, and Henry, Josh and anyone else watching from a good vantage point could see white water spray upward, nearly concealing the seaplane. It was then that they also noticed the small flotilla of motorboats, rapidly converted from fishing craft, that had departed from the recently refurbished dock. That in itself would remove any doubt from the minds of what few citizens had not already ascertained it. It was the Japanese again alright.
The Japanese were a stiff but pleasant folk who, upon being released from the overcrowded refugee camps, where they’d been detained under conditions of severe deprivation, in some cases for more than a decade, had taken to repopulating deserted inland communities. There they secluded themselves in deep austerity, a genteel but real poverty, as if in permanent mourning. Despite this, they made sincere efforts to maintain good relations with their neighbors. They’d been known to share their rice, for example, during times of famine. They seemed to bear no grudge toward the Cascade Republic over the ill treatment they had received, but everyone always wondered what they might be saying in private. Worst of all, there were so many of them. And more kept showing up.
Everyone knew that if you crossed them, retribution was swift, but after that, they’d all be smiling and affable again, as if nothing had happened. That was nice, but also unsettling.
There was a ragged group of Japanese fishermen inhabiting the flooded ruins near the dock like so many cormorants. They built tiny, but sturdy shacks among these ruins, where they seemed to weather even the nastiest winter storms. You’d check on them the next day, rather worried, and there they were, repairing their shacks and boats. Unlike the other Japanese, they all smoked, and they also tended to go out to sea wearing no clothing whatsoever except a single length of red twine tied around their privates. People wondered if they’d feel naked without that. Attempts to get them to show more public decency were met with obstinate requests for others to respect their privacy.
The inland Japanese would journey over in groups to exchange rice and cured tobacco for dried or smoked fish, mostly small ones that no one else was interested in, and take those back as an important protein source. They seemed to have worked out a system in which each town would send its merchants over on certain days, so that there was a steady flow of them. They seemed to want to make everything move like clockwork. A big disruption, such as an unexpected storm, would cause confusion, but then they would get organized again and get on with things.
Recently a new group of Japanese had begun arriving. Over the past several decades, they seemed to show up in waves, and each time a new group would show up, the Daiippa (first wave), who’d experienced the camps, would hear about them and approach the authorities in whatever towns they were being detained in with a promise to take care of them on their own.
“Well, where’ll yeh put ‘em?” they’d be asked.
“In our towns.”
“And ‘ow’ll yeh cope with ‘em?”
“We will work harder. We will expand our irrigation system and fields.”
It always seemed to work out, though with new mouths to feed they would lapse into visible poverty yet again, with signs of malnutrition, and you wondered where the breaking point would be with larger groups, but they kept their word and “coped” with them somehow.
Their clothing at this time, among the poorest groups, consisted of patches, the children favored with more colorful ones, which were stitched together with whatever they could scrounge, sometimes human hair, a detail omitted when this became a popular urban fashion in the wake of the story I am about to tell you.
Even in their hardest times, they always managed to hold little festivals, inviting anyone in who stopped by, plying them with whatever booze they’d produced. Each day they’d put out little offerings in front of their arrays of little stone Buddhas. A child would stand guard nearby to keep off crows, chickens and dogs, and in the evening, the offerings were retrieved and divided up.
In addition to chickens, they kept a smattering of goats and large mobs of ducks that they released into their paddies each morning. From a distance, you could hear the curious chiming of the drakes, punctuated by stentorian demands from the females. They didn’t seem to eat the meat from these, though, but traded it for medicines and other necessities.
It was hard to tell what the mortality rates were in their communities, because they seemed to save up bodies and then hold mass cremations when they had the resources, and it appeared some of these cremations themselves may have been merely symbolic. Each village had its own priests, both Buddhist and Shinto whose duties included keeping account of everyone, but they wouldn’t divulge information to outsiders.
One thing that everyone noticed was that they seemed to divide up each new group of arriving refugees based on region of origin and distribute them that way.
It was all, let’s say, a bit too well organized, as if it had been planned out in advance. And the refugees just kept coming. The old container ships had quit arriving quite a while back, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief because that seemed to be the end of the mass migration. That respite, however, lasted for only a little over a decade, and then they started showing up again, this time in jerry-rigged craft, telling horror stories from the war-torn western regions of Japan, where they were facing an even more desperate mass of invaders from famine-stricken parts of China. Clearly, anyone capable of getting out of the way was fleeing. Hope still lay to the east, from whence the sun arose. The relative prosperity of the Daiippa survivors was well known to the new refugees. In fact, it was famous worldwide.
It didn’t really help matters when people learned that the term “daiippa” dated from World War II, when it meant “assault wave,” as in Pearl Harbor, but by then everyone also realized that this time it was a peaceful assault conducted by a pitiable crowd, capable of little more than begging, and that, furthermore, there was nothing that could be done to stop the influx.
This new group, though, was entirely different. They arrived not in overloaded fishing boats, but old passenger ships, which would be met and escorted in by the navy. They discharged their passengers, refueled at one naval base or another and departed with a load of arms and ammunition to be used in the war against China. Furthermore, local officials were being notified ahead of time how many people were to arrive, their path of travel, and their location of resettlement. These were to be temporary refugees, it was said. It was also said that the surge in demand for bio-diesel, spiking food prices, would then subside, causing these prices to crash again. The new group was thus having a severe impact already, to which they appeared to be oblivious.
Their arrival, of course, suggested the war with China was not going quite as well as they’d expected. The Japanese all hastily denied that. But new houses continued to be built in the inland communities, and an influx of wealth brought formerly quiet little towns to life, with the new refugees and their awkward English making frequent trips in groups into larger towns and cities to make deals with the merchants for goods and services.
The newcomers had considerably more pride, too, than the previous waves of refugees. Haughty teens strutted down the newly refurbished pier carrying cloth-covered, but still obvious, swords on their shoulders. Their clothes were western, but they all seemed to look disconcertingly identical.
Everyone knew the government was monitoring radio messages being sent between Japan and Cascadia. It was said that some important people had decided that it would be safer for their families to take temporary refuge among the Japanese-speaking communities of the Cascade Republic. The papers announced the number of people scheduled to arrive, and these numbers kept growing, as did the estimated length of the visitors’ stay. Some of the messages intercepted were in a code that translated into nonsensical stories about butterflies, chrysalides, swans, storks that swam, apples being washed for a feast, giants waiting, lawyers dancing, and on and on.
The people of Neverwet turned to Henry, the town’s tailor of highest repute, because he spoke a certain amount of the language and had established friends among the Japanese, who had been visiting his shop more and more frequently.
“Apples,” he explained to them, “Probably refer to Cascadia. The Japanese are still growing them out in the mountains, while other farmers have been having difficulty with them in the heat. They take a lot of pride in that, you know. Now, the ‘giants’ and ‘lawyers,’ that is a puzzle to me, but one of the ladies from Rock Hills told me it might refer to the shrine out her way, where many Japanese are living. In fact, the shrine has been there for more than a century, predating the fall of the U.S. In fact, some of the new refugees have been going there. Most of them are going to Seattle and other cities. So this is just a guess. But if it turns out that I’m correct, we may have some interesting guests.”
The arrival today of such an impressive aircraft caused quite a stir among the people of Neverwet, which until recently had been a quiet, fairly prosperous town rebuilding from the wars and retreating from the encroaching sea. Everybody in town knew what an “empire” was, and why you didn’t want to have anything to do with one. On the other hand, how many of them had ever had a chance to see an emperor?
The Emperor of Japan, they knew, was rumored to be in poor health. He’d not made any public appearances for quite some time.
“’Ow long’d they say?” asked Josh observing the aircraft on the sound. “A year? Two? That’d go a long way towards explaining the extravagance of reviving aviation just for this. A long sea voyage could take a toll on a guy, no matter ‘ow luxurious the quarters.”
“Well, you know, there’s been hints of this or some big event set to happen here, and Neverwet still has the old naval port. There had to be a reason for that,” shrugged Henry. “Or perhaps they just thought up a new reason to justify it.”
The port had been heavily bombarded in the wars and the city itself had been largely abandoned at this time. Winter hurricanes with high tides had driven what residents remained eastward, out of the Snohomish delta to a bluff they dubbed “Neverwet.” Thus the town normally had a military presence, but for the past week there had been an influx of army personnel as well, who had been told to keep quiet about their mission there.
“You’d think they’d be more inconspicuous about it if it were someone important to them,” said Henry. “Every person in a week’s gossip reach knows something is going on over here.”
What occurred next only fueled speculations about the identity of the passengers. The largest of the boats in the flotilla, which had a sizable cabin, approached the seaplane, which shut off its engines in response, allowing the boat to row in closer and dock. The other boats spread out in a circle around the seaplane as if to guard it. Folks like Josh and Henry with binoculars and a good enough view could see a side door on the seaplane open and, from the boat, a stout wooden plank extend out to it. After a few minutes, some men dressed entirely in white except for tall black casques on their heads brought out some hoops and began extending a large length of white cloth along the plank until it was entirely concealed. This ostentatious method would allow passengers or goods to be transferred along it either way unseen. The cloth remained in place for the better part of an hour before the men in white reappeared, folding the cloth slowly and bundling it methodically, maintaining the stateliness of a ritual.
“That can only be the Emperor!” concluded Henry, awed.
When they had finished, the plank was withdrawn and stowed, and the door on the seaplane closed.
Surrounded now by the smaller boats, the big boat with its mysterious passengers or cargo proceeded slowly to the refurbished pier.
“Must’a run outta gas!” said Josh, taking a turn with the binoculars.
“Why do you say that?”
“The big boat’s being rowed. Oh, ‘eads’ll roll, won’t they?”
When the big boat laboriously finally reached the refurbished pier, the ritual with the white cloth was repeated.
When that finished, five white lacquered palanquins with round golden inlaid seals stood revealed on the pier.