They had betrayed him; they had all betrayed, but for a few confidants. He had dedicated his life to making Japan strong, and now, as he approached his seventieth year, he was undoubtedly successful – his homeland was modern, indeed more advanced than some European nations, with a grand army and a powerful navy, vast railways and burgeoning industries, and above all a sprawling empire that stretched across the breadth of the Pacific; and yet, he felt empty. He had spent these years, fought battles and won wars, all for Japan, and still they hated him. The called him butcher, tyrant, shogun. When the Koreans were made to kneel, he was loathed. When the Spaniards surrendered Luzon, he was called a warmonger. When the Russian Bear, fierce and powerful, second perhaps only to the British, were compelled to leave Hokkaido and Karafuto, his crowning achievement, his unification of Japan, his ultimate triumph over the West, the finest testament to those who would succeed him that he was the man who had toiled sleeplessly, relentlessly to make Japan great… he was condemned, mocked, and berated; impudent fools, gallivanting as if they were the masters of the empire, who had never fought in the Boshin War, who had never marched in Korea, or dominated the waves of the blue Pacific… these cretins had the audacity, the nerve, to criticise him. When they were being coddled by their mothers and wet-nurses, he was leading the Emperor’s forces to victory, he was making the Japan they would grow up in a reality, he was determining the courses of each one of their lives with the stroke of a pen or the utterance of but a single word.
And now, he was “unfit.” It was funny; he didn’t know the man who had called him that in the Diet. He was a Marquis – inherited, not earned – who was some businessman – again, inherited – who had taken a liking for Satake’s party. Apparently he had served in Chosen, without merit – Date would have remembered him, as he did so many others. To him, and to many others, Date had become a spectre, some horrific ghoul who terrorised those awake in the darkest hours of the night; he was their dictator, their scapegoat – they painted all their failings, all their weaknesses and flaws, and adorned them upon Date – he was not a man to them anymore, nor had he been one for a long time, perhaps as early as the Boshin. He was their monster, the great hulking, aged beast that he wrought havoc upon Japan, ignoring his dedicated service as a general, as a statesman – they painted him in pallets of blood red and gunpowder grey, blind to the black soot of industry, the cold steel of industry, the deep and vibrant blues of the uniforms, the sunlit dawns over peaceful villages, secure in the peace and prosperity his hard work had afforded them…
They were ungrateful bastards, all of them; so arrogant, so self-assured, and so brainlessly confident in their own overestimated abilities that it was sickening – he had long held that regard for the “ruling class” in Kyoto, this pampered, powerless elite that had flooded the Diet over these past few years, men without talent, without wit, without bravery. He heard one had night terrors, ferocious and cruel, of General Mizushima! These were cowards and glorified cuckolds, the lot of them, unfit to run a single platoon in Date’s army, let alone Date’s Japan!
And yet he must tolerate them; not ought of some sense of duty or respect of freedom of speech – that was petty nonsense by now, used only to protect their vitriol from just reprisal. Besides, “butcher, dictator, shogun, unfit” and every other descriptor lobbed at him these two decades had ceased to phase him, if they had at all… no it was the accusations of treason, the ardent, stupid, stupid, stupid insistence that all of Japan’s faults lay squarely upon him – surely they were not so hopelessly witless that they could not see that their rallies and protests and condemnations riled up the people more than Date’s victories in the field, in a defensive war – a triumphant war – could ever have done. Surely they were not that stupid…
They weren’t. They were conniving, ambitious, clawing rat-like at any morsel of rotten food they find. Pathetic. Prince Date, the victor of the Boshin War, the conqueror of the Great Asian War, the father of the Army, the Navy, the Industry, the father of Modern Japan, would not allow these imbeciles and jealous fools destroy everything he worked so hard for…