Chapter 6
10th of September 1937
The economy was booming.
Recent advances in matters of refining rare materials had been improved, marking a small step towards independence from importing the resource.
Yet, this step did not ease the high amount of taxes the people had to pay. As convinced as he was about the benefits of democracy, Haruji had to admit that, as the Tenno was still ruling, taxes had been a lot lower.
Of course, the amount of education Souta received had decisively increased because of an increased budget for education, but the taxes were still too high. In fact, their rise did not match with the rise of the worker’s wages.
Haruji and Yuki were actually forced to draw money from their savings in order to pay taxes.
Obviously, the government hadn’t learnt the lesson of the radical uprising a few months ago. Even now, many of his younger colleagues were aligning themselves to either left-winged parties who promised them a worker’s paradise. The older ones tended to start supporting the old cabinet that had served in the autocracy because “everything was better in the old days”.
He, however, didn’t know what to think. He was about to lose faith in democracy, but he didn’t want to life in an autocratic state again, and least of all he wanted communism. The latter was probably fueled by his own education, during which his teachers told him that communism was the worst evil that could befall a state and its people. Thus, he belonged to the large group of those people who felt a certain disenchantment with politics, leaving the radicals to act.
Being aware of this development, the government decided to stay still while the power of the radical parties grew because they didn’t want even more dissent amongst the population, which would ultimately be the greatest danger for democracy.
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30th of October 1937
Today was an important day for the 16th Homengun.
The motorized corps had received some brand-new trucks to transport its artillery and anti-tank brigades.
Although the new transports meant a decreased maneuverability especially when entering mountainous terrain or forests, it was nothing that could be compared to the morale boost this offered to the men, including both Takumi and Kaito.
To them, the trucks were another sign that they were indeed able to keep up with the great military powers of their time and that they could stand a chance against them, should one of the decide to turn on them.
Kaito and Takumi hadn’t seen each other for some weeks now and Kaito was obviously still hostile towards him because of their endless arguments about whether democracy worked or not. Takumi had made his peace with this because he knew about Kaito’s incredible stubbornness. It was sad that it seemed to end their friendship now, but both men had arranged themselves with it.
While Takumi was continuously trying to forget about the catastrophic situation at home which didn’t look too well, as his sister had written him in some letters, Kaito rejoiced at this, proclaiming that the time of democracy was running out. Ironically, he was also fond of all the technological improvements that were made because of democracy.
Of course, Takumi’s point of view that all those advancements were only made because of democracy were rather questionable, for there had also been research in the Empire.
However, it had been focused a lot more on military instead of industry and education. Also, the increased investment in education since the establishment of democracy had sped up research. Therefore, Takumi liked to point this out as the benefits of democracy should a discussion arise.
After all, the worst enemy of any dictatorship were well-educated people.
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6th of December 1937
The ministry of outer affairs was like a bunch of scared hens in a cage: Everyone ran everywhere, and none knew his destination.
Isoroku was in their midst, sitting at his desk and writing a report about the recent events so that the incident could be passed on into the archive.
Another band of smugglers had been caught about a week ago, but, unlike before, the government had decided to keep the goods that Chinese smugglers tried to bring into Japan.
Ironically, the ruler of the Republic of China considered this to be thievery and demanded the goods for himself.
But the government’s decision was a fix one.
About a month ago, the country had seen another assassination attempt at a leader of one of the radical parties.
It was decided to let things calm down without serious involvement by the state. The current situation in Japan and the reaction of some politicians made it an easy conclusion for everybody that the government was somehow involved in this. He didn’t want to burden his mind with the knowledge about the truth of this, however. He wanted to earn him and his wife a living and enough savings so that they could have a decent life after his retirement.
It was only about 5 years until then. His children were adult and married and his grandchildren were the light of his life by now.
To him, they were the reason why he had always been for democracy. He had wanted them to lead their own lives, free from the influence of any totalitarian ideas. This attitude had grabbed him 40 years ago, in his early twenties as he had been meeting an employee of the American embassy in Tokyo. Being a social worker back then, he cooperated with the American embassy to find houses for its employees because some of them were still learning to speak Japanese.
Of course, he did have to hide his attitude towards democracy or else he would have been fired and maybe even arrested.
The uproar that was caused by the recent assassination attempt had led the government to decide that democracy couldn’t be saved by opposing anti-democratic political streams. Instead, it was to be saved by making it more attractive to the common people, upon which the system as based, after all.
Thus, the ministry of financial affairs revised the tax system, lowering the amount of taxes that was to be paid by the citizens.
In order to minimize the financial losses caused by this, the whole system had been reviewed and improved rather than just lowering the taxation-rates.
Still, the government was losing money.
Therefore it was decided to keep all goods that are smuggled into the country and found during the process. They were sold afterwards on markets, providing the government with desperately needed money.
As is obvious this lead to increased tensions with the Chinese, which is why everyone in the ministry was apparently going mad at the moment.
The funds gave the government a little room to think of something to minimize the financial losses, but the cost for this was a worse relation with China. The task at hand was therefore to improve the relations again to stop the Chinese from declaring war before the Japanese were ready for it.
This case wasn’t very likely to occur, though.
At first, it had seemed that the Chinese Republic might be able to win the war against the Communists but, as spies reported, they were defeated at the gates of one of Mao’s numerous mountain-forts and the Communists were even pushing south now.
The Chinese did therefore have more urgent enemies to deal with.
And, as for the Japanese government, the continuous activities of bands of Chinese smugglers on imperial territory might prove to be a casus belli when the time was right.
Some of the smuggled goods were weapons, thus the conclusion that could be drawn from this was that the Republic supported Chinese settlers in Manchukuo, eventually even aiming at founding an armored guerilla-resistance.
As much as Isoroku was for democracy, he still despised this if it was true, as would many others of his countrymen once the information was made public.
But, for now, peace was more important.
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Author's note:
Thanks for the positive comments!
I agree that the internal enemy is definitely a difficult one to keep in control, especially if one doesn't want to waste lots of IC on consumer goods.
However, bringing back the Emperor can only be achieved if the PA is coming back in charge of affairs again, but they are but a minor party by now. Actually, the majority of population is shared by the Merket Liberals, Social Conservatists and the Fascists.
And hopefully the fix for the USA's trigger-happy foreign minister will also help. By the way, you do know that the Marco Polo Bridge Incident requires you to be autocratic? 
