Dainippon Teitoku

Persuading the Meiji-tenno

Imperial Palace Tokyo, Somewhere in 1910

"Think of it, Your Majesty." Hirohito said to the Emperor, at the celebration of his ninth birthday, "Some day, all of Asia will be under the sway of the Emperor of Japan." He sounded less like a grandson and more like an ambitious courtier, which was really what he was.

The Emperor of Japan was not exactly what you would call a family man, nor was he precisely a modernist. He was in fact, a red reactionary of the fiercest kind imaginable.

The Emperor arched an eyebrow at this young, intelligent, and apparently brave seemingly to the point of recklessness, boy. This was not what he had expected from a young boy. He had expected a dutiful, quiet, sincere child, but he was not prepared to see someone with that bright ticking clockwork of ambition behind his eyes. It was somewhat unnerving, to see that sort of eyes in one so young, but then he thought of his education, and relaxed.

His tutors were probably showing him the shape of the world, and how he could influence it, and when one has a lot of resources, they tend to dream grandly, and accomplish much.

How different he was from Prince Yoshihito, the courtiers thought. How is it that that sickly milquetoast fool could produce a child like Hirohito? He was a child that seemed half grown already, he always asked the right questions, he saw things at his age that most others couldn't. The incident of Nogi's discovery of Japan's being muzzled by the Lords of the West after the war with Russia sprang to mind for the connected, people thought that Nogi had made the actual discovery, but in reality, it was little Hirohito who figured it out first. The boy was obviously intelligent, almost preternaturally so. And just listen to him wax on about this and that. He seemed to have ideas for anything and everything, mostly just doodles in the margins, but they could often be things of portentous significance. And sometimes, they seemed fanciful, if not completely outrageous. He had talked with Admiral Togo about having a fleet of submarines, like the things that the Russians had used in the war, and like those which the Germans were supposed to be building, but larger than anything before. He said they would be like wolves after the winter caravans, sinking the merchant fleets of any nations that should attempt to make war upon the Empire, in his words.

And then there was his interest in airplanes. That on the other hand, didn't seem quite so prophetic. In fact, it seemed almost ridiculous, but he talked for hours about how they couldn't just let people see things, but could be a sort of extremely mobile artillery, but how they could be that was anyone's guess, including, apparently, his own. Even worse, he had enthralled some of the younger, eager officers with his ideas; ideas of an Imperial Air Force, and of big planes that could one day fly all the way around the world. "And then there's foreign policy." he said. That brought the rest of them up short.

"Erm... how exactly do you mean, Your Highness?" one of the younger guys asked, tentatively.

"I mean to say, diplomacy." Hirohito elaborated. The others, including the adults, thought about this. Then they thought about it the other way to see what exactly the little bugger was getting at.

"Well, I don't see how there would be much in the way of foreign policy, my prince." Prince Tarō, the War Minister said, delicately. "This hypothetical Air Force you speak of, it would have two forms of negotiation. It'd either be blowing people to smithereens, or it wouldn't be."

"My point exactly!" Hirohito said, apparently bucked up by the events of the party. "I mean, say the ambassador from America comes along, you know how arrogant that lot are. Suppose he says, 'We want this, we want that, and we want the other thing.' Well, what we say is, 'Shut your mouth unless you want to go home in a jar!'" And there seemed to lurk in his bearing some quiet dread, as if he was really saying, "I can't believe I'm saying this." The other attendees couldn't believe it either, the War Minister actually looked slightly horrified. But it had a certain something.

"They have got a big fleet, America." Said one of Hiro's friends, uncertainly. "It could be rather dangerous, roasting diplomats. It's just that... well... people who see a jar of charcoal come back on the boat, they tend to look a bit askance."

And Hiro, evidently driven even further, said, "Ah! Then we say, 'Ho there, Billy Yank! You no likeum big feller planes belong sky blow up mud hut belong you pretty darn chop chop!'" There was some laughter, but it was worried laughter.

"We could really say that?" Prince Yasuhito said, slightly skeptical.

"Why not?" Another piped up. "And then I bet we'd say, 'Send plenty tribute toot sweet!'"

"I never did like those Americans." One of the other children said, every syllable slotting into place perfectly, with centuries of good breeding in his voice. "The food they eat, it's simply revolting, and all the time, gabbling away in their King's English."

"And how would we build this hypothetical Air Force?" Prince Katsura asked, as if trying to steer the conversation out of la-la land.

"We would need factories, money, and quite a lot of both!" Prince Hirohito proclaimed, eyes alight with a vision which only he could see.

"Can you just imagine it? A great industrial fortress, churning out everything from automobiles to farm tractors and cannons. We would be the center of a vast web of trade routes, the great workshop of Asia!" The idea was indeed a great one, and the prime minister felt himself almost envisioning such a thing himself. Moreover, he noticed that the children were hanging on his every word. "We shall have an Army that will be the envy of every nation in the world, and a fleet which would cast a greater shadow than Britain and France combined! And all will be fueled by money, industry and hard Japanese sweat."

Admiral Saitō seemed to be caught between preventing himself from jumping for joy at an Imperial heir who was so eager to promote the interests of the Navy, and sweating bullets at the thought of actually trying to build it. "Let him." thought Prince Katsura, those navy bastards could stew in their own poison for once. Ever since Tsushima the Navy had been insufferable, always poncing around acting like they counted for everything. He was always eager to remind them that but for their failure to stop the Russian commerce raiding, they might have won the war a bit sooner, perhaps a lot sooner. And he'd heard that the Prince was eager to have them developing some countermeasures for it when someone brought it to his attention. The army would surely be greatly strengthened by Hirohito when he took the throne, and he expected, probably before then. The sheer interest he displayed in the new was amazing. New art, new technology, new ideas in general interested him profoundly.

And as he listened to the youth proselytize about his vision of a pan asian military and economic alliance, he felt himself agreeing with the grand vision laid out by the boy. Even the Emperor, stoic though he was, seemed somewhat interested in the boy's ideas. But at the end of the day, he was just a boy, and he would soon find out that achieving his goals would be quite a different matter compared with dreaming them up. But still, Prince Katsura was quite taken with the idea of an Asia lead by Japan in an actual alliance to show the westerners that they were to be taken seriously.

"After all," Hirohito had said, "We Japanese are not china dolls, no matter what the West thinks." He had no idea of the impact those words would have, nor did he understand that he had just invented a new slur against the Western.

"Hiro, I will approved your request for improvement of Japan. Your request would improve our relationship with our colony like Formosa and Chōsen. But how you do it alone?" His Majesty asked.

"We will try our best for it, our scholars and scientists will increase over time and that will help us."