Japan in Alagaësia

A Discovery at Sea

A Discovery at Sea

It was a race against time.

After an advance survey expedition had hastily determined the biosphere, the geological features, and the state of metagenomics on the southern landmass to be virtually identical to that on Earth, the Japanese government, in cooperation with the private sector, had scrambled to mobilize for the massive overseas projects that were to take place. An emergency meeting between Minato and Kuroda had then been held, and the Bank of Japan had agreed to back the Takahashi Cabinet's policy of immediately divesting in companies that were judged to "not be contributing to their full capacity." At the same time, companies that were participating were offered almost unlimited financing to support their operations. The result was that nearly the entirety of corporate Japan was rushing to participate in some capacity. Because of Minato's extreme policy measures—which was predictably condemned by the Asahi Shimbun—the whole of industrial Japan was scrambling to mobilize at a pace not seen in at least seventy-five years.

The first wave alone involved the transport of more than two-hundred thousand workers and more than one million tons of industrial equipment to the southern landmass, which had quickly been dubbed "Shin Minami" by the media. As the economic and financial collapse caused by the transfer to the new world had led to an unprecedented number of job dismissals across Japan, finding workers willing to embark on these new lands had not proved too complicated, and the process of shipping them over to Shin Minami would be complete within two weeks. As they disembarked on the northern edges of the landmass, the workers found themselves in a place that bore some resemblance to eastern Argentina or Southern Brazil, with its humid subtropical climate coupled with a (albeit more riverine) Pampas-like temperate grassland vegetation and corresponding wildlife. All completely devoid of human life.

The agricultural and resource exploration and extraction megaproject(s), under the management of the government and dozens of private companies, urgently set itself to work. Apart from seeding the available arable land, agricultural workers set themselves with extracting the seeds of the naturally occurring plant crops to use for further seeding, given that the available stocks of seeds they had shipped from Japan would not give sufficient yields to feed the population back home. Astoundingly, most (or maybe all) of the naturally occurring plant crops were identical to those back on Earth, including wheat, potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, soybeans, barley, rye, oats, sorghum, millet, legumes, sugarcanes, coffee beans, cocoa beans, and a variety of fruits, vegetables, and nuts in large amounts—and almost all were of the 21st century, monoculture variant. Little rice, or many other crops historically common in Japan, however.

Yet this was only the beginning. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries estimated that up to three million agricultural workers would be needed in Shin Minami in the short term to meet Japan's food demand (urgent production scale-up had complete precedence over labor productivity). And the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimated that perhaps another one million workers and tens of millions in tons in capital equipment would be needed overseas to eventually meet Japan's demand for natural resources. The sheer scale of it all would almost certainly make this the largest overseas economic undertaking in human history. Back on Earth, at least.

Everything was being rushed as quickly as possible, even if quality of execution had to be sacrificed. Many Japanese organizers and executives gnashed their teeth at this fact, as it went against long-established Japanese management practices and a culture of meticulous planning and deliberation. Minato and other cabinet officials had even pressed private sector actors to eschew "unnecessary" bureaucratic and organizational practices and traditions, and to speed up decision-making procedures. Pressed by Minato, the government itself had massively downscaled its bureaucratic apparatus by cutting down on or overlooking rules, regulations, approval processes, and administrative and organizational traditions. The task of coordinating a project of such scale involving so many different actors was formidable and took up much of the government's governing capacity, and the number of civil servants had to be expanded by more than half. All of this was highly grueling for a country not used to such rapid and extreme actions and changes, but it had to be done.