Japan in Alagaësia

Culture Shocks

Culture Shocks

Reiwa 2 August 1

Minato sipped on his green tea as he looked out the window from his office in the Kantei. The sounds of cars driving past could be heard from outside, less frequently than before the teleportation. In less than a year, Japan would be completely self-sufficient in oil and natural gas, or so he had been told by numerous business executives, and they had urged him to commit to gradually loosening the fuel restrictions. He had dithered on the issue, as he had his doubts about the overly bullish forecasts he had been provided by these interest groups.

Outside, he sighted an airliner in the distant cloudy skies. It was not a Boeing, but one of Mitsubishi's SpaceJet models, probably enjoying a trial flight. The company was scrambling to develop alternatives to the Boeing airliners, with strong government support, American scope clauses be damned.

Minato sat down, and frowned as he took another look at the provisional estimates on fiscal allocation ending July, and the various items that were receiving funding. Since the transfer, the government had unprecedentedly ramped up public spending, with much of the funding directly provided interest-free by the Bank of Japan to bypass the liquidity constraints of the bond market, effectively giving the government access to unlimited money. This massive fiscal expansion was meant to mitigate the enormous consequences wrought by the transfer, and to a lesser extent by the COVID-19, by financing the overseas economic projects and its massive supply chains, to adjusting the domestic economy to the loss of global value chains by supporting indigenization and self-sufficiency, and by steering off the economic depression and mass unemployment in general by boosting aggregate demand. As such, and because he had been preoccupied with the broader details of the overseas economic projects, the scale of the budget and the number of spending items had reached such a degree that Minato himself had lost track of it.

Which was why he was grappling with some of the spending items. Thirty trillion yen just on "discretionary spending"? Just what was included in that spending item? The description was obscure, but implied that a lot of it was to supplement the functionings of JAXA. Something about "asteroid impact avoidance". Minato had a bad feeling about this. He would have to convene a meeting at some point, involving the full Cabinet and other people involved in government budgetary issues. Hopefully someone there would have the answers.

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Reiwa 2 August 3

At the headquarters of the Japan Meteorological Agency, in the operation room, many employees were staring at the latest satellite footage, completely gobsmacked. A whirlpool was seen on a large digital screen, surrounded by the rest of the ocean and the outlines of a large island. That in itself might have not been that remarkable, were it not for its size...

"N-no, no! There has to be a mistake! Impossible!" several people burst out.

The Director-General hmmed. "That has to be at least five kilometers across, if not ten. Far wider than the actual depths of the waters, I think. And not an eddy, but an actual whirlpool..."

One of their lead scientists shook his head in disbelief. "The satellite must have been infected by space dust or something! What it shows goes against everything we know about fluid dynamics..."

"Perhaps this is better approached on a quantum level, rather than on a classical one?" another scientist suggested.

"It's still impossible. There is no way a whirlpool can be that big! Do you realize how fucking ridiculous that is?! Ten kilometers across, that's the size of... of Paris! It would swallow any ship in sight, even the largest oil tanker! Even Seawise Giant!" He continued raving.