Katanas of the Rising Sun: Difference between revisions

''Across the mountains, corpses in the field''

''I shall die only for the Emperor''

 

Japan, 1867. Commodore Perry has visited Japan to display some [[Gunboat Diplomacy]] a decade-and-a-half or so ago, and the potential onslaught of Westerners to dominate Japan the way they did the rest of Asia has galvanized a clique of low-ranking samurai from the southern fiefdoms of Satsuma and Chōshū into leading their Western-style private armies against the Tokugawa Shogunate. They seize the boy-Emperor Mutsuhito at his Residence in Kyoto before the Shogun can secure him. The Shogun is dealt a heavy PR-blow by this, and many lesser Daimyos refuse to come to his aid as it would appear that they were going against the Emperor. The Shogun's forces slug it out, but are eventually driven off Honshu entirely and flee to Hokkaido where they set up a short-lived Republic in Hakodate. Eventually, this too falls, and Japan is more or less united under a new government, which moves the Emperor to Edo (renamed Tokyo) and proclaims the start of the Meiji ("Enlightened Rule") era.

In the aftermath of the first atomic bombing (on Hiroshima), the government continued its refusal to surrender unconditionally, while in private, the emperor prepared for the inevitable. One A-bomb later, and Japan declared its surrender on 15 August, 1945 (mostly at the behest of the emperor, over the heads of military brass who ''still'' wanted to keep fighting). This was fortunate for the US, because they had no more atomic bombs left. The military complex of Imperial Japan was forcibly dismantled, governmental power was effectively handed over to the US military (with General MacArthur having the final say on anything the Diet did), and land and economic reforms were made to break the power of the ''zaibatsu'' ([[Mega Corp|big industrial corporations]]), who had formed a core part of the military-industrial complex. While democratic reforms had their intended effect, many of the economic ones were rolled back in the face of the Korean War, and it was ramping up industrial production to help out the US in this conflict that started Japan's economic recovery in earnest. Control of the country was handed back to the Japanese in 1952, and at the same time, a National Safety Force (later renamed the [[Kaiju Defense Force|Self-Defence Force]]) was formed. This was born out of the rise of hostile Communist governments in East Asia (including China, who had a score to settle with Japan) and the realization that Japan would be effectively helpless with Occupation troops increasingly called upon to fight elsewhere. Its creation was bitterly contested well into even the 1980s, despite assurances of civilian control and non-belligerence, and its naming (which borders on [[Most Definitely Not a Villain|Most Definitely Not a Military]]) reflects this; even so, politicians continue to battle over just what the Japanese military's role should be in modern world affairs.

 

* [[Awesome but Impractical]]: The IJN had a nasty tendency towards wanting to have the biggest and baddest of something, regardless of its actual use. Case in point the ''Yamato''-class battleship: when it was launched it was the most powerful class of a line of ship that had just been rendered obsolete. The ''Yamato'' went on to a borderline-embarrassing career of being held back from fighting as she was too slow to keep up with the carrier forces (her nickname was Hotel Yamato, and it was ''not'' a compliment), and when she finally was committed to battle the gunnery of her huge main guns was remarkably poor, never scoring a hit. Her sister ship ''Musashi'' never even got this far, having been sunk by carrier aircraft before even seeing an enemy vessel. ''Yamato's'' second and final mission saw her and 5 of her escorts at the bottom of the Pacific, managing to down a piddling 12 American planes in the process.

* [[Badass Army|Badass Navy]] : The IJN. [[Badass Decay|Initially]].