The Flowers of Keiwha
Page 15
with two American girls before for various reasons, but he would never forget her. She was, in purely structural terms, nothing physical, his first ever Japanese girl.
The months that followed would bring further phenomena, events, social occasions. Most of the 2/1 students left that weekend back to Japan, although JOHANN and TUSK went the other direction, met up a few weeks later in Shanghai, where the Expo was in full swing. JOHANN reminded TUSK he was owed favors; TUSK had a Korean Ministry of Trade contact take JOHANN out for a round of drinks, tried to get his bar-owner friend to do more than one drink for JOHANN (but he was Jewish). Trade official guy was a bit more generous and also wanted to give lots of advice; he was a small man and made himself feel important. LINGLING-RITSUKO remained friends, getting little of what happened the second half of the program, but at least completing the course, making new contacts. MIKI tried to convince TUSK she was just innocently willing to be friends; a year would pass before TUSK got the message.
COPENHAGEN-ERI become boyfriend-girlfriend. It was a surprise to JOHANN and TUSK. They had seen little that COPENHAGEN could offer, but then, their opinion of ERI wasn’t so supremely high either. Completely unsurprisingly, however, the two were compatible. They went out for no less than a full year, COPENHAGEN eventually breaking it off, but ERI not too torn up in grief. COPENHAGEN stayed in Seoul for a few more weeks after program end, hanging out with Seoul National students. He felt this time even more fun. He claimed that he went out on weekends that were quite productive, as ERI had not quite committed to anything, but eventually they did, as the new fiscal year began and workplaces sprang into action all over the country.
The students generally learned Korean. Three weeks was not a tremendous amount of time, but certain structural changes occurred in the brain, the vocabulary poured out more easily, the familiarity with the everyday language shot up. With an estimated 600 hours required for Japanese speakers to learn Korean but an estimated 2000 for English speakers, the neighboring country citizens completed a full tenth of language acquisition during the three weeks whereas the various Germanics did only about a thirtieth. Final sunnyside weekend JOHANN-TUSK had a huge analytical talk session about specific details, spilling up a hill, down through the deserted gray buildings, to a wooden bar where meokoli was drunk, but TUSK wanted to bring up religion.
"I’m afraid I don’t count it as a score if the elevator doors opened and closed between you and SHINO like a shoji panel,” commented JOHANN cynically.
"But how about me saying on Friday, ‘something unexpected will happen,’ and then exactly at 2:14am, when I’m returning from the club, I run into SHINO exactly at the moment she’s taking the elevator up from her constant TV-watching?”
"Coincidence.”
"Jungian synchronicity.”
"Same difference.”
But it wasn’t. Possibly TUSK’s mind had broke. Possibly TUSK himself had broke. But elephantine imagery had flooded into that now subdued brain, and everywhere he looked, giant pachyderms marched down the streets of Seoul , swaying in their titantic majesty. Walking down the fashion street in front of Keiwha, a shopowner believed TUSK was attempting to shoplift; that item, a green backpack with two elephants, was purchased by TUSK, who was in turn ripped off the shopowner running a bill for 25 USD rather than 25000 KRW as on the price tag; he didn’t make an issue of it seeing the bill a month later. In the plaza in front of Seoul station, an Indian pressed a green elephant into TUSK’s hand. Walking off, she demanded neither payment nor acknowledgment.
"Have you lost your mind? Have you lost your mind?”
A homosexual hit on TUSK at the bathhouse.
"Come on, this is girls only,” said AKEMI, and turned her back.
"Excuse me, that’s quite a unique backpack,” commented a stranger.
"I didn’t ask you to talk to me,” said TUSK. “I’m off to work on something.”
"It’s 1am,” said JOHANN drily, “where would you be off to at this time?”
It was Keiwha’. Not Keiwha Womans University , the lack of apostrophe intentional, the Womans an archaic English usage. But Keiwha’, which existed five minutes away, but orthogonally away rather than backwards or forwards in time. In this world, Japan and Germany had won World War II; spirit, geist, selfless spiritual yamato damashii―these had triumphed over British and American industry and mathematics, and although really in this world it was the increased influence of the Hindu gods that tipped the balance (India revolted; the Indian Legions broke the back of the British Middle East forces), the net result was Axis victory by 1955.
In Keiwha’, history was about ten years retarded from Keiwha. The 1960s in Keiwha’ were the period of conservatism and moral blandness, Axis Japan and Axis Germany both quietly building up their nuclear arsenals (Japan had built the first device, but the Sorge network brought blueprints to Vossstrasse before year’s end), the 1970s erupting in sexual revolution, the 80s a time of Arab turmoil, recession, petrol station lines, societal decadence and the autonomy of India (Japan held on a little longer than the UK; they were initially seen as liberators); the 90s the advent of mass consumer affluence and personal technology. 3rd Germany fell in the year 2000―the conventional wisdom was that Germany was the stronger country compared to Imperial Japan, but in this world, heavy tanks and rocket planes were less important than the broad multiculturalism of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere; heavy tanks were never used in an atomic world.
3rd Germany retreated to a Council of Europe. The flag, exactly similar to the E.U. flag of our world, represented a country that was a bit more racist and sterile-thinking than our familiar Community, but was still a significant divergence back to our world from the regime that preceded it (and the revolution was bloody). Africa, newly independent, began to develop from the Bantustans and Homeland Reserves the Germans had divided it into and the pressing social issue of the day was the exact status of its 20% white minority, a mix of German, Dutch, English, and French blood.
So we are here, 2010’, in Keiwha’, with the Commonwealth ( Japan ) stretching from Madagascar (IJA submarine base) through autonomous India (hotbed of espionage; the Germans still maintain curious ties throughout the north) down to neutral Australia (special status under Japanese-German treaty) to west coast USA (now metropolitan Japan ). East of the Rockies, Seaboard America is neutral but Europe-leaning; the South American countries were all German-aligned and now Europe-aligned, and the Keiwha’ program has just drawn to a close in Keijo’, capital of Japan ’s first overseas territory.
Who were JOHANN and TUSK? Why were they there? The girls were all the same; learning Korean merely to administer a colony of forty million, they wore black uniforms with pink flower seals. Coming from nearly identical prefecture universities to top off their language in country, they would then be deployed to regional offices throughout the peninsula and look forward to careers of twenty years or more before rotation back to the Home Islands or further deployment to even more exotic locales. In such a program, there were 1800 students rather than 180; administrative and functionary needs were pressing and Keiwha’/Shinhak ties to Japan were completely overt.
In this world, a German student had just traveled to Keiwha’ to briefly study Korean before returning to his commercial work in Beiping/Tianjin. Zainichi TUSK, still ironic, still aloof, a low-ranking Shanghai civil service functionary, was not particularly affected by rumors than in ten years there would be a Zainichi Prime Minister. The program’s big point of unusuality was the presence, forty strong, of Seaboard or West Coast Americans, beneficiaries of a Tokyo-based international friendship program, the Japanese girls cooed and whispered to each other about the foreign boys, who were, truly, once-in-a-lifetime curiosities.
Would KANYE have gotten any in such a world? Undoubtedly not. But the problem with the differing political situation was that something else might have been implied entirely. India ’s rising militancy, th
e growing power of syncretist Hindu cults: these were coincident with the mass importation of Indian labor to Korean factories; the Japanese were still controlling access to their Home Islands territory, but even there more and more dark faces could be seen in the universities.
This was where the elephants came in. Imagine a world hotter than this one, one taking place in summertime rather than winter. The great Divali festival is underway, the long line of elephants is reverently worshipped by the Korean-Indian population, as flowers are garlanded from street to street and water is sprinkled on the ground. TUSK saw those elephants; they had been transported through visionary-only means to this world, and as he walked about the streets of Seoul near the river, he knew they were as real as the world we were living in.
Philip K. Dick, author of one of the first counterfactual ‘uchronie,’ speculates in the German-Japanese world conspiracies and plots are rife. The Germans are planning a nuclear strike on Tokyo; factions in both empires are desperately seeking to uncover each other. But such extrapolation seems to reflect a purely American point of view; the real differences were as likely wholly cultural rather than merely an overlay of paranoia