Outbreak Company: Volume 2

by Ichiro Sakaki

  There was no precedent for this here. Nobody knew what would happen to people who lost themselves in otaku culture. And the ones who were busy enjoying themselves surely wouldn’t think that they might wind up at the worst possible end. By the time they realized what was happening, it might already be too late.

  I felt my blood run cold.

  “Everything I’ve done up ’til now has been...”

  My knees went weak, and I thought I might collapse on the spot.

  I declared the rest of the day’s classes to be self-study sessions and went home to the mansion.

  Who was I to stand up in front of a class and preach at them? Eduardo might be an extreme example, but I was sure there must be plenty of other students heading down the same road. And they didn’t even know what a dangerous position they were in.

  But me? Because I was an otaku and had been a shut-in, I knew. Once you get that way, it’s hard to come back.

  You can’t do random tests for it and it’s not illegal—but otaku culture is a drug. Or anyway, it sure acts like it.

  Sure, even narcotics can have beneficial medicinal effects if you use them right. Unlike dictionaries or specialist texts, stories let you gain knowledge almost firsthand, and I think they can be helpful in broadening your emotional horizons. Talking about your favorite works with other people is a lot of fun, and even the most taciturn among us can get garrulous if you stumble onto a subject they’re interested in. In that sense, stories can even make us more socially capable.

  But all this is on the understanding that we observe certain limits. You know: “Use only as directed.” I had thoughtlessly introduced a new drug to the Eldant Empire. Now the people here were captives of the stimulation, and they were starting to overdose. If this wasn’t a narcotic, what was it?

  “Oh ho?”

  As my bodyguard Minori-san and I entered the foyer of the mansion, we found Matoba-san standing there.

  His suit, the color of dead leaves, fit him exactly, yet I could never shake the sense that he didn’t quite blend with his surroundings. It was more than the sight of a guy in modern Japanese salaryman garb standing in the middle of a medieval European fantasy world. In my eyes, the “bureaucrat in a business suit” look suggested a set of values that I didn’t share.

  Politics takes place in a realm far removed from the basic human compassion that most of us commoners are acquainted with. It would only make sense for the people who move in those circles to have unique ideas about the world.

  “What seems to be the matter?” Matoba-san stood in front of us, that half-smile on his face. “Isn’t school still in session?”

  “Er... Yeah. Yeah, it is.” I nodded, my expression stiff.

  Matoba-san met my strained look with a relaxed smile of his own. I’m just an innocent little government prole, it seemed to say—but when I thought about it, I wondered if anyone who would deliberately project that image could actually be as harmless as they wanted to look.

  “And? Is something wrong?” Matoba-san asked, finally appearing to register the expression on my face.

  “Matoba-san,” I said, removing my ring. I was frightened to think of having this conversation with Myusel or Brooke within earshot. Of course, Myusel had picked up quite a bit of Japanese over the last six months, so even taking the ring off was no guarantee she wouldn’t understand what we were saying.

  Eventually I went on. “It’s true, isn’t it? I really am an invader.”

  Matoba-san didn’t respond right away. He blinked, then looked questioningly at Minori-san. She nodded, expressionless.

  “I suppose it’s no use hiding it any longer. Well, to all things a season.” Matoba-san didn’t sound especially bothered. Sort of like an old guy who got caught in a peccadillo he would have preferred to keep quiet. He definitely wasn’t acting like someone who had just been revealed as an accessory to a national plot.

  “I hope you’ll bear one thing in mind as I tell you this,” Matoba-san said, smiling to the bitter end. Now it looked like nothing more than a mask to me. “However things may appear to you, we chose the most peaceful possible way.”

  As a matter of fact, I knew that already. But they hadn’t made that choice out of goodwill—it was just the quickest and quietest way to get what they wanted. A military invasion wouldn’t have been very efficient, and the US and everyone else in the world would have been likely to notice what was going on. Then there was the concern that should any of this become public, a military invasion would be seen as contravening Article 9, and everyone involved would almost certainly be subject to both domestic and international punishment.

  An economic invasion wasn’t very practical, either: insofar as our economic systems differed, it would be impossible to set a meaningful exchange rate. The monetary system in the Eldant Empire might not even be as defined or stable as the one in our own world, which would only make things harder.

  The only other option? Cultural invasion. Using otaku culture, no less.

  “Now that I think about it,” I said, glaring at Matoba-san, “if a bunch of illiterate Eldant commoners learn to read Japanese before even their own language, then that’s all they’ll be reading. It’ll slowly distort their own system of values. It’s sort of brainwashing, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Matoba-san said, not looking the least bit disturbed by the idea. “You consider that a problem?”

  “Isn’t it?!” I howled.

  We weren’t just talking about language here. I thought about Elvia’s pictures. Wasn’t that a form of brainwashing, too? Elvia had learned how to draw moe characters in no time flat; her technique was nearly perfect. If we took her back to Japan, I was sure she would have made it as a pro, no problem.

  But... Then what about the hyper-realistic style she’d cultivated until now? Would the tendencies of otaku culture end up overwriting the unique traditional visual styles of this world? It’s not uncommon for traditional arts to be shoved aside by whatever’s popular, gradually losing pride of place and being pushed out of their own home.

  “You damnable invader!”

  The words the terrorist leader of the “assembly of patriots” had spoken came back to me.

  Was I—

  “There’s no such thing as a person who isn’t brainwashed, Shinichi-kun,” Matoba-san said evenly. “You, me—we’ve been brainwashed with the values of modern Japan. Via television, school, magazines, newspapers, the internet.”

  “Yes, but I’m Japanese!”

  “Yes, you are. But does the free, undiluted culture you speak of really exist?”

  I was speechless.

  To a greater or lesser extent, culture is influenced by politics; that’s true enough. In the Edo Era, women were banned from appearing in kabuki stage performances in order to curtail the allegedly disruptive effects of such shows. As a result, we wound up with yarou-kabuki, all-male stage plays, which are now considered traditional culture. Kabuki began with Izumo Okuni—a woman—so it was only natural that women should perform in the plays. But you had plays performed by prostitutes, plays performed by groups of young boys, and the government, claiming that this was a detriment to public morals, decided to allow only older men to stage kabuki.

  And was moe any different? Countries like the US, where it was mostly okay to show everything in your porn, were more honest in their own way, but also broader, less precise. We’re not exactly talking about a case of “the hidden flower being the most beautiful” here, but rather than just smiling and being as concerned about sex as you are about sports, we wrap it in layers, a sense of guilt hiding just behind the eroticism, and I think Japan’s “moe” is the result. The guilt, and the way you have to talk about it in these vague terms, are a result of all the public-morals laws Japan has.

  Just as evolution is supposed to be urged on by each new danger, the flower of each successive generation’s culture blooms in the soil laid down by the previous one. In that sense, there really isn’t such a thing as “free” cultu
re, totally bereft of the influences of politics and the environment.

  That was all true enough. And yet...

  “Matoba-san,” I said, still glaring at the bureaucrat. “I don’t want to imagine this is true, but...”

  “Hm?”

  “That terrorist incident...”

  “Oh! No, heavens no.” Matoba-san shook his head. “We wouldn’t do such a thing. Although we did let the situation go ahead.”

  “What?!”

  I felt all the hair on my body stand on end. I couldn’t just let that remark pass.

  Ever since the terrorist attack by the “assembly of patriots,” most criticism in the Eldant Empire of our importing otaku culture and running our school had been suppressed. Alessio and his buddies had represented the most conservative of our critics, perhaps, but because he had seen fit to use violence, all those who objected to Japanese culture now risked being considered co-conspirators—traitors to their country, even.

  That was part of why things were going so well for our school.

  And now that I thought about it... Wasn’t the timing of all of it just a little too convenient? That was what had prompted my question. I couldn’t believe they would really...

  “I’d appreciate if you could keep calm,” Matoba-san said. “It’s not as if we knew for certain. Our information-gathering abilities here don’t amount to much. We simply had an inkling. Our own world provides plenty of examples showing that there will always be those who resist cultural invasion.”

  I waited a long time before I answered. “Why didn’t you warn the Eldant Empire, then?”

  “If we’d done that, they would have dealt with everything themselves, wouldn’t they?” He smiled as if wondering how I could ask such a ridiculous question. “That incident established that we can and do intervene in Eldant’s domestic matters. With that precedent in place, it will be easier to expand the JSDF’s activities and operations in the future.”

  I stood in shocked silence. Even I hadn’t imagined they were thinking that far ahead, but it made sense.

  “This country has a superb military of its own,” Matoba-san said. “But strictly speaking, they have nothing akin to what we would call a police force in our world. Naturally, the army will capture criminals and chase away bandits if they’re specifically requested to do so, but they remain principally a military force. If and when a war breaks out, they’ll have no more time to attend to the petty concerns of the citizens, and a wave of violence and looting will be the result.”

  If and when a war breaks out...? Wasn’t the Eldant Empire already constantly engaged in border skirmishes with the neighboring nations? That could only mean...

  “That’s where we come in. We offer to bring over police patrol officers. The Eldant side, seeking any port in the storm of war, will accept. And when our officers’ duties become official, the Japanese government will have that much more say in how things are done here.”

  I was speechless. This was more than taking advantage of your opponent’s weakness—this was deliberately creating a weakness.

  “H-Have you left no sense of decency, sir?!” I demanded.

  “I confess, it hurts me to hear that,” Matoba-san said, the arch of his eyebrows falling slightly. “But this decision comes from over my head.”

  “Over your head?! Oooh! This is why I hate bureaucrats!”

  “All our hands are tied.” Matoba-san shrugged. “And yet you’ve deduced all this, but missed the real point.”

  “Huh...?”

  I thought I saw something dark pass over Matoba-san’s otherwise relaxed countenance, and it spooked me. He wasn’t specifically trying to provoke me—but that made it all the more frightening, the way he talked about the bizarre as if it were ordinary.

  “You understand that these are state secrets, yes?” he said. “I believe we talked about that.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What I’m trying to say is, in the interest of preserving secrecy, any members of our staff who tried to interfere with the execution of our plans would almost certainly be... dealt with.”

  “‘Dealt with’?”

  He couldn’t mean...

  “Me. PFC Koganuma. And you, Shinichi-kun. If those above me decide that you lack the qualifications to be our pioneer here, you could well find that you disappear. Hadn’t you realized?” Chewing over his words, never quite enunciating, Matoba-san said, “Why do you think we brought someone like you—someone incapable of doing either great good or great harm—onto a project of utmost national secrecy?”

  He looked at me; I thought I saw pity in his eyes. It was the same look that self-proclaimed “average people” always give otaku. The pride of the majority over against a minority.

  “Was it because of your deep knowledge of otaku culture? Was it because we thought you would make such an excellent evangelist? Surely not. As I told you, the whole idea of using two-dimensional works as the primary vector of cultural infection was only ever an experiment to the people in charge. One that might go on only until they found a more effective method.”

  Yes... Yes, I remembered hearing that. But still...

  “Do you know why I chose you?” Matoba-san asked. “You fit the brief I was given by my superiors: someone who could be erased wholesale from our world without anyone really noticing.”

  He spoke so calmly, but I felt as if I had been punched in the gut.

  Chapter Four: The Melancholy of an Invader

  I sighed to myself.

  I was standing in Eldant Castle.

  It was the day for me to visit the royal residence, as I did once every three days, but to be perfectly honest, I hadn’t wanted to come out of my room. It was the first time I had felt this way in a long time—in fact, it was the very first time I’d felt this way since coming to the Eldant Empire.

  Normally, I would go to the school immediately after my visit to the castle, but today I just couldn’t summon the enthusiasm. Who knew there were days when teachers didn’t want to go to school, either? I thought back on my high school instructors with a twinge of sympathy.

  The attempt at recollection didn’t go well.

  Their faces were already all but lost to me in the mists of memory. Factoring in the year I’d been a shut-in, I hadn’t seen them for eighteen months now, so it was no surprise that I couldn’t remember them. My classmates, too, seemed oddly unreal to me, like characters in a story.

  Maybe it just went to show how important this half a year in the Eldant Empire had been to me. It loomed so large in my mind that that other world—the “real” one—seemed hazy by comparison.

  And yet, standing there in the castle courtyard with morning light streaming around me, I felt deeply weary. Since the conversation with Matoba-san, I had been doing my best to do some thinking. I had tried questioning Minori-san, too, and although it could take a little cajoling, she was mostly pretty open about things—maybe she figured it was too late to keep secrets now.

  It turned out, of course, that the Japanese government had always planned to invade this world, this place to which they were connected by a hyperspace wormhole. The first sniff they got of this “virgin land” smelled to them like profit. A veritable treasure trove.

  Take, for example, agrobiology, which has been such a topic of discussion lately. Basically, people realized that the bacteria and other plant and animal life-forms unique to specific geographical areas could help make a lot of money depending on how you used them. They could be good for farming, medicine, industry, and even military applications. As biotechnology developed, people started looking for more and more profitable genetic data, the grim hand of research reaching from the tops of the mountains to the bottoms of the seas.

  But as the riches these agrobiological resources could generate became clearer and clearer, the people who owned the land where those resources were found, to say nothing of the countries where that land was located, sought to assert ownership over those resources—right down to the
genetic data that could be gathered from them. The days of digging through the earth, hoping to find some new bacteria, were coming to an end.

  And just as the window was closing, what should appear but this world? The government officials were probably dancing for joy. The mere thought of what agrobiological resources might exist in a world like this, one totally separated from our own, was dizzying. It could be on the order of tens of thousands—it could be millions, or billions! And there was no one here who was trying to claim ownership of those resources—yet.

  They were there for the taking.

  Of course, agrobiology was hardly the only precedent here. Think of the Europeans buying the island of Manhattan from the natives for a swindler’s price. On the Eldant side of the hyperspace tunnel we were dealing with an effectively medieval level of cultural development, which made it easy to take advantage of the other party’s ignorance. For example, in a world without electricity, rare-earth metals were just rocks and dirt. (That was, of course, providing this world actually had any resources like that.)

  Anyway.

  The simplest way to bring this world, or at least the Eldant Empire, under Japanese control would be a military invasion. That, however, would have demanded deploying the JSDF.

  The real problem wasn’t legal qualms about Article 9 or whatever. It was that a military invasion would require a good deal of weaponry and manpower to be sent over here, and the wormhole was an awfully tight fit. Plus, if the government wasn’t careful, other countries would be apt to smell something fishy. America and China in particular weren’t likely to let such a thing pass unnoticed.

  Japan wasn’t exactly the world’s 500-pound gorilla. Once other governments got wind of what was going on, there was a good chance Japan’s priority and resource rights would be taken away. I mean, we’re talking about countries like America, which for all its fulminating about national autonomy was willing to throw its weight around in the Middle East to make sure its oil supplies were secure. They would find some reason to intervene here, too.