Tenno Heika Komei: The Unbalancing Of The Universe And The Invasion Of Most-Sacred Nippon

From the very instant of my birth in the city of Kyoto on the twenty second day of the seventh month of the Western year eighteen thirty-one A.D., I knew that the world was very, very wrong. While I still felt safe, warm and maintained by the aura of Nippon (or Japan), it was as if I was still in the womb, in a fashion- with a small pocket of comfort and, for lack of a better term, rightness- but just outside of this zone, just beyond a thin membrane was a tide of toxicity just waiting to crash down upon us and poison our very souls.

You may doubt that I could sense the wrongness of the universe in my first instant in the world, but I knew. Nippon told me.

From the day the divine sun goddess Amaterasu had blessed Nippon by making her great-grandson Jimmu the first Emperor, the land was good, the samurai did battle and honor reigned supreme. The land of the rising sun was complete and perfect under heaven. Then came the gaijin.

The word "gaijin" is often misinterpreted as meaning, "foreigner" or "barbarian". It is thought in most circles to be an insult, which it is, though some who have embraced the West foolishly believe it to be complementary. Gaijin means: "outside person", and never has there been a more perfect definition.

The invasion came on the twenty-first day of the seventh month of the Western year eighteen thirty-one A.D. Before this day there was only Nippon. Look back through history before this date and see how few real interactions there were with the rest of the world. How many tsunamis and earthquakes and natural disasters occurred that prevented the gaijin from having a significant impact on Nippon.

This is because before the year eighteen thirty-one A.D., there was no outside world.

There was only Nippon and her people and her divine Emperor, Shogun at his side. Then something changed, and the rest of the world suddenly, magically appeared.

The West (the term is used for familiarity's sake. For our purposes it is defined as, "that which is not Nippon") suddenly was vomited forth upon us, and we have been mystified, horrified and repulsed ever since.

A day after the invasion, Nippon gave birth to me to champion her in response. Nippon lavished blessings upon me, granting me long life, vitality and resources, and to my eternal shame it has not been nearly enough.

I attempted to warn my subjects time and again against the menace of the gaijin, but always the weakest of them have been seduced by the promise of an easier life that their clever contraptions could provide.

"But Emperor," My worthless Generals would whine. "Their guns would make our warriors so much better. It would allow them to defeat our enemies at range so much easier than with bows." Easier. Has any warrior ever been made better by walking an easy road? Nippon is Nippon because of its hardships. Our Samurai were supreme because while their choices were often the most simple, their paths they walked were hard.

At every turn we were seduced by the West, given promises and assurances that with every new adoption and integration into our lives that life would be easier. As easy as drowning. As easy as surrender.

In the Western year eighteen sixty-three A.D. I issued the Joi Chokumei, or the "Order To Expel Barbarians", but by that point even my Shogun had been enthralled by the outlanders, and while he paid lip service to the decree, by and large he chose not to enforce it. It was at this point that I meditated upon my failure as Emperor and came to the conclusion that I would be more effective operating from a position of secrecy.

The merchants were replacing the samurai as the dominant force in Japan, therefore I would attempt to improvise and influence the world economically as the power behind the throne. I steadily and covertly began hiding assets and informing my most trusted clans, the Yoshidas and the Tanakas that I would soon fake my own death, which I did in the Western year eighteen sixty-seven A.D., obfuscating the details of my demise with such vigor that to this day historians still argue whether I died of smallpox or poison.

After I assumed the identity of Lord Yamamoto, I remained in hiding, created the Bengosha Company (Defender, in English) and set about preserving Nippon from the invaders at all costs. Despite my abhorrence of the outside world, I realized early on that I required more information about the West. We needed to know our enemy, but in every instance I was rebuffed.

We Japanese have always been terrified of the sea. We take to the water only as a last resort, and even then cling to shore as a child to its mother's leg. I would send out one spy ship after another to all the corners of the newly-deformed world, but always my loyal Samurai would fail to ever reach their intended destinations. It was only years later that I discovered the reason why: the kujira. The whales.

They surrounded my ships and sang their song, and my men would simply be gone. Over and over the kujira turned my spy navy into a ghost fleet. Finally I resorted to employing a gaijin spy so as to attempt to fool the kujira, but they even attacked his vessel in the Western year eighteen seventy-two A.D., banishing him forever from the Earth and leaving his ship the Mary Celeste adrift, a mystery to all in the world but myself.

Attempting to take the battle to them, I turned my resources toward their destruction, building a line of ships and encouraging whaling at every turn to attempt to at the very least thin their numbers, but again the gaijin exerted pressure, condemning us on "moral" grounds until the feeblest of us whined and begged and brought the defense of our shores to a halt.

It was then that I began to suspect that the invasion of Nippon was not some random occurrence or a mere quirk of a perverted and savage universe, but was instead being instigated by an insidious, ruthless intelligence.

Over the next half-century, I attempted to defend Nippon from the gaijin, but at every juncture I failed. Always the promise of an easier life beguiled my people and made them weak; the lure of greed and luxury overcoming the harsh realities of duty and honor. During this time I fought a war of attrition and slowly lost.

Finally I decided that the Samurai were never meant to fight a war of attrition, much less win one. The Samurai excelled in wars of blood and steel and winner-take-all, so from behind the scenes I created and nurtured an imperialist movement, a hearkening back to the days of yore where honor ruled Nippon. I guided the hand of my adopted great-grandson, Admiral Yamamoto as he planned his attack on the West and I cheered as their boats sank to the bottom of the Hawaiian reefs.

It was war, and amid the blood and the carnage and the sacrifice and the glory, my people had rediscovered who they were. While the odds were steep and victory over the gaijin was far from assured, we had reclaimed our souls.

Then came the fire.

If it had been but one of our cities, we would have surrendered- if they had given us the time- but they had constructed two bombs, so that is what they used. With one of our beloved cities murdered, we would have, to our shame, given up, but we would still have eyed our enemy with the sullen glare of one who would rise once more from the ashes. But two? Two broke us. Nagasaki did more than end the war, it ended who we were. It shattered our national soul, and from then we have been a terminal patient steadily bleeding out.

The West did what it almost always does after it destroys a people: it helped. MacArthur came and rebuilt our cities; they provided us with new facilities and new technology and new ideas and they replaced our bow with a healthy handshake. They made our lives so very much easier.

They killed us with kindness.

It was only after the war, after the lines of communication opened with the gaijin that I received enough information to put a name to my enemy, to the one who had somehow caused the invasion of my world and sought to conquer us absolutely: the Magician.

We fought our unwinnable war as best we could in the intervening years, and then in the Western year nineteen hundred and ninety A.D., my vassal Shigekazu Yoshida informed me of his new plan to create a deadly virus that would, at best, defeat our enemy, and at worst allow us to end the conquest, destroy our enemy and allow Nippon an honorable death. His plan was to work to formulate this virus and release it simultaneously on every continent, annihilating all human life outside of Japan. The island nature of our Empire would make it a simple matter to shut down our borders and forbid any travel even before we had released the virus, keeping the populace safe from harm, though should Yoshida's new "Calicivirus" somehow find its way onto our shores, at least we would die on our terms, not the Magician's.

It was then that I made a decision that haunts me to this day: I said no. Despite all that had been done to us, despite all that was at stake, I saw the human cost and deemed it too brutal and horrible a plan to carry out. Was I wrong? Should I have had the fortitude and will to annihilate all human life in the world? That is for history to decide, for whatever history is worth.

I do know that before the year of my birth, history means nothing. The Magician can shift the dates of events at will, changing important "facts" on a whim. And why? Because they never happened. For all intents and purposes, before the Western year eighteen thirty-one, there was only Nippon, the rest of what we now call "the world" simply did not exist.

Shigekazu Yoshida and his friend and assistant Tanaka disobeyed me. Yoshida, seeking first to understand the dispersal and infection pattern of the virus, turned to the Australian government to fund the Wardang Island project, a scientific endeavor they imagined would control their exploding rabbit population. Then, once he had collected his data Yoshida moved on to America, where he exploited the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta for their archives of viruses, attempting to tailor his "Human Calicivirus" until it was perfected.

It was at this point where Yoshida simply ran out of money, as I had long-since refused to aid him, and it was here were one of the Magician's own servants, King Leopold I of Belgium discovered his work and betrayed his own master to assist him. Hoping that if he were to funnel the funds to Yoshida through his own descendant his treason would remain undiscovered by his master, Leopold provided millions and the virus was completed.

Of course, at the very instant of victory, the Magician bore down on Yoshida and murdered him, the virus later destroyed by my now-fellow archivists.

Now, at last, the Magician is coming. I can feel it in my very soul. He rides the waves accompanied by his vile minions, escorted by his fleet of kujira. He is coming here: to my childhood home, to my castle where no gaijin has ever set foot, and here will take place the final battle to preserve Nippon. He will attempt to gain entry to our most sacred shrine deep in the heart of the castle and perform his magic, his trick, ending our world.

We will stop him. We will destroy him once and for all.

So swears Tenno Heika Komei, one hundred and twenty-first Emperor of Nippon.

Josh: Komei

Mary, Kisho Yoshida and I rode in a stretch limousine, following the Yoshida brothers' car to the outskirts of the city. Outside our car windows the sleek skyscrapers of Kyoto were replaced by rural housing and then by the beautiful rolling trees and hills of the Japanese countryside.

As we drove, Mary and I sat in the rear seat with Kisho facing us, Yoshida never taking his eyes from his PDA as we rolled along. As the sun went down over the hills, Mary placed her head on my shoulder and whispered, smiling, "Back in the office? What you did? That was very sexy."

I smiled back at her and was about to reply when Yoshida pulled out his phone, opened it up and pointed it at us. Mary scowled. "What are you doing? Are you videotaping us?" Yoshida made no reply. Her scowl deepened. "You think we're going to have sex right here?" He shrugged, closed the phone and put it back in his pocket, picking the PDA back up again and ignoring us once more.

As Mary glared at him with a combination of disbelief and loathing, I gazed back out the window and murmured, "We should probably get some new friends."

"Ya think?"

The rest of the trip was a touch frosty, and we rode in silence until the cars arrived at a large, wooden gate, with twin rows of lanterns hung on posts on either side of a gravel driveway leading across a bridge and up a small hill.

In no time we'd reached the top, and when the car door was opened for us we found ourselves standing before an actual, medieval-style Japanese castle, with torches mounted alongside enormous, dark, brass-bound, wooden doors. In the darkness it was difficult to make out just how large the castle was, but looking up I could see a significant portion of the sky blotted out by the structure.

I began to walk toward the doors, but the Yoshida brothers' assistant sidled up to me from the other limo and informed me in no uncertain terms that I was forbidden to enter the castle. He and the brothers then ushered us down a path running alongside the gigantic stone and wood structure to a pavilion in a clearing in the back. As we approached I could hear the sound of music- one of those Japanese guitar-things I never knew the name of was being plucked one string at a time in its distinctive, quavering style.

Walking into the pavilion was like strolling into the past. It was brightly lit with lanterns and decorated with red and gold banners (actual design, below), and everyone there was dressed in kimonos, with not a hint of anything modern or technological on display. There was a lovely young Japanese woman on our right playing the shamisen (the weird guitar-thing. Kisho filled me in later), along with a half-dozen men and women sitting on mats and talking quietly amongst themselves. At the end of the room in a clear position of "boss" was an elderly Japanese gentleman, his silk kimono covered with a long, opulent, golden robe that spread out behind him like a fan. To his left stood a young man in his early twenties with just the hint of a smile on his face, reading to him from a small black book. Kisho whispered that the servant's name was Fukimitsu. To the elderly man's right was the most muscular Japanese man I had ever seen, with the mass of a sumo wrestler but without the fat. His name was Ota, according to Kisho. Both of the men standing were holding curved, long canes which were obviously swords in very thin disguise.

As we stepped into the area, led by the Yoshidas, the two brothers actually went to their knees and then bowed so far their foreheads touched the floor. I glanced over at Kisho to see that he was doing the same thing, so Mary and I followed suit.

While we were bowing, Kisho whispered, "It is Yamamoto-Sama. Lord Yamamoto is President and C.E.O. of the Bengosha Corporation." His expression was deferential verging on terrified. He hissed, "Please, please, please be respectful. Do not act like, uh... like you do."

Finally we rose, and the Yoshida brothers spoke in Japanese to Yamamoto for a minute before he nodded and waved us forward to stand in front of him. For an elderly man, Yamamoto's eyes were white and clear, and he gave no impression of frailty whatsoever. As we approached, the sumo guy Ota's knuckles went white on the handle of his sword cane, and it was then that I decided to adopt an immediate and binding "no sudden moves" policy.

Yamamoto cleared his throat and spoke a few words of Japanese to Fukimitsu- the smiling man with the book on his left- and he bowed, lifted up the book and began to read aloud in perfect English:


"Frustrated once again by all our efforts, I retreated to the bar just off the base, hoping that some time away from the project would clear my head. The bar was mostly empty as usual- no surprise given its combination of isolated locale and lack of hygiene.

A middle-aged man in a white suit sitting two stools down ordered another whiskey and drank it in a single gulp, sighing with a smile at the empty glass as he put it down on the bar. He turned to me and commented in a southern drawl, 'Whiskey didn't used to be the drink of the world, my friend. Oh, no. Back in 1831, Aeneas Coffey invented the Coffey still, which produced a far more drinkable whiskey. Later that century, by a remarkable confluence of events, the phylloxera beetle annihilated France's vineyards, and in just a few years there was an enormous shortage of wine and brandy. Then the Scots discovered marketing, and the rest is history. Out with the old, in with the new, so they say.' He grinned at me with yellow teeth as he lit a cigarette and rose from his chair, picking up a thin briefcase as he got up.

I thought he was turning to go, but instead he stepped closer, gestured at the stool next to mine and asked 'May I?', sitting down without waiting for my reply. He ordered another whiskey and took a gulp as he stared straight ahead, gazing at himself in the mirror behind the bar. He looked wistful as he spoke, his voice barely louder than a whisper, 'The fire... the plumes of flame that will jet up into the sky... it was mankind's first discovery and you want to talk about beginner's luck! There is nothing so pure, hypnotic and lovely as a fire, and you will make the greatest of them all.

'Every sweet family home turned to charred ash in an instant, their carefully tended gardens scorched down to the bare earth... and the people! Mothers incinerated as they instinctively but futilely attempt to turn and shield their tiny babies... little boys and girls, their hair catching fire as they play in the street, running like a parade of mad matchsticks and screaming for help that will never come. Sweet fire. How I do admire you, sir.'

The man raised his glass in a toast and drank the rest as I gaped at him, horrified, and demanded to know what in God's name he was going on about. Then as I told him to get away and leave me alone, he turned to look at me, the intensity of his gaze stopping me in mid-sentence. 'Hit a bit of a snag, have we? This might be of some small service.' The man reached down within his briefcase and pulled out a file folder, laying it carefully down on the bar in front of me. I opened it, my curiosity getting the better of me, and I sat stunned as I saw laid out in very clear detail precisely how to solve every problem we'd come up against.

I looked up at the man then just as he was rising to go, asking if he knew what he had there, telling him (stupidly, against protocol, but I was just so damned amazed) that with that file we would be able to construct one by next year at the latest.

The man nodded and tossed a few bills on the bar in payment for his drinks. Suddenly I felt something run across my right ankle, and I looked down in time to see an enormous, black centipede run under the bar and out of sight. With a shiver I looked back at the man to see he was already at the door. He turned back to me before he left and said, 'One? The Japanese Emperor is an extraordinarily stubborn individual, with all due respect.' He gave me a wide, yellow smile that gave me a shiver worse than the centipede just had, then he winked and said, 'Better make two.'

After he'd gone I drove back to the base and read the file from cover to cover. Next year's date was stamped on every page.

And every word was in my own handwriting.

May God have mercy on my soul. 'I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.'"


Yamamoto cleared his throat once more and gestured to one of the women, who instantly rose and brought him a tray with a small cup of tea. He took a sip, and Fukimitsu said, "The diary of Robert Oppenheimer, architect of the atomic bomb. Secret diary, or at least he believed it was." Yamamoto motioned for us to come and sit before him, and two of the servants shuffled mats over to the center of the room. We sat cross-legged and waited, saying nothing. He took another sip of tea, then another. We waited some more. This better be good, I thought to myself, biting my tongue.

It was.

He stared at us with those clear, calm eyes and spoke, Fukimitsu translating. "My lord says: when I was born I was given the name Hiro-no-Miya. I was the fourth son of Emperor Ninko of Japan. When my father died I was proclaimed the one hundred twenty-first, divine, sovereign Emperor, and following what was believed to be my death, was posthumously named Emperor Komei. I am one hundred and seventy-seven years old.

"Tell me everything that you know of the Magician."