Written By the Victors

[Salic]

Yoshio had always thought that there was something missing in his history class. All of the battles were won too flawlessly, the economy was always perfect, and the Dictator was always perfect with his decision-making, seemingly knowing every consequence of every action beforehand and making the perfect preparations to deal with them. While he certainly bought into it when he was younger, he had enough sense to know that something was wrong now. There was no man who was that perfect. No army could utterly defeat a foe so badly and take so few losses. And besides, if Japan had beaten America as thoroughly as they described, how could they still possibly be a threat? And if Japan was so much better than America in every way, then why as American music and American contraband so popular among the youth? Yoshio had never partaken in any of that himself, but it was so notable that it was impossible to ignore. If he was with any other teacher, Yoshio may have had to courage to ask why.

But with Mr. Okinori Ikeda, he knew that one misplaced question would probably end with him getting a one-way ticket to prison.

Mr. Ikeda had bought into everything the government fed him and was hungry enough to ask for more. He preached every word in his history lectures like he was receiving a vision from God that Japan was the promised land. To him, there were no other cultures. There was no other side of the story. Everything was black and white, and if someone didn't agree that Japan was the most superior nation on the planet, then he would accuse them of being degenerated by American influence and turned into a foreign agent who was eroding Japan's moral stability. In Yoshio's mind, his fanaticism made him more cut out for the Kempeitai rather than a high school teacher.

Today's lecture focused on Masanobu Tsuji, the man who had liberated Shingapōru from degenerate and imperialist Western powers. Yoshio rolled his eyes. Another day, another lecture about a completely infallible general who was capable of making no mistakes and utterly decimated any and all enemy resistance. Still, he dutifully took notes. Mr. Ikeda was not the kind of man to repeat anything to the class's slowpokes. Yoshio wrote quickly. His pencil jotted down everything Mr. Ikeda was saying, from the liberation of Malaya to the thrashing of the American armies and their Filipino puppets at Bataan to the pacification of Shingapōru. He waxed poetic about how the cowardly British defenders surrendered to an army of Japanese soldiers half their size, and how Tsuji's strategic genius enabled Shingapōru's liberation in just eight days, and how Tsuji's endorsement of the Battle Royale Act was key to its creation. Soon enough, though, class was finished, and Mr. Ikeda dismissed them from his classroom.

---

Later that night, Yoshio could hardly fall asleep. The image Mr. Ikeda had shown them of Tsuji was stuck within his mind. His eyes looked empty, his glasses doing nothing but framing the openings into the soulless husk on the blackboard. He swallowed thickly. It was the face of a man who had seen everything and was fazed by nothing, even the systematic slaughter of Japan's own children through the Program. He wondered how such a man could possibly be seen as a hero anywhere outside of Japan before realizing that was something of a treasonous thought. He stymied the the thought quickly, as if the Kempeitai had a new implement to detect whether or not someone was thinking out of line. Knowing the Kempeitai, though, they probably did.