Carnifex

Yasukuni-Jinja , Tokyo, Japan, 14 August 2080

At night, the scene would have been lit well enough to read a book by the garish neon of the city. In the day things were better. One might even imagine oneself back in a purer, truer time. One could, that is, if not for the large groups on immigrants, many of them recent and few of them much assimilated, who came to the shrine to, in all too many cases, gawk and sneer.

The immigrants were not the only ones capable of sneering. Watanabe Ishihara, for example, sneered at two groups in alternation. The first was Chinese, immigrants from the mainland. The second was Korean, and conversed in Korean, by the simple and elegant torii, or Shinto gate, that led to the shrine.

His companion, Shintaro Soichi, caught the sneers and corrected, "Despise the Chinese if you want, Ish. After all, they despise us as much as we despise them, and perhaps more. But the Koreans are a different story. There are almost twenty-two thousand of them here, our illustrious fallen eirei, our heroic spirits, as much as theirs. They have an arguable right to be here. Maybe they have an inarguable right to be here."

Watanabe looked down, shamefacedly. Of course Soichi was right. It was just that, "I resent that we have lost, that we are dying out, that everything for which our ancestors strove will belong to those who come to replace us. But, the Koreans, at least, are welcome. Mostly."

"And the Taiwanese?"

"Oh, all right. Them, too."

* * *

Like the rest of the industrialized world, and, to a lesser degree, even much of the non-industrialized world, Japan had seen a precipitous drop in population coupled with a frightening increase in the age of that population and a terrifying decrease in the percentage of that population still working.

Things were never as bad as the doom mongers had predicted, of course. Things never could become as bad as they predicted. Even so, they were bad enough. What helped Japan out more than anything was that their old folks were, generally speaking, willing to work until they were carried feet first out of their offices and factories.

This, however, only delayed the inevitable. There came a time when, despite the best will in the world, the older ones simply couldn't work anymore and had to be supported. And with so few young being born, the burden became too great. Japan, like Europe, had had no choice but to permit large-scale immigration. Too, like Europe, Japan couldn't assimilate them.

* * *

"We must take it all with us, when we leave," Soichi said, his gaze sweeping across the expanse of the shrine. "There will be none left behind to pray to the spirits of our eirei."

"In principle, I agree, Watanabe shrugged. 'But we can fit five thousand colonists? Ten thousand? Maybe twenty thousand, for all this weight of wood and stone and bronze."

"We must take . . . "

"All," Watanabe supplied. "I suppose you're right there, too. And the sakura?"

"Cuttings, and perhaps a few trees. And then there are the living national treasures . . . "

"A fair sampling will come," Watanabe said, "As will a prospective Son of Heaven."

"Who?" Soichi asked,

"Higashikuni . . . "

"Oh, damn. Not that branch."

"Best I could do. Besides, what difference that his multi-great grandfather was screwing some French whore?"