valmora: "Monty Python and the Holy Grail": King Arthur abusing a peasant, captioned "Help, help, I'm being repressed!" (repression)
[personal profile] valmora
a snippet on the end of wwii, in honor of pearl harbor day. pg-13, featuring cameos by satsuma and choshu (my japanese han otp), and the hetalia-canon characters belong to himaruya, not to me.

please do not wank.



All things end. They need not end well, for every fight must produce a loser.

Japan, spreading his fingers across the white sterility of the bandages on his leg, wonders if he will bleed through the gauze, make twin blots of red with tendrils seeping out –

He is not the empire on which no sun may set. He has lost, and he must yield, because he does not have the strength for anything else, now. That he is even lucid is a miracle.

Perhaps he is only dreaming in a morphine haze.

He felt his Emperor sign the unconditional surrender two days ago. He remembers holding Chōshū’s hand tightly as the pain came, as Chōshū whispered, We will be broken from you, and Satsuma laughed from his place by the door, said, Tell the boy what surrender means for our kind. Chōshū said, He knows; he has been with China, and the Philippines, and Malaya, and –

Look willing and remember the lube,
Satsuma said. And yield before he forces you.

So Japan will. He will let America touch him, reform his government and lie in his bed.

Japan can see what is coming. England is weakened in America’s shadow, and Russia has been made strong. If he must choose, he will choose to stand behind America, whose shoulders are broad enough for two, and who is capable of feeling guilt.

Guilt, Japan can use.

He reaches for the jar by the bedside and wonders if he will not profit by losing. If in yielding he will come closer to being accepted as a major power by the West, when no amount of diplomacy or empire in Asia could.



Did you know?
China was not the only country that suffered under Japanese imperialist expansion from 1930-1945, though it did suffer deeply.
The Japanese government set up official brothels for use by American GIs during the beginning of the Occupation to try to forestall rapes. The rank of the soldier determined the ethnicity of the prostitute he could hire. Most of the women had been brought to Japan from "colonized" nations such as Malaysia, China, Taiwan, and Korea (though this is not an inclusive list). High-ranking officers were "allowed" Japanese women.
When the brothels were banned, the number of rapes skyrocketed (not that there hadn't been any before).
Satsuma and Choshu were two Japanese feudal han whose sons ran much of the government behind the scenes from the Meiji Restoration into the 1920's and to a far lesser extent even after.
YOSHIDA Shigeru was a postwar prime minister of Japan who prioritized economic development and the exploitation of the Japanese relationship to the United States in a system known as the Yoshida Doctrine.


Date: 2009-12-07 04:55 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pargoletta.livejournal.com
An interesting choice, to mark Pearl Harbor day with a fic that shows Japan as the one injured.

Date: 2009-12-07 05:48 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] shadow-piper.livejournal.com
Tell the boy what surrender means for our kind.

Shiiiiiveries.

How difficult war is. The winner is not always the hero or agressor, the loser is not always the villian or complete victim.

Date: 2009-12-07 11:48 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] valmora.livejournal.com
...I don't see him that way? I apologize if it came across as like "lol American suffering means nothing". I view Japan's physical pain (the bomb, starvation) as very different from the mental manipulations I meant to allude to (the doctrine of "well, now that that spilled milk is rotting on the floor, let's rebuild using the same structure and people as we had before and go run the rest of East Asia economically. and now we can do it with American support because we're not Commies.").

If you see room in which I can make this attitude more explicit, I welcome your input. I understand that Hetalia fandom can touch on sensitive topics and I don't mean to cause offense.

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