"I choose you - PIKASPEW!!!"
Jamie to 2 month old daughter Madeline,
shortly after being spat up upon...
_______________________________________________
Come and see the fanfics and food of
Bridget and Jamie Wilde!
wildeman@psn.net
http://www.psn.net/~wildeman/
-- Attached file included as plaintext by Listar --
-- File: RGTW-Remember.txt
-ONE-
The snow crunched noisily beneath the boots of Ranma Saotome,
the sound strangely audible against the hustle and bustle of Tokyo
Station. Steam curled from his lips as he trudged silently from the
train station and made his way towards the Imperial Palace. The
Babasaki Moat lay before him, its near frozen waters still and
darkly reflective of the leaden December sky.
He crossed over the moat and entered the Imperial Grounds.
The palace itself was open to the public today, one of only two
times in the year when this was so, as it was the Emperor's Birthday,
and the Imperial Couple would be available for viewing by their
devoted public. He would not be among them.
It wasn't out of malice or spite; he had another rendezvous to
make today. Frankly, he had never really thought much about the
Emperor before. Like most modern Japanese, the Emperor wasn't the
sort of the thing that interested him beyond a certain sense of
tradition.
He made his turn away from the throngs of curious and headed
for the East Garden, a place of heartbreaking color and beauty in
the early summer, but now cold and lifeless, and blanketed in snow.
The fountains were drained, and the trees stark against the white in
their denuded state.
What should have been a picturesque winter scene reminded him
of Korea, and a far grimmer tableaux.
Yasukuni Shrine was reached from the northern end of the
Imperial Grounds. He waited for a yellow bus to pass by before
crossing over a pedestrian bridge to stand before the first _torii,_
and the entrance to the park that abutted the shrine.
Unlike other _torii,_ this one was not brightly painted in
the familiar red-orange. This massive structure was made of steel,
cold and dark like the Babasaki Moat. A fitting monument to mark
the place he had come to visit.
There were few in the park, and even the famous white doves
seemed to have abandoned the place in search of warmer climes.
Ranma passed by the grim statue of Oomura Masujiro, clad in his
finest and carrying a sword. The stone looked old, *felt* old, and
suddenly Ranma bowed his head as if sharing that ancient burden.
The second _torii_ was smaller, and like its sibling dark
and sullen. Two small shops selling souveniers competed for the
few people who milled about. The only color present seemed to
belong to the bright rising sun flags offered by one of the shops.
The other, catering to birdseed sales for the vanished doves and
small scraps of parchment for prayer offerings, was the one Ranma
visited.
Two bundles of the Thousand Cranes fluttered from the sides
of the small shop, symbols of hope in a cold and lonely park. The
proprieter, an old man shrunken and hunched with age, nodded in
acknowledgment of him. He did not smile, merely bowing briefly and
giving Ranma a knowing look.
Ranma's eyes caught the old man's glance at his weathered
and worn fatigue jacket and understood. This was a comrade from
another time, from a war that, like his own, the people of Japan
preferred to forget. Ranma felt an odd pride at that, realizing
that with one look, he had found a man, a total stranger, that
understood what he had been thinking about all day.
He put a few coins on the counter and took a scrap of paper
in return. The man, his *brother,* gave him another nod and
ducked away to sip at his cooling cup of tea.
________________________________________________________________________
J. Austin Wilde and Fission Park Press proudly present:
RANMA GOES TO WAR: REMEMBER
by J. Austin Wilde
Based on a story idea by David Tatum
Fission Park Press
wildeman@psn.net
http://www.psn.net/~wildeman/
The characters and situation of Ranma 1/2
are the creation and property of Rumiko
Takahashi/KITTY TV/SHOGAKUKAN/VIZ VIDEO
________________________________________________________________________
-TWO-
The third _torii_ led to a gate, and into the shrine proper. Snow
covered the gate, though patches of green were visible in spots where
the wind had a freer hand. Cherry trees, their limbs bare, stood out
before the gate like grasping hands against the overcast sky. A flagpole
to Ranma's left rattled in the breeze, and the white with red circle
national ensign of his country fluttered crisply, its cracks and snaps
sharp against the silence.
As he passed through the gate he noted the Honden,
and looked at the scrap of parchment in his hand. Though the Honden
was the place for his offering, he suddenly felt that it would be
wrong to leave it there. Instead he turned to his left and proceeded
down a narrow path, away from the small clusters of people that had
gathered.
He almost missed the monument. It had been placed next to another
simple memorial for the members of Unit 731, a group claimed by some to
be war criminals, though Ranma had no idea what they had done. The Unit
731 Memorial didn't interest him any more than the Emperor's birthday;
he had come for *his* war memorial.
It wasn't very impressive, just a simple white marble monolith
inscribed with the characters for 'glory' and 'honor,' a small United
Nations flag, the Rising Sun flag, and the dates August 26, 1995 and
December 10, 1995. It mentioned the 3,307 Japanese soldiers, sailors,
and airmen who had died in combat, and the 498 civilians killed by
North Korean ballistic missile and submarine attacks. The entire
memorial was scarcely over a meter tall.
Hiroshi, his chum from Furinkan High, had been one of those
unlucky 3,307. A sniper's bullet had torn his throat apart before
Ranma's eyes, and the young man had died moments later in his arms.
The coppery smell of blood came to him, and he looked down at his
hands expecting them to be smeared with his friend's gore. To his
surprise, they were clean, but the smell would not go away, nor the
sight in his mind of the brilliantly white fragments of living bone
and bloody carnage of that single bullet strike.
Hiroshi had died, had been snuffed out. Why? For what?
Ultimately, that was the question Japan asked of its thousands of
dead. It was a question with no easy answers. Many argued that despite
the terrorist-style attack on its major cities with ballistic missiles,
the war in Korea was none of Japan's business. It was South Korea and
the United States' problem; let them fight and die to settle it. Better
to forget about Japanese involvement and move on. There was a recession
going on, and the banks were in trouble. There were more important
matters than someone else's war.
If that was true, and the lack of public approval for the war and
its veterans seemed to confirm it, then Hiroshi and over three thousand
other young men had died for nothing. Hiroshi had been, in effect,
*wasted.* Better that he had never existed, than to be a point of
national contention and guilt.
-THREE-
A young man and a woman approached the monument. Ranma could tell
by the scars on his face, and the dark glasses that hid the vacant
sockets where there should have been eyes, that the man was Daisuke.
The girl reminded Ranma of Daisuke's sister, Hanae. She steadied him
along the path that he could not see, and blithely past the man he had
once known.
"It's right here, brother," she told him quietly.
Ranma watched Daisuke lean over the cold marble and feel the
inscription with his hands. He watched the man's face fall, as if
expecting there to be more to the monument than what his hands told
him. It had only been a year, but the scars and the solemn, almost
vacant, look of his friend had aged him considerably.
He opened his mouth to speak, but words did not come. What could
he say to a man whose life was already over, even if he still lived
and breathed?
Daisuke had no future. His disfigurement earned him a permanent
disability pension, so he would never need to work to keep from going
hungry and living in the street, but it also excluded him from any
reasonable marriage prospects, killed his chances to go to a good
college and therefore get a good job, and left his face a grisly
reminder to the country that had sacrificed him of the war they
wanted to forget.
Ranma considered himself responsible for Daisuke's fate. When
he had called for a medic on that muddy bloody hill, then carried him
over several kilometers against enemy fire to help, he had condemned
Daisuke to this unlife. He stayed silent, and with a curious look from
Hanae, the two departed the monument none the wiser. In moments they
were obscured by the trunks of the cherry trees, and Ranma began to
feel his face burning with shame.
"Daisuke, wait!" he called.
The two stopped. Daisuke turned around, and stared blankly in
the general direction of Ranma.
"Saotome?"
"Yeah!"
"It's good to hear your voice," Daisuke said, and then continued
on his way.
Ranma watched him go, then fell on his knees, his face buried in
his hands.
-FOUR-
A man Ranma's age wearing a dark blue suit approached. Ranma
jumped to his feet guiltily, and the man passed him and the memorial
by. The man had a look equally guilty on his face, and a Korean
Campaign medal clutched in his hand. The man flung the medal at the
monument without even looking back, and the brightly colored
decoration clattered against the cold white marble to fall upon
the thin frost at its base.
Ranma clenched his fists tight, but did not say anything.
"Forget him," a voice snarled.
Ranma turned, and saw Ryouga Hibiki standing there. Akari stood
pensively by his side. Behind them were Hikaru Gosunkugi and Tatewaki
Kuno.
Gosunkugi's right arm hung limply at his side. The nerve damage
caused by the bullet that had wounded him was too much to overcome
with therapy. His eyes seemed just as sunken as Ranma remembered,
though he had a smile on his pale face.
Tatewaki Kuno affected his usual strut, his katana on his hip.
He gave Ranma an indulgent nod and placed a small rising sun flag
at the monument.
"Greetings, Saotome," Kuno announced formally, superiority
clear in his voice.
"Hello, Saotome," Gosunkugi added a bit friendlier.
"What brings you all here," Ranma called back. With the actual
anniversary of the war taking place almost two weeks ago, he expected
to be alone.
"My duties are twofold this day," Kuno replied. "It is right and
just as a scion of a great samurai house that I attend upon the
Emperor's birthday. It also happens that the family swordsmith keeps
shop within the grounds of Yasukuni - thus I pay my respects whilst I
am in the area." He inclined his head towards Ranma. "And thou,
Saotome?"
"Same as you," Ranma said. "Just paying my respects."
"It seems we've got a real reunion going on," Gosunkugi noted.
"Something like that," Ranma agreed. "So why are you here,
Ryouga?"
"Out of duty," he replied. "How about you?"
Ranma gestured to the monument, secluded in an out of the way
portion of the shrine.
"To remember. Someone has to."
Ryouga did not reply. Instead, he stepped over to the monument
and read its meager inscription for the first time.
"I never wanted to be a part of it," he said, partly to himself
and partly to Ranma and Akari.
"You think I did?" Ranma replied.
Ryouga frowned. "Shut up, Ranma. I'm here to put it all behind
me. To say good-bye to the guys we lost, and to a stupid useless war,
and move on."
Now it was Ranma's turn to frown. His fists crackled at his
sides.
"Take it back, Ryouga," he menaced.
"Indeed," Kuno agreed, incensed at the idea that his noble
victory over the heathen North Koreans could be considered so poorly.
Ryouga faced them both with a stern look.
"Take *what* back?" he demanded.
"It wasn't a useless war," Ranma said in a low voice.
"What good was it then?"
"I ain't saying it was a good thing, I hated it just as much as
you did, but you can't go on saying it was useless." He cast an
accusing finger at Ryouga. "Was what we did in that mountain useless?
We stopped Tokyo from getting annihilated!"
"You can't go using that. It could have been someone else that
went!" Ryouga replied angrily, sidestepping Ranma's argument. "The
whole point is that we didn't belong there in the first place!"
"Then why did you go?" Ranma pressed. "You volunteered to go
with Yoshida, same as me and Hiro! Even Kuno would have gone if he
wasn't bed-ridden at the time. You could have gone home right then
and there, been discharged and out."
Akari, who continued to know almost nothing about what Ryouga
had done during the war, stood still and watched the two.
Ryouga closed his eyes. "You know why I went. But it changes
nothing. We didn't belong there. Since we were already involved, I
did what I had to."
Ranma blew out his breath in a blast of steam.
"If you say the war was useless, then you say that all those
guys we knew - Sergeant Yoshida, Kenjiro, Okuda, Nomura, Kishiro,
Hideo, Fukuda, all of them right down to Hiroshi - they all died
for nothing. And you say that what happened to Daisuke, the wounds
we suffered, the pain we felt, all of that was for nothing...
Is that what you want to say, Ryouga?"
Ryouga lowered his gaze to the snow.
"Come on, Ryouga," Ranma said at length. "There's one more
place we have to go."
The five of them continued on to the Statue of the Mother, a
stone statue of a woman, bearing a striking resemblence to Ranma's
own mother, carrying an infant, and attending to two older children
at her sides.
Ranma placed his prayer offering at the base of the statue.
The statue was dedicated to the women who lost husbands to war and
continued on with their lives, raising their children alone. Hiroshi
never had a girlfriend. There was no wife to grieve for him or to
carry on. There was only Ranma, and he would always remember.
THE END
Author's Notes:
1. It's Veteran's Day once again. David Tatum approached me with an
idea for a Ranma Goes to War / Veteran's Day story last year, with
the caveat that he might never get around to writing it. The moment
felt right, so I just decided to run with it. The story itself takes
place shortly before the Epilogue of "Chasing the Wind," thus Hiro
Ohata is not available to appear.
2. In any nation founded on democratic principles there must be those
who are willing to stand before a threat to that principle and face it,
even if to do so will mean their death or dismemberment. Literally
millions of men and women have already done so in this century, and
many hundreds of thousands have paid that ultimate price. The ability
to speak one's mind without fear of reprisal, to live safe in one's
home, to live without fear itself, is NOT a right, no matter what a
piece of paper like the U.S. Constitution might say. Without men and
women willing to stand up time and time again for freedom, all these
things become priveleges, and all priveleges can be revoked with the
swipe of tyrant's hand. Those who have made a sacrifice for freedom,
even if it was only a few years of their life, should be honored and
remembered. They did it so that you could continue to enjoy your
'rights.'
In fact there are quite a few Vets on the Mailing List who might like
to hear from you, if only to say thanks.
3. Yasukuni Shrine could not have been described here without the
copious help of my wife B-ko, who not only visited the shrine, but
took lots of photographs for me to work from. Her translation of
the tour guide also helped immensely.
Free The Nukes!