Yasujiro was baffled. Everyone knew the stories of the founder of the Tsutsumi fortune. They had not been news for three thousand years. “What have I done to bring such anger down on my head?”
“You have done nothing,” said Hikari. “And my anger is not at you. My anger is at myself, because I also have done nothing. I speak of your family’s sins of ancient times because the only hope for the Yamato people is to remember all our sins of the past. But we forget. We are so rich now, we own so much, we build so much, that there is no project of any importance on any of the Hundred Worlds that does not have Yamato hands somewhere in it. Yet we forget the lessons of our ancestors.”
“I beg to learn from you, master.”
“Once long ago, when Japan was still struggling to enter the modern age, we let ourselves be ruled by our military. Soldiers were our masters, and they led us into an evil war, to conquer nations that had done us no wrong.”
“We paid for our crimes when atomic bombs fell on our islands.”
“Paid?” cried Aimaina. “What is to pay or not to pay? Are we suddenly Christians, who pay for sins? No. The Yamato way is not to pay for error, but to learn from it. We threw out the military and conquered the world with the excellence of our design and the reliability of our labor. The language of the Hundred Worlds may be based on English, but the money of the Hundred Worlds came originally from the yen.”
“But the Yamato people still buy and sell,” said Yasujiro. “We have not forgotten the lesson.”
“That was only half the lesson. The other half was: We will not make war.”
“But there is no Japanese fleet, no Japanese army.”
“That is the lie we tell ourselves to cover our crimes,” said Aimaina. “I had a visit two days ago from two strangers — mortal humans, but I know the god sent them. They rebuked me because it is the Necessarian school that provided the pivotal votes in the Starways Congress to send the Lusitania Fleet. A fleet whose sole purpose is to repeat the crime of Ender the Xenocide and destroy a world that harbors a frail species of raman who do no harm to anyone!”
Yasujiro quailed under the weight of Aimaina’s anger. “But master, what do I have to do with the military?”
“Yamato philosophers taught the theory that Yamato politicians acted upon. Japanese votes made the difference. This evil fleet must be stopped.”
“Nothing can be stopped today,” said Yasujiro. “The ansibles are all shut down, as are all the computer networks while the terrible all-eating virus is expelled from the system.”
“Tomorrow the ansibles will come back again,” said Aimaina. “And so tomorrow the shame of Japanese participation in xenocide must be averted.”
“Why do you come to me?” said Yasujiro. “I may bear the name of my great ancestor, but half the boys in my family are named Yasujiro or Yoshiaki or Seiji. I am master of the Tsutsumi holdings in Nagoya –”
“Don’t be modest. You are the Tsutsumi of the world of Divine Wind.”
“I am listened to in other cities,” said Yasujiro, “but the orders come from the family center on Honshu. And I have no political influence at all. If the problem is the Necessarians, talk to them!”
Aimaina sighed. “Oh, that would do no good. They would spend six months arguing about how to reconcile their new position with their old position, proving that they had not changed their minds after all, that their philosophy embraced the full 180-degree shift. And the politicians — they are committed. Even if the philosophers change their minds, it would be at least a political generation — three elections, the saying goes — before the new policy would be in effect. Thirty years! The Lusitania Fleet will have done all its evil before then.”
“Then what is there to do but despair and live in shame?” asked Yasujiro. “Unless you’re planning some futile and stupid gesture.” He grinned at his master, knowing that Aimaina would recognize the words he himself always used when denigrating the ancient practice of seppuku, ritual suicide, as something the Yamato spirit had left behind as a child leaves its diapers.