Battle Royale

"Come on, it's so obvious." Shogo smiled a little, but his eyes glimmered fiercely all of a sudden. "I was going to tear up this fucked up country, this country that tosses us into this fucked up game."

Watching Shogo's lips tremble in anger, Shuya thought, he's just like me. He wants to bring down these assholes in charge of this game, these assholes who won't think twice about making us play this fucked up game of musical chairs, this game of mutual fear and loathing. He wants to send them to hell just like me.

Or maybe...Shogo mentioned in passing he'd lost his friends early on, but I bet he lost someone equally important as Yoshitoki was to me.

Shuya thought of asking him about this, but didn't.

Instead he asked, "You said you'd done a lot of studying...so that was for this purpose?"

Shogo nodded, "That's right. I would have done something against this country eventually."

"Like what?"

Shogo only grimaced. "I wonder." He shook his head. "It's not so easy bringing down a system that's already built up. But I would have done something. Well no, I'm still going to. That's why I have to survive this time too."

Shuya looked down at the revolver and looked up. Another question had occurred to him.

"Can you tell me something?"

"What?"

"What's the purpose of this game? How could this serve any useful purpose?"

Shogo's eyes widened...but then he looked down and began to chuckle. He found it funny. Then he finally said, "There is no purpose."

Noriko raised her voice. "But they insist it has some military purpose."

Shogo kept on smiling and shook his head. "That's just crazy nonsense. Of course this whole country's insane, so maybe it's completely rational."

Shuya felt a rush of anger once again as he spoke, "Then how could this go on for so long?"

"That's easy. Because there's no one speaking out against it. That's why it's still going on."

Seeing how Shuya and Noriko were at a loss for words, Shogo added, "Look, this country's run by a bunch of idiot bureaucrats. In fact you have to be an idiot to be a bureaucrat. My guess is that when this lovely game was first proposed—some crazy military strategist probably came up with it—there was no opposition. You don't want to stir things up by questioning the specialists. And it's terribly difficult to end something that's already been established. You interfere, and you're out of a job. No, worse yet, you might be sent to a forced labor camp for ideological deviation. Even if everyone were against it, no one could say it out loud. That's why nothing changes. There are a lot of screwed up things in this country but they all boil down to the same thing—fascism."

Shogo looked at Noriko and Shuya. He added, "You two, and the same applies to me, we can't say anything. Even if you think something's wrong, your life is too precious to risk it by protesting, right?"

Shuya couldn't say anything back. His hot flash of anger all of a sudden went cold.

"It's shameful," Noriko said.

Shuya looked at Noriko. Noriko looked down sadly. He agreed. He felt the same way.

"Did you know there was a country called the South Korean People's Republic?" Shogo asked. Shuya looked at Shogo, who was staring at a pink azalea flower on a tree branch right in front of them.

It seemed irrelevant, but Shuya answered anyway, "Yeah, it was the southern half of the current Democratic Nation of the Korean Peninsula, right?"

You could learn about what was known as the South Korean People's Republic and the Democratic Nation of the Korean Peninsula—and the civil strife between the two Korean nations immediately west of the Republic of Greater East Asia's inland sea—in a textbook: "Although our relations with SKPR were cordial, due to conspiracies concocted by the imperialists of the United States and the DNKP, the SKPR was annexed by the DNKP." (Of course, following this explanation, the summary would continue, "Our nation must immediately oust the Korean Peninsula imperialists and annex this country not only for the freedom and democracy of the Korean people, but in order to progress towards our goal in attaining the co-existence of Greater East Asia peoples."

"That's right," Shogo nodded. "That country was just like ours. An oppressive government and dictator, ideological propaganda, isolationism, and information control. And support for snitching. It failed though after forty years. But the Republic of Greater East Asia is doing quite well. Why do you think that is?"

Shuya thought about it. He hadn't really given it much thought, but the textbooks explained South Korea's defeat as "a cunning conspiracy instigated by the imperialists including the American imperialists" (The vocabulary employed in these textbook explanations was beyond junior high level.) But then why was the current Greater East Asia still prosperous? Of course the SKPR was geographically located right next to the DNKP but...

He shook his head. "I don't know."

Shogo looked at Shuya and nodded. "First of all, it's a question of balance."

"Balance?"