The Power of Moe

by Ichiro Sakaki

  That seemed to imply the company’s real work was carried out elsewhere...

  “Very good. I’m going to go in the back and check some things on your resume, so please wait here. Oh, and you can help yourself to something from the drink machine.” Then Matoba-san took his papers and left the room.

  “I don’t get it,” I muttered, but just the same I gratefully did as Matoba-san said and went over to the drink machine. I set a paper cup in the machine and picked oolong tea. It dispensed the drink in the blink of an eye, and as I sipped my tea, I looked around again.

  There really wasn’t anything there. It was almost as if they wanted to be sure they could get out of there at any time.

  “This isn’t anything, like... shady, is it?”

  Just outside the window, I could see the Manseibashi police office. I still didn’t believe criminals would operate this close to the long arm of the law.

  I drained the rest of my tea as if to chase away my fears, then sat back down. When was Matoba-san going to come back? He’d said he was going to check a few things, so maybe he was trying to verify things I’d said in the interview or written on my resume? Were employers normally that thorough with entry-level applicants? I knew they sometimes did background checks if you wanted to become a civil servant or something, but...

  Maybe this was a civil service job? I vaguely remembered a few prime ministers back, someone had suggested an anime museum in Akiba. It was supposed to be part of a national policy promoting anime, this jewel of global entertainment. But it was another one of those plans that kind of missed the point because the guy who suggested it was just an administrator with no real interest in anime. But maybe some vestige of that idea had survived, and now they needed people who actually knew something about the medium to make it work.

  “Yeah, right.” If that were the case, I was sure they would have found a better way to advertise. Smiling at my own silly fantasy, I gave a big yawn—

  And that’s where my memory blacked out.

  Okay, flashback over. We’re back to the present now. Where I—

  “Whoaaa!”

  —was exclaiming in amazement. I stepped out the door and looked back at the building. It was a huge brick construct that filled my vision in every direction. In essence, a Western-style mansion.

  But it didn’t have the old-fashioned look so common in games and manga. Instead, it seemed oddly new. Of course, it wasn’t like a piece of set design—like you would see the seams if you looked too closely. It was there, all right, every inch of it, and it loomed over me with an overwhelming power.

  In other words, it was an honest-to-God mansion, and newly built to boot. I had gotten a pretty good sense of how big this building must be from the bedroom, and now that I was seeing it up close, I could tell how right I’d been. It was all too obvious that we weren’t in Akiba anymore, or even Japan.

  But honestly, it wasn’t the house that really surprised me.

  It was what was behind it.

  “It’s huge...!”

  It was an intimidating building so large that it was unmistakable even though it was obviously far away, less like a man-made object than like a feature of the terrain, like a mountain.

  “That’s the Holy Eldant castle,” Minori-san, standing next to me, said.

  Much like the house I’d woken up in, it had a strong flavor of Middle Ages Europe. There was a gate that looked wide enough for a whole herd of elephants to pass through, sturdy-looking ramparts, and plenty of what appeared to be observation and guard towers... In other words, pretty typical.

  But...

  “The castle has the same name as the empire. In other words, it’s where the Emperor lives. Allegedly, they excavated a mountain or something to build it—but I don’t know the details.”

  The castle was bigger than any piece of architecture I had ever seen in my life. Even the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, a template for a Demon King’s castle if there ever was one, looked puny compared to this. It was nothing beside this Eldant castle; even ignoring the height, it was wider and deeper than you could imagine. It wasn’t just that the castle was really tall or covered a lot of ground. It was straight-up big.

  Of course, you might see bigger structures in anime, manga, games, and light novels—you know, fiction—where they might be space fortresses the size of small moons or something. But I was seeing this with my own eyes, and it gave me goosebumps.

  At the “foot” of this mountain of a castle was a collection of other buildings of various sizes. They all looked like they were from medieval Europe, too, and several cobblestone streets ran among them like arteries. The mansion was well removed from them—in other words, on the outskirts of the castle town. The ground sloped gently in the direction of the castle, giving the feeling that I was looking down on the town.

  “It really looks just like a fantasy setting,” I breathed.

  “Doesn’t it, though?” Minori-san grinned.

  “Can I go explore the town?”

  “No fear, huh?” she said with a hint of admiration. “I was worried you might just shut yourself up in this house and never come out. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that this isn’t your run-of-the-mill foreign country. It’s another world. An alternate universe. You understand that?”

  “Look, not to brag,” I said, a smile tugging on my lips, “but this is meat and drink to me.”

  I was one serious otaku. Fantasy worlds? I’d seen ’em in everything from games to anime and manga, even light novels. The only difference was that now it was in three dimensions instead of two. The realism had leveled up, you might say. I practically felt like I already knew the place, like I was finally coming home.

  Stay shut up in that house? Hardly.

  “Well, I admit I panicked a little when I saw that dragon earlier.”

  “That’s understandable,” Minori-san said.

  If I looked really hard, I could see two or three dragon-like shapes in the sky above the castle. Apparently in this world, you could ride dragons like horses. The one I’d seen earlier had had some kind of saddle on its neck, too.

  “Strictly speaking, what you saw earlier was a wyvern,” Minori-san said. “Actual live dragons are a lot bigger and a lot more violent.”

  “Fantasy down to the bones.”

  Dragons and wyverns. At this rate, I wouldn’t have been surprised if a sea serpent turned up, or a cho**bo you could ride like a horse.

  “In any case, maybe you could put off going to town for a while,” Minori-san said, squinting her eyes. “Our official explainer is here.”

  Puzzled, I followed her gaze toward the town, looking down the road that led away from the mansion. And there I saw something that looked altogether out of place.

  An automobile. Dark green, or in other words, the same color as Minori-san’s skirt. The squarish body made it obvious that this was a military vehicle—and I thought I recognized it. It was a light armored vehicle used by the self-defense forces—sometimes called “light armor” or an LAV. It had been used on some overseas deployments, and was pretty common in fiction featuring the SDF.

  And there it was, an SDF military vehicle rolling right past the medieval European fantasy scenery. It definitely did not look like it belonged there—that was some serious anachronism.

  Before long, the LAV trundled up to us and stopped. The back door opened and someone climbed out—and I recognized him, too. Neatly parted hair and a suit the color of dead leaves, as if he were trying to look as ordinary as possible.

  “I-Interview Guy?!”

  Matoba Jinzaburou, I think his name was. I had expected some SDF soldier in field camo, or maybe someone in fantasy attire, but this was the polar opposite. His Hello, my name is Average Salaryman outfit looked as weird here as that armored vehicle. Not that Minori-san or I fit in any better.

  “Kanou Shinichi-kun, hello.” Matoba-san had a calm smile on his face. “Welcome to the Holy Eldant Empire—or should I say, to another wo
rld entirely.”

  He sounded like he was greeting a visitor from abroad. I mean, I guess if I hadn’t seen a dragon, I might have believed this was some tourist trap in western Europe.

  “What... exactly is going on here?” I asked, frowning. “How did I get from an interview room in Akihabara to this place?”

  “Yes, I intend to explain everything. I ended talks at the castle early so I could come back here,” Matoba-san said.

  “Talks at the castle?”

  “Well, that’s part of ‘everything.’ Anyway, come inside.”

  And with that, Matoba-san started walking toward the house.

  “Now, then.” Matoba-san had a cup of tea in his hand. We were in the mansion’s reception room. It was big enough to feel like a party hall, boasting a table that must have been about three meters long. Matoba-san and I sat in a couple of chairs around it.

  Minori-san had set a chair in the corner of the room and was sitting there. Apparently, she didn’t intend to participate in our conversation. Myusel stood beside her, attending to a cart with a teapot on it. She had poured the tea Matoba-san was drinking, as well as the cup that sat steaming in front of me.

  “Before I explain things,” Matoba-san said with a glance at Myusel, “Kanou-kun. Could you remove your ring?”

  “Huh...?”

  Did he mean the magic one on my finger? I looked at it. It was the one Myusel had given me. Apparently, it worked like a translator; as long as we were wearing them, we could understand each other, even if we were speaking our own languages.

  “I wouldn’t want there to be any... misunderstandings. And there are a few things I wouldn’t want the people here to hear.”

  Matoba-san, I noticed, wasn’t wearing a ring. I glanced over at Minori-san and saw she didn’t have one, either. I was pretty sure she’d been wearing one earlier, though.

  “Right... This good?”

  I took off the ring.

  “Perfect.” Matoba-san nodded, then leaned his elbows on the table and interlaced his fingers. “This all started a year ago, when a strange ‘hole’ was found in Fuji’s Sea of Trees.”

  “A hole...?”

  He said it all so nonchalantly. The Sea of Trees—that was the famous Aokigahara Forest, right? Notorious for suicides and messing up compasses. Supposedly haunted.

  “Strictly speaking, it’s more of a fissure. But everyone simply calls it ‘the hole.’ The researchers say it’s a hyperspace portal.”

  A hyperspace portal? He was suddenly trotting out these unbelievable words.

  “Close investigation of the hole revealed something interesting. Specifically, that it pierces three-dimensional space and leads to a different world.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “You don’t seem very surprised,” Matoba-san smiled.

  “Well, obviously. What could be more cliché than that?”

  Wormholes. Warp gates. Shift portals. Passages leading through space and time to other worlds had been a standard plot device from the oldest legends to the most modern SF and fantasy stories.

  “Anyway. When we sent someone through the hole, they discovered an unknown land. Further, they found that creatures normally considered to be the stuff of myths and children’s stories really existed there, as did a developed human civilization much like our own. But not entirely like.”

  “Not entirely? You mean... magic?”

  “...Indeed.”

  I had said it jokingly, half-expecting him to deny it—but Matoba-san nodded vehemently.

  Silent, I looked at the ring on the table. So the whole simultaneous interpreting thing must have been because of the ring’s magic.

  “That’s one of the objects created by magic,” Matoba-san said, as if he had read my thoughts. “And so, Japan finds itself adjacent to this unreal land.”

  “Adjacent.” Somehow that didn’t seem like quite the right word—but since you got to this other world through a hole in Japan, it wasn’t exactly wrong, either.

  “The Japanese government organized an investigative expedition. In so doing, they made contact with the group that controls the area including the hole. A state, if you will. That’s the Holy Eldant Empire, where we are now. The hole falls within their territory.”

  “We’re lucky there wasn’t a war.”

  If manga and novels had taught me anything, it was that when two different worlds, two different cultures, suddenly collide, there’s a pretty good chance of conflict. You don’t have to turn to fiction; human history has more than a few similar examples.

  “We’re no fools. And our advance party included some wise heads.” Matoba-san shrugged. “After we had carefully sized each other up, we were soon working out a way to cooperate that would be to our mutual benefit.”

  Of course: someone who already knew what was likely to happen (i.e., war) could approach the situation delicately, so as not to do anything careless that might ignite the situation. So in a sense, manga and novels’ endlessly recycling this plot point had actually been helpful.

  “Following me so far?”

  “I... I guess so.”

  Frankly, it was still hard to believe, but it looked like the only person who could explain any of this—the castle, the dragon, the whole bizarre world I’d been sucked into—was Matoba-san.

  “The one thing I don’t get is, what does any of this discovery-of-another-world stuff have to do with me?”

  Assuming anything he was saying was true, how did it relate to a former home security guard like myself? This was an earth-shaking discovery, and I would fully expect representatives of Japan and maybe foreign governments to get together and do something about it, but what was the point of dragging a private citizen here, even giving them JSDF protection?

  “Don’t tell me—I’m actually a prince of this world, sent to the human world when I was just a child, but now destiny has brought me back to defeat the Demon King?”

  “Relax. We’re not indulging in such tired, old plot lines here,” Matoba-san said with a smile. “I’m the chief of the Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau, which reports directly to the cabinet.”

  “C-Come again?” That name seemed surprisingly difficult to parse.

  “Well, that name is just for public purposes. The Far East Culture Exchange Promotion Bureau is an organization dedicated to cultivating the relationship between Japan and this other world. And General Entertainment Provider Amutech is a half-public, half-private company operating under the umbrella of the Bureau. Japan and the Holy Eldant Empire are both invested in it—a parallel-world first!”

  “Uh...huh.”

  “And you,” he said, “have been hired as Amutech’s general manager.”

  “Its what?”

  A first-of-its-kind cross-world entertainment company?!

  General manager?! Me?!

  But... why?!

  “Not as, like, gofer or new guy or anything?”

  “Is that what surprises you most?” Matoba-san grinned. “We could just as well call you the president or CEO, or anything you like. Whatever title you choose, you’re at the top, you’re the person in charge.” He sounded so calm. “Your job as Amutech’s general manager is to import Japanese anime, manga, games, and so forth to this country.”

  Anime, manga, games, and so forth were an export Japan took great pride in, as any otaku would know. But again... why?

  “Leisure culture seems to be rather underdeveloped in this world, so we thought we would begin by exporting it to them. As a way of bringing our two nations closer.”

  “Huuuuuh?!”

  They were going to foster international relations by exporting anime and manga and games?!

  I may not have been the sharpest tool in the shed, but even I knew that when a government official starts talking about getting “close” to another nation, you can’t take them at face value. It’s a question of diplomacy. And this wasn’t some other Earth nation we were dealing with. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think there
had ever been such an outrageously delicate situation.

  And in light of all that, their first move was to introduce otaku industry?

  “Ah. I understand what you’re getting at,” Matoba-san said, still smiling. “Of course, we first thought of pottery, textiles—traditional cultural items. We tried those for the first several months, but they just didn’t seem to take.”

  Apparently, they hadn’t been enough to interest the people of the Holy Eldant Empire. This was a difference of culture, which is closely related to history and style, so it was hard to say anything one way or the other. Some things about Japanese culture struck me as potentially difficult for foreigners to grasp, such as wabi-sabi, the “perfection of imperfection” the Japanese so cherish. Maybe the Holy Eldant Empire didn’t get it, either.

  “So we mentioned to them that Japan has another worldwide export we’re quite proud of, called Japanimation, along with video games and the like. We mentioned the huge lines of people waiting to buy new games, and the blackmail cases that occur around limited editions.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “They want hot new culture, the kind that can inspire social phenomena like that. When we actually showed them some anime, the reaction was favorable.”

  “Yes, I understand, but—”

  A good deal of anime these days got exported overseas; in fact, it was often made with the assumption that it would be seen internationally. In other words, you ended up with a sort of basic quality to the entertainment; it didn’t put too much emphasis on culture or anything. It didn’t demand the amount of knowledge going in that a Noh or kabuki play might. In comparison, anime and so on had a simple-to-understand amusement that could engage boys and girls all over the world.

  “But some felt that art like this... well, maybe it would be best if it weren’t handled by government officials. They feared bureaucrats would lack a certain finesse, that the bureaucracy might skew the project in strange or unexpected ways. Just look at what happens when the government builds public buildings. They get mismanaged and shut down, again and again. Make sense?”