Commentary: Otherworld Affairs

The Library-City Dungeon summons replicated copies of libraries, together with their holdings and equipment, from various otherworlds, but the otherworld most deeply connected to it has the following characteristics.

● International Affairs

1909: The shooting of Itō Hirobumi (an attempted assassination). In later years Itō died in the saddle, atop a woman.

1910: (The Korean Empire endures.)

1914: The World War breaks out. A small land army and the Kongō-class battlecruisers are dispatched to Europe, but the navy takes grievous losses at the Battle of Jutland.

1915: Founding of the Chinese Empire (the Beijing government). The de facto fragmentation of China amid a proliferation of warlords.

1917: The Russian Revolution. Worker-Peasant Russia is established, and the imperial family flees abroad.

1919: The Paris Peace Conference. By the Treaty of Versailles, Germany is partitioned.

1923: In the Kingdom of Bavaria, the Munich Putsch fails. Hitler ends his days as an unremarkable architect; indeed, he finds rather more success as a racehorse owner.

1923: The Great Kantō Earthquake.

1925: The Ugaki disarmament. Divisions and regiments are not reduced, but troop strength is cut, effectively abolishing conscription.

1928: In the Republic of China (its remnants), the Nanjing Nationalist Government is established.

1931: (No Manchurian Incident.)

1939: (No Second World War.)

1940: The Tokyo Olympics and the Tokyo Exposition are held.

1943: Tokyo City is reorganized into a special city.

1947: The Hokkaidō Agency is renamed Hokkaidō and given parity with a prefecture. The rest of the Six Great Cities are reorganized into special cities. The five provinces of Taiwan are reorganized into prefectures.

There is no "Germany"; small states differing in language and form of government, such as the Kingdom of Bavaria, stand divided.

China is the Chinese Empire in Beijing and the Republic of China in Nanjing. In Shengjing there is the Later Qing. The Korean peninsula is the Korean Empire.

Worker-Peasant Russia endures.

Israel does not exist. There was no Holocaust. Regions of armed conflict are comparatively few.

● Otherworld Japan

Because there was no Pacific War, the constitution has not been revised even once in nearly two hundred years, and is considerably out of date.

That said, since there are no land borders, conscription was effectively abolished long ago.

Women's suffrage came in the 1940s, along with France, among the very last of the world's major nations.

The political parties are centered on the Seiyūkai and the Minseitō, with small and medium parties such as the Social Masses Party besides, and a handful of fringe parties holding zero to one seats, like the Evolution Party, which advocates "racial improvement."

The Kuril Islands, Karafuto, Taiwan, and the South Seas Islands are Japanese territory. The Korean peninsula is the Korean Empire.

There are sixty-three circuits, agencies, prefectures, and municipal cities (one circuit, five agencies, fifty-one prefectures, six cities). The six cities are Tokyo City, Yokohama City, Nagoya City (having absorbed the surrounding towns and villages), Kyoto City, Osaka City (having absorbed the surrounding towns and villages and, for some reason, Amagasaki), and Kobe City. The population of the government-designated cities of Fukuoka and Taipei is greater than that of the special cities of Kyoto or Kobe. The Tama district of Tokyo Prefecture is "Tama Prefecture," with its prefectural seat at Fuchū City.

Taiwan comprises the five prefectures of Taipei, Hsinchu, Taichū, Tainan, and Takao, and the three agencies of Taitō, Karenkō, and Hōko.

There are besides the Karafuto Agency and the South Seas Agency. Except for the Karafuto Agency, whose population exceeds 600,000, the agencies have smaller populations than the prefectures.

With no Second World War and thus no baby boom, the population has gone on increasing slowly and steadily, and although the Malthusian-Darwinist Evolution Party advocates racial improvement and population control, Japan's population is quite excessive.

The educational system is a cumbersome thing, a patchwork stitched onto the so-called "prewar" system as enrollment rates rose.

There is no Shinkansen. Most of the national railway lines have been abolished, and the railways survive only in the cities and along the trunk lines. Conversely, there are many commuter railways in the metropolitan areas: from Ikebukuro via Toda, Nishi-Urawa, and Sashiōgi toward Ishitojuku; from Ikebukuro toward Higashi-Urawa, Shichisato, and Hasuda; and so on.

Tokyo's airport is the "Tokyo City Aerodrome," south of Jōtō Ward and Fukagawa Ward. Osaka's airports are at Nankō and off Sakai. The airlines center on three companies, founded respectively in 1922-23 by a taxi company, a newspaper company, and an aircraft manufacturer. Of the passenger-aircraft makers, in practice only one remains.

In automobiles, home appliances, and the like, American products maintain "a certain" presence. "Germany," having been partitioned into several states such as Prussia, is not conspicuous.

● Other Otherworlds

The libraries are summoned from various otherworlds, and even the holdings of the same library can be summoned from differing "worlds of possibility." For this reason, by introducing technologies from otherworlds where different technologies have developed, it is in theory possible to "take the best of each," but with no industrial base, this cannot be put to use.

Owing to the constraint that libraries outside the Japanese-language sphere are difficult to summon, no libraries are summoned from worlds where Japanese is not used, or where libraries do not function, for example, the following kinds of worlds:

Worlds that entered the Chinese sphere at some juncture, whether through the Mongol invasions or the Qing-Japanese War, or the like.

Worlds where the closed-country policy was never enacted and which became Spanish territory.

Worlds where the Meiji Restoration failed, with eastern Japan becoming French territory and western Japan British territory.

Worlds that lost the Russo-Japanese War and, supported by Britain, became a British protectorate.

Worlds where society was thrown into such turmoil by communist revolution, ethnic conflict, and the like that libraries could not be maintained.

Worlds where, as Mori Arinori advocated, the official language was switched to English. And so on.