General Masao Takahashi peered out the window of the air defense transport plane, following the sun as it began to rise from the horizon. He squinted into the glare, searching the sea below for the US carrier group holding to the northeast. It was the fourth such armada to steam into Asian waters—a display of power and resolve meant to counterbalance the growing threat to what the Americans assumed was still the helpless country they had created so many decades ago.

China would take a half step back, Japan would continue to grovel over its past, and Western economic interests—the only interests that mattered to the United States—would be preserved.

Takahashi could still remember the day he’d seen the great man. The day that Douglas MacArthur’s motorcade had roared through the irrelevant little village his family had been left to rot in. The American commander had been exactly as the news reels depicted: a uniformed statue sitting in the back of a jeep, hidden by his hat, pipe, and sunglasses. He hadn’t even bothered to look at the poverty-stricken farmers lined up alongside the muddy road, showing complete indifference to the people whose pride and dignity he’d stolen.

Ironically, the people there that day saw him as a god. A supernatural entity who would restore Japan and teach it the arcane secrets of Western democracy. The savior of a backward race that could not be trusted to create its own future.

Takahashi’s mother hadn’t come to see the spectacle. A woman of wealth and grace before the war, she had been in the middle of a fourteen-hour day working the fields. It had been hot, backbreaking labor that she wasn’t suited for, but she never complained. She’d died just as his father was beginning to lay the foundations for the revival of the empire the Americans had stripped from him. And even with that last breath, she had spoken only of her concern for her sons.

Takahashi had been just a boy at the time with no concept of what was happening. No understanding that the treats she had given him and his brothers were from her own rations and that she hadn’t left herself enough to survive. Or maybe he had understood. Maybe he had just been unwilling to look beyond his own empty belly.

His headphones crackled to life with the voice of the pilot, pulling him back into the present. “General, we have a visual on our target.”

Takahashi went forward, stopping in the doorway to the cockpit. Through the windscreen he could see the vague shape of no fewer than five ships. The JDS Isi helicopter carrier and two Takanami-class destroyers were the only ones identifiable at this distance. The Izumo, though, was gone. She had dropped beneath the waves for the last time hours ago with forty-three men still aboard.