World War Z

Tae Han Min’guk was on the brink of national collapse. Plans were being secretly drafted for a Japanese-style resettlement. Covert teams were already scouting locations in Kamchatka. If the Chang Doctrine hadn’t worked… if just a few more units had broken, if a few more safe zones had collapsed…

Maybe we owe our survival to the North, or at least to the fear of it. My generation never really saw the North as a threat. I’m speaking of the civilians, you understand, those of my age who saw them as a backward, starving, failed nation. My generation had grown up their entire lives in peace and prosperity. The only thing they feared was a German-style reunification that would bring millions of homeless ex-communists looking for a handout.

That wasn’t the case with those who came before us … our parents and grandparents… those who lived with the very real specter of invasion hanging over them, the knowledge that at any moment the alarms might sound, the lights might dim, and the bankers, schoolteachers, and taxi drivers might be called to pick up arms and fight to defend their homeland. Their hearts and minds were ever vigilant, and in the end, it was them, not us, who rallied the national spirit.

I’m still pushing for an expedition to the North. I’m still blocked at every turn. There’s too much work to do, they tell me. The country is still in shambles. We also have our international commitments, most importantly the repatriation of our refugees to Kyushu.… [Snorts.] Those Japs are go

I’m not asking for a recon in force. Just give me one helicopter, one fishing boat; just open the gates at Panmunjom and let me walk through on foot. What if you trigger some booby trap? they counter. What if it’s nuclear? What if you open the door to some underground city and twenty-three million zombies come spewing out? Their arguments aren’t without merit. We know the DMZ is heavily mined. Last month a cargo plane nearing their airspace was fired on by a surface-to-air missile. The launcher was an automated model, the type they’d designed as a revenge weapon in case the population had already been obliterated.

Conventional wisdom is that they must have evacuated to their subterranean complexes. If that is true, then our estimates of the size and depth of those complexes were grossly inaccurate. Maybe the entire population is underground, tooling away on endless war projects, while their “Great Leader” continues to anesthetize himself with Western liquor and American pornography. Do they even know the war is over? Have their leaders lied to them, again, and told them that the world as they know it has ceased to be? Maybe the rise of the dead was a “good” thing in their eyes, an excuse to tighten the yoke even further in a society built on blind subjugation. The Great Leader always wanted to be a living God, and now, as master not only of the food his people eat, the air they breathe, but the very light of their artificial suns, maybe his twisted fantasy has finally become a reality. Maybe that was the original plan, but something went disastrously wrong. Look what happened to the “mole city” underneath Paris. What if that occurred in the North on a national level?Maybe those caverns are teeming with twenty-three million zombies, emaciated automatons howling in the darkness and just waiting to be unleashed.

Kyoto, Japan

[The old photo of Kondo Tatsumi shows a ski

I was an “otaku.” I know that term has come to mean a great many things to a great many people, but for me it simply meant “outsider.” I know Americans, especially young ones, must feel trapped by societal pressure. All humans do. However, if I understand your culture correctly, individualism is something to be encouraged. You revere the “rebel,” the “rogue,” those who stand proudly apart from the masses. For you, individuality is a badge of honor. For us, it is a ribbon of shame. We lived, particularly before the war, in a complex and seemingly infinite labyrinth of external judgments. Your appearance, your speech, everything from the career you held to the way you sneezed had to be pla

I can’t speak for your educational system, or, indeed, for that of any other country, but ours was based almost entirely on fact retention. From the day we first set foot in a classroom, prewar Japanese children were injected with volumes upon volumes of facts and figures that had no practical application in our lives. These facts had no moral component, no social context, no human co

You can understand how this education would easily lend itself to an existence in cyberspace. In a world of information without context, where status was determined on its acquisition and possession, those of my generation could rule like gods. I was a sensei, master over all I surveyed, be it discovering the blood type of the prime ministers cabinet, or the tax receipts of Matsumoto and Hamada, or the location and condition of all shingunto swords of the Pacific War. I didn’t have to worry about my appearance, or my social etiquette, my grades, or my prospects for the future. No one could judge me, no one could hurt me. In this world I was powerful, and more importantly, I was safe!

When the crisis reached Japan, my clique, as with all the others, forgot our previous obsessions and devoted our energies entirely to the living dead. We studied their physiology, behavior, weaknesses, and the global response to their attack upon humanity. The last subject was my clique’s specialty, the possibility of containment within the Japanese home islands. I collected population statistics, transport networks, police doctrine. I memorized everything from the size of the Japanese merchant fleet, to how many rounds the army’s Type 89 assault rifle held. No fact was too small or obscure. We were on a mission, we barely slept. When school was eventually cancelled, it gave us the ability to be wired in almost twenty-four hours a day. I was the first to hack into Doctor Komatsu’s personal hard drive and read the raw data a full week before he presented his findings to the Diet. This was a coup. It further elevated my status among those who already worshipped me.

Doctor Komatsu first recommended the evacuation?

He did. Like us, he’d been compiling the same facts. But whereas we’d been memorizing them, he’d been analyzing them. Japan was an overcrowded nation: one hundred and twenty-eight million people jammed into less than three hundred and seventy thousand square kilometers of either mountainous or overurbanized islands. Japan’s low crime rate gave it one of the relatively smallest and most lightly armed police forces in the industrialized world. Japan was pretty much also a demilitarized state. Because of American “protection,” our self-defense forces had not seen actual combat since 1945. Even those token troops who were deployed to the Gulf almost never saw any serious action and spent most of their occupation duty within the protected walls of their isolated compound. We had access to all these hits of information, but not the wherewithal to see where they were pointing. So it took us all by complete surprise when Doctor Komatsu publicly declared that the situation was hopeless and that Japan had to be immediately evacuated.