Horizon:Volume 4C Afterword

Afterword

And there you have Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon 4-C. This brings the Oushuu and Jouetsu story to an end. Starting next time, the story will lead to a confrontation, an invasion, and a counterattack.

It was mentioned in the novel itself, but in this time period of Japanese history, the daimyos often ran into the problem of gaining and then losing land.

That’s because Ieyasu introduced the rule about one castle per feudal domain and the rules about the extinction of clans in his Laws of the Military Houses, but ironically enough, clans supported by Ieyasu ended up with no heir and thus qualified for extinction under his rules.

Mogami is one clan that got hit by that inconvenience. Since it happened near the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Ushuu (the Sea of Japan side of Tohoku) became a political blank zone. But that allowed it to develop as a region of production and to get through the Meiji Restoration relatively peacefully.

Japan’s current distribution of politicians is influenced a lot by whether one leaves a family behind or not, an idea that has its roots in the era we’re looking at here. With that in mind, history seems a lot more continuous and not so much divided up into distinct eras.

Now for the chat.

“It really doesn’t matter anymore, but do you have any stupid stories? One from your school days would be good.”

“When I was in elementary school, firecrackers were really popular.”

“This is sounding dangerous already.”

“Yeah, and y’know those missile-style ones? Where you stick the powder in the tip and throw it so it’ll go ‘bang!’ on the ground? Well, we were doing those in the classroom and I threw one out the window.”

“And?”

“When I looked down from the 3rd floor, I saw Takei (pseudonym) lying sprawled out on the ground. It looked pretty bad, so I made sure to get rid of the evidence. Elementary school me really did hide the evidence.”

“You wouldn’t be able to hide the victim’s memories.”

“Yeah, that’s always a problem.”

You run into it often? But I wonder if they still sell those gunpowder toys these days.

Now, my work background music this time was ‘Taiyou no Mannaka he’ by Bivattchee. No matter how difficult or sad things get, I want to always carry a song like that inside me.

Anyway…

“Who sought their promise the most?”

And with that, wait a bit until the next one.

October 2011. A sunny morning even though they said it would rain.

-Kawakami Minoru

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