NationStates Jolt Archive


The End of an Era ...

Turkmeny
11-09-2004, 06:35
RYUICHI TORITA DIES AT AGE 88

http://www.rekihaku.ac.jp/e-rekihaku/104/koichi.jpg

Earlier this morning, Field Marshal Ryuichi Torita died from a blood clot in the brain complicated by pneumonia. He was age 88. He was a revolutionary general that helped see Tokarev through years of blood civil war and counterrevolutions, and is seen by many as a hero. He is seen by an equal number as a criminal.

Ryuichi Torita was born in Sendai as Masatsugu Araki on June 18, 1922. He spent the first sixteen years of his life in Sendai, in fact he almost never left his family's estate. Araki murdered a general, and friend of the dictator Dohihara, who had raped his sister, forcing him to flee his family's estate, which was later destroyed by the Army.

The next four or five years of his life are a mystery, but during that time he changed his name to Ryuichi Torita and became the captain of a guerilla band in the mountains, rebelling against Dohihara. The Army successfully ambushed and killed most of Torita's band, and captured Torita himself. Torita somehow escaped to Hokkaido, where he worked off and on as a miner for two years.

In 1945, he returned to Sendai and formed a new guerilla movement, this time with far more success. For the next nine years, he successfully robbed banks, stole supplies, and murdered many officials appointed by Dohihara. His numbers swelled at times from a few dozen to a few hundred, and the Army unsuccessfully tried to occupy the northern mountains with over ten thousand men to track him down and kill him.

In 1955, a full-scale revolution began against General Kenji "Chifuso" Dohihara, dictator for some thirty-two years, under the leadership of one Lieutenant-General Shira Makino. Torita became the General of the Grand Army of the North, quickly seizing Hokkaido and most of the northern prefectures of Honshu. His southern counterpart, Lieutenant-General Minoru Eda, was able to take control of Shikoku and the southern prefectures of Honshu, but was defeated by superior forces on Kyushu.

In 1956, Dohihara fled Japan, dying in exile in Russia four years later. Makino named himself President of Japan, the government of which he called Tokarev. Makino was a benevolent dictator, fixing many of the problems caused by Dohihara and other dictators before him, which had forced Japan into what amounted to a feudal system.

Makino was President for less then a month before his Minister of Defense, Field Marshal Seikichi Hyakatuke, had him and many of his supporters murdered, installing himself as dictator. Hyakatuke began a series of bloody purges in Tokyo and the surrounding prefectures, killing thousands.

Now General Torita joined forces with Isamu Cho, Governor-General of Hokkaido, and Nobuyoshi Obata, a soldier-of-fortune who had been a Brigadier General under Makino. Minoru Eda once again returned to the south of Japan, where he raised his own army.

General Torita ruled over Hokkaido and parts of northern Honshu as a warlord. He financed his army by stealing thousands of tons of supplies off of ships passing through La Perouse Strait, and selling them to the Russians, who were all too willing to supply him with guns and ammunition. The economy stagnated, and Torita issued his own currency, often having merchants that wouldn't take it shot. A man on his staff, known only as Furuno, on Torita's orders personally killed thousands of Japanese, Russians, and other foreigners. One of his few noble acts was splitting up large estates once owned by supporters of Dohihara and giving them to the families of those he killled.

Torita refused to drink or smoke, and ran every morning to stay in shape. He was an avid swimmer, often sneaking into enemy territory at night to take a swim or a bath in a hot spring. According to close friends, he had over twenty-five concubines, in addition to his wife.

In 1959, Hyakatuke's armies were defeated and Torita and Eda met on Mount Fuji to accept his surrender. He committed hara-kiri first, forcing the two generals to occupy Tokyo. The first presidential election in Tokarev in more then half a century took place, electing Isamu Cho, the political advisor to now Generallisimo Torita.

Cho turned out to be just as brutal as Hyakatuke, purging thousands of civilians in Honshu and Shikoku. Once again, Eda and Torita took up arms against the new president, each returning to their former strongholds, where they had strong defenses and many supporters. In 1964, after years of fighting, Eda was murdered when a general, under the guise of surrending the city of Osaka to his armies, detonated a bomb strapped to his chest.

Defeat after defeat at the hands of his former chief of staff, Nobuyoshi Obata, who was a brilliant general in his own right, forced Torita to retreat to Hokkaido. When the Russian government stopped supplying his armies, and began to openly support the Cho regime, Torita embarked on a series of brilliant and daring raids.

He managed to sneak his armies into various parts of Russia, including Vladivostok, the Kuriles, Sakhalin, even as far as Kamchatka, raiding and pillaging. Thousands of Russians were killed in these attacks, and Torita's frogment even destroyed a few warships in harbor at Vladivostok.

Self-proclaimed Field Marshal Torita was a hero to the people of Tokarev, and a brilliant general, but Obata got the best of him and Torita was forced to surrender Hokkaido in 1968. Cho, showing a rare glimmer of mercy, didn't punish Torita, instead forcibly retiring him on a general's salary to Sendai.

Later that year, thugs hired by Cho ambushed and tried to murder Torita, who was becoming politically active in campaigning against Cho. Torita used his charisma and this attempted murder against Cho, and defeated him in the 1971 presidential elections.

Almost immediately upon his inauguration, Obata fled south, where he raised Eda's old armies and joined them with nearly a third of the standing Tokarev Army. Despite Torita's popularity, Obata was able to raise nearly half the country against him, establishing his base of operations at Nagoya, with the front lines within site of Tokyo.

The Tokarev Civil War lasted for five years, ending with Obata's surrender in the April of 1976. The war was long and bloody, resulting in the deaths of nearly one million Japanese. In the final year of the war, Torita showed no mercy on the southern prefectures, sending an army on a march from Kitakyushu to Osaka, literally destroying everything in its pass. It would take most of the nexty fifty years to recover from the damage of this war.

Once his seat in power was firmly established, and after another failed assassination attempt, he used the Tokarev National Guard to terrorize and banish opponents. He established a secret police force known as the "Bureau for the Upholding of Virtue and Prevention of Vice," more commonly known as the Keikan, which not only gathered information but engaged in torture and murder at Torita's request. He used the Keikan to control the press, bribe businesses, and create a climate of fear in Tokarev.

In 1983, he ordered the extermination of over twenty thousand foreigners "squatting on Japanese territory." Despite these fear tactics, he modeled his dictatorship largely on the benevolent "father knows best" dictatorship created by his hero, Makino, before his assassination almos thirty years prior.

Torita used his political control of the nation to amass great personal wealth. He took over factories, plantations, and other businesses. His family, relatives, and political supporters received lucrative jobs. Millions of dollars created in the Tokarev were used to throw lavish parties and the rest was stashed for safe keeping in foreign bank accounts. Despite his dislike of foreigners, he welcomed Russian businesses and investors in Tokarev and he maintained a pro-Russian foreign policy.

In the summer of 1995, exiled Japanese returned to the islands and began trying to organize a mass resistance against Torita. These attempts were quickly crushed, prompting small groups of young Japanese to form underground organizations dedicated to his overthrow. Most of the rebels were poor, suffering under Torita's often cruel policies.

2005 marked another attempted overthrow, ending in thousands of rebels, mostly teenagers, being rounded up and tortured and killed in military prisons. In January 2006, the survivors tried again, planning to assassinate Torita at a party, but the Keikan got wind of the plot, and many rebels and just as many innocents were tortued on the electric chair then thrown naked into an empty oil barge and deported to China.

Throughout 2006, the few remaining rebels, now supported by some of the upper class, who had begun to resent Torita and his policies, found an unexpected ally in Russia, who had found Torita too unstable and no longer supported his regime. In the May of 2007, the conspirators ambushed the eighty-five year old dictator's motorcade on a deserted patch of highway and riddled it with heavy calibre bullets.

Somehow, Torita survived, and over the following month began a purge of the upper class, torturing and killing most of the conspirators and their families. Many committed suicide before they let themselves fall into the hands of the Keikan. In October, riots broke out in the streets of Tokyo and workers went on strike throughout the country.

On November 18, the six surviving assassins were tied to trees above the Imperial Palace, shot, cut up, and fed to fish in the Bay. The following day, Torita secretly fled Tokarev and went into exile in the Philippines.

For the next three years, Torita played an active role in politics, though never actually returning to Japan. He prominently spoke out on the international scene against imperialism and the dangers of a monarchy. The Imperial Family of Japan, which had fled to China nearly a century before and had been living there ever since, finally returned to Tokarev to retake the reigns of the nation, creating the first true democracy in sixty years.

Three months later, on April 12, 2010, Field Marshal Ryuichi Torita died in his home in Luzon. Torita was the last of the revolutionary generation to die, inf act dying only one day after his old nemesis Cho, who had been living in retirement on Okinawa.
Turkmeny
11-09-2004, 21:15
BuMpO
Telliria
11-09-2004, 21:44
Telliria rejoices at the death of such a confused man. We pray that your nation find a path worthy of your people. May this be the start an era were you find yourselves.
Turkmeny
13-09-2004, 03:24
Torita's body was brought back to his home in Sendai today, and a public funeral was held while his body was lowered into a private cemetary where his family's estate used to be, which was replaced by a museum. Nobody attended the Field Marshal's funeral.