Chapter 4 The world is bustling

Waiting until the next morning, Sheng Haizhou, who was still a little excited, came to the No. 072 industrial ship again with red eyes and brought good news to everyone: "After discussion last night, the resolution of Mr. Song Haiping to establish a Japanese reform group and establish a Japanese reform office has been decided. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info”

Katsu Haishu is more aware of the power of this Japanese reform office, which will overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate in the early stage, and the decrees that integrate all of Japan in the later period will come from this reform office - that is, to overthrow all the daimyo and the emperor. Although Song Haiping served as the team leader, he was an outsider after all, and the shogunate bosses Ii Naobi and Abe Masahiro in the deputy team leader were older than Katsu Haizhou, no matter how you look at it, twenty or thirty years later, Katsu Haizhou will be the number one person in Japan as long as he does not make mistakes.

Song Haiping took Sheng Haizhou to the side of the ship with the previous book: "Look, our modern fleet is also a little larger. ”

What caught my eye was the ironclad ships with a length of 70 or 80 meters on the side of the industrial ship, including 10 high-speed light cruisers of 2,500 tons and 10 protective light cruisers of 3,000 tons.

Lin Haiyang also said: "These small boats are nothing more than for military training, and in the future, there will be ironclad ships of four or five thousand tons, seven or eight thousand tons, or even 10,000 tons." ”

Last night, when the shogunate held a meeting overnight, Katsu Haizhou also heard a detailed report that the ironclad ships were constantly underground here, but it was one thing to hear it, and it was another thing to see it. Imagine that Perry only drove a few steam-powered thousand-ton wooden warships, and frightened the shogunate into accepting almost all the conditions for the opening of the country. There are now twenty steam-powered ironclads here, and if it weren't for the fact that Japan doesn't have enough sailors to operate them, Katsukaishu would have had the urge to return to the United States with a fleet of ironclads.

Song Haiping accompanied Sheng Haizhou to start reviewing the fleet one by one, for Sheng Haizhou, who aspired to be the commander of the navy, the happiness in front of him came too suddenly, and the trouble of happiness was that so many cutting-edge ironclad ships could not find enough sailors to drive in today's Japan, no wonder the people of Shangguo said that they wanted to popularize education.

This ironclad ship requires 200-300 navies to form combat effectiveness, what is the concept of two or three hundred professional samurai in Japan, and the daimyo with a smaller land can't afford to raise so many samurai.

Song Haiping picked up a book at a workbench somewhere: "If you train sailors, just follow the rules and dogmas here, and they are all written in Chinese characters." In the early stage, only some samurai and sailors who can know kanji can be selected to train on the ship, so take your time, and the naval school will still be established in the future. The same goes for the Naval Officer Academy. ”

Sheng Haizhou nodded and bowed: "Yes, my lord." When will adults go to Edo Castle. ”

Song Haiping: "Let's go, let's go to the boiler and make a fire and drive this boat to the shore of the Edo River." ”

Sheng Haizhou: "Okay, my lord. ”

Having said that, Sheng Haizhou still called a few sailors from the small morning boat, and together with Sheng Haizhou himself and Song Haiping, he began to learn ship operation from the boiler room bit by bit. Eight men were in a hurry and almost crashed into the wooden pier before the light cruiser No. 01 was moored.

In fact, the displacement of more than 2,000 tons was at the level of destroyers in later generations, but destroyers were designed to fight torpedo boats and submarines. Now there are no submarines, whether they are small torpedo boats of several tens of tons or large torpedo boats of several hundred tons, they are obviously no match for light cruisers.

On the dock on the shore, the shogunate prepared two boxes - actually a Japanese sedan chair, which was relatively small, and the space inside was about the size of a single-cylinder washing machine. But Song Haiping visually didn't practice ninjutsu, it seemed that it would be difficult to get in, and even if he practiced ninjutsu, it wouldn't be very comfortable to get in.

After reading the sedan chair, Song Haiping said to Sheng Haizhou: "Let's take a walk, don't they all say that after dinner, walk a hundred steps and live to ninety-nine!" ”

"Yes, yes." After Sheng Haizhou answered twice, he waved the sedan chair man who carried the sedan chair away.

Guarded by more than 100 shogunate samurai, Song Haiping and Katsu Haizhou walked from the port into the Edo castle tower. Passers-by saw this group of people either bowing or kneeling - it was perfectly legal for a samurai to draw his sword and kill a passer-by who did not like it.

Although the outside of the castle tower looks tall and ornate, it is still a military facility after all, and the inside is not spacious, and in some places it is so low and narrow that you have to get into it - it is a nightmare for the attacking side to go in one by one and wait for the people inside to be killed one by one. Although there are now better siege weapons, cannons, explosives, etc., tradition is tradition, and some of the rules of building the castle tower will not change.

Fortunately, the place where Song Haiping and Katsu Haizhou were going was a relatively wide assembly hall, and there were more than 100 shogunate courtiers in Edo Castle on the left and right, half of whom were civil officials, and the rest were middle and high-ranking military generals in the shogunate. Here, I'm going to hear how this foreigner came to implement Japan's reforms.

After the arrival of the Black Ship, everyone actually understood in their hearts that Japan was now sick and needed a dose of reform medicine to cure it. But now no one can come up with the medicine of reform -- that is, the banner of the later shogunate army is to overthrow the shogunate, expel the foreigners, and abolish the treaty. Later, when they saw the strength of the industrialized countries, most of them changed to pro-Yi reformers. For this reason, the old Japanese soldiers in the period of the fall of the curtain were killed again, and the Hollywood movie "The Last Samurai" is about the content of this period.

After taking a seat in the middle of the hall, Song Haiping spoke eloquently to the shogunate courtiers: "Japan is sick now, and it needs a change. But look at those reformers in history, Shang Ying, Wang Mang, Wang Anshi, and Zhang Juzheng. There are not many good ends, and since it is a reform, it is necessary to touch the interests of some people. However, in the course of reform, it is often not one person whose interests are violated, but one class.

If I had a heavy army, I would have chosen to wipe out this class. But this is not good, the human head is not a leek, and it will not grow if it is cut. Japan now has a population of less than 40 million, which is too small. More than 100 years later, Edo, the area known as the Tokyo metropolitan area, will have a population of more than 30 million.

In my opinion, the problem in Japan today is not that there are too many people in a narrow area, but that there are few people in a narrow area. In particular, there are fewer educated people who can serve as industrial workers and soldiers in modern countries. ”

Masahiro Abe, the elder of the shogunate, who sat down first, asked, "I don't know what specific reform strategies Lord Song Haiping has?" ”

Song Haiping: "The first step is to vigorously develop modern education. The second step is to reorganize and form more modern armies to strengthen national defense. Third, a large number of state-owned factories and enterprises should be formed. In order to reduce the unemployed and homeless population in society and stabilize the society. As for the machines needed by the factory, the weapons of the modern army, and the new textbooks, there is no need to worry, my companions and I can provide a lot, and if we only produce firearms, one or two years of production will be enough to equip all the Japanese. ”

This kind of good thing is almost not much different from pie in the sky, and if you have an opinion, you will not have much opinion to look at the tens of thousands of tons of steel giant ships that are horizontal outside. Naobi Ii and Masahiro Abe knelt down together and bowed in the direction of Song Haiping: "The future of Japan is up to Your Excellency. ”