Hikoyoshi Ijiin was the eldest son of the samurai Ijiin Yoshiji of the Satsuma Domain, and from 1908 he served as a minister in the Qing Kingdom until the fall of the Qing Kingdom.

He had a close relationship with Yuan Shikai, and in another time and space, during the Xinhai Revolution, he once advocated a constitutional monarchy, and kept tempting Yuan Shikai to be emperor, trying to create a confrontation between the north and the south so that Japan could profit from it, but because the Southern Revolutionary Party promised Yuan Shikai the president, his mission failed.

In other words, Hikoyoshi Ijiin was a staunch Japonist, and he always adhered to the attitude of weakening China, splitting China, and then benefiting Japan.

In terms of diplomacy, he is good at secret diplomacy, that is, reaching agreements with people in private before making public gestures, these methods have made him comfortable in China, a weak country in the past, but later after he went to other stronger powers, such as Italy, as a special envoy, his methods were not effective.

Similarly, this time he came to Taiping Mansion from Tianjin, and he also followed his usual secret diplomacy, and the main reason for his coming was the Whale Pill incident.

The Whale Maru is an ordinary Japanese merchant ship, and what is unusual is that this wooden steam cargo ship, which is only 500 tons full, has just been seized by the Jiangnan government's naval anti-smuggling team on charges of drug smuggling.

Under Li Zhigao's rule, drugs such as opium were strictly forbidden, and once discovered, both users and traffickers were forcibly arrested, and the addicts would be sent to the mines for labor camp until they quit their addiction, and the traffickers would be shot directly after confiscating all their property.

Because of Li Zhigao's strength, drug addicts can only secretly smoke at home, while drug traffickers have fled the Jiangnan area under his control.

However, the problem of drug control is a big problem in modern society, and because the area ruled by Li Zhigao is the most prosperous place in China, the purchasing power of the people is very strong. So there used to be a lot of opium addicts.

Drug traffickers who are relatively easy to arrest are numerous, highly concealed, and with the police force that Li Zhigao currently has, it is difficult to catch them all, hence Li Zhigao's strong anti-drug policy. It is not possible to actually ban the circulation of drugs in the market, at most it will reduce the supply and reduce the amount of opium.

If the supply decreases, the supply will exceed the demand, and the price of opium will increase significantly, which will inevitably make the profits of the opium business soar, and when the profits are high to a certain level, then even if they are shot and killed, they will not be able to stop those drug traffickers.

Of course. Due to China's current special national conditions, drug trafficking is mainly done by foreigners, after all, they used to have many privileges in China, and among these foreign drug traffickers, especially Japanese and British, are the majority.

In the past, since opium was not produced in Japan, opium traders had to buy high-priced opium from others and sell it. The profits are not too high, and light industries such as textiles in Japan are in the ascendant. In terms of profits, in China it is completely comparable to the obviously immoral trade of opium, and many businesses are even more profitable than opium, so in the past, there were not many opium merchants in Japan, but Japanese merchants in China. There are more cloth merchants and traders. In other words, in the past, Japan mainly dumped cloth produced in Japan to China, and in turn purchased silk and minerals from China, which was an export of industrial goods. The trade situation of the acquisition of raw materials.

However, after the emergence of Li Zhigao, especially when Li Zhigao's modern spinning mill and weaving factory were built one after another, all this changed, because the cloth output of Li Zhigao's factory alone was higher than the output of more than 50 large weaving factories in Japan.

Those Taiping cloth production, not only the quantity is huge, the quality is also much stronger than the Japanese cloth, what is more rare is that the price is also much cheaper than the Japanese cloth, and there are a lot of high-end fabrics that can not be imitated, adding synthetic fibers, it can be said that the price is remote and sufficient, high-end atmosphere on the grade, and these cloths are also called Taiping cloth.

Under these circumstances, the Japanese cloth was completely defeated, and after March 1911, the trade surplus of Japanese cloth with China became a trade deficit, which caused many Japanese cloth merchants to complain.

In the past, the Japanese government could have used intimidation and other means to threaten and force the Chinese government to compromise, but now China is already divided, and the culprit of all this is a very powerful warlord.

According to the secret report of the Black Dragon Society, Li Zhigao, a warlord who not only had a powerful industry, but also a powerful army, controlled not only the most prosperous and wealthy part of China, but also the iron ore that Japan needed the most, was also under his control.

In other words, Li Zhigao and his army have been the targets of the Japanese Government's greatest attention recently, and according to normal logic, they will have to deal a head-on blow to this kind of force that is destined to be a threat and has a strong momentum of development, but it is a pity that after seeing Li Zhigao's strength, the top level of the Japanese Government has dispelled the idea of intervening by force and threatening and intimidating.

This is mainly related to Japan's strength and political situation at this time.

At this time, Japan was still under the Meiji Emperor, and although the Meiji Emperor was now bedridden for a long time and could no longer serve the government, the famous ministers who really created the Meiji Restoration were still there. For example, the current Prime Minister, Katsura Taro, is a very wise and calm person.

Although Katsura Taro is not an expert on China issues like Hirobumi Ito, who was assassinated, he was born in the army, and he has served as a spy adviser in the General Staff Bureau for a long time, and he is very familiar with intelligence work. To put it bluntly, in terms of political foresight, Katsura Taro's quality was far superior to that of any Chinese politician at this time, and in terms of pure ability, he was the first person in Japan at this time.

Having said all this, in fact, I want to make it clear that Japan is a fairly calm country at this time, although it has just experienced the victory in the First Sino-Japanese War and the victory in the Russo-Japanese War, which led to the self-confidence of ordinary people, but core decision-makers like Katsura Taro still maintain a sober brain.

Whether it is Katsura Taro or the dead Hirobumi Ito, they all understand a truth, that is, Japan's current strength is boasted and obtained by luck, but in fact the foundation is unstable. Not only are the Japanese generally poor, not much better than the Chinese, but the government is also quite financially IOU at this time.

It should be said that the Meiji Restoration was still successful, but in the previous Russo-Japanese War, on the surface, Japan won the victory. In fact, it did not gain much, and it hurt its muscles and bones, especially the heavy burden on the finances, and the efforts made before the Meiji Restoration were almost ruined, so due to financial constraints, Japan's military strength at this time was barely maintained, and there was little ability to start a new war.

In addition, if you really make up your mind to start a war, face Li Zhigao. Japan didn't have much chance of winning at this time.

For a force like Li Zhigao, it is useless to only dispatch the navy, because Li Zhigao's industrial base is not by the sea, but inland. Moreover, according to intelligence, Li Zhigao has a heavy artillery group with a range of more than 30 kilometers, regardless of whether this data is true or not, but it is certain that Li Zhigao has heavy artillery, which shows that Li Zhigao has the ability to blockade the Yangtze River. This greatly increases the danger of the navy going up the river, and the gains outweigh the losses in terms of feasibility.

Other words. To deal with Li Zhigao by force, the only way to deal with Li Zhigao is to dispatch the army, but the army has no certainty of victory.

At present, the Japanese Army has only six veteran divisions and 14 second-class divisions that can really fight wars, with a total of only 20 divisions and regiments. The number of people will not exceed 400,000, which is not much different from the army under Li Zhigao, only slightly exceeded, but if you add mobilized soldiers, the number is far inferior.

If you talk about the number of people, you can still fight. But in terms of weapons and equipment, there is no comparison at all.

The main equipment of the Japanese army at this time was the Type 30 rifle, and the other seven main divisions and regiments were equipped with some Type 38 rifles, both of which were bolt-action small-caliber rifles, backward in technology and insufficient in lethality, not to mention the semi-automatic rifles of Li Zhigao's main forces, and even the medium and formal rifles commonly equipped in Li Zhigao's troops were far inferior in all aspects.

If the gap in light weapons is not so obvious, then in terms of machine gun fire and heavy firepower, Japan and Li Zhigao's troops are no longer at the same level at all.

At this time, the Japanese army did not have an exclusive autonomous machine gun, and the machine guns equipped were mainly imported Makqin, which was not only small in number, but also very backward in terms of use, and only the battalion and regiment level were configured, and their number and power were far inferior to Li Zhigao's troops, after all, even the reserve mobilization troops under Li Zhigao's command could basically reach the company level in terms of machine gun configuration.

In terms of heavy firepower, the Japanese Army's divisional and regimental heavy firepower at this time was the highest 75 mm heavy artillery, which was mainly imported Krupp, plus some of its own imitation 41 mountain guns. Although the Japanese army also has a caliber of 280 mm super heavy artillery, such as during the Russo-Japanese War, that kind of gun is actually a coastal defense artillery, extremely bulky, only suitable for attacking fortified positions, in the face of Li Zhigao's kind of mobile army generally equipped with cars, mules and horses is not much use.

In addition, in terms of the quality of the army's personnel, although Japan believes that the quality of the soldiers of Li Zhigao's army is inferior to that of the Japanese soldiers, it is also much stronger than the armies of other warlords, and the Japanese soldiers will certainly not be able to win with bayonets, but they may not be willing to fight with you with bayonets because they have such powerful firepower.

Although the Japanese army advocated bayonet fighting, encouraged bushido, and emphasized the role of the human spirit, it was fundamentally because the government's finances were not sufficient, and it had to be so, not because they did not pay attention to firepower, or as later generations said, they were even deceived.

In other words, the high-ranking officers of the Japanese army were very clear-headed at this time, they knew very well what modern warfare was focused on, and their understanding of firepower and logistics was more accurate than that of other Asian countries. For example, during the Russo-Japanese War, the reason why the Japanese army was able to win in the end was actually by using firepower more reasonably, especially machine gun fire and heavy artillery, rather than fighting bayonets, because it was precisely the strength of the Russian army that fought bayonets at that time, and the Japanese army was not a little worse than the Russian army in terms of fighting bayonets. Therefore, the flesh-and-bullet charge advocated by fools like the military god Nogi Noshinori is not the mainstream among the top echelons of the Japanese army, and the spiritual victory method is just a means to fool junior officers into selling their lives in the case of lack of materials.

In short, after some comparison, the Japanese top brass found that Li Zhigao's army was at least superficially very strong, and even if the Japanese army could win, it would definitely have to pay a considerable price, and this was precisely what Japan could not accept at present.

Since it could not be contained militarily for the time being, and the economy was defeated and retreated, it was only possible to start from other aspects, and there is no doubt that the British did a very good thing back then, that is, the opium trade.

Due to the deliberate promotion and strong support of the Japanese side. The number of opium merchants in China gradually increased, and the focus of these opium merchants was on the Jiangnan region, where supply exceeded demand, so that they could not only make huge profits in one fell swoop, but also bring a series of social problems to Li Zhigao's rule.

Whale Maru. It was in this context that a cargo ship specializing in drug trafficking was born, which ostensibly belonged to an ordinary Sino-Japanese joint venture steamship transportation company, but in fact it was the industry of the Black Dragon Society.

In the past, due to their privileges, foreign ships, including Japanese ships, could crisscross the Yangtze River at will, but since Li Zhigao rebuilt the Yangtze River Naval Division, especially after the introduction of many new ships, he has intensified his efforts to combat smuggling on the Yangtze River. On the entire surface of the Yangtze River under Li Zhigao's control, the Jiangnan Navy's anti-smuggling team, which was reorganized from the Yangtze River Naval Division, could conduct anti-smuggling inspections on any ship of any country.

One night not long ago, a 62-1 frigate of the Jiangnan Navy's anti-smuggling team seized a cargo ship on the Yangtze River channel near Nanjing, and this ship was the Whale Maru. This check revealed that the entire ship was filled with contraband. Among them were a thousand Mauser Gew.98 rifles, ten Maxim machine guns, 100,000 rounds of ammunition, 200 Mauser pistols, and 1,000 grenades, 500 kilograms of explosives. In addition to these arms. There were also three hundred tons of cooked opium on board.

In other words, the Whale Pills are all contraband, because under Li Zhigao's rule, opium is not allowed to be sold or smoked. It is also forbidden to trade arms privately, so when they saw the cargo of the Whale Maru, the anti-smuggling team resolutely took the action of arresting people and seizing the ship.

After interrogation, the staff on board the Whale Maru, most of whom were Japanese, numbered 123 people, of whom 100 were determined to be soldiers with strict military training.

In this case, Li Zhigao's countermeasure was to detain it first, and at the same time announce the seizure incident in a high-profile manner, but there was just a Tang Qianming incident recently, and he really paid more attention to this matter, so that this matter did not make headlines, and it seemed a little bleak.

But no matter what, whether it is for the sake of face or for the sake of those Japanese, the Japanese government cannot sit idly by, so it sent Ijiin Hikoyoshi, an official minister, and Yamamoto Jotaro, who had dealt with Li Zhigao before, in the hope that this matter can be quickly and effectively settled.

"Mr. Li, you are a friend of our Great Japanese Empire and a person whom I admire, but you have made us deeply regretful in your handling of this incident." As soon as they met, Hikoyoshi of Ijiin began to attack, "The Whale Pill is just an ordinary cargo ship, and the cargo on it is just ordinary Chinese medicinal materials and some cloth, cotton and other goods, and it does not violate any regulations, you just forcibly detain the ship and arrest people, and put a name on us for drug trafficking and arms smuggling, which is completely unacceptable to us." Therefore, we hope that you will release the boat as soon as possible, and publicly apologize to us, as well as make corresponding compensation. ”

"Tut-tut, I guessed you would say that." The corners of Li Zhigao's mouth twitched, and then he threw a thick brown paper folder over, "Before you talk about that, let's take a look at this." ”

Seeing this situation, Ijiin Hikoyoshi instinctively frowned first, and had a bad premonition, but in this case, he had to open the file bag with his head down.

As soon as he opened it, his brow deepened because inside was a stack of confessions with red handprints and many realistic color photographs.

The confession is just a confession, and the content can be imagined, but those realistic color photos are unbearable, because the content of those photos was taken by the anti-smuggling team during the anti-smuggling mission, and it can be said that almost all the scenes at that time were taken clearly, including the opium and arms exposed after opening the box inside.

"That doesn't mean anything." Ijiin Hikoyoshi put down the document bag, "Although the photo is very good, it is very likely that you are faking it, replacing the unpacked goods with other goods, just like a tanuki for a prince." ”

"I knew you'd die with a duck's mouth." Li Zhigao smiled, "But it doesn't matter, I have better evidence." ”

Speaking of this, Li Zhigao snapped his fingers, and then found that the light in the entire room was dimmed, and after that, a large curtain in front of him began to fall, and two more female bodyguards came in and began to operate on a strange machine.

Soon, Hikoyoshi understood what it was, it was a projector, the projector was playing a movie at this time, and the movie was actually a color sound movie, of course, but this didn't make him much moved, after all, this is an era of rapid technological change, and what really moved him was the content of the movie, because the whole process of the official anti-smuggling team capturing the Whale Maru was played on it.

In the movie, the anti-smuggling team first shouted at the Whale Maru, asking to stop the ship for inspection, but unfortunately the Whale Maru did not listen and continued to move forward, and when the anti-smuggling boat approached, he should fire the gun first. After discovering this situation, the escort boat of the anti-smuggling team opened fire decisively, and the tracer bullets could be seen flying the sawdust of the Whale Maru, and in desperation, the Whale Maru had to stop the ship for inspection.

After that, the anti-smuggling team boarded the ship to be inspected is also vivid, in which the resistance and quibbles of the crew, as well as the scene when the goods were unpacked and inspected on the spot, are all recorded in the movie, it can be said that this realistic color film truly reproduces the scene at that time, not only the picture, but also the sound is completely recorded.

At the back of the film, there is a scene of interrogation, in which the Japanese who were interrogated separately told their identities, the origin of the goods, who they were going to give them to, and the purpose of sending them. According to their account, the goods were to be sent to the local "Loyalty Society" in Nanjing, which was an organization composed of bandits and local ruffians and hooligans in the city, with the highest leader being Li Ping and Chen Qimei as the matchmaker. Among them, opium is to make money for this organization, arms is to increase the force of this organization, and those Japanese soldiers are instructors, responsible for training those bandits, and the purpose of this is to create chaos in the Jiangnan area and create trouble for Li Zhigao's rule, and they also said that the Whale Pill is only the first batch, and they will continue to give greater support in the future.

"Now what else do you have to say?" When the movie was finished and the lights were turned on again, Li Zhigao smiled playfully, "The facts of the crime are clear, the human and material evidence are all there, and photos and documentaries were taken at that time, which can be said to be ironclad evidence." I'd like to see how you want to deny it at this time, or rather, I'll see how far your shamelessness can go! (To be continued......)