Chapter 61: Japan on a Cruise (Part I)

Osaka, Japan

The largest port in modern Japan is now in ruins. www.biquge.infoCountless shells, aerial bombs, and flames completely destroyed the place into a white field. The streets were littered with corpses too late to be buried, and the air was filled with the smell of gunsmoke, corpses, and burning wood.

Only a few remaining citizens, like the walking dead, wandered around the ruins numbly, as if trying to get something intact out of the ruins, or trying to find their lost relatives and their burned homes—messages were coke-scribed on the remaining walls in search of relatives who might still be alive, but in the end, only one in ten could actually find them.

However, compared to the other refugees whose homes were destroyed by the war during the World War, the Japanese refugees in the Theater area were already very fortunate - after recovering the densely populated Kyoto-Osaka area, the wartime base camp of "Light Red Japan" allocated astronomical supplies for the relief of the refugees and post-war reconstruction. They do not have to rely on digging rats and birds, peeling tree bark and digging grass roots to survive, like the Chinese before and the Germans today, and they do not have to continue to suffer from the sun and rain and sleeping in the open after their homes are in ruins.

In every area that had just been recovered, the wartime base camp set up food relief stations as quickly as possible, and provided a certain amount of dried vegetables, salted fish, rice, canned food, flour, wine, sugar, salt, and sauce free of charge according to the ration card of each citizen, not to mention that these things can be taken for nothing.

Of course, although it is said that it is a relief product that does not require money, it also has to pay a price. After eating the relief food distributed by the government and wearing the uniform provided by the base camp -- for some reason, all refugees, regardless of gender, old and young, were uniformly arranged to wear sailors' uniforms, and had to submit to the strict militarized management of the authorities, and to obey the distribution and dispatch of the authorities. However, for the Japanese, who are the most disciplined and obedient in the world, this little battle is really nothing.

The slogan of the base camp for this relief campaign is "Never give up a compatriot", which can be said to be the ultimate of Our Lady, not at all like Japan.

It's just that the refugee camps that Japan's wartime headquarters accommodated and housed these compatriots seemed to be a little special......

“…… Wow! Wow wow—"

In a small and dark space, the upper bunk of a double-shelf bed suddenly heard the immature cry of a baby.

Then, amid the complaints of her roommates, Suzune Sunset, a twenty-two-year-old young woman who had just evolved from a wife to a surviving person, sat up from the cramped bed, hurriedly undressed amid the cries of the child, and fed her young son, who had not yet been weaned, with milk......

However, the little son in her arms who had been suckling his breast milk had only been quiet for a few seconds, and Mrs. Sato's little daughter in the lower bunk also began to cry, and the loud cry echoed in the cramped steel cabin, so loud that everyone's ears were buzzing and sleepy.

That's right, Suzune Sunset, a war refugee and a single mother, and her fugitive companions, four women and two babies, are now crammed into a cabin of less than eight square meters...... And this is the sea refugee camp where they were housed in the wartime base camp.

-- Instead of transporting refugees to a certain place by boat, we arranged for them to live on a ship!

Because, for today's wartime base camp of Japan, instead of wasting time and effort to rebuild the city on a piece of ruined and scorched earth, it is better to directly start the money printing machine and exchange the banknotes for a large number of cruise ships from the [era vending machine], which is relatively more convenient and convenient...... The camps also need to be planned and built by engineering teams, and ensuring the supply of water, electricity and food is also a major problem. Large cruise ships, on the other hand, are readily available, and the living facilities on board are readily available, as long as a group of rookie crew members who can tinker with machinery are urgently trained, they can be put into use.

Thus, after the reconquest of the densely populated Kyoto-Osaka region, the rear ports of Osaka, Kobe, Hiroshima, Kagoshima, Sasebo, and Nagasaki, which were controlled by the "light red Japanese", quickly became overcrowded. In order to accommodate millions of war refugees, the wartime base camp got more than 1,000 10,000-ton ocean liners in one go, and used them as refugee camps, almost filling all the ports under its rule.

Of course, although they were placed on an ocean cruise ship, these refugees were squatting in a shelter instead of enjoying a luxury cruise holiday, so their living conditions were not so comfortable. In order for these ships to accommodate more people - not that there were not enough ships, but that there was a serious shortage of sailors who knew how to steer them. All kinds of luxurious entertainment facilities on the ship have been simply and rudely dismantled. The glittering on-board dance halls and casinos have been converted into large cabins and filled with bunks by refugees. As for the depraved gambling tables and pachinko machines, they were also thrown into the sea.

The surviving young woman Sunset Suzune was taken care of because she had a child who was still nursing and was a survivor of a soldier, so she was taken care of, and she did not have to make a bunk on the floor in the cabin, but was assigned to a third-class bunk. But it's also crowded like a sleeper on a train, and it's hard to even turn around after stuffing your luggage......

However, Sunset Suzune is already very satisfied with this, after all, in this war years, it is already very happy to have a place to shelter from the wind and rain, and to have a full stomach - thinking back to the most tragic months before, when her family was ruined and she was forced to escape from Osaka with her child turned into a sea of blood, she hid in the bare wilderness, couldn't eat for several days, ripped off her clothes in the cold wind and tried to feed the crying child with the shriveled nursery ♀, but she couldn't squeeze out anything, she could only cry with her emaciated child... … Sunset Suzune felt that the current days were like heaven.

It is precisely because of this awareness that a month ago, when the military and police in charge of hosting the refugees gave each of them a rice ball and then demanded that all refugees, regardless of gender, undergo sanitary quarantine and disinfection. While the other young women were still a little squirming and pinching, and even almost caused a riot, Sunset Suzune took off her already tattered clothes in public, and stood up with the child in her arms, allowing several doctors in masks and white coats to carefully examine it from head to toe. Thanks to her leadership, the quarantine of the refugees was able to proceed smoothly.

Those who were diagnosed with the disease were sent to another quarantine area, while Sunset Suzune and the others were treated to a hearty hot meal and a hot bath - according to the doctors, for the sake of everyone's health, they had to be thoroughly cleaned before boarding the ship to get rid of germs and fleas, otherwise it would be no fun to start a plague on a crowded ship.

As a result, each refugee was burned in shabby clothes, changed into sailor suits of different sizes and models, and then received towels, toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, water bottles and lunch boxes. When Suzune finally took a hot bath again after a few months, using soap, which was very rare during the war, she couldn't help but burst into tears—hot water with the pungent smell of bleaching powder sprayed out of the metal shower head and slapped on her face, and the same warm tears flowed down her face......

Then, the surviving Sunset Suzune and her unweaned child began to live a life of curling up on the ship all day long, which was very crowded and boring. What's even more uncomfortable is that because the ship has been moored next to the pier and does not move, there is no automatic air supply of the snorkel, so the air in the cabin is always very turbid, fortunately, there is no shortage of food and clothing, and more importantly, it is very safe, at least it is much better than the previous escape career.

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After being woken up by the baby's cry, the women in the cabin also lost their sleepiness and began to chatter quietly. Some people miss their relatives who don't know their whereabouts, and Sunset Suzune can't help but think of her eldest daughter who died in the bombing and her sailor husband who died in Kure Harbor...... After a while, with the electric ringing of "jingle bells", everyone got up from their beds to freshen up and prepare to go to the restaurant for breakfast.

Along the long passage, Sunset Suzune climbed out of the third-class cabin with the child in her arms, and immediately gasped desperately, greedily breathing in the fresh air, and then lined up in a long line of old elders, slowly moving towards the dining room little by little......

-- According to the original design, the ship's restaurant is large enough to accommodate all passengers at the same time. But now that the ship is being used as a refugee camp, it is filled with twice as many people, and some of the restaurants and bars have been turned into chase shops for the refugees, so the seats, tables and chairs for the meal suddenly become tense, and the refugees have to wait in long lines to eat in batches, which fortunately, the Japanese seem to have become accustomed to...... By the time Twilight went to the restaurant with her baby in her arms, several waves of refugees had already finished their meals, and they were walking and chatting on the deck, taking advantage of the rare rest time to let off steam.

After waiting in line for more than an hour, and after nursing the baby again, Suzune finally squeezed into the dining room, which was filled with a fixed metal table on one side and a counter for receiving meals on the other, similar to the cafeterias in schools and factories, but the contents were much more plentiful, even for the simplest breakfast, there were snow-white polished rice, fragrant bread or biscuits, canned fish as the main course, and a clear soup made of seaweed, shrimp skin, and scallops...... For lunch and dinner, there is usually curry rice, scrambled eggs made from canned beef and egg powder, and extra sweets and pastries for the little ones. Aside from the fact that there are no cigarettes and alcohol (no smoking and alcohol on board just in case), it's like a holiday every day!

The relief food rationed by these base camps for free was a luxury even before the war, and ordinary Japanese who were a little poorer could not eat it at all. Even the petty bourgeoisie and the middle class would be very painful to eat like this every day, let alone in wartime when supplies were scarce.

After entering the restaurant, Suzune first leaned over to the drinking water tap by the wall, filled her kettle with cold boiled water, and then went to the counter to receive her own ration: a box full of white rice, a paper bag of small biscuits, a canned fish, and nori soup in an enamel teacup, plus an extra box of Morinaga fruit candy to care for her lactating mother—when she was given these things, the white-hat chef behind the counter said apologetically that the milk was gone, I can only give her a little more sugar to replenish her body......

Well, in the past, she had to carry the baby for breakfast every day, and in order to take care of her as a mother, the chef would always give her an extra bottle of milk.

Although she was already satisfied, when she was still at home, these breakfast items alone would be enough for her to eat for a day!

Since getting on this boat, eating and sleeping more every day and not exercising, her originally thin figure has become much plump, and even her belly has become slightly fat. Hey, I really hope that such a day of good food and drink can go on forever, at least until the time when the child is weaned, right? Sunset Suzune sighed like this, I just don't know what will happen in the future, and the government will definitely not let everyone eat and drink for nothing all the time...... It seems that they can only obey the arrangement.

However, while the free breakfast distribution is exaggerated, a place to sit and eat is hard to find, at least for the moment. The few metal tables in the ship's dining room were already crowded, and many children could only sit on their parents' laps. And next to every seat that is already occupied, there are at least one or two people guarding with lunch boxes and teacups...... The surviving Lady Sunset Suzune held her baby in her arms and walked around the overcrowded dining room, her arm so sore that she was about to break it, and she still couldn't find a vacant spot. In the end, he had to give up, turned around and walked out of the restaurant, planning to find a clean place on the deck, and just squat and eat.

Obviously, there were quite a few people who had the same idea as her, and Sunset Suzune walked around the equally overcrowded deck for a while before she found a place near the railing near the gangway where no one was around, crouched down and opened the lunch box. However, she had barely taken a few mouthfuls of food before she was driven away by another sailor. Because a group of guys in military uniforms had arrived on the dock in trucks at some point, and were boarding the ship from the gangway in turn, and among them were a few white Westerners with blond hair and blue eyes and handsome faces...... And Sunset Suzune just happened to block the entrance to the gangway on the deck.

However, the appearance of these Westerners did not cause much commotion - the Japanese today know that although the country is fighting bloody battles with the United States and Britain, it is also allied with the Russian Maozi. So it's not uncommon for a few white Western faces to appear occasionally on the territory of our country...... But the sharp-eyed Sunset Suzune keenly noticed that the pattern of the foreigner's collar badge in the lead was not the Russian red star, but a black iron cross!

Although as an ordinary Japanese housewife of this era, the surviving lady Nitsu Suzune also had limited knowledge. But thanks to the overwhelming propaganda of the Japanese government during the war, she still knew what this Iron Cross badge represented - it was the military insignia of the German allies!

Oh, my God...... Could it be that they are Germans? Wait, isn't Germany already defeated? What are they doing in Japan now?