Sorry for those of you who've seen this already from me.

[camwyn]

Ever have one of those times when you find yourself thinking, "I should slap so-and-so for planting thus-and-such an idea, only I think i can make it work"?

Just got back from a housefilk at akawil's/ladymondegreen's/agrumer's. They saw me knitting the Hapi coat. akawil (Canadian) asks if I am knitting myself a Mountie. I say 'only if they're Japanese' and show him the design and the source. He thinks for a bit and says "Ah! The Royal - no, sorry, the *Imperial* Japanese Mounted Police!"

And I think I can make it work, if we start from the assumption that someone is trying to humiliate a lesser lord and make him the target of Imperial wrath or the wrath of his neighbours by persuading the gaijin to gift him with so many horses and guns that it can only be viewed as giving him an army. Said lesser lord frantically consults his advisors, thinks about it for a while, and then staffs the horses with commoners and trains them at fighting - and then turns them over to the Emperor, having sworn them all to powerful oaths to serve the Throne, the Law, and the Gods, and not be used for anything less.

All of that, mind you, being spun up in the car ride on the way home from Jersey City, and coming packaged with the intro line of "Say to his Majesty that I am coming to Edo, and I am bringing him a mighty gift...."

Frell, I need to stop drinking Mountain Dew after nine PM.

Comments

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

Actually, Wil's not Canadian, I've just been corrupting him all these years. I'm the native. :)

*hugs*
LMG

[camwyn]

That's right, I was confusing him with his clone. Sandy's from Ontario somewhere, looks vaguely similar around the eyes (nowhere else, really), has almost exactly the same voice, and the same attitudes and sense of humour as Wil. IT's really freaky.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

*grin* That is freaky. We'll have to meet this Canadian clone of Wil's at some point.

*hugs*
LMG

[lwood.livejournal.com]

.... oooooo!

-- Lorrie

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

As requested, chatterdump:

"You very bad man. The first female to petition the Emperor to be allowed to serve is doing so in my head."
"Her father was an IM, and died under dubious circumstances. His sword was returned to his family, and said family was going to remain in disgrace because there was no son to fix things. So the Eldest Daughter takes the sword and rides to the Imperial Court. She is permitted to carry it into the throne room because 1) everyone assumes she is there to return the sword to the Emperor and beg him to grant her family a new honorable name and 2) well, she's a girl, she has a sword, so what. So she's kneeling down, making ob(that word I can't SPELL), the sword held in front of her. She sits up, and humbly begs the Emperor to take her into service, that she might recover her family's honor. While everyone is trying to process what she /actually/ said, as opposed to what their brains were all set to hear, she calmly draws the swoord, /CHOPS OFF HER HAIR/, and bows down again, offering both sword and hair to the Emperor."

"And of course you're going to name her Tomoe, that's what her name is. Fugisawa no Tomoe. V. high family, being allowed to use the name of the sacred mountain. That's why it's so important to her."
(clearly, family produces many Shinto priests as well as warriors. Eldest daughter was probably in training at the family shrine.)

[penguinzero.livejournal.com]

Quite the nifty idea -- I'm getting quite enraptured by the vision of the Mounties of Japan. Just one nitpick to help with the verisimilitude -- you wouldn't go to Edo to bring a gift to the Emperor. From about the late 8th century, the emperor lived in Kyoto, up until the early Meiji era in the 19th century. He was moved to Edo then, but at the same time, Edo was renamed Tokyo. The Tokugawa shogunate's government, of course, ruled from Edo, but giving the Mounties to the shogun would have an entirely different feel from giving them to the Emperor.

What period are you thinking of putting them in? The sengoku period just prior to the Tokugawa era is a popular time for action tales -- it's often been compared to the Old West, which of course resonates a bit with some of the things you've said about the Mounties in the past. There's still some strife in the early Tokugawa period, though that eventually dies down a bit. Then the Meiji revolution, which is maybe a bit too chaotic to be a good backdrop for this -- but any Ruroni Kenshin fan will tell you there's a lot of drama left in the early Meiji period, with the conflicts between modernization and tradition.

Just rambling a little, because it's a neat idea. :-)

[camwyn]

To be quite honest, aside from a lone anthro course in Japanese Culture and Society I know precious little about Japanese history between the time of Lady Murasaki and the time of Commodore Perry. Most of what I do know relates to the introduction of Western medicine via Portuguese and Dutch traders/missionaries who rather cleverly promoted said science through the highly visible art of dentistry. Whatever time period would be most appropriate, I suppose.

It's worth noting that when I mentioned the IJMP to a friend of mine on the phone last night, he came up with an entirely different scenario for their creation, set about fifteen years in the future instead of the past. It begins with the premise that Japan's problems as a population the size of the entire US crammed into a space the size of California only get worse. Increasingly disaffected youngsters agitating over the economic problems of a society that frantically scrabbled to look after the needs of its growing population of elderly at the expense of the generations coming up behind made life in the cities much, much nastier than it had to be. The pollution problems spreading out of southeast Asia and parts of China, combined with the sudden loss of available petroleum from an increasingly war-devastated Middle East, led to the radical step of banning cars and other petroleum-powered vehicles in favour of mass transit and human-powered forms of transportation. Fearing the kind of riots and widespread lawlessness seen elsewhere in Asia during periods of economic transition, the Japanese government commissioned the creation of an entirely new police force, answerable only to the Tokyo government but tasked with maintaining the peace in the communities they lived in. For all that electric vehicles are good for the environment and bicycles are highly efficient means of transportation, you can't do riot control on a bike, and an electric cycle just hasn't got real emotional impact. The Government wanted something that the people would appreciate, or at least be interested in, and so to maintain the humanity and effectiveness of this new police force at the same time they purchased two hundred Friesian horses. Enter the Imperial Japanese Mounted Police, living symbols of the contrast between Japan's agricultural past and technological future- and the struggle for balance between the two.

[camwyn]

Oh - my liver and spleen seem to have finished processing the Starbucks venti iced mocha I ordered this morning, and passed the results on to my brain. Said brain has just informed me that if I jigger my scheduling right I can probably make a case for the IJMP existing in both time periods - either having been dissolved at the end of the Second World War because of MacArthur's fears about reconstruction, or having been part of that reconstruction but whittled away to damn near nothing over time thanks to the advent of more machinery than anyone knew what to do with. Only the precipitous drop in the oil supply, plus the pollution, plus the crowding, plus everything else caused some bright young light to go through his or her history books, then stand up in the Diet and propose that Japan bring the Mounties back.

[penguinzero.livejournal.com]

They might have been a victim of the Meiji reconstruction, for that matter -- seen as a symbol of the antiquated past, like the samurai, though one would hope they'd acquitted themselves better.

I'm at work now, but if you'd like when I get home, I could dig up some of my old history books and point out specific timeframes where the Mounties might work best. (I did major in this stuff, after all.) The sengoku period is looking most attractive to me right now, really -- with no strong authority in charge of the country, the daimyo were constantly warring among themselves, and the Emperor, as was common in Japanese history, was largely a pawn. With a large, thoroughly trustworthy force at his disposal, I can see an Emperor being rather more proactive, though it'd take some handwaving. And I like the idea of these magistrates going out to show that no mortal is beyond the mandate of the Son of Heaven, and that be he lowly peasant or grand daimyo, the Mounties always get their man.

[camwyn]

They might have been a victim of the Meiji reconstruction, for that matter -- seen as a symbol of the antiquated past, like the samurai, though one would hope they'd acquitted themselves better.

I could see that. I could see that being the cover story put across by a government too frightened of their potential (despite the 'Imperial' in the name) to know what to do with them, actually.

And I like the idea of these magistrates going out to show that no mortal is beyond the mandate of the Son of Heaven, and that be he lowly peasant or grand daimyo, the Mounties always get their man.

Similarly appealing to me, that thought. All right, you're the appropriate history major - let's see what we can get in terms of suitable time periods and then we can see about how badly history has to be broken down and restructured. With the right manga-ka or animators on the task, you can do just about anything if you make it sound properly plausible.

[mephron]

Another idea: they might not have been a VICTIM of the Meiji Restoration, but organized as PART of it, as part of the wave of modernization that came about the same time. An addendum to the constabularies, assigned to parts of prefectures instead of towns, and therefore having a bit more neutrality in areas than the actual constables.

Give to them the mandate to protect the heimin (farmer/laborer class) from the depredations of the remaining wandering samurai and you start to get the idea that their orignal goal was a propaganda device - "See how well we are treating our lower class now" - but they actually BELIEVE they are meant to do that, causing them to become quiet but beloved local heroes.

If you've seen Zatôichi to Yôjinbô, I could see Sanjuro Kuwabatake (the yôjinbô of the title, played by Toshiro Mifune) becoming one of those after he decides the life of a wanderer is no life at all at the end of that movie.

[camwyn]

.... ooooo.

Okay, yeah, I like that.

[penguinzero.livejournal.com]

Thinking on it, I have to agree -- it's one of the more plausible periods for them. The Meiji Restoration was ostensibly about removing power from the shogun and his loyalists and returning it to the Emperor where it belonged (though really it went more to the clique of younger nobles who'd organized the restoration in the first place). Naming a group like this after the Emperor would make perfect sense in that climate. And there were groups like the Iwakura Mission travelling abroad to study foreign countries and bring back their best ideas to help reform Japan -- some modifications to the idea of a national police force could be all the inspiration they'd need. (When were the RCMP founded again? The Meiji era began in 1868, which might be a little early to get direct inspiration...)

More later, when I get home.

[camwyn]

It's five years early. The Northwest Mounted Police weren't created until 1873, and they didn't become the Royal Northwest Mounted Police until 1904. In 1920 the force absorbed the Dominion Police, the only other federally empowered police force in Canada, and was officially named the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Gimme a little bit to see what I can dig up . . . on. . . ah. When I get home I will check my copy of Policing a Pioneer Province. At one point a delegation from the Japanese Emperor toured parts of BC, but I don't know exactly when that was. I do know that the BC Provincial Police were established in 1858, and that the initial commissioners had grand plans and hopes for them, which were mostly thwarted by local politicians. If we assume one of the early commissioners was told to talk to visiting Japanese nobles, and he represented his dreams for the provincial police as if they were going to be implemented, I think that'd be enough to turn the trick.

I only had to look up the 1904 renaming date. I knew all the rest by heart, including several events that happened during the Imperial visit - I want to say that the Emperor himself may have been along for the ride, though I could be wrong. And yet, I could not even tell you when the FBI was created in my native country... oy.

[penguinzero.livejournal.com]

Okay, this is a little delayed, but...

The Meiji era definitely seems like a great time to start them out. A large part of the reasoning behind the early Meiji government's actions was to bring Japan up to speed with the rest of the world without letting it get colonized or conquered. So groups of scholars and political leaders were sent out to tour the world for a few years and bring back detailed information on whatever it was they were assigned to study. Often you'd have one person dropped off in Germany to study the court system, another in France to pore over the legal code, a third in the US to get some study of industrial engineering, and so on. (Just picking examples at random there.)

The most famous of these expeditions was the Iwakura Mission, led by Iwakura Tomomi, one of the most prominent revolutionary leaders. It left Japan in late 1871, and most of its members stayed abroad for at least a year and a half, with some being gone longer as they tried to fully understand their subjects.

One of the ideas they brought back was the concept of a courteous, helpful national police force, which would maintain law and order and protect the people, rather than keeping the people under control for the upper classes as had often been the case in Japan's past. Unfortunately, this was easier said than done, and Meiji Japan's police quickly became repressive and authoritarian. The founder of the modern police system, Kawaji Toshiyoshi, was outspoken in his support of a "police state" where the police ferreted out 'undesirables' with great zeal.

The early Meiji era was a time of great change and some unrest in Japanese society. There was massive work being done to establish a constitution, a government, and a legal code, some elements of which were still being defined as late as the 1890s. There were a number of peasant uprisings during the era, too, generally inspired by the fact that a lot of the Meiji policies weren't great for the peasants -- high taxes chief among them, though many weren't fond of compulsory education for their children or military conscription. In the earliest days of the era, there were even a few massive revolutions by disposessed samurai and nobles, though those were eventually fought down.

In other words, it was an era of change, advancement, idealism, and discontent. The perfect time for someone to actually come in and apply the pragmatic idealism of the Mounties, and give Japan some elements it desperately needed.

There are other decent times for the Mounties to be injected, but not quite so fitting. The sengoku era, which lasted from about 1477, when the Ashikaga shogunate was shown to have no remaining practical power, to 1600, when Tokugawa Ieyasu triumphed over his rivals to unite Japan under his banner, was a time when the lords warred among each other for honor, power, land, or grudges, and everybody suffered from it. It was a fairly dark time, with death and danger common companions, and a power like the Mounties might have been welcome. They might, however, have been rather overshadowed by the local lords, who had near-absolute power in their fiefs, at least until a rival came along and defeated their armies.

Another good period might be early Tokugawa, after Ieyasu had gotten himself declared Shogun. Peace was returning to the land, but there was still unrest, and a few revolts. Not everyone appreciated Tokugawa's rulership, especially his former rivals. And with Tokugawa's reforms, a number of samurai were put out of work, left without masters or duties, and no small number of them turned to banditry or other illicit activities. Plenty of room for the Mounties there.

Anyway, this should be enough to get you started. If there's anything more you need my help with, just ask, here, or on PF, or at my email address (zagyg@io.com). Hope this is all useful!

[camwyn]

Hmm. I think I'm gonna go with the Meiji; it's near enough in time that if the institution died out for whatever reason, it could be revived again in the early 21st century without causing people to go 'buh?' too hard. Early Tokugawa makes a nice second choice, but that's far enough back in time that the whole thing becomes a total alternate-history work instead of a bit of twiddling with the past leading into a more easily worked future.

Thank you very much for the reference material!