Decline and Fall of the
Japanese Empire
Sometime after 1400bcc, the Americans located and begin exploiting distant iron sources atop Mount Hawai'i, located at the halfway point between Amu-Kyoto and the Virginia Plain. In 1375, the Yanks returned to raiding the Western Japanese after they were weakened by their war on Polynesia.
Amu-Kyoto warlords led their bands down into the Osaka Valley, occupying the main Osakan farmlands. In the front of the column rode the ruthless Yankee warprince,
Jedgar, a direct descendant of Hoover, with a plan to starve the Osakan into submission. With his loyal retinue of black-clad
Phed'heral Guard around him, Jedgar occupied the villages and hamlets between the two warring kingdoms and forced pledges of loyalty upon the peasantry. The Phed'heral Guard were proficient archer divided into three companies. The Mikado of Osaka began to round up the peasants of the hinterlands and bring them inside the capital's straw and wooden fortifications, setting off a panic among the populace. The name Jedgar became a synonym for fear and terror in the Osakan tongue.
Jedgar dispatched one of his three Phed'heral archers into the Kyoto highlands to vanquish the Osakan spearmen holding that high ground, while the rest of his troop wintered in Osaka's lush farmlands and cut off food from entering the city itself. Unprepared for a siege, the starving defenders of Osaka quickly fell to the Yanks in the spring campaign and the Mikado taken captive. Now Jedgar held in his grasp a city full of residents convinced his next move would be to initiate a policy of cannibalism.
Warchief Robbertoover of Animal House
Riots broke out in Kyoto following the execution of the Mikado of Osaka. The conquest was on the verge of proving unmanageable to the victorious conquerors. The Phed'heral Guard acted quickly to bring peace. The warcaptain of the archers,
Magarthor, betrayed his lord and slew him in the town square, then proclaimed himself the American Mikado. With the Hoover Dynasty replaced by the Magarthor Dynasty, the Kyotans settled down and eventually accepted foreign rule. Relations with Jedgar's father
Robbertoover in Amu-Kyoto were strained, but the American ritual of rule by personal combat was far too ancient and respected a tradition for the barbarian's leader to justify civil war.
The American march to conquer Pacifika continued. Gradually, around this time, after centuries of resisting the natives' "devil signs," the American overclass ruling Kyoto and Osaka began to adopt the
Byzanto-Japanese hieroglyphics for labeling property and issuing decrees to their Amu-Nihonese subjects. Over many generations this would evolve into the simplistic early American "writing" system—something still scorned as civilized and for many centuries effete southward in the American heartland.
With the finalization of the
Great Einenhauser Highway (literally the "one-house" highway) joining North and South America, however, the eventual adoption of the alphabet, along with many other hallmarks of civilization, the domestication of the American warrior was inevitable.
In the east the Tokyonese Kingdom spread northward, even founding the colony of Edo in the sacred Fuji Mountains. Polynesian warbands, who also claimed the Fujis as a sacred site, warred on the troubled Tokyonese. With a growing onslaught from new waves of American warriors, the Mikado of Tokyo doubled his military force by
forced conscription. As with Osaka, harassment by Polynesian proved too troublesome to ignore, despite the great threat from the south and west.
The Mikado sent an army to finally dispatch the troublesome nomads in 1025bcc, but did not pursue them to extinction as many of his subjects demanded. The relentless threat from the American barbarians still remained and the storm clouds gathered. Preparing for the invasion, the Japanese developed horse mounted fighting skills to prepare new defenses against the Yanks. Sadly, Tokyo lacked access to the horse herds needed to put a significant cavalry in the field.
They also lacked the raw manpower to resist Yankee aggression, with more than one half of the continent's ethnic Japanese living under American rulers. American bandit incursions grew bolder and bolder.