REIWA JIGOKUHEN - Chaotic Disturbance of Reiwa Era

Chapter 15 - Emergency Disaster Response Headquarters

Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo: on Route 20

The certification ceremony in the Imperial Palace's Pine Chamber ended on a somber note.

Minister of Extraordinary Temporal and Spatial Disaster Response, is Muto's new title. He will be the deputy head of the Emergency Disaster Response Headquarters, and will also continue to serve as the Prime Minister's Advisor to National Security Affairs. He will be the first person to respond to the extraordinary situation in which the entire country has thrown back in time. The thought of this heavy responsibility naturally made him tense. Aside from the damage caused by the air raid, there has been no visible damage yet. However, the future that is foreseen is too harsh.

'Well then...'

In the backseat of his official car, Muto peered at the screen of his tablet. It was a list of countermeasure office staff sent from various ministries, universities, and research institutes, and new names were added one after another. Some of them he had drinks with, some he had talked to somewhere, some he had heard rumors about, and some he didn't know at all. Anyway, he quickly memorized their faces, names, and backgrounds.

'Seventy percent of them are serious and thirty percent are weirdos?'

Because of the nature of the cataclysm, the faces were not the same as usual. The tasks to be assigned to them could be roughly classified into four categories.

The first was to survey the extent and scale of damage caused by the time-space cataclysm. The most obvious damage from the disaster is the aircraft and vessels that have disappeared since last night, as well as Japanese nationals abroad who have not been heard from since last night, and the team currently working to confirm and gather information will take over. Since all Japanese diplomatic missions abroad have apparently disappeared, it may be difficult to identify them completely, but they still have to do their best.

The second was to clarify the cataclysm itself and find a way to return to their proper world. For this, a team of temporary staff members, mainly physicists and astronomers, will be organized. He had no idea what they would be working on, and they would probably participate via videoconference from their laboratories, but it would be important to at least guarantee them a budget and full access to all kinds of observational data.

Third, control of the domestic economy. Resource shortages due to trade disruptions would immediately and lethally hit the economy and destroy the nation itself. In order to contain this as much as possible, a large organization of most ministries and agencies would be formed. There is a mountain of issues to be dealt with, such as managing the distribution of daily commodities, controlling the supply and demand of electricity and transportation systems, freezing non-essential and non-urgent businesses, planned closure of private businesses, and the associated financial and tax compensation, dealing with the instantaneous unemployment that is expected to rise to several percent, and planning for the mobilization of personnel to increase food production and develop the country's resources. This is where the seriousness of the bureaucracy is put to the test.

The fourth thing that needs to be done is a survey of this world. So far it looked like March 1945, but maybe the inhabitants of this world are fake humans composed of optical isomeric proteins. Even if this is an extreme case, they must compile information on whether this world really is March 1945, what the Earth was like then, and what the distribution and production of resources necessary to sustain the domestic economy were like. They plan to have personnel from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) provide assistance in this task. Like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the National Security Bureau, which is in charge of liaison with other countries, including former colonies such as Korea and Taiwan, will hire new advisors and temporary staff to duplicate some of the work. Industrial and military history will become very practical disciplines here.