White Founts Falling in the Courts of the Sun

William Adams (September 24, 1564 - March 7, 1601) was an English navigator who, on April 19, 1600, became the first Englishman to reach Japan. He served as a military advisor to the daimyo Tokugawa Ieyasu, and sought to weaken the influence of Portuguese Catholic missionaries in Osaka and Edo. His ill-fated participation in the Battle of Sekigahara caused these efforts to backfire, as his execution on the orders of the victorious Ishida Mitsunari strengthened Japan’s ties with Portugal, leading to a partnership that would establish Japan as a colonial power over the course of the 17th century.

–New Cornell Encyclopedia, Cornell University Press. Ithaca, 2026.

Lieutenant Christopher Hernandez, California Shogunate Air Force, stepped onto the fencing mats in the San Francisco Naval Academy’s Joshua Norton Gymnasium, not quite sure how he had gotten this far in the Branch Weapons tournament. In his last year fencing for Sacramento, he had placed second in the country with saber and third in kendo, sure, but despite the university setting, this wasn’t college sports anymore, and the Air Force never got into the last three rounds of Branch Weapons, much less the final round.

When someone from another branch explained why the Air Force never won, they usually fell back on the pun “Chair Force”, but their true disadvantage was obvious enough to go without saying. It was in the name, Branch Weapons: this was a contest the Security Directorate put on for esprit de corps, so they said, where officers from each branch of the armed services would fence with sparring-safe facsimiles of the edged weapons they carried– at least in their parade uniforms, if not in the field. Most other branches were on reasonably even footing: the Army sported a long, basket-hilted rapier, the Navy and Marine Corps had curved two-handed blades– the shorter ko-katana and the longer tachi respectively– and the Gendarmerie marched with one weapon on each hip: a wakizashi, a short one-handed cousin of the Navy and Marines swords, and a jitte, a baton with a wide hook for catching blades.

The Air Force used the largest edged weapon they had in service: the Bowie knife in their aircrew survival kit. Not quite eight inches of blade, and scarcely one inch lengthwise of handguard. An imposing knife, but no sword.

A Marine or an Army man had come up with this contest, maybe a Gendarme who was particularly good with his jitte, but certainly nobody from the Air Force.

Chris could come up with no explanation for how he had made it to the final round, beyond two ever so slight advantages: he was left-handed, which threw off the technique of most right-handed opponents; and he had read the rules of this particular tournament carefully. They were sloppy work; the event had only kept on for decades without major changes because everyone fenced according to muscle-memory learned in drills or in more traditional competition formats. This was a unique, once-a-year thing, with a limited body of contestants and a modest prize pool. The loopholes went unexploited simply because nobody had bothered to find them.

Lieutenant Hernandez and his opponent– a tall, lean man with the golden poppy crest of the Army of California painted on his fencing mask– bowed at the waist. Each held his weapon before his face in salute, and Hernandez’s eyes traced the roughly five and a half lengths of his own blade his opponent’s weapon– an epee lengthened from the sports fencing standard to match the profile of the Army rapier– spanned as he drew it down to a guard.

To add insult to injury, Chris’s own weapon wasn’t even fully metal, but a plastic training knife, gouged where it had parried steel sparring-weapons and inset with a long, flat aluminum plate for an edge. He took up his guard, the knife point-up at chest level.

A beep sounded, to mark the start of the match. In earlier rounds, he had been able to win by madly rushing his opponents straight away, but no man who could be overwhelmed that way had made it this far. Instead, he waited, and let the Army officer move in on him.

The other man shuffled in, a foot-width at a time, until he was just within measure and lunged.

As expected of a seasoned fencer, he knew how far he could extend this thrust within an inch. It was a long way, though Chris had guessed that from the length of his legs.

Some onlookers blinked, and where Chris’s head had been when their eyes closed, there was the tip of his opponent’s epee when they opened. He had tipped it just out of measure with the faintest half-step and lean.

Now he went on the offensive. He batted the epee aside with the flat of his blade and rushed in. The other man backed up, but Chris was faster, and he brought the knife down at the knee still outstretched from the lunge. He had to think about the move for a split-second even as he performed it– there were no score areas below the waist in saber fencing or in kendo– but Branch Weapons was full-body, and he followed through quickly enough to hear the scoreboard beep as his edge made contact with the padding.

They resumed their original places, and a starting beep sounded for the second exchange.

The Army officer came on in a more conservative string of lunges; Chris thought he saw an opening, but the moment his front foot came in, the button-sensor on the tip of the epee depressed against his mask.

They went back and forth, Chris first falling behind under the reach disadvantage, then recovering upon figuring out a way to get the cat’s–claw of the knife around the epee’s guard and score on his opponent’s fingers. He was sure they would tweak either the rules or the safety gear before next year because of it, but his opponent seemed to recover each time with little more than a limp-wristed shake of his sword-hand.

He kept track of the score in his head for the first few exchanges, then lost it somewhere around 2-3 against him. He didn’t look up again until he had deflected a thrust from the epee with his right forearm– an illegal move in the ordinary epee ruleset, from which only the rules about needing to score with the tip of that weapon had been copied– and landed a strike on the Army man’s bicep. 4-4, next point had the match.

The Army officer’s opening thrust came at chest-level. Chris shifted from a diagonal fighting stance to a squared-off one leaning to his right, and the tip passed under his left armpit.

He clamped that arm down on it. The Army man tried to pull it back, but Chris got the ring and pinkie fingers of his knife-hand under the epee’s guard and held it. He couldn’t bring the knife to bear like that, but his opponent’s weapon was every bit as harmless.

His opponent, in an apparent bout of confusion and panic, instead pushed the weapon in, bringing it up as he did so and flexing the blade against Chris’s armpit.

Chris realized he could match the gesture, lean in on his opponent, and score a hit on his chest. But the epee-blade was bending like a foil, and he felt tension in the metal pressed against his shoulder that worried him.

A blade in good condition wouldn’t break. There was nothing in the rules as written that would deny him a victory if he went for it. But he knew enough about military procurement to guess that not one blade made for this tournament had been replaced since his father had been a cadet, and winning this wasn’t worth getting impaled through the shoulder by the stub, or letting the tip jump back and do God-knew-what to another officer. Getting a little rough with the man’s fingers was one thing, but this could kill.

He backed up, bringing his right hand down on top of the blade’s arc. The whole thing jumped free shaking. His opponent scrambled to recover. A split-second before the epee’s tip pressed into his thigh, Chris’s knife was on the Army man’s wrist.

He bowed and cast off his mask. Almost before the white yarrow crest of the California Air Force touched the mats, he was whisked off to a podium next to a middle aged-man in the tan uniform of an Army colonel, medal in hand and a surprisingly satisfied look on his face. In the madness of the moment, the medal was nearly on Chris before he recognized the face.

He fumbled a moment for the right form of address– California samurai were particular about using English, Spanish, or Japanese honorifics to match the etymology of one’s clan name, but he and the rest of the clan Hernandez de Puerto Peñasco were vassals to a clan with a German name, which had no set protocol.

“Don Sinzendorf.” he settled on to address the Daimyo of Sonora.

“At ease, son.” his liege lord said, then whispered in his ear, “the Director of Security would like to see you after this.”

Chris nodded, but the statement left him in a daze. General Robert Earp, he recalled faintly, Daimyo of Tucson, highest officer in the land short of the Shogun, and by all accounts one crusty hard-ass of an old soldier. How would winning at some silly sport have drawn his attention?