White Crane Republic (6.0)

Flag of the White Crane Republic

## Emblem

Seal of the White Crane Party

The Free Regions of  Kantō and Chūbu, more commonly known as the **White Crane Republic** (Kanji: 共和制白鶴; Katakana: ホワイトクレーン共和国) is a federal, one-party presidential republic situated in the center of the Japanese island of Honshu. The Free Regions consist of two semi-autonomous regions of control — Kanto and Chubu — and one capital zone which lies within the city limits of Kofu. Despite the regions’ relative separation from one another; both having governors and their appointed cabinets, both administrations must answer strictly under the Kofu authority and Tsurugi, or Crane Council, which acts as the executive judicial, and legislative body of the Free Regions.

The years which followed the collapse of the Imperial Japanese government after the rapid flooding of all coastal metropolitan areas of Honshu could be generously described as chaotic and hellish. Despite the Emperor’s grip on the Japanese people’s hearts, the wills of the IJA and IJN did not conform to the constantly-shifting rhetoric of the collapsing aristocracy, and it eventually all came tumbling down, forcing the archipelago into something of a short second Sengoku period. Out of this sump of Imperial warlords, communists, and republicans was birthed the idea of a united Tokyo, and eventually a united Central Honshu. The ideals of such a nation-state were fledgling, to say the least; the promises of democracy for the much-illed people of Japan was a breath of fresh air, but also an unproven theory for the loose banded confederation of cities which stretched from coast to coast, and which had begun calling itself the “White Crane Republic”; an homage to the delicate metaphor of the crane; something so fragile yet graceful, able to stand up to the highest tides and catch the mightiest fish despite its seemingly lightweight state.

Due to the nature of the republic’s founding, a single date cannot be placed on its conception, but rather a loose series of events that led to the eventual confederation of several conservative-minded city-states in the Kanto and Chubu regions around 1955. Since the fact, the state of the nation has changed little despite the dramatic rise in population and eventual reintegration of heavy industry — government is geriatric, administrative branches have stayed stagnant and oppressively bureaucratic, public works have been left to local councils to consider and carry out, and the military is officially disbanded, instead of left to the bountifully-funded Central Band Police Force, which is capable of fielding weaponry heavy enough to be considered a capable fighting force in this day and age.

In the modern era, the White Crane Republic is a declared state, stating its official independence and federalization from the smaller warlord and republican factions May 18th, 1978 in the White Crane Accord. The objectively corrupt one-party system of the Free Regions compliments the effective state of martial law that the Central Band Police Force has imposed on the metropolitan regions of the nation as a measure to curb the rapid and systemic organized crime wave which began in the mid-eighties shortly after the White Crane party’s nationalization of several dozen arms manufactories, which led to the owners of such industries to turn to white and blue-collar crime to make end’s meat.

In short: the government, despite its best attempts, has become faceless and departmental. Citizens of the Free Regions, despite being able to vote freely, often find themselves coming back to the same handful of inoffensive, vaguely corrupt politicians who side with the Central Band Police Force and discourage any kind of real economic or political growth, as their pockets are full enough as it is. The police presence is omnipresent and all-encompassing, but not threatening; the people of the Free Regions still enjoy a certain level of vice and hedonism within the dens of sin of the lower layers of society, while the rich revel in a different but similar kind of pseudo-aristocratic pleasure that comes from old money. Rural infrastructure past major highways have crumbled and the agricultural community is null past the local marketplace, while heavy industry rots the inner cities like a festering parasite within a once-healthy body, now destroyed with cancers and warts and moles in decaying wooden structures and quick-crumbling concrete blocks built out of necessity from the post-war period. Blue skies are hard to find in the Free Regions, and naturally clear water is all but a myth amongst the common citizenry.