I would be very interested to read a biography of your character Doctor Lucas Braga and Admiral Okada Harouka.
Can I just ask if the Horatio Hornblower series of novels by C. S. Forester might have been written in this universe, or a counterpart.
Okada Haruka was born in Tokyo in 1892. He attended and graduated from the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy prior the beginning of the First Great War.
Okada served in the Imperial Japanese Navy during the First Great War, and survived the Battle of the Three Navies in 1916. Okada continued to rise in the ranks of the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Interwar period, and fought in the Pacific War against the United States during the early 1930s.
Okada also served in the Second Great War, first in the Japanese naval actions against the United States, and later in the Japanese offensives against the British Empire in Southeast Asia towards the end of the war. After the end of the Second Great War, Okada rose to the highest ranks of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and was an admiral beginning in 1955.
Okada Haruka never had favorable views of the United States. However, he developed a wariness of the United States during his decades of active military service. He believed that the United States was the most dangerous enemy that the Japanese Empire faced. Unlike many high ranking Japanese military leaders, who dismissed the US because of the ultimate outcomes for Japan in the two Great Wars and the early 1930s Pacific War, Okada believed that the United States, with its former enemies in North America defeated, would use its full military and industrial power in a future war with Japan. Okada believed that war with the United States should be avoided, and that the Japanese Empire should focus on consolidating its control over the Co-Prosperity Sphere.
By the 1950s, Admiral Okada had also came to view the continuing Japanese war of conquest in China as a waste of resources. This, and Okada’s opposition to waging an offensive war against the United States, put him directly at odds with the Japanese military commanders who made up the Universal Victory faction, as well as Japanese military officers who belonged to even more fanatical secret societies. During the 1950s, Okada did come to occupy an influential position along the highest ranking Japanese naval officers. Okada gradually became more and more embroiled in strategic and ideological arguments, as well as disputes over resources, between the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy that would eventually end in open fighting between the two military branches in the Japanese Civil War during the Fourth Pacific War.
Admiral Okada, in spite of his opposition to continuing the war in China and launching an offensive war against the United States, was not a pacifist. Had Okada come to power in 1966 as Japan’s prime minister instead of General Ishii Yamada, he would have attempted a grand strategy of isolating the United States by undermining and breaking apart the postwar US-German anti-proliferation alliance. Okada also believed that the Japanese Empire should have pursued a diplomatic strategy of undermining and breaking apart the Independence Movement, with the goal of gaining Bharat as a military ally.
Admiral Okada quickly became the strongest opponent among the highest ranking Japanese military officers to the regime of Ishii Yamada. In late 1967, as Ishii argued forcefully for an offensive war against the United States and the CDS in response the isolation of Japan following the beginning of the Second Chinese Revolution, Okada initially succeeded in preventing a decision in favour of war. This opposition to General Ishii collapsed after Admiral Okada was severely wounded in an attempted assassination by ultra-nationalists supportive of Ishii, though, as historians later discovered, not on Ishii’s direct orders. Okada, recuperating from his wounds, resigned from his military position, and was effectively confined to house arrest.
Okada collapsed into despair after the beginning of the Fourth Pacific War, and the devastating setbacks that the Japanese military experienced at the hands of the United States and the CDS. Okada also became deeply fatalistic, and prevented naval officers from launching a coup against Ishii following the first of what proved to be two US nuclear attacks against Unit 731 in early 1968.
Later in 1968, after the successful US-Russian invasion of Mongolia and the joint US-CDS invasion of Japanese-held West Papua, several high ranking Japanese military commanders and civilian officials plotted to orchestrate a coup against General Ishii with the goal of replacing him with Admiral Okada, though without Okada’s knowledge. General Ishii, upon learning of this plot, used it as an excuse to launch a purge of the entire Japanese military high command and civilian bureaucracy that he imagined was conspiring against him. In early July 1968, Admiral Okada was among those who were murdered by the allies of General Ishii in what would later be remembered as the Days of the Butterfly Swords.
After the end of the Fourth Pacific War and the ascent of the Syndicalist regime, the family of Okada Haruka were among those who were exiled by the Japanese Worker’s Republic to the Republic of Ezo.
