Interview with the Translator, Hills of Silver Ruins: Bureaucrats I

Kate: Ono captures chillingly well the infighting, Screwtape Letters, dog-eat-dog nature of bureaucrats. In many fantasy books, the hero's return is the end of all strife. With Hills of Silver Ruins, Taiki's calculated return throws the Screwtapes into a flurry of frustrated, enraged, and (increasingly useless) countermoves. His outsider status and his outsider mentality appear to serve him well here.

Are Ono's descriptions true to bureaucrats everywhere (there is Screwtape!) or is she drawing on Japanese business and/or political life specifically?

Eugene: An interesting twist in the political universe of the Twelve Kingdoms is that if you rise high enough in the provincial or imperial government, you get to live forever. Or at least until you get tired of living forever. Gyousou has a mid-eternal-life crisis where he quits government service and hangs out in the Yellow Sea while learning how to wrangle youjuu (which comes in useful later on).

I think Ono is combining the rigorous meritocracy of the Chinese civil service with what became a hereditary civil service among the samurai of the Edo period. As a samurai, you were guaranteed a stipend, but it didn't amount to much unless you rose up the ranks. That meant knowing the right people or being good at your job. Probably both. Being born into the right clan in the right province helped too.

So in a functioning regime in the Twelve Kingdoms, once the slots get filled, the job board shuts down. The only way in is to wait until someone retires or push them out (using devious means, as in Chou'un's case). Or in the case of Rakushun, have Enki create a position because there's no sense letting all that talent go to waste.

In medieval China, executing a successful coup was ipso facto proof of the Mandate of Heaven, so Asen would be sitting pretty. During the Edo period, the next shogun was chosen from among the three main houses of the Tokugawa clan by the elder statesmen of the regime. By the mid-19th century, guys like Ii Naosuke (a far more ruthless version of Chou'un) were picking shoguns that were easy to manipulate.

To give him credit, Ii Naosuke really was the smartest guy in the room. But the brutal Ansei purge he initiated to remove or sideline anybody opposed to his policies seriously destabilized the shogunate and in the end got himself assassinated (not by outsiders; one of the targets of the purge was Tokugawa Nariaki, governor of Mito, and his retainers were not happy with how he was treated).

In the Twelve Kingdoms, however, the emperor and the kirin are literally appointed by Heaven. The dilemma facing Asen and Chou'un is that if you get rid of the emperor or kirin, unlike Ii Naosuke, you have no control over who will show up next. Youko is an outsider, while Keiki is the insider. Gyousou is the insider, while Taiki started on the inside and ended up the quintessential outsider.

At the beginning of A Thousand Leagues of Wind, the bureaucrats take the Ii Naosuke approach and try to turn Youko into a puppet. By the end, she's pulled off the equivalent of her own palace coup and cleaned house.

Thus periods of regime change become particularly precarious for the civil service, as you can end up with rulers who have no loyalty to "established precedent." This will inevitably result in political infighting as all the permanent undersecretaries vie to maintain their permanence. The exchanges between Ansaku and Chou'un in chapters 7 and 33 (book 3) of Hills of Silver Ruins remind me of Yes, Minister.