Appendix

Additional author's notes...

That's because
I'm gonna become much much more happy from now on.

I'm not gonna compromise with just this.
We are gonna take back all of our happiness that we lost.

For me, that's about a hundred year's worth.
For you, a thousand year's worth.

— Frederica Bernkastel

Chapter 2

On the subject of government services, the Science and Technology Agency is a Cabinte Office agency of the Japanese government responsible for overseeing technological development would be merged with the Ministry of Education in January 2001 to form the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the Defense Agency was created in the Fifties in order to oversee the Japanese Self-Defense Force was upgraded to the cabinet level as the Ministry of Defense from in January 9, 2007. The Ministry of Home Affairs, responsible for administrating Japan's internal affairs was merged with the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and Management and Coordination Agency to form the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications while many of the MPT's functions were transferred to an independent post service which would later be Japan Post.

In Japanese politics both historical and contemporary, factionalism is quite common and backdoor deals are prevalent, even today. This is a very common theme portrayed in anime and manga. Also, kingmakers or power brokers have immense influence in Japanese politics when it was dominated by the LDP throughout the second half of the 20th century. These people can make or break future and current prime ministers. Examples of these are Shin Kanemaru, Kakuei Tanaka, and Ichiro Ozawa.

Chapter 3

Unit 731 was indeed known officially as Water Purification Unit 731, used as cover for their horrific biological experiments. Many of them were pardoned to work on biowarfare by the United States. Nobody knows for sure how many of Japan's big names in their medical establishment are war criminals. It's most certain to imagine that these men are racists and classists to the core. While they honor war criminals in Yasukuni Shrine, it won't be hard for them to consider POWs and civilians in occupied territory as trash at worst or subjects at best, whose only purpose is to obey their betters, at the mercies of their whims. And as a matter of fact, I noticed a subtle kind of classism in Japanese anime and manga.

The Higurashi series always points subtly to the village as a Burakumin settlement. The Burakumin(literal translation village or hamlet people) was a traditional underclass in Japanese society, discriminated heavily as they worked as they are criminals, butchers, leatherworkers, and other livelihoods that come in contact with death, since death is an impurity in Shinto, kegare. As a magistrate in the Edo period had once put it, "an Eta is worth one seventh of an ordinary person" and a person cannot be charged with murder with one-seventh of a man. The Burakumin are traditional recruits of the Yakuza so the Sonozakis shouldn't come as surprise. The calling of African-Americans "niggers" by the political godfather isn't also a surprise as the Japanese, who for all their politeness, can be racist in ways that'll stun people in the West and maybe even put the KKK to shame, although it depends on what they hate at the time. No doubt in their minds that the public will forget about the village after its wiped out, owing to its Buraku inhabitants. The Japanese claim that the Burakumin problem is taken cared off but as with their war record and their approach to social issues, I take that statement with a grain of salt.

The lymph idea was inspired after I took a look at the lymph nodes and their parent system, the lymphatic system. And the Wolbachia idea came from The Phantom Pain, courtesy of Code Talker, as a counter measure against the vocal cord parasites. Also, Pentostomida was mentioned as modern descendant of VC 'sites, it being mentioned here was used as a basis for parasite developed by the Chinese philosophers which target English literacy. Still Wolbachia fits thought as it gives the cicadas a useful purpose. All and all, this presents my ideas of the Hinamizawa syndrome so don't take as gospel, although an interesting debate may be in order.

Chapter 4

Operation Damocles is a real-life operation by Israel that targeted Egypt's ballistic missile program and the Germans employed in it. It is a minor plot point in Frederick Forsyth's novel, The Odessa File. Although the Mossad was the one carrying out the operation, the Shin Bet(their equivalent to MI-5 or FBI) carried out the actual attacks since they lack an operations branch at the time. The Jabal Hamzah facility is still in operation today.

Having termed Plan Mappo to Operation Nihonto is a reference to Operation Gladio, the codename for NATO's clandestine network of cells of stay-behind operatives who would be used to create armed resistance in the event of occupation by Soviet forces following a successful invasion of Europe, the names are derived from swords, Japanese sword and Roman legionnaire's sword respectively. Gladio is controversial in Europe, especially in Italy as it had a role in the Years of Lead which racked the country with both rightwing and leftwing terror from the late 60's to the early 80's. The chapter's title refers to the strategy of tension allegedly conducted by Western governments during the Cold War, which used terror, misinformation, false flag ops in order to manipulate public opinion.

In Peace Walker, Miller was mentioned as having been a policeman, most likely military police, in the SDF. His superiors considered this a liability so he was never promoted. From what I know, there are many scandals around the bend in Japan, most famous were the Lockheed bribery scandals. Lockheed bribed Liberal Democratic Party officials to get the SDF to buy the F-104 Strafighter, the first sustained Mach 2 warplane but having a notorious safety record(this lead it to being named the Widowmaker during German service), instead of the Grumman F11F-1F Super Tiger as replacement for their previous top-of-the-line fighter, the F-86 Sabre. They also got Japanese civil air services to buy the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar instead of the McDonell Douglas DC-10 as their standard carrier after hiring rightwing Yakuza boss Yoshio Kodama as consultant to get them to buy it. Here, "Tokyo" would be nervous if Miller had run cases which would lead to them so yeah, they stonewalled him whenever they could.

Chapter 5

Skull Face's saying was a paraphrase of Churchill when on the night of November 13, 1940 bombers raided Berlin during a conference between Nazi foreign minister Joachim Ribbentrop and Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov over the inclusion of the Soviet Union into the Tripartite Pact (Germany, Japan, Italy) where all parties are to respect "each respect each other's natural sphere of influence, disputes to be settled "in an amicable way," and that none of the four join any or support any combination "directed against one of the Four Powers." Must of us know where that ended. The bombing made a mockery of Hitler's claim that England was a beaten nation. The Prime Minister wrote that it was timed for the occasion.

Miruko is the Japanese name for Maitreya, the final Buddha who would come in the Age of Degenerate Dharma and teach the true form of it.

Account Number 21214 is a reference to the movie Rollover a slush fund where Emery is moving money belonging to the Arabs into gold as a safe haven against potential losses if the dollar collapses.

In context of the Cold War, America rolled back on the liberalization of Japanese politics. This was called Reverse Course. The occupation had begun with various moves toward democratization, including land reform, the purge of officials responsible for Japan's ultra-nationalism, and the suppression of both the zaibatsu and the yakuza. This extended to Japan's new constitution, which included an article that barred the government from maintaining a standing army. This constitution and related policies had been written by Rooseveltian New-Dealers. The Reverse Course changed such policies in favor of the containment policy. As a result, public-sector workers lost the right to strike, private-sector unions lost a great deal of bargaining power. Furthermore, severe blows were dealt to ideological freedom, to the zaibatsu-busting process, and to the suppression of the yakuza. It also allowed for the creation of the Japan Self Defense Forces. It put conservative politicians back in power, who went on to spearhead the development of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party. According to George F. Kennan's theory, Japan would serve as an industrial engine of East Asia; by extension, a strong Japanese economy would prevent communism from spreading in Asia. A remilitarized and strengthened Japan made Japan the cornerstone of US security policy in East the US Dept. of State official history puts it "In this 'Reverse Course,' Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, focused on strengthening, not punishing, what would become a key cold war ally".

George F. Kennan, belonged to a group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men", who provided President Harry Truman advise in foreign policy, an are which he had no knowledge of. Incidentally, this sounds like the Wisemen's Committee, the founding members of the Philosophers in the Metal Gear universe. In book The Wise Men, they were described as the hidden architects behind the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and Cold War containment. Kennan, in particular, is regarded as "the father of containment." They were portrayed as personifying an ideal of statesmanship marked by nonpartisanship, pragmatic internationalism, and aversion to ideological fervor. They tended to be practical, realistic, and nonideological. After the six had retired from public life, they and other like-minded establishment elders were dubbed The Wise Men. In 1967 and 1968, Johnson summoned them and a few others (including General Omar Bradley) to advise him on foreign policy, particularly the Vietnam War. In November 1967, they unanimously recommended staying in Vietnam, but in a pivotal second meeting in March 1968, most said the war could not be won and American troops should be withdrawn.

To many Japanese the Korean War was merely 'fire on the other shore' (taigan no kaji). While it's open knowledge that Japan received a boost during the conflict, manufacturing supplies, equipment, even weapons and ammo for the United Nations forces fighting there, it is lesser known that Japan contracted services in the form of ships and labor. Through the Japanese government and many private contractors, many Japanese found work in logistics, repair and construction. Many of them were confined in the bases or in ships modified as floating barracks in ports. According to an estimate by Japan's Special Procurement Agency, 56 Japanese sailors and labourers were killed in the Korean War zone in the first six months of the war alone; 23 of the deaths occurred when Japanese-crewed ships were sunk by mines. No official estimate of the total number of Japanese killed in the Korean War has ever been published, indeed, there has never been official recognition by the US or Japanese governments of the role of Japanese in the war zone. This was a minor but signifcant plot point in the the Studio Ghibli film From Up on Poppy Hill. To this day, neither Japan or the US government does not acknowledge those workers or the acts of the Maritime Self-Defense Force's predecessor, the Coastal Safety Force, whose ships performed minesweeping operations during that conflict. Many of the outsourcing of tasks by military to private contractors common during conflicts now a days had a start in that conflict.

Chapter 6

Skull Face's calling out of the men's backgrounds referred to many events in history such as the rehabiliation of Japanese war criminals and the help they provided, small reference to the Yakuza's involvement in Japanese politics including the involvement of a Korean oyabun in the kidnapping of Kim Dae-Jung as well as the terrorist incidents involving Japan such as the rise of the Japanese Red Army and the Japan Airlines hijackings. When Skull Face referred to the scientist's early career, he was talking about the fire ballon or Fu-go raids launched by Japan late in the war, the first intercontinental attacks in the world. They were generally ineffective, having a few that reached the North American mainland but they engender worries of biological agents being used.

And the accusation by Skull Face to the general and Home Minister of secretly training life sentence, death row convicts, and Yakuza is fictional, inspired by Robert Ludlum's Bourne Trilogy, which talks about how Jason Bourne served with Medusa, a top-secret unit of convicts trained and supplied by the CIA to conduct attritional guerrilla warfare inside Communist territory in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, basically a death squad behind enemy lines. While this may be an unintentional reference to the real-life elite multi-unit MACV-SOG in terms of operation doctrine, which was still classified when he wrote the series, there was another real-life precedence when the South Korean government created the 209th Detachment, 2325th Group, a hit squad against North Korean leadership in retaliation of an assassination attempt against the South Korean president. It was made up of convicts and jobless youths who were promised shortened sentences and jobs respectively and were given a brutal regiment of training to do so. When the op was called off, they mutinied and tried to get to Seoul but where intercepted by the army, four survivors captured, tried and executed.

The Irish language survived in areas where it remains a primary language called Gaeltacht. The Republic of Ireland kept the Irish language alive in various ways including summer colleges in the Gaeltacht, wich are attended by tens of thousands of teenagers annually. Students live with Gaeltacht families, attend classes, participate in sports, go to céilithe and are obliged to speak Irish. All aspects of Irish culture and tradition are encouraged. Gaeltacht's equivalents in Scottish Gaelic and Welsh are Gàidhealtachd and Y Fro Gymraeg respectively.

The Plantation of Ulster was one of the causes of "the Troubles," the sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants during the '70's through '90's, which captured headlines all over the world.

The Welsh Not or Welsh Note or Welsh stick was a punishment used in some schools in Wales in the 19th and possibly early 20th century to dissuade children from speakingWelsh. It was represented as a piece of wood, inscribed with the letters "WN", that was hung around the necks of children who spoke Welsh during the school day. The "not" was given to any child overheard speaking Welsh, who could pass it to a different child if they were overheard speaking Welsh. By the end of the day, the wearer of the "not" would be punished. The purpose of the "not" was to discourage pupils from speaking Welsh, at a time when English was considered by some to be the only suitable medium of instruction. Headmasters were required to seek the approval of parents before implementing a "Welsh not" policy. There is strong evidence of use of the Welsh Not in schools prior to 1870, however it was never official government policy. This has an equivalent policy in American Indian boarding schools, a fact touched on in MGSV: TPP and Hōgenfuda (方言札?, "dialect card"), suppression of Ryukyuan languages and dialects of the Tōhoku region in Japan.

What Evans/Ifan said about burning English vacation homes in Wales referenced to Meibion Glyndŵr(Sons of Glyndŵr), a Welsh nationalist movement violently opposed to the loss of Welsh culture and language. They were formed in response to the housing crisis precipitated by large numbers of houses being bought by wealthy English people for use as holiday homes, pushing up house prices beyond the means of many locals. They were responsible for setting fire to English-owned holiday homes in Wales from 1979 to the mid-1990s.

Chapter 7

Hiroshima and Nagaski survivors, the Hibakusha, were discriminated heavily due to public ignorance of radiation sickness and so are their descendants. This also reveals how Japanese culture sees disabled people as a burden as in Shintoism, the deformed and disabled are an affront to their notions of order and purity while in Buddhism, it's only the result of the negative karma they accumulated in their past lives. A chilling example of this is the Sagamihara killings, in which a former caretaker leaves 19 dead. And the public response was less than most people anticipated as few prayer vigils are made for them than say the Fukushima and the tsunami-earthquake tragedies. Many major Japanese news papers have called this a hate crime but with Japan, is it really that serious to them? But the real tragedy is that the disabled remained discriminated heavily, most are institutionalized and many do not hold jobs despite mandates by Japanese law.

As demonstrated in chapter 6 and here, the role information plays in society was a recurring core theme in Kojima's Metal Gear. It also reflected to a great extent Japanese attitudes towards reality. Which probably explained the textbook and war crime denial policies of the Japanese government and the establishment.

The concept of face is prevalent in all cultures one way or the other but in East Asia, this is a paramount virtue. Face is the prestige or dignity of an individual or group within a social context. It is highly-valued and to lose face would bring great shame. Another reason for Japan's historic revisionism.

Kotodama (言霊) is a Japanese term meaning 'word-spirit.' It refers to the original, divine spirit of a word, before it enters the world of thought waves. The significance of kotodama is that words are alive, and have the power to create. No doubt this what Kojima had in mind when creating the Metal Gear Games, especially in MGS2 and Phantom Pain. It is also why Japan's official historical revisionism and much more remains very prevalent to this day.

We can see why Skull Face would detest them so much. The power to twist words and contexts at their whim is abhorrent to him, especially about how Hungary was crushed by Soviet Union twice during WW2 and the uprising in 1956, and how those events were defined in Soviet-dictated historiography; their urge to shape the world to their own image; their non-acceptance of the ugly realities of the world.

Epilogue

I took lore from the other MGS games and added some of my own to give this chapter flavor.

I based Donald Anderson's parents on James Peck, who was an African American man from Pennsylvania who was turned down when he applied to become a military pilot in the US. He then went on to serve in the Spanish Republican Air Force until 1938 and was credited with five kills; and Salaria Kea, a young African American nurse from Harlem Hospital who served as a military nurse with the American Medical Bureau in the Spanish Civil War. She was one of the two only African American female volunteers in the midst of the war-torn Spanish Republican areas.

I believed Sigint entered the army when desegregation was well under way but institutional racism wasn't. It was inspired by the experiences of Jimmy Hendrix's and Walter E. Williams' experience in army service, the latter who waged an active campaign to challenge the army's "Jim Crow" mentality. As a result of several court-martials, Williams found himself transferred to Korea. Upon arriving there, Williams marked "Caucasian" for race on his personnel form. When challenged on this, Williams replied wryly if he had marked "Black", he would end up getting all the worst jobs.

Sigint would feel indebted to Zero for recognizing his talent and getting a job with the CIA and would certainly share the same thoughts about the world.

Major Zero would have found an information highway as the best means to unite the world more to his liking due to the influence of British achievements in the field of communication and others related to it during the war, especially the works of Alan Turing and the decryption work done at Bletchley Park. No doubt the rise of Victorian Britain and its colonial empire where influenced by the rise of telegraphy, also known as the Victorian Internet and Charles Babbage and Lady Ada Lovelace's own contribution, the first programmable computer.

Two controversial amendments by Mansfield limiting military funding of research were passed by Congress.

The Mansfield Amendment of 1969, "passed as part of the fiscal year 1970 Military Authorization Act (Public Law 91-121) prohibited military funding of research that lacked a direct or apparent relationship to specific military function. Through subsequent modification the Mansfield amendment moved the Department of Defense toward the support of more short-term applied research in universities."[16] The amendment affected the military, such as research funding by the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The Mansfield Amendment of 1973 expressly limited appropriations for defense research through the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is largely independent of the military, to projects with direct military application.

An earlier Mansfield Amendment, offered in 1971, called for the number of US troops stationed in Europe to be halved. On May 19, 1971, however, the Senate defeated the resolution 61–36.

As a wrote the final chapter, it was headcannon to me that Dr. Clark's(Para-medic) Japanese assistant who would be Solid Snake's surrogate mother, was researcher on loan from "Tokyo" as indicated by presense of Takano Miyo and Nomura in that chapter. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was a clinical study. The study was done between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service. Its goal was to study how syphilis progressed (got worse) if it was not treated. The study's subjects (the people who were being studied) were poor African American sharecroppers. They were told that they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government.

This experiment is famous because none of the men being studied were told that they had syphilis. Even after the 1940s, when doctors realized that penicillin could cure syphilis, the men were not given this cure, or any other treatment. The men were not told that they were not getting real treatment, or that a cure was available. This study raised many important questions about medical ethics.

The attack of the Parasites Unit's attacks in Japan are a reference to Skull Man, a one-shot manga popular in 1970. The hero of the story, whose parents have been murdered, grows up to use his peculiar powers to take revenge. The original Skull Man was one of the first antiheroes to be seen in manga, someone who would sacrifice the lives of innocents in his quest for vengeance. This darkness was what made the Skull Man so magnetic and successful. In the story, he is responsible for massacres and catastrophes. The Skull Man is actually not a person, but an ancient helmet that grants the user supernatural abilities and deadly weapons.

I believed that Skull Face would have convinced Hikabuza and Minamata mercury poisoning victims to join the ranks of XOF, playing up their shame for their condition and the rejection or silence they faced by society, no doubt offering revenge. They would have been in the Skulls after receiving parasite therapy.

Being unable to catch Skull Face, following only his trail of taunts would have frustrated Sigint to no end as his own assets are incapable to stopping Skull Face and fears when and where he will strike, noting his experience in stopping two disasters with Snake. Without Snake to help him and Zero to guide him, he would have been motivated to bring the Patriot AIs online, however incomplete, in a desperate bid to stop him as well as his own desire to avenge Snake and Zero.

"Why are we still here? Just to suffer? Every night, I can feel my leg... and my arm... even my fingers. The body I've lost... the comrades I've lost... won't stop hurting... It's like they're all still there. You feel it, too, don't you? I'm gonna make them give back our past."

— Kazuhira Miller