The “spoilt girl” hypothesis developed in the previous installment of my analysis is further weakened by Takashi’s conduct while Misa is in military academy. During this time, her correspondence with Riber includes commentary on, among other things, in-universe events and subjects of a military, political, and geopolitical nature. Among them are a huge, top secret military project that eats up the UN government’s budget, the launching of the first Oberth-class space destroyer, and the assassination of Harlan J. Niven, the first Prime Minister of the UN Government.

Also, Misa relates to Riber an event at a restaurant where she and her military academy classmates were treated in a hostile manner by patrons and staff alike. It’s striking that there’s no mention of her father’s presence anywhere in this correspondence. She never makes any mention of him visiting, calling, or having any form of communication with her; there’s no mention of him offering her his advice, his opinion on something related to her training and her future career, his experience – or any kind of mentoring.

However, even considering Takashi’s duties as a flag officer in the context of a widespread global conflict, it’s implausible that he couldn’t take a break and call or write home. After all, he’s a flag officer, not a grunt in some foxhole – I have to reject Ōnogi’s narrations about commanders and NCOs alike fighting the enemy hand-to-hand as one of the many authorial inventions in White Reminiscences that expose Ōnogi’s lack of military knowledge or experience. However, even if we accept Ōnogi’s verbose and byzantine excuses, Takashi’s absence in “White Letters” and “White Parting” is another indictment. Ōnogi doesn’t show him communicating with Misa about Riber’s loss, and the narration of his actions around Sakiko’s hospitalization, death, funeral, and the impact of these events on Misa sabotages the writer’s justifications.

Even the most casual of readers would wonder if Takashi’s “job” regarding Misa’s militarization – itself a crime which would normally be career-ending for him and all complicit parties – ended in getting her in the academy. This further erodes his credibility as an “equal-rights advocate,” as it makes a more critical reader wonder if he’s (ab)using the academy as a finishing school to shape his daughter into the appropriate wife for her future “splendid military man” husband. Or, once this “splendid military man” was no more and after Sakiko’s death, arrange to take her with him to the UN Forces High Command headquarters in Alaska. After all, he can find plenty of “splendid military men” there to marry her off and “rest easy.”

Dependable?

A parent must know when their presence is needed and when it can be undesirable. Especially in adolescence, there are many things a child wants to do and explore without parental interference. In fact, there are cases when the child needs the parent’s absence: for instance, a teacher’s child risks being accused of nepotism and, therefore, getting bullied and ostracized at school if their parent teaches or, worse, is put in charge of their class. In more “mundane” settings, a teenager will absolutely not want their parents to be around while they’re with another teenager they’re romantically interested in. Respectively, there are many occasions when parental presence, guidance, compassion, and support are desperately needed. Such was the case with the two back-to-back losses Misa suffers in the last four months of 2005.

Now, let’s have a look at these crises. September 8, 2005. Riber is killed when the return fleet from Mars Base is destroyed by the Anti-Unification Alliance. White Reminiscences makes no mention of her parents saying anything. Her mother is already hospitalized for chronic liver disease; her father’s away, with Ōnogi telling us, vaguely, that he went to America to fight the Anti-Unification Alliance and the guerillas it was attempting to leverage.

Before I go any further, as someone who’s actually served in the military, I must say outright I’m having a very hard time being kind to Ōnogi’s narrative. Vice Admiral Takashi Hayase is a flag officer, not a foot soldier who goes into the battlefield, dodging bullets and mortars. To the UN Forces, he’s a strategic asset whose job is to mastermind operations from heavily guarded, bomb- and missile-proof headquarters compounds. Thus, while his presence on board a UN Navy capital ship as fleet commander is perfectly plausible for a fleet defending a critical area, the idea of him conducting counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare somewhere in “America” (which is mostly landmass) is ludicrous. COIN doesn’t work that way, because insurgencies occur where the state loses legitimacy with the locals.

Airdropping flag officers foreign to the area, the force in place, and local communities simply isn’t part of any recipe for success in such operations. So, even though I have to accept Ōnogi’s narrative about Takashi being away, the vague “America” reference and the tactical and operational implausibility of him doing COIN there make me treat the author’s claims as to what the Vice Admiral was really doing there very cynically.

That said, Misa is left to deal with these crises alone. There’s no mention of a letter from Takashi to Misa regarding Riber’s death; there’s no mention of him calling her, either. She can’t turn to her hospitalized mother for emotional support, either – Misa’s become Sakiko’s caregiver and protector now. The only one who bothers to visit Misa and try to comfort and steel her is Bruno J. Global.

Global’s presence in the academy, though, sabotages Ōnogi’s efforts to absolve Takashi of his failure: Commodore Global, a flag officer like her father, takes the time to visit her and show actual care for her emotional state and her well-being. Knowing how an actual military works, it’s obvious to me that Global makes use of the options available to him, such as taking leave (if he’s a commanding officer at the time, he gets to grant it to himself) and delegating duties during his absence. Regardless of what one may think of the speech he delivers to Misa, he makes the effort, placing himself – unwittingly – in contrast with her father.

This contrast isn’t lost on Misa, much to Sakiko’s shock and chagrin, who attempts, in true ryōsai kenbo (“good wife, wise mother”) fashion to justify and excuse Takashi’s very palpable absence. Ōnogi frames Sakiko’s acceptance and justification of this absence as a “strength” Misa cannot possess. Whether it is strength or the result of methodical gaslighting through an educational and ideological construct that emerged in the late Meiji period and persisted, in modified form, throughout postwar Japanese society as the gendered substrate of the “salaryman family” (Koyama 2013; Uno 1993; Meguro 2026), will be examined in Part 2, where I’ll examine Misa’s mother specifically.

Takashi’s absence after Riber’s death is obviously hurtful for Misa. Obviously, anyone – teenager or adult – would reasonably expect their parents to comfort them after losing a loved one. And Riber wasn’t a stranger to the Hayases, as Misa’s romance with him wasn’t a secret to them. If anything, Takashi and Sakiko had both given their tacit blessing for this romance, and the narration makes it plausible for the reader to think Riber was the “splendid military man” he expected Misa to marry. This makes his absence inexplicable. No matter how hard Ōnogi tries to absolve him, no reasonable reader can be expected to believe Takashi couldn’t find even ten minutes to call Misa or send her a letter to give her even a mere sliver of consolation.

As if Riber’s loss, which went practically unmanaged since only Global showed up, wasn’t enough, the novel subjects Misa to another tragic loss – this time, it’s Sakiko, her mother, as had already been foreshadowed in her last conversation with Misa at the hospital. While Sakiko was wasting away in hospital, Takashi was absent. In “America”, as Ōnogi vaguely informs us. I’ve already expressed my misgivings about the COIN narrative, but I’ll pretend to play along. Contrary to what Global did for Misa when Riber was killed, he used none of the many options available to him to visit his terminally ill wife. He doesn’t call Sakiko, Misa, or the hospital; he doesn’t write; he doesn’t even answer Misa’s letter. Even when Sakiko eventually succumbs, he’s not there.

During Sakiko’s funeral, which is held in a small, private circle, the only ones who bid her the last farewell are her closest relatives and connections – the novel is conspicuously vague as to who these are – and Misa. When Misa goes home after the funeral, she’s left alone in the “vast Hayase residence” with a white box containing Sakiko’s ashes. Nobody’s there to hold her and comfort her. Her only companion is loneliness.

Only in late January 2006 does Takashi return. Not before having “gradually finished all the loose ends from the end of the battle.” He lights up an incense stick, places a memorial tablet (ihai) next to it, and remembers his life with Sakiko. When Misa confronts him for his absence and his lack of response to her attempt to reach him, he reacts with “a kind gaze,” which – at least the way I read the scene – is deployed by author and character alike to deflect Misa’s anger, anguish, and sorrow. He offers no apology or explanation during her outburst. Instead, he remains silent, as if he’s waiting out a storm.

After Misa’s done venting, he responds, and his response is startling. He makes a symbolic gesture by breaking his favorite meerschaum pipe in two and says that “on that day, things were broken for no reason.” Then, he proceeds to tell Misa he couldn’t leave the Far East Headquarters – as if he was merely late for dinner – and instructs her to calm herself, entirely trivializing her feelings. Finally, he hugs her, picks up his briefcase, and leaves again. He says no more. He does no more.

This, as Misa realizes, is all he has to offer. Technically, she gets the wish she had expressed the last time she ever spoke to her mother: she just sees his face again. He’s there for a while, indeed. But he comes after the fact, and his presence is meaningless and empty. He gives her no words of consolation; he doesn’t sit with her; he doesn’t hold her; he doesn’t let her cry on his shoulder; he doesn’t try to make up for the lost time. He does nothing a father who realizes he was away when his family needed him most would do to make amends. As mentioned before, he doesn’t even apologize to her – and she’s his only daughter. Any father in his place would understand she’s the only person left for him to exist for. Misa gets the message: she can’t rely on him for anything.

This is why the “spoilt girl” reading ultimately fails: indulgence in the Hayase household didn’t produce entitlement, but the opposite. Misa isn’t a girl convinced the world owes her everything, but one who concludes she can count on no one but herself – which is exactly the emotionally armored Misa who reports for duty at the beginning of SDFM. The harm of being “spoilt,” in her case, wasn’t that she was given “too much” by her parents, but that she was given everything except a self of her own.

Bibliography

1. Koyama, S. (2013). Ryōsai Kenbo: The Educational Ideal of “Good Wife, Wise Mother” in Modern Japan. Translated by S. Filler. Leiden: Brill.
2. Meguro, Y. (2026). Why Japan’s family policies have failed: a gender perspective on the demographic crisis. Nippon.com, 17 January 2026. Available at: https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d00906/ (Accessed: 19 May 2026).
3. Ōnogi, H. (1984). Hayase Misa: Shiroi Tsuioku [早瀬未沙 白い追憶; Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences]. Animage Bunko. Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten. (In Japanese.)
4. Uno, K.S. (1993). The death of “good wife, wise mother”?. In Gordon, A. (ed.) Postwar Japan as History. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 293–322.