Ōnogi provides strong hints that Takashi had a positive opinion of Riber and that he, at the very least, didn’t object to the idea of a possible marriage between Misa and the young Fruhling. One could plausibly wonder if the idea of facilitating a marriage between Misa and Riber had the additional appeal of a formal Hayase-Fruhling connection. This, however, was not meant to be, as SDFM and White Reminiscences narrate.

It’s worth noting here that the reader is given a conflicting account of Takashi’s view of Misa’s military career. As I’ve already established here, Takashi didn’t “groom” Misa for a career of any kind, hence her utter lack of dreams for her future. Likewise, he didn’t “groom” her for a military career, either. As I wrote previously, the only “possible selves” he had in mind for Misa were (a) a wife, (b) a soldier’s wife, and (c) a soldier’s wife who is also nominally a soldier.

This aligns well with the complete lack of mentions of him mentoring Misa during her academy years, and with what he says about her to Riber in the “[b]urn after reading” letter, where he describes her as a “sweet and kind girl” who has “no first-hand knowledge of death or murder,” before proceeding to assure Riber she will “not be participating in any battles on the ground.”

Furthermore, it seems that he’s not entirely sure Misa embraces the Hayase legacy of career military service, which goes back “several generations” or, as Misa herself explains to Hikaru Ichijyo in SDFM episode 12, more than one hundred years. Despite his own pride and obsession with it, he tells Riber he “believes” Misa has been brought up “not to be ashamed of [it].” His uncertainty is very interesting, as it’s expressed in the same letter where he tells Riber how “enormously” he was pleased to “think that [his] only child’s desire was to carry on” this legacy.

However, we must remember that, until he decided to pull strings, rank, and favors to put her in the military pipeline at the illegally low age of fourteen, there was one role he expected her to occupy – that of a wife: more specifically, the wife of a “splendid military man.” He explicitly told her so when he said he didn’t think she should become a soldier and that she should be content with being married to such a man.

If, as Ōnogi nudges the reader to surmise, that man is indeed Riber, it seems that Takashi doesn’t mind his pacifist-leaning views or his lack of combat prowess and experience. I believe this is noteworthy and in line with Ōnogi’s complete lack of mentions of Takashi mentoring, advising, or otherwise supporting Misa during her studies in the Far East Officers’ Academy. An observant reader could be excused for thinking Takashi merely “parked” her there, treating the academy as a finishing school (as I’d written earlier in this series) that’ll prepare her for a rear echelon career she’ll hopefully share with Riber after the Unification Wars – both she and Riber destined to be nominally soldiers, kept well away from the brutal reality of war.

This status-based approach seems to be enough to satisfy his implied dream to see his only child “carry on the family legacy” – the very child he had originally destined for a military wife’s role. It could perhaps be construed as a compromise between his pride in the Hayase military legacy and Sakiko’s tears when Misa told them she wished to join the military.

Riber’s Death

Was this Takashi’s plan for Misa and Riber’s military careers? The hints provided by the novel are tempting, to say the least: if I’m reading Takashi’s actions correctly, it would be most convenient for Takashi to have Misa and Riber married after her commencement, which would then make it easier for him to transfer both of them close to him in rear echelon jobs, away from the brutality and danger of war. Perhaps Ōnogi would’ve liked to express it more explicitly.

However, Riber’s death derails this plan. With Riber dead, the marriage between him and Misa simply can’t happen. The same goes for a possible Fruhling-Hayase “merger” through this marriage – if it had ever been on the cards, of course. Tragically for the Fruhlings, now both of their children are dead. As for Takashi, now he can only take Misa with him. With her and Sakiko alive, he could still arrange to have her transferred close to him back home – in Aoyama or wherever he’d be transferred after the end of whatever operations he was conducting in America. But what really throws a wrench in the works is the aftermath of Misa’s two losses – Riber’s and Sakiko’s.

I may be reading too deeply into the novel and the TV series, but the fact that neither Ōnogi nor the TV series show Takashi discussing Riber’s loss makes me wonder if he’s trying to downplay this loss and prompt Misa to move on. After all, Takashi’s main wish is to see Misa married, and soon: just over four years after Riber’s death, his one question to Misa in SDFM episode 24, as they ride the elevator to the Grand Cannon in Alaska, is “is there a man in your life yet?”. Likewise, in the novel’s “Prologue” section, he tells her, “[t]he sooner you find someone, the sooner I can rest easy.” Whereas the phrase Ōnogi inserted in the novel is genuinely pressuring, his question in the aforementioned TV episode can be interpreted differently if we view Misa’s romance with Riber through the eyes of a middle-aged adult like Global or Takashi.

With age and experience, an adult sees a romance like Misa’s and Riber’s as what it is: a teenage girl’s tragic first crush – sweet, platonic, long-distance, mostly epistolary, unconsummated, and untested. Misa – as we see in the novel and as she herself admits in SDFM episode 21 – was never able to tell him how she felt, and Riber’s life was cut short so tragically. An experienced, middle-aged adult can be reasonably expected to understand that a romance like this couldn’t – and didn’t – produce the intimacy of a complete love affair. Therefore, no one has any right to expect Misa to continue mourning Riber and remain celibate in his memory four years later. This must be entirely up to her.

Global, the one person who comes to provide her with any kind of comfort, has experienced the loss of a lover in his youth and knows what she’s going through. Yes, much of his speech to her is spent comparing her situation to his and becomes awkward, but this doesn’t change his understanding and empathy, which are confirmed in SDFM episode 7, where he allows her to investigate the strange transmissions the Macross received from Mars Base Salla and search for survivors. Even though he knows and explicitly states that there can’t be any survivors, he allows her request to give her the closure she badly needs.

Does Takashi have the same understanding and empathy as Global, though? He’s certainly old, experienced, and intelligent enough for the reader to expect him to understand the limitations of Misa’s romance with Riber compared to the emotional depth of a consummated relationship. However, his already well-documented absence and his implied subsequent silence on the matter conspire to paint a much less favorable picture – that of a father who probably doesn’t think this matter is important enough for him to spend some time with his daughter on the phone or write her a letter or two. I’ll state once again that Ōnogi’s “Takashi had no time, he was fighting tooth and nail, night and day” narrative is implausible. I’ve already explained why, and I’m not going to dwell on it here. In the next segment, I’ll examine how Sakiko’s death affects Takashi’s plans to have Misa married to a “splendid military man.” One would normally think it irrelevant, but it has a sort of “butterfly effect” on things, triggering events that Takashi wasn’t expecting and certainly didn’t want.

Bibliography

1. 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.)