The Great Pestilence

Black Death

Overview

1.          The first reported case of the Great Pestilence, also called Black Death, was in Mimasaka Province, Japan.  Within weeks, it had killed most of the men in the province and then spread outward.

a.          With incredible virulence, the Plague spread across Japan.  It first went north, then south touching the periphery of Japanese civilization.  Once the Plague finally reached Kyushu, it quickly spread to the mainland.

b.          Countless men died within several years of the initial outbreak as it spread across the length and breadth of Japan.  It mattered not if the men were rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy; it infected them all.

i.          The Great Pestilence was not without bias however.  More often, it would infect men with brown eyes than it would those with yellow and red eyes, which was odd.  Furthermore, boys were far safer from its effects than men were.

ii.          It never affected true hermaphrodites (futanari) despite their obvious male traits.

2.          Black Death’s symptoms were manifold and resembled tuberculosis in its earliest stage.  Necrosis (gangrene) then followed, and the victim lost feeling in his extremities, which caused permanent damage to the fingers, hands, feet, and toes.  Finally, the victim died, and the virus self-destructed, which dramatically increased the necrosis until noting remained but a blackened, unrecognizable corpse—hence the name Black Death.

a.          Because of the number of men killed, and because of what it did to the corpse thereafter, other diseases followed if the bodies were left where they had fallen.

3.          Unbeknownst to the Japanese, the source of the Plague was not a bacterium but a retrovirus engineered to extinguish vast numbers of human males by attacking the Y-chromosome.  But it was not perfect.  For instance, men with nonhuman ancestors often showed resistance to the virus’s effects or went their whole lives without contracting the virus.  Moreover, certain races fared better than other races.  And the third sex never suffered the Black Death.



Initial Countermeasures

Black Death would reach the mainland before the Japanese could muster an adequate response.  The villages and cities were fast filling with the dead bodies of men and teenage boys.  Something needed to be done quickly to thwart pandemic.

1.          To that end, Empress Seiko’s solution was to dispose of the bodies by burning them in mass graves, which were huge pits far from any city, township, or village and then burry the ashes.  The mages proved invaluable in her efforts because they could sustain fire at a high temperature to ensure complete disintegration of flesh and bone.

2.          She advised her female courtiers to quarantine their sons before the Plague could reach them.

3.          She later ordered her warriors to stop foreign merchants from leaving Japan.  However, because most merchants were men, her orders applied only to the men, not the women.  That would prove fatal in the end.

4.          Empress Seiko’s solution proved effective, but not in how she had hoped.  The meticulous incineration of the infected corpses stopped other diseases from arising, yet did nothing to prevent the Plague from spreading.  No one ever discovered that women were the virus’s principal carriers.

5.          Still, she did not halt her countermeasures.  Later generations would continue to enforce her ideas to prevent further outbreaks of Black Death and the diseases that follow its wake.



Sociological Effects

A civilization does not change overnight, and nor does it abandon its traditions immediately or without bloodshed.  Civilization resists change as much as any individual person would.  After all, it takes but discipline for a woman to alter her life’s path or to stray from it.  Thus, the transition from patriarchy to matriarchy was neither smooth nor peaceful for the Japanese.  From the imperial family down to the peasantry, the Great Pestilence forced radical change upon them all.  It was a dark time indeed.  Men were dying, their bodies littering the countryside, clogging the city streets.  Hosts of people, mostly women, took to the streets, razing villages and towns while burning the countryside.  Japan once again plunged into a vicious civil war fueled by economic dearth, hopelessness, and guilt.  The Japanese would not know peace for three generations.

The Black Death ripped asunder a society dominated by men.  But men never completely lost their political primacy.  What they did lose was the inevitable consequence of their rarity.