Content Warning: This chapter touches on themes of psychological trauma and emotional distress.
To gain something, one must give something in return. This is an eternal, unchanging truth. No one can take without giving, whether they're born into a poor farming household or into a zaibatsu that controls a nation's economy.
Yet, life is inherently unfair. Until true equality exists, each person's status at birth is different. Everyone must pay a price—but how much, and in what form, depends on the individual.
The Jingū Zaibatsu is currently one of Japan's Six Great Zaibatsu. With a history spanning more than 400 years, it is a true aristocracy steeped in legacy and tradition.
Four centuries ago, the Jingū family held no economic or political sway. At that time, they were simply the owners of a small shop. One ancestor had mastered what was then cutting-edge copper ore smelting technology—an impressive feat in an era where Japan's metallurgical capabilities were underdeveloped. This allowed the family to build its initial wealth.
Japan at the time was both economically and politically backward. The emperor held nominal power, but true control lay with the shogunate. Having borrowed heavily from Chinese civilization, Japan regarded merchants as socially inferior. Though the Jingū family amassed wealth through their smelting expertise and access to local copper mines, they remained politically irrelevant as mere merchants.
But regimes change, rulers fall, and history teaches one thing clearly: those with capital—true capital—are the ones who endure. As long as they align themselves with the ruling powers and provide value, they survive.
Shoguns came and went. Dynasties fell. But the Jingū family persisted across 400 years, while the ruling clans vanished into the pages of history.
When Western powers forced open Japan's borders, the country underwent a seismic shift. The emperor regained authority and launched the Meiji Restoration, initiating full-scale Westernization. Riding this wave, the Jingū family broke free of the mining industry. They established banks, opened machinery factories, produced fertilizer, built power plants, and more. Backed by favorable public policy and abundant capital, the Jingū Group rapidly expanded and evolved into a modern, multinational corporate conglomerate. Alongside other zaibatsu, they came to dominate Japan's key industries: energy, banking, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, insurance, transportation, heavy and light industry, construction—virtually everything.
However, at that time, the Jingū Zaibatsu was the weakest among the four major zaibatsu. When the global economic crisis and World War II hit, these conglomerates weathered the storm by financing war efforts—lending to the government, converting peacetime automobile factories into wartime tank and aircraft production. In exploiting the economy of war, they found profit.
Fortunately, this world is different from the one Jingū Akira came from. Japan never invaded China in this timeline. Otherwise, as someone reborn into the Jingū family, he might have been wracked with guilt.
Still, as in the original history, during the Second World War, Japan's true ruler wasn't the government but the emperor. With the fall of the shogunate and support from the zaibatsu, the emperor had regained real political power through the Meiji Restoration. That's also why, after Japan's defeat, the imperial family was never tried as war criminals—thanks entirely to American manipulation.
In this world's version of Japan, though the country never attacked China, it still invaded Korea, Southeast Asia, and clashed with the U.S. in the Pacific. After its defeat, America supported Japan's economic recovery to keep China's rising power in check.
Post-war, the original four zaibatsu were forcibly dissolved by the U.S. Although the emperor was spared, he lost his political power. As Cold War tensions escalated and China grew stronger, the U.S. relaxed its restrictions and supported Japan's economy—allowing the zaibatsu to resurrect. Because the Jingū Zaibatsu had been the smallest and weakest, its wartime losses were minimal. Ironically, this made it the quickest to rise from the ashes.
Like all major zaibatsu, the pre-war Jingū group was composed of various capital stakeholders. The core was banking and finance, governed by a central executive body known as the "Board of Managers." The Jingū family was merely the most important faction among several—far from all-powerful.
But that changed with Akira's grandfather, the previous family head. A true business genius, he seized the postwar economic chaos to devour rival holdings—using both legal and illegal methods, and leveraging a close relationship with the American occupying forces. As Japan's economy boomed in the 60s and 70s, the Jingū Zaibatsu ballooned in size. Most crucially, the old man accumulated over 80% of the conglomerate's shares, transforming it into a near-total autocracy.
Thus, Japan's Four Zaibatsu evolved into Six, and the weakest became the strongest. And what drew the envy of the others wasn't just its wealth or power—it was the fact that a single family controlled it all. Unlike the old Rothschild dynasty, which influenced all of Europe, the Jingū family's reach was more limited—but within Japan, their influence on the economy was nothing short of overwhelming.
This is why Jingū Akira's fiancée is a princess from the imperial family.
After the war, stripped of real power, the emperor's household urgently needed the backing of a major zaibatsu. The Jingū family—now in total control of theirs—was the perfect match. And so, the current emperor offered his most beloved daughter in political marriage.
For over 2,000 years, the emperor's line has held symbolic authority. In the eyes of the people, they still command great reverence. The Jingū Zaibatsu, seeking that very legitimacy, found their interests aligned. Thus, a political union was born.
This is the future that awaits Jingū Akira: an overwhelming influence on national affairs and a hidden fortune so vast it can never be accurately measured.
Is Bill Gates truly the richest man in the world? Perhaps in personal assets. But when compared to the secretive financial empires of the global elite—the true old-money dynasties that span nations and centuries—he falls far short.