The Mushroom Tree Mystery (Crown Colony, volume 6) by Ovidia Yu

[james_davis_nicoll]

Hiroshima has been obliterated. Singapore's liberation from Imperial Japan is nigh... if the Japanese occupiers don't simply murder everyone out of spite.

The Mushroom Tree Mystery (Crown Colony, volume 6) by Ovidia Yu

Comments

[movingfinger]

I can't remember whether I thanked you for pointing these books out. I really enjoyed them. I found an old map of Singapore to give me a better idea of distances and relative locations as I read. Looking forward to the next one, too!

[petrea_mitchell]

I was happy to see the end of Japanese occupation in this one because the inconsistent transliterations of Japanese names were driving me up the wall.

[ba_munronoe]

I think the"100 million" is a reference to Hirohito's call for "100 million shattered jewels" or "ichioku gyokusai", for all Japanese to fight to the death against the Americans. It's a bit unclear as to whether he was just using a nice round number or including colonial subjects among those who would sacrifice themselves.

https://apjjf.org/hiroaki-sato/2662/article

[armiphlage]

"For another, I don’t think a Japanese superweapon, even if non-nuclear, would have been plausible."

Japan did have extensive chemical and biological research programs. Marine toxins would be a suitable research subject for study in Singapore, with ready access to diverse marine environments.

Maitotoxin ("more than one hundred thousand times as potent as VX nerve agent") wasn't isolated until long after the war ended, but it was known at the time that microorganisms growing on subtropical and tropical reefs could create powerful marine toxins.

Maitotoxin has a lethal dose of 130 ng/kg. At the end of WWII, Singapore had about 50,000,000 kg of people. A depressingly small amount of concentrated toxin could murder a city. And thanks to WWI, there was existing technology to efficiently disperse lethal substances with limited risk to the perpetrator.

This could be the topic of a grim alternate history novel that I would not want to read.