Jack of Harts

The Kitsune of New Japan are a kind of a social club, if you consider the Masonic Lodges a social club. They have both youth and adult organizations, own businesses for both production and play, and even influence certain political parties in the New Japanese government. They are a serious enterprise in truth, devoted to the preservation of their Japanese traditions, while expanding it to include the American traditions they deem would improve it. Like the Scouts that they partner with, the Kitsune Youth is devoted to the practice of raising helpful and courteous children into trustworthy and brave adults. Most people only see the fox ears they wear, thinking they are something like the Disney Planet’s Mickey Mouse ears. They are to a point. Anyone can buy and wear them if they wish, but the ears and the right bow are akin to the Scouting Handshake when it comes to meeting a fellow Kitsune in public. Proof that they trained themselves at a young age to be physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. There are subtleties in the Japanese oaths that do not survive the filtering into American, but the standard Scouting Oath is a good approximation. It is one of the reasons the two organizations partner with each other so well.

The Japanese Kitsune were little more than a loose assemblage of social clubs who enjoyed dressing up in costumes before the Fall of Japan. They went to conventions and played games with each other. They watched anime over the networks. They had fun. Then the Japanese Home Islands fell and the new Empress called on the survivors to organize. To remember. To prepare. That was when several prominent members of the Kitsune community came out of the closet as members of the Imperial Household. Or several prominent members of the Imperial Household came out of the closet as Kitsune, depending on your point of view. Not the Empress. She maintained an official distance from any and all social organizations, but she made it clear that old divisions must end if their people were to survive. And so more and more Kitsune stepped out of the closet and began doing in the open what they had once done in the shadows of public disapproval. They organized meetings and outings, with Imperial approval and funding, and it did not take them long to become one of the larger organizations supporting the new Imperial plan to rejuvenate Japanese culture in Los Angeles. Or New Japan as many began to call it.