"Kita-kun, just how lacking do you think Japan's... class consciousness is?" Saionji asked, his tone quite unnatural. The Japanese language certainly didn't lack the term 'class', nor did it lack the word 'consciousness', but combining them seemed rather odd to him.

Kita Ikki answered immediately, "Every Japanese person's interests are closely linked to Japan as a nation. The nation's interests are the interests of the entire Japan. Class interests, however, are about the distribution of existing interests. Every class hopes to get a larger share of the overall benefit. Yet, to obtain more benefits, one must expand Japan's overall productive capacity. In this regard, I believe Japan's current system is unreasonable."

The People's Party never hid or tucked away the issue of class interests. Chen Ke was extremely disgusted by the lies of capitalism, especially in the era he had lived in, where financial capital told one monstrous lie after another, making the face of capitalism even clearer to him. No matter how many checks were written, or how many zeros were added to the figures, if no one planted and harvested the fields, rice and steamed buns would absolutely not grow out of the ground. If no one lifted the sedan chair, the sedan chair would absolutely not walk by itself.

All finance is built upon the foundation of physical production, and all profit is built upon the foundation of labor. This simple and direct explanation was enough to shatter the capitalists' lies, making the development of productive forces stand out with exceptional clarity. Coupled with the People's Party's recent outreach regarding property and capital, Kita Ikki's understanding of Japan had deepened significantly.

Capitalists own capital, but that doesn't mean capitalists are rich people; many are actually heavily in debt. The commodities produced only generate profit for the capitalist after they undergo the "thrilling leap" from commodity to currency. To expand markets and plunder currency, colonialists have been looting the whole world for hundreds of years. Kita Ikki believed that the path China was taking—developing productive forces and tapping into internal potential—was the correct path Japan should choose.

Originally, Kita Ikki thought revolution meant getting rid of a small bunch of bad guys at the top of Japan. But after realizing the class theory defined by capital ownership, he actually began to fear socialist revolution. Because what he wanted to get rid of were "bad people who stole their positions," while socialist revolution wanted to get rid of "the system established by capitalists." Kita Ikki did not consider small and medium capital owners to be Japan's enemies. That was why he risked so much to run back, attempting to persuade the Japanese bourgeoisie to have "class consciousness." He hoped these people could understand that their interests were built upon the foundation of the national interest as a whole, and thus build a more harmonious Japan.

Listening to Kita Ikki expound on these "heresies" with clear logic, the other three members of the Japanese upper class remained silent. Takahashi Korekiyo could completely understand the economic theories Kita Ikki proposed, and Saionji Kinmochi resonated with the political consultation under a parliamentary system. As for Ugaki Kazushige of the Army Ministry, he appreciated Kita Ikki's political concept of national unity from top to bottom.

All three approved of certain parts of Kita Ikki's theory, while maintaining a stance of complete opposition to other parts. The one thing they had in common was their complete opposition to the "class division theory" proposed by Kita Ikki. Kita Ikki believed that if Japan wanted to achieve progress, the core could only be the coordination between the two opposing classes: the capital owners and the proletarian laborers.

After finally listening to Kita Ikki's narrative, Ugaki Kazushige stood up and said, "I still have matters to attend to, so I will take my leave first."

Saionji Kinmochi wanted to say something, but in the end, he said nothing and simply stood up and left.

Takahashi Korekiyo was quite interested in the People's Party's economic development, so he actually conversed with Kita Ikki about it. Hearing the details of the People's Party implementing state ownership of land, where everyone was allocated land and larger-scale production was organized through production teams—especially that thirty percent agricultural in-kind tax and industry feeding back into agriculture—Takahashi Korekiyo was already certain that China's economic policies could absolutely not be copied in Japan.

"Kita-kun, I would like to ask, what do you think the core economic concept of the People's Party is?" Takahashi Korekiyo asked.

Kita Ikki answered crisply, "I personally believe the People's Party's core economic concept is to lower the cost for an individual to become a laborer."

This concept was not Kita Ikki's creative idea, but content from the People's Party discussions. With laborers as the ruling class of China, rather than property owners and rentiers, lowering the cost for a person to become a laborer was the People's Party's core economic line of thought. There were many methods to lower it, such as low grain prices, compulsory education, various social service systems, and state restrictions limiting one person to owning one house while using various methods to make it very easy for laborers to obtain the right of residence. Even to expand employment, the People's Party accepted the existence of private enterprise. Everything revolved around lowering the cost for an individual to become a laborer.

If, under such low costs, a person was still unwilling to actively become a laborer, the People's Party had, in addition to ideological counseling and employment counseling, institutions for forced labor. Chinese families sent their good-for-nothing members into these labor institutions with jubilation. Compared to Japanese people begging grandparents and pleading with grandmothers yet still unable to find a job to feed themselves, China's employment situation seemed excessively good.

Even without much fantasy about the Japanese upper class, Kita Ikki still tried his best to lobby the current Japanese Minister of Finance, Takahashi Korekiyo. "Your Excellency Takahashi, I believe this is exactly what Japan lacks most right now. In Japan, labor professions are still divided into high and low ranks. In China, they are working to change this mindset. Even in China, the People's Party believes there is no need to adopt administrative means to forcibly eliminate capitalists. China is using anti-monopoly measures, anti-local protectionism, and even political anti-populism, using means of free competition to allow state-owned enterprises to gain a dominant position step by step. Japan's economic situation is not good, so the state has an even greater obligation to shoulder the responsibility. To promote Japanese economic development by having the state lower the cost of becoming a laborer, and thereby drive the progress of Japanese politics as a whole."

Takahashi Korekiyo appreciated this policy, but he understood very well that Kita Ikki's suggestions had absolutely no possibility of being realized in Japan. After sending Kita Ikki away, Takahashi ordered his servant to brew tea again. Holding the bone china teacup that felt warm and smooth in his hand, he reflected on what Kita Ikki had said: the class consciousness of the Japanese ruling class and bourgeoisie was insufficient.

The Japanese ruling class might lack the consciousness to realize national interests, but they absolutely could not be said to have "insufficient class consciousness" when it came to protecting their own existing interests. In terms of suppressing the people internally, plundering interests externally, and slaughtering socialists, the various ruling strata of Japan were unprecedentedly unified. Even the Navy's Constitutional Party faction and the Army's Imperial Way faction, which appeared incompatible on the surface, only differed in degree on these matters, not in stance. The difference between the two was merely that the Constitutional Party faction hoped to limit and eliminate the socialist movement and socialist influence, while the Imperial Way faction knew they couldn't limit and eliminate the socialist movement, so they simply adopted a high-pressure policy of physical extermination. As long as an incident involved the Japanese people pursuing their interests, the Japanese ruling class would get as excited as if a red-hot branding iron had been shoved up their rectums.

So Takahashi Korekiyo really didn't understand: who on earth let Kita Ikki return to Japan?

Kita Ikki seemed to have absolutely no self-awareness that he might be persecuted. After leaving Takahashi Korekiyo's place, he didn't return to his residence but started strolling around Tokyo.

Compared to when he left Japan a few years ago, Tokyo had changed a lot. There were more and more small wooden houses in Tokyo, and more and more people on the streets. When Kita Ikki compared the Japanese he saw with the Chinese he had seen, the problem was obvious. Height, posture, dress, complexion—the Chinese looked much healthier than the Japanese. Japan was Kita Ikki's hometown after all; the familiar clothes and local accents made him feel very comfortable. It was just that in the details, Kita Ikki noticed the differences between Chinese and Japanese clothing.

In Chinese cities, patched clothes were extremely common. The recently popular denim clothes didn't look bad at all even after being patched. The biggest difference in clothing between China and Japan lay in the hemming. Most hems in Japan were hand-sewn, while in Chinese cities, they were machine-sewn. Not just in big cities, but even in county towns and small towns formed by merging a few villages, there was no lack of sewing machine shops. Sewing fees were very cheap; besides state-owned sewing shops, the number of private sewing shops was also large. In Chinese industrial cities that had been industrialized for a longer time, the sales proportion of ready-made clothes was getting larger and larger.

Using a sewing machine to hem greatly increased the durability of the clothes' edges. If washed on time, the lifespan of the clothing would also be extended significantly. The only problem was that sewing machines and soap were not cheap.

After visiting a few general stores in Japan, Kita Ikki found that the price of soap in Japan was at least four times that in China. Especially the high-grade "transparent soap" from China; the sales price in Japan was even eight times that of the sales price in China.

Such a data comparison definitely could not prove that Japan's national power was five times that of China; it could only prove that the cost of living in Japan was several times higher than in China.

Having grown accustomed to commodity prices in China, Kita Ikki's expression became extremely ugly as he looked at the price tags on Japanese goods. Before returning to Japan, Kita Ikki had already fully accepted the fact that China's national power far exceeded Japan's, but he still hadn't expected the gap between the two countries to have widened to such an extent.

The shop owner didn't recognize Kita Ikki. Seeing this fellow with a ruddy complexion and robust build standing wordlessly in front of the soap section with a gloomy face, looking very much like he was looking for trouble, his heart shivered. Looking closely, Kita Ikki had all ten fingers intact, and there were no traces of tattoos exposed at his collar or cuffs. Although the fabric of his dark blue Western-style suit was peculiar, it draped well and didn't wrinkle. The round-collared shirt inside was of a fine and smooth texture—he didn't look like a hooligan.

Even so, the owner was still apprehensive. After secretly sending a clerk to contact the yakuza brave who collected protection fees on the shopping street, the owner walked up with a smile and said, "Sir, would you like to buy some soap?"

Kita Ikki asked offhandedly, "Do you have any soap smuggled from China here?"

Now the shop owner's face changed drastically. Smuggling was a heinous crime in this period. If caught, there would be a huge fine. Asking such a question, Kita Ikki was clearly not here to buy things; he was obviously here to smash up the shop.

The owner laughed dryly and said, "What kind of joke are you cracking? We absolutely don't have any smuggled goods here."

Kita Ikki didn't pursue it. He picked up a bar of soap and smelled it under his nose—sure enough, it had that unique aroma of coconut oil soap. Just as he put down that bar and was about to pick up another, several people stormed in from outside the shop. "Who's making trouble here!" the leader shouted.

Kita Ikki turned his head to look. The face was somewhat familiar; looking closely, it turned out to be an old acquaintance, Sakata Kogoro, who had run errands for Kita Ikki before. Sakata Kogoro also hadn't expected to see his old patron Kita Ikki here. He knew Kita Ikki was a figure "watched" by the Japanese government, but definitely not a hooligan looking for trouble or a government spy.

After a brief communication between the two, the misunderstanding was cleared up. Since Kita Ikki wasn't here to cause trouble, Sakata couldn't use force against him. But hearing Kita Ikki ask about soap smuggled from China, Sakata's expression immediately became very ugly. "Kita-kun, why would you think of asking about this sort of thing?"

"I'm doing a social investigation, just an investigation," Kita Ikki answered. He roughly described the soap prices and supply channels within China to Sakata, proposing that he wanted to compare the soap prices between China and Japan.

This question was too baffling. Sakata Kogoro didn't want to invite trouble, so naturally, he immediately refused to help Kita Ikki.

Coming out of the shop, Kita Ikki didn't care if anyone was tailing him. He wandered around Tokyo for a good while longer, only returning to his residence when night fell.

As soon as he opened the door, he saw someone was already waiting for him inside. It was Kita Ikki's good friend in Japan, Okawa Shumei. Okawa Shumei was a high-achieving graduate of Tokyo Imperial University and now served as a professor at Takushoku University. The first president of Takushoku University was Katsura Taro, and the school had been restructured from the "Taiwan Association School"—this connection alone was enough to reveal the relationship between Okawa Shumei and the Army Ministry.

"Kita-kun, I heard you went to do a social investigation. Why did you think of investigating smuggled soap?" Okawa Shumei didn't stand on ceremony at all. Seeing Kita Ikki enter the room, he stood up to greet him and asked straightforwardly.

"Okawa-kun, please have a seat." Kita Ikki shook hands with Okawa Shumei and sat down with him. "It's not a problem of soap. Since Okawa-kun already knows about this, I assume you've brought soap over?"

Okawa Shumei had been entrusted by the Army Ministry to sound out Kita Ikki's attitude. The person in charge was meticulous and had indeed asked Okawa Shumei to bring a few bars of smuggled Chinese soap.

"I learned some things in China. It's a bit interesting," Kita Ikki said. He picked up a bar of transparent coconut oil soap and smelled it. "This is coconut oil soap, made from coconut oil China ships in from Southeast Asia."

As he spoke, Kita Ikki picked up another bar of soap and smelled it. This time, Kita Ikki nodded and said, "This is it. This is soap made from palm oil. The smell is different from other soaps."

Okawa Shumei watched Kita Ikki showing off his knowledge like a charlatan, simply not understanding what significance this had.

"The source of raw materials for the soap, the production mode, and the sales channels. Once these are understood, one can roughly calculate how many countries the People's Party has oil trade dealings with. And the transport and processing of oils, as well as the price of soap, can determine China's processing capacity, transport capacity, and the output and technical level of a portion of related chemical products. Just by comparing the price of soap in China and Japan, and collecting some basic relevant data from China, one can also roughly estimate the industrial gap between the two sides, and even roughly calculate the gap in national power between the two sides."

Okawa Shumei not only didn't understand Kita Ikki's meaning, but he was also even more confused by these words. If one could see so many things just from a small bar of soap, then what was the use of so many intelligence agencies?

"Okawa-kun, what I want to say is, if Japan wants to break free from its current difficult situation, it must change its current political system and build Japan with a more effective system. If we don't do this, Japan will be completely crushed by China in terms of national power within a few years," Kita Ikki answered.

When facing high-ranking Japanese officials, Kita Ikki still had to try his best to use language that wouldn't provoke them. But facing his like-minded friend Okawa Shumei, Kita Ikki had absolutely no reservations and began to reveal his entire line of thought for building Japan to Okawa Shumei.