Dmitrianakova played the bayan. However, the bayan she played was a state of the art version capable of creating everything that middle twenty-third century quantum electronics and psycho-digital technology were able to do. The limit of what that technology was able to create was entirely dependant upon the intelligence of the player, and Dmitrianakova was incredibly intelligent.

Dmitrianakova was a year seven pupil aged eleven. Despite her Russian sounding name she was Japanese, though she had relatives who lived in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy. She asked the women in the school’s reception office for permission to use the hall at lunchtimes for her to practice her playing and singing. She was granted permission as long as the hall had not been booked for anything else. Her first lunchtime she played and sang in Portuguese the Brazilian rebellion song that she had anonymously conceived and written that had become a global hit and had changed permanently the politics of the entire south American continent from Mexico southwards.

The staff that had heard her had been amazed that she could cover the sound so well. It never occurred to them that they were not listening to a cover but the real thing Then she played Japanese shamisen music and sang in ancient Ainu.(1) Only the Japanese pupils at the school understood what language she was singing in, and most thought less of her for it, for the Ainu, who were in the main from the northernmost island of Hokkaido and were considered to be not true Japanese in their ancestry, were regarded as second class citizens by many southern Japanese. However, the Europeans who heard it more objectively appreciated it was superb music. All in the hall saw the two almost unbelievably beautiful teenage girls dressed in centuries old, traditional Japanese clothing sitting two metres [6 feet] in the air above and slightly behind her playing the long necked three stringed shamisen with what appeared to her western audience to be paint scrapers, though they were an age old Japanese equivalent of a plectrum called a bachi. Her ability to create the illusions of the shamisen players using her bayan was so skilled that even the Ainu belittlers were deeply impressed. One felt obligated to say, [Translation], ‘Only one inspired directly by the gods could achieve such. Thank you, Lady, for the privilege of being allowed to be here to witness the magic.’ The English staff who had heard her singing and playing and seen the illusions were beginning to doubt that she was reproducing someone else’s sound and images and in their minds were questioning just who, or perhaps more saliently what, she was. All had seen highly skilled modern bayan players produce illusions with their music but none had seen illusions as complex and sophisticated as Dmitrianakova’s.

Despite their best effort to induce Dmitrianakova to promote the school, the staff could do nothing to exploit Dmitrianakova’s talents to perform on their behalf because when under pressure she didn’t seem to understand what they were requesting of her. Within a couple of years she became an extremely attractive, intellectually gifted, young woman whom none of the staff nor pupils had ever managed to relate to, for she chose to be isolated and only spoke to any when good manners or a class question gave her no choice but to reply. She had no friends at school and her home life was a complete mystery to the school other than to the Japanese pupils who as a result of parental pressure in fear of their parents but mostly of Dmitrianakova gave nothing away to any else. She was the child of an ultra upper class, highly respected, reclusive, quasi-religious group who dedicated themselves to the skills of the mind and the body. They were also feared, for it had been widely believed for centuries all were trained as assassins, though none had ever been suspected of having killed never mind been accused of having done so.

Her family were also highly respected by all of their culture from the wealthiest to the poorest because it was known that for millennia they had treated all as their equal, none higher and none lower, and Dmitrianakova was more generous and egalitarian than any of her family had ever been. Her family had decided to move to the UK before Dmitrianakova was born to serve the spiritual needs of their folk there. Born in the UK to a family open to outside influences she had become the embodiment of globalised emancipation. She was in totality a child of her millennia old heritage, and like all of her heritage she had been married within weeks of her birth, yet she was equally as much a child of the environment she had grewn up in her entire life, and without ever truly appreciating the why of it she was respected by all of those who shared any part of her heritage. She had known, loved and been loved by her husband all her life and they were looking forward to rearing their children, the next generation of their culture.

Once she had turned sixteen and had left her parent’s household to live the life of a married woman, much to the joy of her family and with the approval of her parents Dmitrianakova became a political campaigner on behalf of the less fortunate of her people. She had always maintained, “The Ainu are Japanese. The rest of us need their vision and their culture, and most Japanese if they checked would discover they have Ainu in their blood lines somewhere. I challenge you to have a simple DNA test, for it will probably surprise you. If you are not prepared to accept them as true Japanese, then I am not prepared to accept you as true Japanese, for you are a bigot, which is something I associate with the worst of historic western cultures as well as our own. You are no better than a white American of times long gone, all of who despised their ethnic minorities from the day they set up their colonies. Further more, any who despise the Eta(2) are no better, for the Eta lived for centuries the way they did purely in order that their children may live. Any who despises those who do what is necessary to ensure the survival of their children do not deserve to be thought of with anything but despite, for to protect one’s children is the touchstone of a good parent, a decent human being worthy of utmost honour and respect. The Burakumin(3) are true Japanese, and they enabled our ancestors to feel superior without any justification for it. Now it is time, time long overdue, for us to pay our debt to the children of those who enabled the way of life most of you live.

“This is one of the last remaining bigotries, for LGBT+ rights have long been enshrined, not just in the legal systems all over the globe, but more importantly in the cultural values of every nation. Religious freedoms are equally embedded in both law and culture, although it took a long time for all to accept that freedom to practice did not include the right to limit the freedom to practice of any other. It took even longer for it to be accepted that those rights did not give adults the ownership of their children, for they too had rights. That took away the right of parents to facilitate the practice of genital mutilation in the name of religion, and thankfully involuntary clitoridectomy, circumcision, and ‘correction’ of intersex conditions shortly after birth are now part of a barbaric past that makes all shudder in horror.

“Issues of what were usually referred to as race, but which were in fact more truthfully matters of no more than skin colour are long over. A lot of those issues were no more than bigoted stupidity. At one time applying for a visa to enter the US involved filling in a form that gave one a lot of ethnicities to choose from and at the top of the list was ‘white’, next down was ‘Irish’. One can only presume the Irish were not considered to be white, or at least they were somehow a lesser white than the English. Where abouts a protestant Ulster man, whose entire blood lines generations before had originated in Scotland, fitted into that paradigm must remain problematic. Again Spaniards, Portuguese and Italians were always considered to be Europeans in Europe, but not in the US where they were described as ethnically Hispanic or Latino which would indicate one could change ethnicity merely by crossing the Atlantic ocean. The justification for the collection of such ethnicity data was usually that it would help to prevent discrimination. In practice it facilitated discrimination.

“We have long been proud of our sophisticated culture and of the way we value and maintain the privacy of others even when there are a lot of us in close proximity, but it is time for we Japanese to finish putting our own house in order.”

1 Ainu, a historically much discriminated against group in Japan who in the main lived on the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido, the northern Tohoku region of the Japanese island of Honshu, the Russian island of Sakalin, the Russian Kuril Islands and the southern parts of the Russian Kamchatka peninsula. Now the Ainu are widely integrated into mainstream Japanese society and many persons only become aware of any Ainu ancestry as a result of DNA testing for genealogical purposes.
2 Eta, a former untouchable group in Japan at the bottom of the traditional social hierarchy who have long been subject to much discrimination. Also known as Burakumin. Despite many efforts to fully integrate this group, at the time of writing, much discrimination still exists though it is not as overt as it was historically.
3 Burakumin, a former untouchable group in Japan at the bottom of the traditional social hierarchy who have long been subject to much discrimination. Also known as Eta. Despite many efforts to fully integrate this group, at the time of writing, much discrimination still exists though it is not as overt as it was historically.