The war had been good to Osamu, well as good as a war ever could be. The life and death struggle had brought to light his predecessor’s inability and allowed Osamu to take the Captaincy. Even on the very first day of the occupation, when he was but the number 3 in his division, he saved a large number of lives and made a name for himself that carried more weight with the common folk than it did the shinigami. Come the end of that day he was the Lieutenant due to the old Lieutenant’s inability to keep his head attached to his shoulders and ever since then Osamu had been working away with a singular determination.
The tenth division itself was almost unrecognisable compared with the first day of the occupation. Back then it was small, understaffed, under resourced, unambitious and its shinigami were little more than glorified clerks. Now it was a whole different animal. Using the division’s ambiguously worded goal, pre-existing powers, emergency powers, the vast pool of refugees and idle manpower, the excuse of a war they were dangerously close to losing and the fact he was genuinely concerned, helpful and able to get results, Osamu had almost rebuilt the tenth from the ground up. The first thing he did was get almost all of the shinigami under his command out of organisational and logistical roles whilst simultaneously actively taking on new shinigami recruits with great enthusiasm. Those few still carrying out such tasks tended to function as senior managers and department heads. Osamu had replaced the shinigami administrators with civilian administrators. The ability to move like the wind, swing a sword and throw spells around was not a part of your average desk job or any non-combat duty, so why have shinigami do it? All you needed was a brain and motivation and he had civilians by the truck load that fulfilled those requirements.
The second thing he did was re train his shinigami, of course they had all successfully passed out from the academy but their combat skills were a tad rusty when he took command. Brining in a few retired veterans he refreshed their memories and put his division through proper combat training once more as well as expose them to numerous small scale skirmishes to give them a taste of battle and some confidence whilst simultaneously keeping casualties down. Through this initiative he brought his men up to the standard of a regular, non-specialist, combat troops. They were no second, eleventh or thirteenth division but they could hold the line.
The third thing Osamu did was radically expand the activities of the tenth. They went from absolute bare bones Logistics, HR and finance to something resembling a full-fledged national bureaucracy. Food rations, the courts aside from the central 46, civilian law enforcement, heat, water, electricity, sanitation, public health, education, homes, industry, agriculture, labour, transport, roads, infrastructure, military equipment, battle casualty replacements, payroll, accounts, finance, divisional funding, property management, pensions, large segments of the treasury, military and civil logistics and more all came under the umbrella of the tenth. Everything a shinigami did or had, from the food he ate, to the sandals on his feet, was somehow administered or controlled by the tenth and in these dark times the same was true of the majority of the civilian populace who he stepped in to provide for. In doing so he trod on the toes of some of the Ichigawa family who had been traditionally responsible for running large elements of the Rukongai. Some were glad for the responsibility to be taken away, it was a burden and in this time of crisis it was a near impossible one to manage. Others saw their power base being eroded, never to be returned. But they couldn’t do much to stop Osamu, he stayed just within the law at all times and he was getting results the likes of which the Ichigawa had not achieved for thousands of years. The Ichigawa had been neglecting the lower districts for millennia and they would have been entirely unable or unwilling to deal with the current crisis. Osamu exploited this fact to the fullest and so he was able to carry on with his activities whilst subtlety and indirectly reminding the general populace it was Osamu and the tenth who were helping them.
He was able to pull off these remarkable successes because of the huge amount of idle labour at his disposal, the surface of which he has barely begun to scratch, but also because he was a smart businessman. He had been raised to run the family business and there was little doubt that he would have been excellent at the task. The tenth, for all its previous small size, was bloated and horrifically run under the old captain. Osamu fixed that, he increased revenue, clamped down on high wealth tax evasion and tax loopholes and brought down costs. Some of this cost reduction was done through efficiencies but most was done through bringing things in house, or at least that’s what it would have been called in the private sector. In the public sector it was more akin to nationalisation. He was not so stupid as to outright seize private companies providing these services and their property, which would have been spectacularly illegal. Instead he simply used the resources of the tenth to set up publically owned competition with a non-profit motivation and then only use them, essentially bankrupting the private sector competition, then hiring their laid off work force to do exactly the job they had been doing any way, only in a more supportive environment as well as purchasing the relevant infrastructure from the private companies for a song as they went into insolvency. It was a surprisingly elegant way to fulfil his professional obligation, support the people of the soul society and push his social agenda all in one fell swoop.
The fourth thing he did was perhaps the most controversial. Osamu had set up a few departments within the tenth that were more or less purely internal. These included the committee for military theory, a think tank coming up with ideas and plans for the future of soul society warfare. They didn’t feed their results to any of the other divisions or even the captain commander unless Osamu told them to. They reported to Osamu and Osamu only. They functioned like a second idea machine for him, a second military brain. Their most notable output to date was actually the brain child of Osamu alone, who chaired the committee. That idea was the NDV or Neighbourhood Defence Volunteers. Osamu had far grander plans for them than their name suggested but for the moment they were a radical solution to the problems of military manpower and law and order. They were made up of people who were not spiritually powerful enough to be shinigami or who were borderline at best. At first they were pooled together, given basic training and assigned to patrol their neighbourhoods and the walls, dealing with low level hollow incursions and delaying the bigger ones until actual shinigami could turn up. They were also responsible for every day law and order and helping boost public moral as well as helping with some community issues. They also served a valuable propaganda purpose, tough very few of them realised it. It helped foster a sense of trust in the general populace, a sense of inclusion and reminded them that Osamu at least had not forgotten about them. This was doubly true amongst the refugee population from the lower and middle districts.
However, Osamu wanted them to turn into much more. To that end he had assembled NDV volunteers from the refugee population specifically and, after being sure they believed in the cause, began turning them into something resembling a proper fighting force. The model was an interesting one, with blocks of NDV troops forming the majority of the fighting men with shinigami acting as officers, NCOs, line fillers, reinforcements and shock troops. This was what Osamu had really freed his men up to do and though this particular branch of the NDV wasn’t quite ready for show time yet both Osamu and his shinigami were working hard to make them ready. To that end Osamu was also gently leaning on the twelfth division, trying to steer their research into weapon and equipment projects to increase the potency of the NDV and make up for their lack of meaningful spiritual power. In return for the twelfth’s cooperation their budget was protected and they received comparatively generous resource allotments given what Osamu had to work with. The twelfth had yet to produce a meaningful success that could be used in the field rather than just a lab but Osamu was assured the twelfth were close to something Osamu could use.
Still, as good as the war had been for Osamu and his agenda it had not been good to him personally. The man was juggling more balls than any one person should have to and whilst his civilian administration made his job a lot easier he still kept a close eye on things, determined not to let his original duties slip no matter the cost. As such the man was almost never seen at social occasions. He loved them but he had to work, he wasn’t getting enough sleep, there were hints he wasn’t eating enough and his actual bed was developing a noticeable layer of dust. The rumour was that when he did sleep he did so on a bed roll in his office. The man was briefed before and during breakfast every day and he read notes and prep files well into the night. He worked his people hard as well, but not unreasonably so. The tenth’s offices worked 24 hours a day with very few departments able to shut down at night. He had a rotation of three eight hours shifts per day constantly repeating. But he never worked any one person too hard and he kept moral up, less through joy and happiness but more through reminding them of the cause and the fact they were saving not just the soul society but civilization as they knew it. But Osamu worked himself far harder than he worked anyone else.
However, turning to the affairs of the present, Osamu was, as ever, punctual. He was too busy to arrive early and too organised to arrive late. Still though, he was making the best use out of every second. Even as he rounded a nearby corner and started to stride towards the imposing tower which would play host to this meeting he was still conducting business. Accompanied by his fourth seat the man was still giving orders and asking questions. The topic of the day was medical supplies and food. A hundred year siege tended to put a strain on those kinds of things. Osamu had already turned over every scrap of publicly owned green land he could get his hands on into a working garden of some sort, either growing food or medicinal plants. Still they were under producing. He had purchased some private land for war production but the biggest plots of open land still in shinigami control belonged to the noble families and due to the realities of diplomacy, politics and even law he could not get his hands on them. There were a lot of things Osamu wanted that he couldn’t get. But for now he had to pick his battles. His diplomatic instincts were not merely poorly tuned when it came to the nobility, they were almost non-existent, but even he got the funny feeling a war of words might come forth from this meeting. Especially given the fact he intended to try and address the very issue of food and medicine today, in what even he knew was a controversial manner. That was, if he had the opportunity. He had no idea why this meeting had been called and it may be that more pressing matters could take precedence. After all, the Captain Commander had summoned this gathering, she would doubtless have an agenda.
Leaving his number four at the gates to the tower, in order to take messages on behalf of the Captain, and then to fully brief him upon the end of the meeting, the Captain of the tenth made his way into the meeting room, pausing only to give a nod of courtesy to those already present. The man’s unceremonious entrance was exceeded by his unceremonious garb. He was wearing what he termed battle dress, he was still identifiable as a shinigami but only just. It was like he had stepped out of a parallel world or different time where shinigami were rather different. It rather encapsulated his entire attitude to the 13 divisions and the soul society as a whole. He didn’t want to be rid of the whole thing, he still saw great value and potential in it. But he wanted it to change, a lot. More to the point he was actually trying to bring about such change though even Osamu knew he had to bring both the people and the majority of the other Captains along with him and that was something far easier said than done. Especially since he was such a fresh face amongst the Captains. He had only come into the position a few years after the hollow invasion, when his predecessor had been made to step aside. A new face should avoid throwing his weight around too much. Throw in a civilisation threatening war on top of all that and well, reform was difficult. But utterly necessary.
Once present he cast his eyes gently about the room, taking in who was early, who was late, who was talking to who and about what. Unless directly approached however, Osamu would abstain from conversation. For now, he preferred to simply observe. He paid particular attention to the Captains of the second, sixth and eighth divisions. In the event of some form of internal strife those three would be the most important people around and truth be told, Osamu believed he was more at risk from the internal working of the soul society than he was from the hollow threat.
The Captain of the eighth, Hakkin, Kiyoko, worried Osamu. Her division was one of those most historically connected to dark deeds and internal intrigue yet she seemed to be a happy go lucky sort who just wanted to get along with everyone around her. This mismatch between her presentation and his own expectations caused almost every paranoid alarm bell to go off in his mind at once. He didn’t understand her, not in the least, and just like every man, he feared what he did not understand. He needed to know her, how she would behave, how she would respond to various developments before he could start working with her without always watching for a knife in his back. He would not make the first move, he was not about to start any internal struggle or civil war with the enemy at the gates and he wasn’t the kind of person who betrays his colleagues without a serious reason, but privately he was ready for someone else to be that stupid.
As for Yukihiro Yue, there was someone else he didn’t know the nature of nearly as well as he wanted to. Since she was in charge of Special Forces and assassins he desperately needed to know the content of her character, the second division wasn’t just something he wanted to quietly sit on the side lines he actively wanted it backing him. But he couldn’t read her she seemed well, far too normal to be believable. Too calm and well balanced, too pleasant and generally submissive yet she ran a tight ship, he knew that much. She seemed to ideal, plus no one as seemingly meek as her could run a division so well. Plus her noble connections troubled him. If push ever came to shove, which he sincerely hoped it would not, how loyal would she be to the Yukihiro family? How staunchly would she defend their interests and what, if anything, would make her stand away from her family? These were not immediate concerns but it was something he needed to know, if not now then later and Osamu feared he would not be able to crack that particular nut in time.
But, returning to the matter at hand, he took his seat and politely took the tea when it was proffered to him, with a little nod of thanks to the Captain Commander as well as a nod of greeting to the Captain of the fifth. He had not had the questionable pleasure of getting to know the Captain Commander, something he hoped to redress once the occupation crisis was dealt with. After all, he had only made Captain after the invasion and everyone had been a little bit busy since then. This meant he had no idea what an ominous sign the offer of tea was. So, he simply gently put it on the table in front of him, letting it cool gently until it was at a pleasant temperature. Part of him wondered where she got the tea leaves from, but after a few moments consideration he decided it must have been a small private garden. Besides, he had more important things to consider, such as why this meeting had been called in the first place? Sitting silently he waited for the Captain Commander to bring the meeting to order and get on with the business of the day.