As little as a week earlier he would have thought riding out the storm possible. Now it didn't look that way. Hadn't he been Japanese he might have contemplated leaving the country, but what was the point in racial purity if you left the islands behind you?

Right now he was fighting for his life as an upstanding member of society. At least in one aspect the enemy had made a dangerous miscalculation. His wife knew his loyalty to her was absolute. They shared that loyalty and had done so since they married close to forty years earlier. It wasn't love – it was something much stronger and purer.

Last night she waited for him when he came home. Dinner ready and a bath drawn as always but this time she brought him an unexpected bonus.

Somehow the Himekaizen kids had made stronger allies than just the Wakayama family, and with that information it was just a matter of digging up some dirt on the new players. Everyone had something they wanted to hide from prying eyes.

While idiot gaijin believed proper Japanese women stayed home because they were abused and helpless servants, nothing could be further from the truth. Rather than being tied to one company they knit strings of power with other women married to men from different domains of influence, other wives of powerful men who could be manipulated. Only a moron failed to respect his wife, and there were a lot of morons out there with political clout.

Together they'd topple those behind the bothersome kids, and in doing so pulling the kids down as well. He didn't plan to go down alone, and his wife would despise him if he allowed that to happen.

With a smirk on his lips the principal of Red Rose Academy put his seal to a letter of resignation which he hid in the small safe behind his desk.

Rumours had it Principal Nakagawa of Himekaizen Academy had a similar safe behind his. Maybe he was just luckier keeping his dirty secrets behind locked doors, but that luck was bound to run out.

The time had come to fail to blackmail one diet member who had bought a few hours of conversation with the tall Swedish whore half a year earlier. The powerful man wouldn't crumble under such a weak threat, but he was certain to hang the girl out to dry to save his own skin just in case.