*hats off to you for the translation* I hate that point where it stops making sense, because it usually comes after I've gotten into a groove and I irrationally feel that if I keep going I can still produce something worthwhile, which just isn't the case.

*reads the "Japanese history" quotation* The ignorance, it burns. I don't even know what else to say to something like that--it's clear the writer hasn't the slightest fucking clue that they haven't a clue. There's just not even anything to engage with.

Anyway, you should totally write that story. The research for my own steampunk story/stories is going to kill me, but better that than thoughtlessly reanimating and reinscribing all the oppression of the actual era. For me personally, I think the attraction of steampunk is its glorification of changing the past (and indeed, the glee with which it frequently does so); I don't see the point to the exercise at all if it doesn't change the past, to paraphrase Tom LaMarre in a slightly different context. But if steampunk doesn't imagine alternatives and revisions--not (necessarily) utopian, mind--to the (usually systemic) oppressions of the period, I can't tell how it isn't just dressing up those oppressions in a new coat with goggles and brass trimmings.