Japan was officially at war with the small Suffolk town of Brome for 174 years. During the entire war, only seventeen shots were fired: in 1877, the Japanese ambassador to Britain fired twice at a London fruit-market trader whom he suspected (wrongly) of coming from Brome, missed, and was promptly deported; and in 1944, an American pilot, whose mother had emigrated from Brome to Los Angeles forty years previously, took particular relish in firing his first - and only - nine rounds at a Japanese aircraft carrier before he himself received six bullets to the head from a fanatically anti-Brome Japanese spy who had been hiding in the rear of the cockpit. Peace broke out in 1983, when it was finally realised that there were no surviving records of the incident that had supposedly started the war, and that the whole thing was bloody stupid anyway.