Shōwa Station is emblematic of the depths of cynical power politics that fueled the Scramble for Antarctica. Situated in perhaps the most hostile coastal region on the continent the former Marie Byrd Land, the base serves little purpose beyond legitimizing the Japanese claim to the area, a fact that its residents are reminded of daily. With a harbor nearly constantly covered in dense ice, supply convoys are rare, and its residents operate with bare minimum necessities. Despite being under the nominal command of the IJN's Antarctic Task Force, based thousands of miles away on the Gilbert Islands, the base is of negligible military value and is treated as such. A few token soldiers perform routine patrols more out of boredom than necessity, while the base's defenses are left to rot. Bureaucrats, workers, and the occasional scientist of the Imperial Polar Research Institute perform equally menial tasks carrying on the pantomime of a functioning Antarctic base.

In recent years the Navy has offloaded many of the tasks of day-to-day management to the Nissui fishing conglomerate, who use Shōwa Station to legitimate their exclusive claim to fish and whale in these waters. Supplies seem to come more often from Nissui shipping vessels than naval convoys these days as the creeping chill of privatization moves ever closer. Nissui is also responsible for one of the few notable changes to the local landscape: a vast graveyard of whale bones, accompanied by various macabre devices once used to process the leviathans for oil and meat. This slaughterhouse is rarely used nowadays, but the gruesome display serves as a perpetual reminder to the residents of Shōwa Station of where their fate might lie should things take a turn for the worse.