“It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed or governing, but people.”

Childan longs for a day when his country is beyond the need for race but not due to an innate altruism or belief in equality. He is old enough to remember his country before the Japanese took over, meaning that he remembers a time when he was a member of the dominant racial demographic. Childan is a racist, spiteful man who does not crave equality but power, which is why he respects the Japanese and their ability to manage the racial caste system. He does not want the oppressive society abolished so much as he wants to be part of the dominant group. 

“And the cipher was the metaphor type, utilizing poetic allusion, which had been adopted to baffle the Reich monitors.”

The German fascists are so self-involved and ecstatic in their racism that they fail to perceive cultural nuances of other, non-German people. As such, the Japanese hide coded messages within cryptic allusions to literature and cultural idiosyncrasies because they know the Germans will not know or care about such things. Togami thinks this way about the Germans and congratulates the Japanese for their intelligence, but he then depends on his American assistant to help him perceive the nuances of American culture when selecting a gift. Togami and the Japanese suffer many of the same chauvinistic cultural blind spots.