“It can’t be helped”

“It can’t be helped” is the language of necessity in the railway scenes involving Major Nakamura and Colonel Kota: a phrase that makes coercion sound like the absence of choice. Its force lies in the gap between the practical obstacles the officers face and the immense human cost their decisions impose. As the railway’s demands are treated as fixed, prisoners and laborers become resources to be spent, and decisions that expose them to death are recast as unavoidable.

The phrase within the railway’s machinery

The expression appears amid a crisis of manpower, tools, and time. Colonel Kota tells Major Nakamura that the railway employs more than a quarter of a million coolies and sixty thousand prisoners, yet the workforce is still insufficient. Burmese and Chinese laborers flee or die; Tamils are dying from cholera; and the arriving workers do not make up the shortfall. Kota also dismisses the complaints of English and Australian prisoners about hunger, fatigue, and being slapped, judging their work against the beatings a Japanese soldier would expect for neglecting his duties. His account presents a brutal system of labor and discipline, but the phrase that closes it—“None of it can be helped.”—turns that system’s effects into a condition to be endured rather than a policy to be questioned.

The scene’s timing sharpens the contrast. Before the prisoners, guards, and engineers are awake, Major Nakamura walks through the mud, his nightmares dissolving as methamphetamines quicken his mind and heart. He feels that the day and camp are his to shape. In an empty mess, Colonel Kota, eating tinned fish, gives him written orders and damp technical drawings. Nakamura’s sense of command exists alongside shortages and orders he did not make; the language of inevitability bridges that contradiction. The officers may lack the tools and manpower they need, but the railway’s schedule remains the governing fact.

The march and the denial of alternatives

One order requires a hundred prisoners from Nakamura’s camp to be sent to a camp near Three Pagoda Pass, about 150 kilometres north on the Burmese border. Nakamura immediately recognizes what the reassignment means for his own section: he already needs another thousand prisoners to finish the work on time and cannot spare even a hundred. He asks whether the men must march there. Kota answers, “There is no other way in the monsoon. That can’t be helped either.” The monsoon makes the journey more dangerous, but the order stands; the phrase closes off discussion precisely where the danger should demand it.

Major Nakamura knows that many of the men will die on the march, perhaps most of them. He nevertheless reasons that the railway has been ordered by the Emperor and that this is how it has been decided it will be built. He asks how he can construct it with no tools and fewer men each day, but Kota’s reply removes even survival as a limit: “Even if everybody dies.” The completion of the railway is treated as the constant; the loss of the workforce becomes a variable that may reach its total. The phrase therefore does not mean that nothing can be done in an ordinary practical sense. It means that the order will not yield, even when carrying it out destroys the people required to fulfil it.

From necessity to moral evasion

The language is bound to a hierarchy in which prisoners have been stripped of human standing. Major Nakamura sees that, within this logic, a prisoner of war is “Less than a man,” material for the railway like teak sleepers, steel rails, and dog spikes. The comparison makes explicit what the ostensibly practical conversation has already enacted: people are counted as labor units, transferred between camps, and exhausted in service of the line. Kota’s bluntness exposes the endpoint of the reasoning, while the repeated appeals to what cannot be helped make that endpoint sound impersonal.

The same pattern returns when Colonel Kota tells Major Nakamura about his executions. He describes seeking prisoners to behead when weeks had passed without a killing, and explains that he has come to see people chiefly as necks to be assessed for the sword. As Major Nakamura listens, he again perceives that even these acts are being framed as necessary to realize the Emperor’s wishes. The connection broadens the phrase beyond logistical hardship: it belongs to a worldview in which violence can be incorporated into duty and then narrated as having no alternative. The account does not make the executions equivalent to the railway’s labor orders; it shows how the same justification can accommodate both.

The phrase’s significance

The phrase’s apparent resignation conceals a forceful choice: to continue obeying. Colonel Kota’s claim that nothing can be helped sits beside orders he delivers, judgments he makes, and a railway he insists must be completed. Major Nakamura, too, recognizes the likely deaths and persists. Their constraints are real, but the passage shows how acknowledging constraint can become a way to avoid confronting responsibility for what follows.

In this sense, “It can’t be helped” is not simply a refrain of despair. It is a verbal mechanism that converts imperial command into supposed inevitability, and human consequences into accepted costs. The monsoon, the shortage of tools, the dwindling workforce, and the long march are concrete conditions; none by itself requires the officers to treat prisoners as expendable. The phrase fuses those conditions with obedience until a policy appears to be fate. Its chilling implication is that the railway’s violence is not only inflicted through orders and weapons, but sustained by the language that makes alternatives disappear.