Execution of Choi Sang-min (Goanna)

The execution of Choi Sang-min, known to the prisoners as the Goanna, ends his story at Changi Prison with a punishment he cannot reconcile with any of the identities imposed on him. Convicted for ordering the death of Wat Cooney and for other mistreatment of prisoners, he faces death without finding a cause, country, or belief that can make it meaningful. His final concern is the fifty yen he says he has not been paid: a small, unresolved debt that becomes his measure of how little the war’s competing authorities have valued him.

Trial and disputed responsibility

Choi’s execution follows a two-day trial in an Australian military court. Most of the proceedings are in English, which he understands only in fragments. An interpreter relays the verdict: the charge concerning the death of an Australian Imperial Force sergeant is dismissed because the written testimony is contradictory, but the charge that Choi ordered Wat Cooney’s murder is upheld, along with lesser charges of ill-treatment. The court finds him guilty as a Class B war criminal and sentences him to death by hanging.

The evidence behind the conviction leaves a question hanging over the judgment. Choi says that, as a Korean sergeant, he could not have ordered a prisoner’s death. The Australian lawyers rely on the interrogation of Colonel Kota, who said Choi had given the order. Choi also points out that Wat Cooney was no longer in the camp when the order was supposedly issued, but the camp records are too confused and incomplete to establish that fact. The case therefore turns on evidence that Choi disputes and records that cannot settle his account.

After sentencing, his Australian defence counsel urges him to petition for clemency. Choi sees little reason to prolong what he regards as an agony with a certain end. He also notices that other Korean and Formosan prisoners held at Changi as Class B and Class C war criminals believe that Allied authorities have freed some better-connected officers while leaving men of lower rank to be punished. In his thoughts, Major Nakamura has not been arrested and Colonel Kota is free; he suspects that both may be working for the Americans. His execution is thus presented not as a clean resolution of responsibility, but as one outcome within an uneven system of postwar justice.

Death row at P Hall

After conviction, Choi is transferred to P Hall, where condemned Japanese, Korean, and Formosan prisoners live together. He is issued a dirt-brown uniform marked CD, letters he is told signify that he is condemned to die. The change brings an unexpected release from fear and inferiority: those feelings, once central to his life, seem to lose their force now that his own death has been decided. The condemned men fill the days with go, shogi, books, magazines, or silence, making a routine within the prison’s suspended time.

Every few weeks, an Indian captain arrives with an execution notice. The prisoners wait to learn whose name it bears, relieved when the condemned man is someone else. On the third such visit, Choi understands that he is to die the following morning. The paper itself seems too slight to contain the end of a life; he cannot connect the official notice with all the changes and possibilities he still associates with being a person. Yet the other prisoners’ intense relief makes the meaning unmistakable: this time, the notice is for him.

The night before the execution, the four men due to die receive a Japanese meal and cigarettes, and a Buddhist monk attends them. Choi resents the meal’s distance from the spicy kimchi he longs for and refuses to eat. To him, accepting a last meal would mean accepting that it really was his last. He remains silent as the others speak of loved ones. The ritual offers a form for approaching death, but Choi does not accept the terms it sets out for him.

The fifty yen and an uncertain identity

As he waits, Choi’s mind shifts between panic about being unable to escape and anger over his unpaid military wages. He believes that, as a member of the Japanese military, he should still be receiving fifty yen a month, although he has seen none of it since before the war ended. The amount is not important to him as wealth. It stands for the reason he served and for an obligation he believes has been withheld even as the state’s authority over him has brought him to the gallows.

The same unresolved question shapes his sense of who he is. He has had a Korean name, Choi Sang-min; a Japanese name, Akira Sanya, which he was given and made to answer to in Pusan; and the Australian name the guards use for him, the Goanna. None provides a secure identity. He thinks of other condemned men whose convictions rest on ideas about Japan, Korea, religion, or justice, then recognizes that such ideas may have been absorbed from slogans, broadcasts, speeches, and military instruction. He wants an idea of his own, something that might bring understanding or peace, but none comes before morning.

Choi’s memory of Japanese military training gives this uncertainty its history. He recalls being slapped in Pusan for speaking too softly, holding his posture incorrectly, or seeming too Korean, and being taught through beatings how to strike others. He had wanted to return home but feared punishment for himself and his family. The training was supposed to make him a Japanese soldier; he knew he would instead become a prison guard, serving a system that treated prisoners as less than men. At the point of execution, he cannot claim either the national loyalty of a Japanese officer or the patriotic certainty of a Korean prisoner. His insistence on the fifty yen remains more concrete than either allegiance.

The execution

Choi is unable to sleep and tries to steady himself by recalling how other men met their deaths. A condemned Korean’s patriotic cry does not give him a language he can share. He rejects the identities of both Korean and Japanese, describing himself instead as a man of a colony. The phrase does not resolve who he is; it names the position from which he has been claimed, disciplined, and finally sentenced by others.

When the guards come for him, Choi resists. He is offered medication to calm him, and after the first attempt does not settle him, a doctor gives him morphine. He is escorted across the courtyard to the gallows. There, amid the preparations and the assembled soldiers and pressmen, he is asked whether he wishes to say anything. He has no statement that can turn his life into a cause. The fifty yen returns to his mind, now reduced to an amount he considers too small even to count as a fair bargain. He does not deliver a speech; the execution proceeds, and Choi dies still unable to reconcile the promised pay, his coerced service, and his sentence.

Aftermath and historical significance

Choi’s death belongs to a postwar reckoning in which convictions, releases, and missing records do not produce a uniform account of responsibility. Elsewhere in the novel’s treatment of the trials, Professor Ishiyama dies in prison, while other men sentenced to death have their sentences commuted and are eventually released. The account also observes that both the Americans and Japanese want the past forgotten. These outcomes sharpen the contrast between Choi’s execution and the survival or release he imagines for men above him in the wartime chain of command.

The novel places such individual judgments against the scale of the Death Railway’s violence and the difficulty of preserving its victims’ names. At Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, locomotive C 5631 is displayed without a plaque acknowledging the railway’s horrors; the shrine’s Book of Souls includes the names of executed war criminals, some convicted for mistreating prisoners. Yet the railway’s dead are not comparably recorded, and estimates for the deaths among Asian labourers differ widely. Choi’s execution cannot repair those omissions or settle the broader question of responsibility. Its force lies instead in the unresolved particulars it leaves behind: a disputed order, incomplete records, a man caught among imposed national identities, and fifty yen that he is still waiting to receive.