The Kyushu University vivisections of American POWs enter the novel not as a scene witnessed directly by the reader, but as a wartime memory narrated by Kameya Sato to Tenji Nakamura. Sato describes how American airmen were taken from guarded hospital wards to a university dissection room and subjected to operations presented as scientific work. His account unsettles Nakamura’s inherited confidence in wartime justifications, while its postwar coda shows how incomplete and uneven the reckoning remained.

The account and its setting

Sato tells the story while he and Nakamura are playing go in a small garden. An accusation that the Americans had lied prompts Sato to say that he had been present. He then identifies himself as an intern near the end of the war, working under Professor Fukujori Ishiyama. The scene is therefore both a report of wartime events and a confrontation in the present: Sato’s experience challenges the assumptions Nakamura has carried into their conversation.

Sato recalls being ordered to collect an American airman from a ward where guards were posted. The man was tall, with red curly hair and a narrow nose, and had been shot by a soldier involved in his capture. Sato was instructed to take him not to an operating theatre but to the anatomy department’s dissection room. The distinction between the destination Sato was given and the purpose of the journey becomes central to the account: the airman trusted the intern who guided him, without knowing what awaited him.

The first operation

The room held doctors, nurses, other interns and army officers. Ishiyama had not yet arrived. Sato remembers the airman getting onto a gurney, then standing and lying down on the dissection table himself. He winked and smiled at Sato as though they shared a joke. That gesture makes the deception personal: the patient’s apparent confidence rests on a trust Sato knows is misplaced.

Nakamura assumes that the airman was anaesthetised before Ishiyama operated. Sato corrects him. Orderlies restrained the patient, and Ishiyama addressed those assembled before beginning. He presented dissection before death as a means of obtaining scientific data for future battles, describing sacrifice and commitment as necessary to great achievement. He cast the doctors’ work as service to the Emperor. The staff bowed toward the patient before the operation, a formal gesture that could appear to acknowledge him while the acts that followed denied his consent and personhood.

Sato recounts that Ishiyama carried out a series of operations, removing organs while the airman remained conscious. The young man, initially appearing intelligent and vital, became weak; he was eventually unable to cry out. Sato’s account does not present the procedure as an accidental departure from medical practice. It shows it being organised in a clinical setting, explained to colleagues as research, and connected explicitly to military service.

Repetition and complicity

Sato says the first case was followed over the next few days by operations on other airmen. He recalls procedures involving the chest, facial nerves and brain. The repetition matters: what he initially encountered as one extraordinary episode became a sequence of acts carried out within the same wartime institution. Medical staff and officers were present, and Ishiyama’s appeal to scientific progress and national service offered those involved a way to understand the work as legitimate.

Sato also remembers his own response. At the time, he felt proud to be there and initially gave little thought to what he had witnessed. His recollection therefore bears on more than the professor’s responsibility. It records how a participant could accept a moral framework that turned human beings into research subjects, and how the familiarity of that framework could persist even after its consequences were plainly described. The account does not say that Sato performed the operations; it places him at the scene as an intern who assisted in bringing a patient there and witnessed what followed.

Nakamura’s response and the postwar record

Nakamura listens as Sato’s testimony undermines the claim that the Americans had fabricated reports of abuse. He recognises the same structure of reasoning that had shaped his own adult life: a proclaimed necessity, the promise of service, and the subordination of an individual to a larger cause. Yet recognition does not immediately become moral clarity. The account describes Nakamura as finding that the reasons offered for the operations still seemed intelligible to him, even as he understood that the American allegations were true. The scene makes the persistence of wartime ideology visible in the gap between learning what happened and feeling its full moral force.

After the war, Ishiyama hanged himself in prison. Other people involved were sentenced to death, had their sentences commuted, and were eventually released. Sato says that for a time he feared he might also be tried, but that the danger had passed. His account presents no comprehensive resolution: Ishiyama died in custody, others returned to freedom, and Sato was not tried. It closes with the claim that both the Americans and the Japanese wanted the matter forgotten. In the novel, Sato’s belated testimony counters that silence, while its uneven aftermath leaves responsibility and justice unresolved.