Manchukuo appears in the novel through memories of military training, wartime service, and imperial exploitation rather than through a sustained portrait of civilian life. It is where Colonel Kota learned to treat violence as a military skill, where Major Nakamura’s memories of ordinary food become bound to longing, and where the histories of Korean recruits expose the economic pressures behind imperial service. These returns make Manchukuo both a remembered place and a measure of how institutions shape what their participants can remember, excuse, or desire.

Military Training and the Making of Violence

Colonel Kota recalls arriving in Manchukuo as a newly commissioned second lieutenant, five years after officer school, for special field exercises intended to prepare officers for combat. One exercise took the trainees to a prison, where Chinese prisoners were made the subjects of an initiation in killing. Kota remembers not only his fear but the attention he paid to the instructor’s method and to the other trainees’ attempts. He watched closely, learned what counted as a competent stroke, and, when his own turn came, carried out the act with an outward calm that concealed his horror.

The recollection matters because Kota describes violence as something he learned by watching and then practicing. He notices the procedure, his balance, and the need to keep the prisoner still; the training converts an atrocity into a lesson in technique. The story does not present Manchukuo as an abstraction detached from individual choices: it is the setting for an institution that teaches young officers to perform violence and to observe it as a professional task. Kota’s later narration makes the memory’s persistence plain. The lesson did not end with the exercise; it became part of how he understood himself and military life.

Nakamura’s Recollections and Longing

Manchukuo also persists in Major Nakamura’s memory through ordinary details. He remembers eating gyoza there during his service and thinking nothing of it at the time. Years later, in a ruined room in postwar Tokyo, the possibility of obtaining the dumplings occupies him so completely that he acts on it, entering the room with a crowbar. The remembered food is a small, concrete link to an earlier life, but its return is set against hunger, danger, and the violence of the present.

Nakamura’s connection to Manchukuo is not simply a wish to recover a happier past. When Colonel Kota speaks of seeing a neck and longing for Manchukuo, the place is joined to the military experience that formed him and to the violence he cannot separate from it. The recollection makes nostalgia morally unsettled: remembered familiarity can coexist with the memory of a system that trained officers to kill. Manchukuo offers these men a point of return in thought, but not an uncomplicated refuge from what they did or witnessed.

Recruitment, Poverty, and Unequal Choices

Choi Sang-min’s account places Manchukuo within a wider pattern of recruitment across the empire. His father wanted him educated, but poverty ended his schooling after three years. As a child, Choi worked in Korean households for food, lodging, and small wages. At fifteen, he heard that the Japanese military was recruiting guards for prisoner-of-war camps elsewhere in the empire, with monthly pay of fifty yen. That sum offered a reason to enlist, though the account shows how limited his alternatives had been.

Choi’s thirteen-year-old sister also went to Manchukuo for work, believing she would help soldiers in hospitals and expecting pay similar to his. She could not read or write, and the family never heard from her again. Choi later understood that the work was not what she had been told; he tried not to think about her and hoped she was dead. Her disappearance gives the place a sharply different meaning from the familiar food in Nakamura’s memory. Manchukuo is connected not only to military careers and remembered routines but also to the vulnerability of people drawn into imperial systems by poverty, incomplete information, and promises of wages.

The Military System Beyond the Battlefield

The novel further associates Manchukuo with the reach of military and scientific institutions. Kameya Sato tells Nakamura that scientists connected with work there had conducted experiments on prisoners, including biological-weapons testing. He describes this work as large-scale and supported at high levels, while pointing to the postwar prominence of people associated with it. His account connects the earlier violence of military training to a wider institutional history in which prisoners could be used for purposes concealed or obscured after the war.

Sato’s recollection also challenges the neat separation between wartime wrongdoing and postwar respectability. He says that some people were sentenced, others had their sentences commuted, and still others were released; he believes the past was allowed to remain buried because both Japanese authorities and the Americans had reasons not to expose it. Manchukuo therefore enters the novel not as a complete historical record but as a place implicated in memories of violence and in later struggles over what would be investigated, punished, or forgotten.

A Place Reconstructed Through Memory

These episodes give Manchukuo no single emotional or moral meaning. For Kota, it is bound to the moment when military training made violence an acquired skill. For Nakamura, it returns through food and the habits of service, although his nostalgia remains entangled with the violence of the world he remembers. For Choi, its history reaches into his sister’s disappearance and the economic conditions that led both of them toward imperial work. Sato’s testimony, meanwhile, connects the place to research on prisoners and to the uneven aftermath of wartime accountability.

The novel’s method is accumulative: Manchukuo emerges through separate recollections, each revealing a different connection between place and power. What sounds at first like longing or personal reminiscence repeatedly opens onto a larger system—military instruction, recruitment, exploitation, and the management of postwar memory. The location’s significance lies in this contrast. Its remembered details can be intimate and ordinary, but the histories attached to them show how private memory persists alongside harms that public institutions may leave unrecorded or unresolved.