Tenji Nakamura—Tomokawa

Tenji Nakamura—Tomokawa is a relationship between two Japanese wartime associates whose postwar reunion becomes an uneasy test of memory, responsibility, and self-justification. As Nakamura, ill and approaching death, tries to hold on to an honorable image of his service, Tomokawa’s recollections reopen what that image leaves out: violence against prisoners, atrocities in Manchukuo, and the deaths bound up with the railway they built. Their conversation offers neither a clean confession nor a settled judgment. Instead, it reveals how shared experience can sustain both companionship and evasion.

Wartime Association and the Railway

Tomokawa and Nakamura share the history of building the railway in Siam. In their later conversation, Nakamura considers the project a feat achieved against extreme material and human constraints: the men faced disease, starvation, and Allied air raids, while sick prisoners were made to work and the healthy ranks were scarcely sufficient. Without the capacity to manufacture railway iron or use heavy construction machinery, the Japanese dismantled lines deemed strategically less important in Java, Singapore, and Malaya and transported the rails to Siam. Nakamura’s account makes the railway’s material ingenuity part of his defense of the undertaking, but it also places forced labor and death at the center of the achievement he calls a triumph.

The scale of the work sharpened the moral problem between the two men. Nakamura understood that he could once have been accused of responsibility for the deaths of perhaps hundreds of romusha and prisoners of war, though he could not say how many. He believed the railway had to be built for the Emperor and could not have been built by any other means. By remembering the project as duty performed with devotion and honor, he could treat the deaths as unavoidable costs rather than consequences that implicated him. Tomokawa’s later words unsettle this account, even though he does not offer a sustained alternative reckoning.

The Conversation and Its Disturbing Recollections

The reunion takes place as Nakamura is weakened by illness and morphine. He is trying to recall the beautiful, noble Japan he believed he had served, but a memory of a prisoner painting portraits of him and his men in Siam troubles him without his understanding why. His concentration falters; frozen monsters seem to loom around him. Tomokawa speaks, but Nakamura’s perception turns him into a gigantic, fire-breathing turtle. The scene makes the conversation less like a composed retrospective than a troubled encounter in which speech, memory, and hallucination overlap.

Tomokawa says that he had feared being prosecuted as a war criminal, then dismisses that fear as misplaced because he believed the authorities cared only about Japanese treatment of Allied prisoners. He recalls what they had done to Chinese people in Manchukuo, including sexual violence against women, and argues that the punishment of Japanese personnel for railway abuses while other atrocities went unpunished defied reason. His account does not amount to repentance: he uses the unequal reach of prosecution to question the justice of punishment, rather than to deny or excuse the underlying acts. Nakamura hears the argument and recognizes its apparent common sense, even as it supplies another way to displace responsibility.

The memory of the prisoner artist becomes a second disturbance. Tomokawa tells Nakamura that he had explained to a woman that the man who painted them was not Nakamura but an Australian associated with a sergeant who used to sing at night. Tomokawa uses the story to suggest that prisoners’ singing meant their experience could not have been so bad. The recollection reverses the image of the railway as a purely Japanese achievement: the prisoners are not anonymous laborers in this exchange but people who painted, sang, and remain attached to specific remembered scenes. Yet Tomokawa turns those details into evidence for a minimizing conclusion. Nakamura’s inward response is a brief question about how they had lived, not a reply that resolves the contradiction.

Shared Memory and Moral Evasion

The exchange shows that the men do not remember the war from a neutral distance. Nakamura’s image of himself depends on a distinction between personal goodness and service to the Emperor, but that distinction is becoming harder for him to maintain. He tries to find evidence of a good life outside orders and authority, recalling that he offered quinine to an Australian doctor and despaired at the violence of a beating. Those memories cannot cancel his recognition that the railway’s construction cost many lives. Tomokawa’s recollections bring the same difficulty into their shared space: he names crimes and abuses, but frames their punishment as selective and their victims’ suffering as less severe than it was.

Their relationship therefore holds two kinds of memory together without reconciling them. The men can remember the railway’s practical triumph and the comrades who died of disease, while the very acts that made the project possible remain difficult to face as wrongdoing. Tomokawa’s reasoning gives Nakamura language for his own defense, but the conversation’s intrusive images and remembered prisoners keep that defense from settling into uncomplicated reassurance. The past returns through details that resist the story the men would prefer to tell about it.

The Relationship’s Final Note

When Nakamura tries to form an alternative account of goodness, the effort falters amid images of skeletal bodies crawling through rain and mud. He understands that those who inhabited such bodies would not have welcomed their deaths any more than he will welcome his own. Tomokawa then returns to the prisoner painter, remarking that the painter’s stories about the Japanese were horrors, and treating prisoners’ singing as proof that their lives could not have been entirely bad. Nakamura’s response remains internal: he thinks of how they lived.

After Tomokawa’s wife returns with food, Tomokawa changes the subject, but Nakamura continues thinking about what he has said. Later, Tomokawa calls the period the happiest time of his life. The statement gives their bond an intimacy that sits uneasily beside the violence they remember and the suffering their accounts diminish. It is not presented as a resolution or a shared verdict: it is Tomokawa’s own claim, followed by Nakamura’s failing consciousness and the approaching end of his life. Their relationship matters because it makes the war’s contradictions audible between two men who shared its work, yet cannot turn shared memory into a shared reckoning.