A no man

“A no man” is the phrase used to describe a prisoner of war as someone stripped of honour and human standing. Its force lies in the contradiction it exposes: the prisoner is denied the status that might command protection, yet remains subject to the army’s discipline and violence. The expression also echoes Choi Sang-min’s later recognition that, despite the names imposed on him, he does not know who he is.

Meaning and military logic

The phrase occurs in a passage questioning what a prisoner of war could mean within the Imperial Japanese Army’s code of honour. The Field Service Code prescribed suicide for a captured officer; from that premise, captivity could be cast not as a condition with rules or claims, but as proof that a man had forfeited honour. “A no man” compresses that logic into a label: the captive is made less than a person precisely because he has survived surrender.

That judgment does not place the captive beyond military power. The railway prisoners are counted, classified by their ability to work, and sent into forced labour. When Major Nakamura and Lieutenant Fukuhara oversee a count, Dorrigo Evans reports 838 prisoners: 67 with cholera, 179 in hospital with severe illness, 167 fit only for light duties, and 62 newly reporting sick. He says only 363 are available for railway work. After further bargaining, Dorrigo offers 400, arguing that sending more sick men would be useless and would cause deaths. The administrative arithmetic makes visible the practical consequence of denying prisoners the standing implied by their name: their bodies remain under command, but their suffering does not secure them release from labour.

The expression and Choi Sang-min

The phrase gains another resonance in Choi Sang-min’s account of his own unstable identity. His Korean name, the Japanese name Akira Sanya, and the Australian guards’ name for him, the Goanna, mark different authorities’ claims over him. He recalls being beaten and disciplined in Pusan for failing to meet Japanese military expectations, including being punished for being too Korean. He says he hated this treatment and wanted to return home, but feared that resistance would bring punishment on his family. The role left open to him was that of a prison guard over men whom the military regarded as having surrendered rather than died.

After his trial, Choi is himself condemned as a Class B war criminal. The Australian military court dismisses the charge that he participated in the murder of Frank Gardiner but upholds charges that he ordered Wat Cooney’s murder and was involved in other ill-treatment. Choi disputes the allegation about Cooney: he says Cooney was no longer in the camp when the order was supposedly given, while confused and incomplete camp records fail to establish that point. He also recalls that Colonel Kota’s testimony helped convict Korean and Formosan guards, while Kota was later released without charge. The case therefore places the language of honour and criminal responsibility beside the uncertainties of testimony and the uneven consequences of postwar judgment.

Coercion, responsibility, and remembrance

Choi’s lack of a settled identity is not presented as simple indecision. He sees the convictions voiced by others around him as slogans and doctrines absorbed through military instruction and repeated beatings, rather than ideas freely made their own. His account links the production of the obedient guard to the same coercive order that defines prisoners as dishonourable. The phrase “A no man” names one part of that order: a person can be assigned a role and subjected to its commands while being denied the moral standing that would make his circumstances legible.

The novel extends this problem beyond individual camps and trials. The Yasukuni Shrine’s Book of Souls lists more than two million people who died in service to the Emperor, including 1,068 men convicted of war crimes and executed after the war. The shrine’s locomotive C 5631 commemorates the completed Death Railway, but its plaque says nothing about the railway’s construction or the people who died building it. The number of Asian labourers who died remains disputed, and their names have been forgotten. Against that memorial landscape, “A no man” carries a wider implication: institutions can classify people, commemorate some, and leave others without a record, while the lives erased by those acts remain part of the history being told.