Beheading training with Chinese prisoners in Manchukuo

Shiro Kota’s account of the beheading training with Chinese prisoners in Manchukuo describes a military exercise in which an act of killing became both a test of courage and a lesson in procedure. Recalled years later to Major Nakamura, the episode follows Kota from a newly trained, frightened second lieutenant to a cadet who could perform the assigned act with outward composure. Its significance lies not only in what the officers were taught to do, but in what Kota says the experience did to his sense of himself.

Setting and Purpose

Kota places the episode five years before his conversation with Major Nakamura, when he had just left officer school and was serving as a very inexperienced second lieutenant in Manchukuo. The cadets were taken to a prison for what Kota identifies as a trial of courage and a form of special field training intended to prepare them for combat. The prisoners had been deprived of food for days; they were bound and blindfolded and made to kneel near a large pit. The exercise thus brought the cadets’ military instruction into direct contact with vulnerable captives, making the prisoners the means by which the officers were tested and trained.

The lieutenant in charge first demonstrated the procedure with his sword. Kota remembers watching closely, concentrating on how the instructor positioned himself and how the act was carried out. The lesson was practical as well as performative: the cadets were not merely asked to witness violence but expected to learn from it and take part. The setting gave the exercise the authority of an organized military institution, while its stated purpose made the execution of prisoners part of preparation for combat.

Kota’s Turn

When the cadets followed the demonstration, some struggled to carry out the task; the instructor had to intervene when one attempt went wrong. Kota describes himself as frightened, including by the possibility of making a fool of himself, but says that watching had already taught him what counted as a successful stroke, where to stand, and how to keep the prisoner calm and still. The account presents attention as a form of training: he learned by observing the instructor and the other cadets, even while he remained horrified by what was happening.

When his turn came, Kota used the sword his father had given him. He recalls wetting the blade as instructed and watching the water gather and run away. He says that attending to this small, controllable detail helped him maintain his outward composure. His account distinguishes that composure from his inner state: he was horrified, yet he performed the actions he had been shown without visibly shaking. The exercise had taught him not only a technique but a way of directing his attention through an act he could scarcely accept emotionally.

Afterward, Kota found himself thinking about the act’s ease and about its vividness, rather than sustaining a feeling of connection to the prisoner. He says that he no longer felt anything for the man and despised him for accepting his fate meekly; at the same time, he felt angry with him for allowing Kota to slaughter him. That contradictory response makes the episode more than a recollection of military instruction. Kota’s account shows him turning his own participation into resentment toward the person subjected to it, even as he recognizes that he himself had carried it out.

The Change He Remembers

As Kota tells the story, his sword hand continues to clench and unclench, as if repeating the movement. The gesture links his present telling to the remembered exercise: the event has ended, but his body reproduces an action associated with it. His memory also returns to the water on the sword, a detail that offered him something to watch while he acted. Rather than describing a settled understanding of what happened, he recounts a sequence in which observation, technique, and bodily control displaced reflection in the moment.

Kota describes the result as a feeling that he had gained something and become another man, as though he had died and been reborn. The transformation is not presented as triumph. It follows his account of horror, the ease with which the action seemed to proceed, and his loss of feeling for the prisoner. The language of rebirth therefore carries a disturbing double meaning: Kota experienced a change in himself, but the change was bound to an act imposed on a captive and to his own participation in it.

Later Testimony and Responsibility

The story’s later context gives this recollection additional weight without making the training exercise identical to the separate crimes examined after the war. In an Australian military trial, Choi Sang-min was convicted of ordering the death of Private Wat Cooney and of lesser offences involving mistreatment and the withholding of food and medical supplies. Choi tried to explain that, as a Korean sergeant, he could not have ordered a prisoner’s death. The Australian lawyers cited an interrogation of Colonel Kota in which Kota had said that Choi gave the order. Choi also argued that Cooney was no longer in the camp at the relevant time, but confused and incomplete records did not establish this.

Kota’s testimony had helped convict several Korean and Formosan guards, while Kota himself had later been released without charge. Choi, sentenced to hang, interpreted this difference as evidence that lower-ranking men were being made scapegoats while officers with connections to Japanese nobility were freed. That was Choi’s perception of the justice administered by the victors, not a finding that resolves every question about responsibility. The contrast nevertheless places Kota’s remembered training beside a postwar process in which testimony could help determine who was punished, while the uneven record and outcomes left accountability contested.

The novel also sets such disputes against the memorial treatment of the war. At the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, the displayed locomotive C 5631 and the Book of Souls commemorate Japanese service and the war dead; the shrine’s account of enshrinement includes absolution, while the locomotive’s plaque says nothing about the railway’s construction or its dead. That larger contrast between commemoration, omission, and the uncertain record of responsibility echoes the training episode’s central tension: an institution could give violence a procedure and a military purpose, while later accounts struggled to establish who had done what and who would answer for it.