Changi serves as both a point of departure and a place of postwar reckoning: Australian POWs leave it for forced labor on the Death Railway, while Korean and Formosan guards are later held there as war criminals. The prison’s place in the novel links the solidarity of the prisoners sent out to the railway with the fractured, contested justice that follows the war.

Departure for the Railway

A thousand POWs first leave Changi as Evans’ J Force. They come from different Australian states and military experiences: Tasmanians and West Australians surrendered in Java, South Australians surrendered at Singapore, survivors of the sinking of HMAS Newcastle, men from Victoria and New South Wales, and RAAF airmen. They arrive as a force and, despite deaths that steadily diminish their number, remain one in the novel’s account of their shared captivity.

Changi is part of a much larger history of displacement into forced labor. Of the 22,000 Australian POWs, most had surrendered at Singapore; 9,000 would be sent to work on the railway. When locomotive C 5631 travels the completed Death Railway on 25 October 1943, its passage over the remains of the dead gives the railway’s completion a human cost that official ceremony does not acknowledge. The novel estimates that one in three of those Australians would die.

A Cohort Held Together by Loss

The men who depart Changi are not presented as a representative cross-section of Australia. They include drovers, clerks, teachers, wharf workers, shearers, and men shaped by poverty and the Great Depression. Their different origins do not undo their shared identity as Evans’ J Force: even if only one man survives to march out of the camp, he will still belong to the same force that arrived.

That continuing identity rests on mutual belief and responsibility. The prisoners’ attachment to one another grows stronger as men die; survival does not erase the dead but binds the living more closely to them. Changi therefore marks the beginning of a collective ordeal whose fellowship is defined not by common background but by the insistence that the lost remain part of the group.

Trials and Contested Responsibility

After the war, Changi also holds Korean and Formosan guards classified as Class B and Class C war criminals. Choi Sang-min is tried in an Australian military court over two days. He understands little of the English proceedings except when directly questioned, and receives the judgment through an interpreter’s fragmented Japanese. The court dismisses the charge that he participated in the murder of Sergeant Frank “Darky” Gardiner, but finds him guilty of ordering the execution of Private Wat Cooney and of other mistreatment, including withholding food and medical supplies. He is sentenced to death by hanging.

The judgment is complicated by gaps and asymmetries in the evidence. Choi says Cooney was no longer at the camp when the order was supposedly given, but incomplete records cannot establish that. The prosecution cites Colonel Kota’s interrogation testimony; Choi has heard that Kota was later released without charge, while several Korean and Formosan guards were convicted. Choi sees this disparity as a pattern in which men with connections to the Japanese nobility escape while lower-ranking men become scapegoats. His defense counsel urges him to petition for clemency, but Choi refuses to prolong what he regards as an unavoidable ordeal.

The Place and the Limits of Remembrance

Changi’s significance extends beyond the fate of the Australian force. The railway was built by Allied POWs and a far larger Asian labor force, including Tamils, Chinese, Javanese, Malayans, Thais, and Burmese. Estimates of deaths among these laborers vary widely, and the novel emphasizes that no agreed total exists. Their names are already forgotten, and there is no equivalent record preserving them.

The postwar treatment of wartime responsibility sharpens that absence. Sato recalls that Professor Ishiyama hanged himself in prison, while others received death sentences that were later commuted before they were released. He says that the Americans wanted the matter forgotten, as did the Japanese. Set beside Choi’s trial and the selective fates of those accused, this account makes Changi a setting for justice that is real but uneven—and for the silences that survive the formal end of war.