Imperial Japanese Army 2nd Railway Regiment

The Imperial Japanese Army 2nd Railway Regiment is a military unit whose place in the novel emerges through the railway officers and engineers linked to it, rather than through a formal account of its organization. Former major Tenji Nakamura is identified as having served in the regiment, and Aki Tomokawa as having been part of his platoon on the railway. Their wartime work belongs to the construction of the Death Railway, an imperial project whose material ambitions depended on the forced labour and deaths of prisoners and Asian labourers. The regiment’s later presence in the story is equally important: former engineers seek to restore a locomotive as a memorial to what they regard as their achievement, while the novel places that commemorative effort beside the human cost the memorial leaves out.

Identity and Wartime Setting

The novel identifies Tenji Nakamura as a former major in the Imperial Japanese Army 2nd Railway Regiment. Aki Tomokawa, his former corporal, had served in Nakamura’s platoon on the railway. These details establish a chain of military association—regiment, commander, subordinate, and railway service—but the narrative supplies no roster, internal structure, or complete account of the unit’s operations.

The regiment’s setting is the larger Japanese effort to build a railway between Siam and Burma during the Second World War. Japan sought a land route to supply its forces in Burma, but lacked the money, machinery, and time to build the required line by ordinary means. Military engineers marked a projected route with surveyors’ pegs for a line of 415 kilometres from north of Bangkok toward Burma. The plan’s strategic urgency was translated into a vast construction undertaking, with prisoners of war and Asian labourers made to provide the labour that equipment and time could not.

Railway Work and Its Human Cost

The railway’s physical demands appear in the contrast between grand engineering plans and the tools and labour available on the ground. In one account, a major cutting already half-completed is ordered enlarged by a third, requiring another 3,000 cubic metres of rock to be cut and removed. The prisoners do the work by hand with hammer and chisel; there are not enough proper chisels, and the available forge lacks coke to sharpen blunted tools. This episode concerns the railway command’s altered plans, not a specifically assigned action of the regiment, but it shows the kind of engineering pressure surrounding the railway units and the people compelled to meet its targets.

The labour regime worsens as the monsoon arrives. Under the Speedo, rest days disappear, quotas rise, shifts lengthen, and prisoners are increasingly ordered to work both day and night. The distinction between the fit and the sick gives way to a distinction between the sick and the dying. The regiment’s military railway setting is therefore inseparable from an infrastructure project that treated human endurance as a replaceable resource.

The scale of that cost exceeds what the surviving memorial record can reliably count. Of 22,000 Australian prisoners of war, 9,000 were sent to work on the railway; the account estimates that one in three of those Australians would die. Allied prisoners were only part of the labour force: about 60,000 prisoners of war worked alongside a quarter of a million or more Tamil, Chinese, Javanese, Malayan, Thai, and Burmese labourers. Estimates for deaths among the Asian labourers range from 50,000 to 200,000, and the total is unknown. The regiment’s association with railway construction consequently sits within a history whose victims vastly outnumber the names preserved in official commemoration.

Nakamura, Tomokawa, and Regimental Memory

Years after the war, Tomokawa’s letter finds Nakamura frail but recovering from illness. Tomokawa has searched for his former commander and gathered news of their old comrades. Nakamura had avoided contact with former comrades since seeing his name among suspected war criminals at the Shinjuku Rashomon, but the letter changes how he regards that self-imposed isolation. He comes to see Tomokawa’s loyalty as a claim on his own response, and decides to travel to Sapporo to meet him despite his illness.

Tomokawa also reports that a group of railway engineers from their old regiment has returned to Thailand, now called Siam, and found the rusting remains of the first locomotive to travel the full length of the Siam–Burma Railway in 1944. They are restoring it with the eventual aim of taking it to Japan for display at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, honouring what they consider a great achievement. For Nakamura, news of the work marks a release from the fear he has lived with since the Shinjuku Rashomon and awakens a wish to share in his former comrades’ pride. The restoration thus functions in his personal story as a route back toward fellowship, as well as a public claim about what the regiment’s railway service means.

Commemoration and Historical Significance

The locomotive’s memorial afterlife sharpens the novel’s contrast between engineering achievement and omitted responsibility. A steam locomotive identified as C 5631 is displayed at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where the Book of Souls records more than two million people who died in service to the Emperor between 1867 and 1951. The shrine’s association with absolution, including the enshrinement of 1,068 executed war criminals convicted after the Second World War, makes the display more than a neutral record of railway technology. Some of those executed men had worked on the Death Railway and were convicted of mistreating prisoners of war.

The plaque before C 5631 does not mention the railway’s horror or name the people who died building it. Nor is there an agreed count of those deaths. Against this public absence, the novel grants space to the forgotten labourers and to the physical remains of the railway. After the war, the line loses its military purpose: its Japanese engineers and guards are imprisoned or repatriated, remaining enslaved labourers are freed, and the route is abandoned, dismantled, or pulled up for salvage. Rain and vegetation then break apart its banks, bridges, and cuttings. The regiment’s legacy is consequently divided between the restored locomotive, which preserves a version of its achievement, and the broken line, whose ruins and uncounted dead expose the cost that version suppresses.