Kameya Sato

Kameya Sato is a doctor and surgeon whose understated manner conceals a direct knowledge of wartime atrocities. Through years of playing go with Tenji Nakamura, he becomes a trusted friend; at their game table, he eventually recounts witnessing the dissection of living American airmen. His testimony does more than correct Nakamura’s denial: it places individual complicity beside the postwar arrangements that allowed perpetrators and institutions to escape full accountability, and makes Sato a witness to the history his friend would rather explain away.

Identity and Character

Sato comes from Oita and works at the hospital where he meets Nakamura. He is devoted to his patients, quiet and humble, and unlike the other doctors he has the eccentric habit of never wearing a white jacket. These details present a physician whose authority is not asserted through the conventional uniform of medical status. His manner is modest, but his eventual account insists on the moral weight of what medical authority enabled during the war.

Sato’s connection to Nakamura begins in an unlikely form of ordinary routine. Nakamura, despite his solitary habits, comes to play go with him. Sato is the better player, and he treats the game as more than a contest of skill: he explains that things possess patterns and structures people may not yet see, and that the task is to discover those patterns and work within them. The principle initially fails to make sense to Nakamura. Sato responds by gently pressing two fingers into his side, turning an abstract explanation into a physical demonstration. His teaching style is intimate and unshowy, an attempt to make an idea graspable rather than to overpower his listener.

Friendship with Tenji Nakamura

The go games grow over several years into trust, and trust into a quiet friendship. This gradual development matters because Sato’s disclosure arrives within a relationship built through repeated, peaceful encounters, not as a formal interrogation or public confession. During one game, he places a black stone on the board and tells Nakamura that he was present at the wartime events the Americans had described. The familiar board becomes the setting for a challenge to Nakamura’s account of the past.

Sato’s testimony unsettles the calm of their routine without changing its outward form. They continue playing in a small garden made for hospital staff; it is spring, birds sing in the early evening, and the last sunlight catches the maple tree. Against this quiet setting, Sato describes an atrocity that Nakamura had dismissed as American lies. The contrast gives the conversation its force: the violence is not announced in a battlefield scene but spoken plainly across a go table by a friend whom Nakamura has learned to trust.

Wartime Witness

Near the end of the war, Sato was an intern under Professor Fukujori Ishiyama. He was ordered to fetch a wounded American airman from a guarded ward. The prisoner was exceptionally tall, with a narrow nose and red curly hair; he had been shot by a soldier involved in his capture, yet trusted Sato enough to climb onto the gurney Sato showed him. Sato had been instructed to take him not to an operating theatre but to a dissection room in the anatomy department. Sato remembers feeling proud to be there, a detail that makes his account a record not only of what happened but of his own participation in its institutional setting.

Before the operation, the assembled staff bowed toward the patient. Sato recalls that the American did not struggle and could not imagine what was about to happen. Ishiyama cut into his abdomen, removed part of his liver, and sewed him up; he then took the gall bladder and a section of the stomach. The prisoner, who had appeared intelligent and vital, became old and weak. Although his mouth was gagged, he soon could no longer scream. Ishiyama finally removed his heart while it was still beating and placed it on scales, where the weights trembled. Sato recounts these procedures without turning them into an abstract medical experiment: the airman’s trust, progressive weakness, and inability to cry out remain central to what the account reveals.

Sato says that at first he did not think much about what he had seen because it was wartime. Over the following days, he witnessed further operations on other airmen: one involved opening the mediastinum, another severing facial nerve roots, and at the last operation he attended, four holes were made in a serviceman’s skull before a knife was inserted into his brain to observe the result. The sequence establishes that the dissection of the first airman was not an isolated episode in Sato’s experience. His calm recollection also exposes the normalization that had allowed him to feel pride and accept the procedures as part of war before later recognizing their significance.

Aftermath and Moral Significance

Sato recounts that after the war Ishiyama hanged himself in prison. Other people were sentenced to death, had their sentences commuted, and were eventually released. Sato thought for a time that he might be tried as well, but says that possibility had long passed. He describes both the Americans and the Japanese as wanting the matter forgotten. His account therefore moves from the operating room to the postwar handling of responsibility: punishment occurred, but it did not amount to a complete or lasting reckoning.

To show Nakamura that the wartime violence extended beyond the operations he witnessed, Sato points to an article about Ryoichi Naito, founder of the Japan Blood Bank, whose company bought and sold blood and who had become a respected public figure. Sato says he had colleagues who worked with Naito in Manchukuo, where Naito was among the leaders of scientific work that included vivisection and other practices. He reports that prisoners were used to test biological weapons, including anthrax and bubonic plague, and to test flamethrowers and grenades. He characterizes the work as a large operation supported at the highest levels, and argues that postwar American interest in Japanese biological-warfare research, in the context of preparing for conflict with the Soviets, helped protect the history from exposure. He also states that Chinese prisoners were used in the tests and that the Americans wanted to use the weapons against Koreans. The article’s image of respectable success thus sits beside Sato’s account of the violence that preceded it.

Nakamura responds that the Japanese, too, were victims of the war. Sato says nothing. The silence leaves Nakamura’s claim unanswered rather than endorsed: Nakamura continues to see himself, Ikuko, his executed comrades, and Japan as honourable victims falsely accused, while Sato has just supplied knowledge that complicates that self-exonerating story. Nakamura is excited by the account and senses in it the possibility of liberation, yet the testimony does not immediately make him acknowledge his own error. Sato’s narrative role lies in this unresolved encounter. He offers concrete witness against denial, but neither his friendship nor the force of what he has seen can compel Nakamura to accept its moral implications.