Nakamura’s Methamphetamine Dependence

Tenji Nakamura’s methamphetamine dependence grows from an expedient response to exhaustion into a condition woven through his command of railway construction. After malaria leaves him depleted, Philopon helps him keep working; later, he needs it to stay awake, meet new orders and return to the line. The drug sharpens his senses and makes him feel strong and certain, but it also gives him distance from his actions. His dependence is therefore bound both to the brutal demands placed on him and to the brutality he passes down to the men under his authority.

Work, illness and the first reliance

Nakamura first takes shabu after a second attack of malaria, when he is still exhausted but must continue working. The railway is being built without machinery through wilderness, a task the narrative describes as superhuman. The pills enable him to return to it day after debilitating day with renewed fervour. In this first account, the drug appears as a means of meeting demands that exceed the body’s capacity to recover, rather than as a habit detached from the conditions of his work.

That expedient becomes dependence. By the time fresh orders arrive from the Railway Command Group, Nakamura has been surviving on army-issued methamphetamine and little else. Lieutenant Fukuhara reports that Colonel Kota is waiting to brief him, and that a truck carrying supplies is bogged three kilometres away. Nakamura must meet Kota, organise a rescue and somehow finish his section of railway within the impossible time headquarters now demands. He knows sleep is what he needs, but also knows the night will not allow it. His repeated demand for shabu makes plain what has become indispensable to him.

The empty bottle and its replacement

The dependence takes visible form in the bottle beside the field table. When Nakamura reaches for it, nothing comes out. He stares at the empty container on his army cot; its label bears the army’s claim that the drug is meant to inspire fighting spirits. The official language turns a private need into something that can be presented as service, even as Nakamura understands that he needs sleep and cannot have it. He throws the bottle violently through the open doorway, where it disappears into mud and jungle. The gesture briefly rejects the object, but does not free him from the need it represents.

Nakamura soon calls for Tomokawa. While the kerosene lamp swings over mould-spotted drawings, reports and work sheets, Tomokawa finds a Philopon bottle and hands it to him. Nakamura gulps four pills. He explains that Philopon helps him through his fever and stops the ticks biting, then insists that it is not an opiate and disparages other peoples as susceptible to addiction. The insistence sits against the scene’s evidence: he has just demanded the drug, consumed four pills, and earlier acknowledged that he needs it more than food. His explanation preserves an image of control even as his actions expose how little control remains.

Effects on body and judgment

The pills bring a rapid change. Nakamura feels his early-morning stupor dissolve into alertness and vigour; the scratching that had grown increasingly ferocious begins to fade, and he experiences a swelling sense of physical strength. The text also registers sexual arousal as part of that bodily surge. These effects make the drug more than a way to postpone sleep: in the moment, it restores sensation and confidence where he had felt weakness and doubt.

Nakamura experiences the mental change as equally useful. Shabu sharpens his senses, supplies certainty, eliminates fear and creates distance from his actions. That distance is especially consequential because he is not simply a labourer trying to survive a shift. He is a commander responsible for organising work under coercive conditions. The stimulant sustains his capacity to keep going, while its promised separation from fear and action helps him act without fully confronting what that persistence demands of others.

Dependence and command

The railway’s logic appears in Nakamura’s instructions to Fukuhara. He tells the young engineer to treat all men as machines in the Emperor’s service; when those machines seize up, he says, force must be applied to make them work. The language converts exhausted people into equipment and presents violence as a practical response to failure. Nakamura’s own body is also being driven past exhaustion, but the drug enables him to continue enforcing the same logic on the labourers beneath him.

The scene therefore links dependence to both imposed pressure and delegated power. Headquarters demands completion on an impossible timetable; Nakamura stays awake, takes the pills and resumes command. His renewed certainty does not soften the order he gives. Instead, the stimulant makes continued work feel possible and supplies the emotional distance through which coercion can be treated as necessity. When Nakamura realises that the ticks have stopped biting, the immediate relief is real, but it belongs to a cycle in which exhaustion, the demand for shabu and renewed exertion follow one another. The discarded bottle has vanished into the surrounding darkness; its replacement brings him back to work, not out of dependence.