Pusan

Pusan is identified in the novel as the place where Choi Sang-min underwent Japanese military training before being sent to guard prisoners in the jungle. It is significant not as a described cityscape but as the site where a system of hierarchy and enforced discipline shaped the conduct he would later exercise over Australian POWs.

Training and Assigned Role

At Pusan, Choi and the other Korean recruits received training like that of Imperial Japanese Army privates, including marching, shooting, and bayonet practice. Yet they were not to become soldiers: their assigned role was guarding surrendered enemy servicemen, whom their training taught them to regard as men who had chosen surrender rather than death. The distinction left the recruits inside the military system but beneath the status it held out as an ideal.

Discipline was taught through binta, the prescribed slapping of faces for even minor mistakes. If one trainee erred, the whole group could be punished. Recruits stood in two lines facing one another and took turns striking the person opposite, alternating hands and cheeks until the punishment had visibly taken effect. Obedience and this repeated ritual formed the practical substance of their instruction.

Choi Sang-min’s Experience

Pusan also marks the beginning of Choi’s divided identity. There he was given the Japanese name Akira Sanya and made to answer to it, although he understood that he would never become a Japanese soldier. He wanted to return home, but feared that flight would bring punishment upon his family; the prospect of a monthly wage was another reason he remained within the arrangement.

When Choi and the trainee facing him tried to soften the punishment by agreeing to go easy on each other, a Japanese officer noticed. Choi had admired the officer and imitated his manner, but the officer rejected the attempted evasion and punished him. The following day Choi struck his counterpart with a rage that, the narrative indicates, did not entirely leave him. Pusan’s training thus appears in retrospect not as neutral preparation but as a formative encounter with the violence the recruits were ordered to enact and made to endure.

From Training to the POW Camp

The routines learned at Pusan reappear in Choi’s later conduct as a guard. He enforced punishment against Australian prisoners, at times going further than he considered strictly necessary. He associated their public whistling and singing with a cheerfulness he disliked, and sought to make that cheerfulness stop. The novel connects this behavior to the training’s demand for obedience and to the position Choi occupied within its hierarchy, without making that background an excuse for his actions.

Pusan’s importance is therefore carried through memory rather than through a separate account of its streets or surroundings. In Choi’s recollection, the paired lines of trainees, compulsory blows, and failed attempt at mutual leniency establish an early pattern: authority imposes violence downward, while those subjected to it are trained to reproduce it against others. The place helps illuminate the path from Choi’s subordination as a Korean recruit to his later power over surrendered prisoners.