Tenji Nakamura—Kameya Sato

Tenji Nakamura and Kameya Sato form a friendship around the go board, but Sato’s eventual testimony about wartime vivisections turns their shared pastime into the setting for a confrontation with what Nakamura has chosen to believe. Their connection develops quietly, and its dissolution is equally quiet: after the disclosure, neither man can return to the trust that had made their games a habit.

Friendship at the Go Board

Nakamura encountered Sato at the hospital where Nakamura worked, first as an orderly and then as a storeroom clerk. Though he generally kept apart from other people, he gradually began playing go with the doctor. Their games continued over several years, and repetition became familiarity, then trust, and finally a quiet friendship. Sato, from Oita, was devoted to his patients and notably humble; unlike the other doctors, he never wore a white jacket. He was also a much stronger player than Nakamura.

One evening, Nakamura asked what made someone good at go. Sato answered that everything had a pattern and structure, even if people could not see it, and that their task was to discover it and work within it. When Nakamura did not seem persuaded, Sato made the idea tangible by describing an appendectomy: he would separate the muscles according to the anatomical pattern he had learned at Kyushu, then remove the inflamed appendix with the least danger and stress to the patient. His explanation joined the game to his medical practice, presenting both as ways of perceiving and working within an underlying order.

That confidence in order would acquire a darker meaning when their conversation turned from Kyushu’s medical training to a wartime story Nakamura had read in the newspaper. He remembered reports that doctors had been tried and jailed for vivisecting living American airmen without anaesthetic, and had been angered by what he regarded as American accusations. When he raised the matter with Sato, the surgeon answered that he had been there. The game continued around them, but the trust built over years had brought Nakamura to a disclosure that would test the assumptions on which he had made sense of his own past.

The Disclosure of the Vivisections

Sato began with the part Nakamura did not know. Near the end of the war, as an intern at Kyushu under Professor Fukujori Ishiyama, he had been ordered to fetch a guarded American airman from a ward. The young man was exceptionally tall, with a narrow nose and red curly hair, and had been wounded by the soldier who helped capture him. He trusted Sato enough to climb onto the gurney himself. Sato had been told to take him not to an operating theatre but to a dissection room in the anatomy department. Nakamura supplied the version he expected: the airman had been anaesthetised and Ishiyama had operated on his wound. Sato corrected him. Orderlies strapped the man’s limbs, torso, and head to the table with leather belts.

Ishiyama addressed those present while the airman was restrained. He argued that dissecting subjects before death could produce scientific data useful to soldiers in future battles, and presented the work as a sacrifice required for great scientific achievement. Doctors and scientists, he said, could prove themselves worthy servants of the Emperor through it. Sato remembered feeling proud to be there. Nakamura, looking down at the go board, listened as the surgeon described an operation that began with an incision into the airman’s abdomen and the removal of part of his liver. Ishiyama sewed him up, then removed his gall bladder and part of his stomach. The young man, initially intelligent and vital in appearance, became old and weak; gagged, he was soon beyond screaming. Ishiyama finally removed his heart, which was still beating when he placed it on the scales.

The disclosure reached Nakamura without producing the moral shock its facts might seem to demand. Sato’s account established that the American reports Nakamura had dismissed as lies were true. Yet Nakamura could still follow the reasoning that had authorized the operation: the language of duty, sacrifice, science, and service to the Emperor repeated the patterns by which he had understood his own adult life. The go game had begun with Sato’s claim that unseen structures governed things; now that idea seemed to expose a terrible order, one in which organized violence could appear to its participants as ethical work. Sato went on to describe other operations on captured airmen, including the opening of one man’s mediastinum, the severing of another’s facial nerve roots, and a final procedure in which four holes were drilled into a serviceman’s skull before a knife was inserted into his brain.

The Past and the End of the Friendship

Sato widened his account from the operations at Kyushu to the postwar fate of those involved. Professor Ishiyama hanged himself in prison. Others were sentenced to death, had their sentences commuted, and were eventually released. Sato had once feared that he, too, might be tried, but said that fear had passed. He believed that both the Americans and the Japanese wanted the matter forgotten. The history he disclosed was not only a personal confession: it implicated a postwar settlement in which justice gave way to competing interests and deliberate silence.

To make that silence more visible, Sato pointed Nakamura to a newspaper article about Ryoichi Naito, founder of the Japan Blood Bank and a celebrated businessman. Sato said colleagues had worked with Naito in Manchukuo, where prominent scientists oversaw vivisection and other abuses, including biological-weapons tests on prisoners using anthrax and bubonic plague, and tests of flamethrowers and grenades. He described the operation as large and supported at the highest levels. In his account, Naito’s respectable postwar standing and the failure to reopen these crimes were linked: the Americans wanted access to biological-warfare knowledge for possible conflict with the Soviet Union, while Japan and the United States had reasons to move on. Sato added that some perpetrators were hanged while others escaped punishment, with Koreans especially vulnerable to being sacrificed.

Nakamura answered by placing himself and Japan among the war’s victims. Sato did not reply. Nakamura nevertheless felt confirmed in the belief that he, Ikuko, his executed comrades, and the Japanese people were honourable and unjustly accused. That sense of victimhood gave his secretive, diminished life a kind of grandeur and helped him explain what had happened to him without confronting the responsibility disclosed by Sato’s story. The friendship’s fracture therefore began before either man openly withdrew: they had heard the same history, but Nakamura absorbed it into his old moral framework, while Sato’s testimony had made that framework harder to sustain.

They never spoke of Sato’s past again. Over the following months their go games became less frequent, and the surgeon who had once seemed genial and interesting came to feel tedious to Nakamura; their meetings became a burden rather than a pleasure. The estrangement appeared mutual. Sato stopped visiting Nakamura in the storeroom office for a smoke, and Nakamura avoided parts of the hospital where he might encounter Sato. At last they stopped playing altogether. The friendship had grown through repeated games into trust, but the disclosure that tested that trust left no argument capable of restoring it: its end arrived through avoidance and silence.

Estrangement and the Possibility of Truth

The silence between the men did not simply restore Nakamura’s earlier isolation. As he grew distant from Sato, he also began drawing closer to other people and found strength to be more truthful. He came to recognize how many men who thought of themselves as proud and honourable, having done their duty, also understood themselves as victims of the war. But he could no longer treat secrecy and selective memory as permanent conditions: the period when people concealed who they were and remembered only what could be spoken about was ending.

As the remaining imprisoned war criminals were released, Nakamura abandoned the pretence of subterfuge and returned to his real name, choosing to acknowledge the truth as the more honourable way to live. The narrative does not present this change as a reconciliation with Sato; the two had stopped playing go and never discussed the disclosure again. Their friendship’s importance lies instead in the pressure Sato’s testimony placed on Nakamura’s account of himself: the relationship ended in withdrawal, but its aftermath made continued evasion harder to sustain.