Umi Yukaba

Umi Yukaba is an ancient poem that became a prominent wartime expression of loyalty to the Emperor and the refusal to surrender. In the novel, it appears both as part of Japan’s public language of military sacrifice and as a private password that identifies Tenji Nakamura years after the war. Its movement from radio announcements to a tense postwar encounter links imperial ideology with recognition, memory, and the uneasy return of what might otherwise be suppressed.

Wartime Meaning and Use

During the war, Umi Yukaba was so popular that radio announcements about battles began with it. Those announcements presented Japanese soldiers as having met honourable deaths rather than suffered the dishonour of surrender. The poem thus did more than commemorate the dead: its repeated use supplied a public frame for interpreting their deaths, making them expressions of loyalty instead of losses to be understood outside the language of military honour.

The lines quoted in the later scene place death across a vast landscape: “Across the sea, corpses in the water,” followed by “Across the mountains, corpses upon the grass . . .” The poem’s final lines make the allegiance explicit: “We die by the side of our Emperor,” and “We never look back.” Together, these fragments move from bodies scattered across sea and mountains to a declaration of unwavering service. The refusal to look back gives the poem a forward-driving force, but in the novel’s postwar setting it also resonates with the difficulty of confronting what the war left behind.

That public language belongs to a wider imperial claim that victory would come through the Japanese spirit, understood as the Emperor’s will. The poem’s wartime prominence makes it one expression of that conviction: death could be narrated as honourable so long as it was placed within service to the Emperor. The novel does not present the poem as an isolated piece of lyric culture; it shows how its words entered the machinery of wartime announcements and shaped the terms through which battle deaths were reported.

A Password in the Postwar Encounter

In the spring of 1959, more out of curiosity than optimism, Tenji Nakamura applied for a position with the Japan Blood Bank and unexpectedly received an interview. He travelled by train to Osaka on a winter morning. At the headquarters, he waited until almost lunchtime, was ushered into a large executive’s office rather than a meeting room, and was left alone there. After a further quarter of an hour, a voice behind him told him not to turn around. A hand traced a crescent across the back of his neck, and a man began reciting the poem.

Nakamura recognized Umi Yukaba immediately. He answered not with an explanation but with its final lines: “We die by the side of our Emperor,” and “We never look back.” The exchange works as a password because both men know the poem and its place in wartime life; Nakamura’s response confirms that he understands the signal. Its familiar words, once broadcast to frame soldiers’ deaths, now establish recognition between two men in a private room decades later.

The physical details make the recognition more than a verbal test. The hand returns to Nakamura’s neck, and the man praises it as “Such a good neck, a great neck”. Nakamura turns and sees a face that has changed: the hair is white and spiky, the body burlier, and the face more sagging, though its shark-fin quality remains. The man explains that he had to see Nakamura’s neck to be sure he had found the person he thought he had found, then adds, “You see, I never forget.” In this scene, the poem’s function is inseparable from the body and the act of remembering: a wartime text helps identify someone, while the touch and altered face make the passage of time visible.

Memory, Recognition, and the Aftermath

The encounter takes place amid a larger postwar reckoning with wartime responsibility and selective remembrance. In the surrounding conversation, Kameya Sato recalls that Professor Ishiyama hanged himself in prison, that some others were sentenced to death before their sentences were commuted, and that they were eventually released. Sato says that he once thought he might be tried too, but that the time for such a reckoning has passed: “The Americans want it forgotten, and so do we.” Against that stated wish for forgetting, Umi Yukaba returns as something both men still know by heart.

The novel also sets wartime remembrance against the memorial language of Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The shrine’s Book of Souls lists more than two million people who died in service to the Emperor between 1867 and 1951; enshrinement there carries absolution from evil acts. Among the names are 1,068 men convicted of war crimes after the Second World War and executed, including men found guilty of mistreating prisoners on the Death Railway. The poem’s promise of death beside the Emperor therefore sits beside a postwar practice of honouring the war dead that can obscure distinctions between service, wrongdoing, and responsibility.

The novel makes that obscuring concrete through what the memorial record leaves out. A plaque before locomotive C 5631 does not mention the horror of building the Death Railway or name the hundreds of thousands who died in its construction. The number of dead is not agreed upon; estimates for Asian slave labourers range from 50,000 to 200,000, and the text insists that no one knows. It concludes that the names are already forgotten and that there is no book for their lost souls, offering only a fragment in their place. Read in this context, Umi Yukaba is not simply an emblem of remembrance: its powerful, repeatable account of imperial sacrifice stands in contrast to the uncounted dead whose names and experiences have no comparable memorial.

The Poem’s Changing Function

Umi Yukaba changes meaning with the setting in which it is heard. On wartime radio, it frames deaths as honourable and binds them to the Emperor; in the 1959 office, its final lines form a compact test of shared knowledge and a means of identifying Nakamura. The same words carry public ideology and private recognition, while the man’s insistence that he never forgets cuts across the surrounding desire to put the war behind them.

That tension does not resolve into a simple opposition between remembering and forgetting. The poem survives precisely because it was repeated so widely, but its survival does not restore the names of those absent from official memorials or settle questions of responsibility. In bringing the poem back through a whispered recitation, a response from memory, and the touch of a hand on Nakamura’s neck, the novel shows how a familiar wartime expression can outlast its original public use—and how recognition of one person can coexist with the wider forgetting of many others.