Yasukuni Enshrinement of the War Dead and the Idea of Absolution

Yasukuni Enshrinement of the War Dead and the Idea of Absolution is the novel’s account of how commemoration can turn military death into sacred honor while obscuring the violence for which some of the dead were responsible. At Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, the Book of Souls records millions who died in service to the Emperor, including executed war criminals; nearby, locomotive C 5631 is displayed without any account of the Death Railway’s dead. Against this ordered memorial landscape, the novel sets incomplete trials, private acts of remembrance, and the losses for which no names or agreed totals remain.

The Book of Souls and posthumous absolution

The Book of Souls lists more than two million names of people who died in service to the Emperor of Japan in wars between 1867 and 1951. The novel describes enshrinement at this sacred site as bringing absolution from all acts of evil. The claim makes remembrance more than the preservation of names: it gives the dead a shared honor that can overrule distinctions between service, culpability, and the harm done to others.

That implication is sharpened by the presence among the names of 1,068 men convicted of war crimes after the Second World War and executed. Some had worked on the Death Railway and were found guilty of mistreating prisoners of war. Their inclusion places victims and perpetrators within the same commemorative register, where service to the Emperor is the defining fact and the histories behind each name risk disappearing.

C 5631 and the missing dead of the railway

The locomotive C 5631, the first train to travel the completed Death Railway, is proudly displayed at the shrine’s museum. Its plaque does not mention the railway’s horror. The train’s public honor therefore sits beside a conspicuous absence: no names of the hundreds of thousands who died building the line, and no agreed count of the total dead.

The uncertainty is not marginal. Around 60,000 Allied prisoners of war were only a fraction of those forced to labor on the project. Alongside them were roughly a quarter of a million Tamil, Chinese, Javanese, Malayan, Thai, and Burmese laborers, or possibly more. Historians’ estimates of deaths among these laborers range from 50,000 to 200,000. The novel refuses to settle the number where the record cannot: the dead are not made knowable by a memorial that honors the locomotive while omitting their names. It offers them instead a fragment of remembrance, explicitly marked by the impossibility of recovering all that has been lost.

Trials and unequal responsibility

The novel’s account of postwar justice echoes the memorial’s uneven treatment of responsibility. At Choi Sang-min’s two-day trial in an Australian military court, proceedings were largely conducted in English, which he understood very little. The court dismissed the charge that he had participated in the murder of Australian Imperial Force Sergeant Frank “Darky” Gardiner because of contradictions in written testimony. It upheld the charge that he had ordered the murder of Private Wat Cooney, along with lesser charges of ill-treatment, including withholding food and medical supplies that led to avoidable suffering and death. Choi was convicted as a Class B war criminal and sentenced to hanging.

The evidence and its gaps mattered. Choi maintained that, as a Korean sergeant, he could not have ordered a prisoner’s death. The prosecution cited Colonel Kota’s interrogation statement that he had done so; Choi also argued that Wat Cooney was no longer in the camp when the order was supposedly given. Confused, incomplete camp records could not prove that claim. Choi further believed that Allied authorities freed some officers with connections to Japanese nobility while leaving lower-ranking Koreans and Formosans to serve as scapegoats. He thought of Major Nakamura, who had not been arrested, and Colonel Kota, who had been released. His sense of injustice does not erase the upheld findings against him; it makes the allocation of punishment, and the reliability of the record supporting it, part of the novel’s account of remembrance and responsibility.

A separate recollection by Kameya Sato extends the pattern beyond the railway cases. Sato says that after the war Fukujori Ishiyama hanged himself in prison, while others were sentenced to death, had their sentences commuted, and were eventually freed. He tells Major Nakamura that he once thought he might be tried, but that possibility has passed; both the Americans and the Japanese, he says, want the matter forgotten. The result is not a single, complete reckoning but a history in which some acts reach judgment, some sentences are reversed, and other responsibility recedes from view.

Private acts of remembering and forgetting

The memorial problem also appears in the prisoners’ daily practices. During a cholera funeral, everything touched by the disease must be burned, including the dead men’s possessions. A pyre maker brings Dorrigo Evans Rabbit Hendricks’s sketchbook, and Dorrigo tells him to burn it. When Dorrigo later tells Bonox Baker that everything is forgotten in the end and that it is better to live now, Bonox answers by invoking the duty to remember. Their exchange sets survival against commemoration without resolving the conflict: preserving an object may be dangerous, while destroying it can erase one of the few remaining traces of a dead man.

Jimmy Bigelow’s later memories offer another, personal counter-record. After his daughter Jodie dies of leukaemia at nineteen, he lives for another twenty-eight years, increasingly less concerned with taking himself seriously and increasingly forgetful. He retains small, sustaining details, including the taste of the duck egg Darky Gardiner gave him and Wat Cooney’s habit of waiting at the cookhouse so the last man back would still receive food. At Wat’s burial, no one wanted to be the first to throw a sod onto the grave. Jimmy remembers the kindness and the men’s reluctance, but not Wat’s death during the cruel march north to Three Pagoda Pass. His sons and others correct his inconsistent accounts; he insists on the authority of having been there, even as the details recede.

The shrine’s promise of absolution, the missing names beside C 5631, and these fragile private memories do not form a reconciled history. They reveal competing ways of carrying the dead: through sacred inscription, a public plaque, a trial record, a burned sketchbook, or the remembered kindness of a man who fed the last person in line. The novel’s fragmentary memorial is not a substitute for the names that cannot be recovered. It is an acknowledgment that official honor and imperfect recollection alike leave much of the past unresolved.