The Narrow Road to the Deep North(102)

Choi Sang-min longed for such clarity and certainty. The Japanese had it—at least, he had always felt that the Japanese had it. And now he could see what he had sensed as he had tried to smash it out of the POWs with his fists and boots—that the Australians had it too. Everyone had it; everyone in the world had it. Except perhaps him.

The gallows were behind the gallery in which Choi Sang-min and the three other men now sat waiting for their last ever lock-up. On the days of executions the CDs yet to have their date of execution confirmed waited inside this hall in silence, able to hear the condemned’s steps up the scaffold and his final words. The Japanese officer had shouted, Long live the Emperor! The trapdoor had slapped open and a dull thud followed almost immediately.

But what good was such an attitude for him, a Korean? thought Choi Sang-min. He had not done anything for his country and his country had done nothing for him. He had no particular beliefs. He thought of his parents, imagined their anguish on hearing of his death, and he realised he could offer them not one good reason as to why he died, other than fifty yen a month.

As they waited in this anteroom of death, a condemned guard called Kenji Mogami sang songs. They had briefly worked together in the same POW camp. They called him the Mountain Lion, but he, who had never hurt anyone, was also to die. Choi Sang-min remembered an Australian singing and how he had stopped him singing, but about Kenji Mogami’s singing he could do nothing. A Japanese officer waltzed alone. Then they were taken to their cells.

He was unable to sleep. He felt almost painfully alive and awake and now wanted to taste and know every second of his life. To stop his mind wildly pitching between panic at not being able to escape and anger at not getting his fifty yen he tried to remember how some of the others had met their executions.

Hurrah for the Great Korean country! cried out one Korean as he walked the fateful thirteen steps.

What great Korean country? wondered Choi Sang-min. What about my fifty yen? I am not Korean, he thought to himself. I am not Japanese. I am a man of a colony. Where’s my fifty yen? he wanted to know. Where?

His father, a peasant, had wanted him to have an education, but times had been hard and after three years at elementary school learning some Japanese myths and history, he left to work for a Korean family as a servant. They gave him his board, two yen a month and regular beatings. He was eight years old. At twelve he went to work for a Japanese family, who gave him board, six yen a month and an occasional thrashing. At the age of fifteen he heard the Japanese were hiring guards to work in prisoner-of-war camps elsewhere in the empire. The pay was fifty yen a month. His thirteen-year-old sister had signed up with the Japanese to go to Manchukuo to work as a comfort woman for similar pay. She told him she would be helping soldiers in hospitals and, like him, was very excited. As she could neither read nor write, he had never heard from her again, and now that he knew what comfort women did, he tried not to think about her, and when he did, he hoped for her sake that she was dead.

Though he had many names—his Korean name, Choi Sang-min; the Japanese name he had been given and made to answer to in Pusan, Akira Sanya; his Australian name that the guards now called him, the Goanna—he realised he had no idea who he was. Some of the other condemned had strong ideas about Korea and Japan, the war, history, religion, justice. Choi Sang-min realised he had no ideas about anything. But the ideas the others had seemed no better to him than having no idea. Because they were not their ideas, but the ideas of slogans, wireless broadcasts, speeches, army manuals, the same ideas they had absorbed with the same endless beatings they too had endured in their Japanese military training. In Pusan they had slapped him because his voice was too low or his posture wrong, they had slapped him for being too Korean, they had slapped him to show how to slap others—as hard as he could. Choi Sang-min hated it. He wanted to run away, back to his home. But he knew that if he did he would be punished, and, worse, his family would be punished. They slapped him, they said, so he would be a strong Japanese soldier, but he knew that he would never be a Japanese soldier. He would be a prison guard, guarding men who were less than men—those who had chosen surrender before death.

Sitting on death row, Choi Sang-min desperately wanted to have an idea of his own. He hoped that long night that an idea would finally come to him, open him up, an idea that would allow him to understand and at the same time to know peace. He hoped to be like the Japanese officer who believed in the Emperor, or the Korean guard who believed in Korea. Perhaps he should have asked for more than fifty yen. But no idea came, and far too quickly morning did.