Dr. Ibaraki Character Analysis

The doctor’s long fingers prodded me with surprising force while he dictated the condition of my lungs, heart, hair, teeth, and genitals to his assistant in a voice louder than seemed necessary. He met my gaze only once, when I mentioned that I was a physician, too.

Johnny Chang [….] was known to everybody and moved among the Japanese, Chinese, native, and even white population with ease. His father was a Chinese immigrant who’d made a modest fortune on the goldfields and moved to Broome to start a restaurant, eventually marrying the Japanese daughter of a laundry owner.

It was strange I hadn’t recognised Johnny straight away. Perhaps it was the difference in his attitude. In Broome, he’s always been easygoing, but here it was as if he were another man.

It wasn’t until sometime after I finished my studies and began interning at Tokyo Imperial University Hospital that it dawned on me how incapable I was—how incapable we all were. Medicine was not the noble, enlightened profession I’d envisaged. Patients still died; there was no secret cure. Greater men might be able to achieve more, but not me.

“You think I don’t know that? I’m more than happy to do my fair share. But they’ve got the boys in our tent doing everything—all the shit jobs that they don’t want to do. Just because we’re not like them. Because we don’t kiss their arse, worship their god, bow to their emperor. Tell me something: is your guy helping you out with the work?”

All at once it became clear: this was part of Johnny’s plan to create havoc at camp. Due to jealousy or some personal vendetta, Johnny wanted to bring down the leaders of our compound, and he had somehow convinced Stan that Yamada was to blame for his attack. For all I knew, Stan might have inflicted the wound on himself.

Seeing them play baseball together reminded me of the divers in Broome, who were always so at ease in each other’s company [….] They were my countrymen, but the way they conducted themselves was almost alien to me. To be a diver was to never be alone.

We moved into our new home early in the new year and started on repairs straight away. There were doors to be measured and mats to be ordered. We bought new shutters and installed latches that stopped them from banging in the wind. We replaced our fence with new bamboo stalks, binding them together with rope. We scrubbed the soot from the kitchen, the mould from the bathtub, and the grime from the floors. Kayoko took to the work with a vigour I’d previously only seen in her when she played the koto. She insisted we do everything ourselves. “It’s our first house—it should be just the two of us. We’ll feel more proud this way.” She could be sentimental about such things.

I was struck by the ingenuity of the [mallee] tree in its ability to regenerate and create a new shape better suited for its environment.

Gazing at the mallee trees as we walked to the river, I once more admired their inconspicuous quality [….] Taking a wider perspective, I realized that every element of the landscape […] seemed at pains not to outdo the others, and it struck me as a very noble quality indeed.

Now, from my own position at the edge of the river, I thought of […] waking up in the darkness of the ocean. I considered the slender divide between our perceptions of life and death. And how one life could be valued over another.

My past failings as a doctor became clear—not just with Stan, but also in Broome and in my previous experience in Japan. I had been wrong to leave the kindness of the human touch to Sister Bernice and others. In keeping my silence, I hadn’t exercised the very quality that makes us human: our capacity to understand each other.

But for all [Sister Bernice’s] outward calmness, I sensed something had changed. She still conversed with me and occasionally brought me black tea—although she herself never used the cup I gave her, which pained me—but there was a coolness to her now. She had closed a part of herself to me.

I thought about the situation with Kayoko. I had sent her two letters from Broome, telling her of the new life I had begun in Australia, but I never got a reply. After that, I gave up, convinced she never wanted to hear from me again. But perhaps I had stopped writing too quickly. Perhaps I had not written what she wanted to hear. I tried to think of what Harada would have done. Surely he would have fought for her, even at the risk of shaming himself. Honour, duty, pride—Harada would have sacrificed all those things for the woman he loved.

“The true purpose of the facility is concealed from the local community through the disguise of a lumber mill. We’ve even started calling our test subjects maruta. It started as a joke, but ‘logs’ has turned out to be a convenient euphemism, so we have persisted with the term.”

“A great doctor, just like a great military commander, knows that sometimes a few lives have to be sacrificed to save thousands of others. When this war is over, great doctors will be remembered.”

I stared at Mrs. Sasaki’s face. Her drawn-on eyebrows. The cheeks that had grown heavy with age. The ugliness of this woman who’d come into my house and presumed to know me. She had no idea of the things I had to do each day, the secrets I had to keep. Neither did Kayoko. She didn’t understand the sacrifices I had made to serve our nation—to help ordinary people such as her.

Sister Bernice gazed at me. “Don’t you realise what this means? We’re at war with Japan now. You mustn’t stay here. It isn’t safe.” Perhaps mistaking my silence for shock, she continued to speak. “They’ll come for you—they’ll put you away. You should have left a long time ago.”

Her face was creased in anguish. I felt a great tenderness towards her at that moment. “Thank you for your concern, Sister, but you need not worry—I have prepared myself for this outcome.”

It was a dreadful kind of waiting. Time entered a new dimension—not exactly slow, but a state in which I sensed everything more keenly. I detected the sharp scent of metal in the air, I felt each drop of sweat beneath my shirt, and I observed how the shifting light at dawn and dusk seemed to hide more than it revealed.

Despite my efforts, everything was in ruins. Why could I never do anything right?

Images crowded my mind. Stan, all alone within the kaleidoscope of sheets. Kayoko in the hallway, her luggage at her feet. It was all so clear to me now: somehow, I always failed the people I cared about. [….] As long as I got to the infirmary in time, everything would be all right.

Yamada stared at me, looking deep into my soul. A feeling of shame rose up through my body, filling my chest and throat. As much as I wanted to deny it, I know he was right. My refusal to believe Stan had prompted his deterioration. For that, I couldn’t forgive myself.

The ceremony was originally intended for only a small group of Stan’s friends—mainly the Australian-born Japanese and me—but that afternoon more than thirty people lined the path that snaked through the garden. For someone so quiet, Stan had many friends.

We reached the junction at the middle of camp and I looked back. The blur of my friends pressed against the fence. The sweep of ochre dirt. The rows of galvanized-iron huts. The guard tower rising up beyond the fence. It was bleak, but it was home. A place where I belonged.

I was struck by the paradox: although I’d been released from camp. I’d never felt my enemy status so keenly till now. Ahead of us, a small crowd of onlookers was gathered at the top of the stairs. From a distance, they looked like a typical group of sightseers there to admire the ships, a handful of children among them. But as we neared, their mouths set hard. We were nearly on the gangway when one of the men shouted, “You should kill them!” “Yeah, shoot the bastards!” a woman cried. My chest felt tight. I thought back to the train journey to Loveday, when I’d see the woman with the little girl on the platform—the expression on her face.

“To give one’s life to one’s country, for the greater good of all—it’s the greatest sacrifice. They’re true heroes,” he said, shaking his head. Everyone around me nodded.

But as I thought of the men in their metal coffin, their final breath escaping from their lungs, I imagined them at peace with themselves, knowing what they had done. It is much harder to descend to the depths of suffering and then find a way to keep living. I know, because that is what I have done.

In the coffee shop, a dark figure came towards me. My heart fluttered when I realized it was Kayoko. She wore navy monpe trousers knotted above her waist and a matching coat. In the unfamiliar clothes, I hardly recognised my wife. Grey threaded her hair. Her cheeks had lost their fullness and her mouth was tight. We sat together, the hum of conversation surrounding us as we shared fragments of our pasts. She smiled when I told her about releasing the lanterns in Broome and the baseball competition at camp. She described the friends she had made at the factory where she worked, assembling munitions parts.

I’d clung to the ideal of discretion, when it was courage—and forgiveness—I’d needed all along. My silence had been weak.

The doctor’s long fingers prodded me with surprising force while he dictated the condition of my lungs, heart, hair, teeth, and genitals to his assistant in a voice louder than seemed necessary. He met my gaze only once, when I mentioned that I was a physician, too.

Johnny Chang [….] was known to everybody and moved among the Japanese, Chinese, native, and even white population with ease. His father was a Chinese immigrant who’d made a modest fortune on the goldfields and moved to Broome to start a restaurant, eventually marrying the Japanese daughter of a laundry owner.

It was strange I hadn’t recognised Johnny straight away. Perhaps it was the difference in his attitude. In Broome, he’s always been easygoing, but here it was as if he were another man.

It wasn’t until sometime after I finished my studies and began interning at Tokyo Imperial University Hospital that it dawned on me how incapable I was—how incapable we all were. Medicine was not the noble, enlightened profession I’d envisaged. Patients still died; there was no secret cure. Greater men might be able to achieve more, but not me.

“You think I don’t know that? I’m more than happy to do my fair share. But they’ve got the boys in our tent doing everything—all the shit jobs that they don’t want to do. Just because we’re not like them. Because we don’t kiss their arse, worship their god, bow to their emperor. Tell me something: is your guy helping you out with the work?”

All at once it became clear: this was part of Johnny’s plan to create havoc at camp. Due to jealousy or some personal vendetta, Johnny wanted to bring down the leaders of our compound, and he had somehow convinced Stan that Yamada was to blame for his attack. For all I knew, Stan might have inflicted the wound on himself.

Seeing them play baseball together reminded me of the divers in Broome, who were always so at ease in each other’s company [….] They were my countrymen, but the way they conducted themselves was almost alien to me. To be a diver was to never be alone.

We moved into our new home early in the new year and started on repairs straight away. There were doors to be measured and mats to be ordered. We bought new shutters and installed latches that stopped them from banging in the wind. We replaced our fence with new bamboo stalks, binding them together with rope. We scrubbed the soot from the kitchen, the mould from the bathtub, and the grime from the floors. Kayoko took to the work with a vigour I’d previously only seen in her when she played the koto. She insisted we do everything ourselves. “It’s our first house—it should be just the two of us. We’ll feel more proud this way.” She could be sentimental about such things.

I was struck by the ingenuity of the [mallee] tree in its ability to regenerate and create a new shape better suited for its environment.

Gazing at the mallee trees as we walked to the river, I once more admired their inconspicuous quality [….] Taking a wider perspective, I realized that every element of the landscape […] seemed at pains not to outdo the others, and it struck me as a very noble quality indeed.

Now, from my own position at the edge of the river, I thought of […] waking up in the darkness of the ocean. I considered the slender divide between our perceptions of life and death. And how one life could be valued over another.

My past failings as a doctor became clear—not just with Stan, but also in Broome and in my previous experience in Japan. I had been wrong to leave the kindness of the human touch to Sister Bernice and others. In keeping my silence, I hadn’t exercised the very quality that makes us human: our capacity to understand each other.

But for all [Sister Bernice’s] outward calmness, I sensed something had changed. She still conversed with me and occasionally brought me black tea—although she herself never used the cup I gave her, which pained me—but there was a coolness to her now. She had closed a part of herself to me.

I thought about the situation with Kayoko. I had sent her two letters from Broome, telling her of the new life I had begun in Australia, but I never got a reply. After that, I gave up, convinced she never wanted to hear from me again. But perhaps I had stopped writing too quickly. Perhaps I had not written what she wanted to hear. I tried to think of what Harada would have done. Surely he would have fought for her, even at the risk of shaming himself. Honour, duty, pride—Harada would have sacrificed all those things for the woman he loved.

“The true purpose of the facility is concealed from the local community through the disguise of a lumber mill. We’ve even started calling our test subjects maruta. It started as a joke, but ‘logs’ has turned out to be a convenient euphemism, so we have persisted with the term.”

“A great doctor, just like a great military commander, knows that sometimes a few lives have to be sacrificed to save thousands of others. When this war is over, great doctors will be remembered.”

I stared at Mrs. Sasaki’s face. Her drawn-on eyebrows. The cheeks that had grown heavy with age. The ugliness of this woman who’d come into my house and presumed to know me. She had no idea of the things I had to do each day, the secrets I had to keep. Neither did Kayoko. She didn’t understand the sacrifices I had made to serve our nation—to help ordinary people such as her.

Sister Bernice gazed at me. “Don’t you realise what this means? We’re at war with Japan now. You mustn’t stay here. It isn’t safe.” Perhaps mistaking my silence for shock, she continued to speak. “They’ll come for you—they’ll put you away. You should have left a long time ago.”

Her face was creased in anguish. I felt a great tenderness towards her at that moment. “Thank you for your concern, Sister, but you need not worry—I have prepared myself for this outcome.”

It was a dreadful kind of waiting. Time entered a new dimension—not exactly slow, but a state in which I sensed everything more keenly. I detected the sharp scent of metal in the air, I felt each drop of sweat beneath my shirt, and I observed how the shifting light at dawn and dusk seemed to hide more than it revealed.

Despite my efforts, everything was in ruins. Why could I never do anything right?

Images crowded my mind. Stan, all alone within the kaleidoscope of sheets. Kayoko in the hallway, her luggage at her feet. It was all so clear to me now: somehow, I always failed the people I cared about. [….] As long as I got to the infirmary in time, everything would be all right.

Yamada stared at me, looking deep into my soul. A feeling of shame rose up through my body, filling my chest and throat. As much as I wanted to deny it, I know he was right. My refusal to believe Stan had prompted his deterioration. For that, I couldn’t forgive myself.

The ceremony was originally intended for only a small group of Stan’s friends—mainly the Australian-born Japanese and me—but that afternoon more than thirty people lined the path that snaked through the garden. For someone so quiet, Stan had many friends.

We reached the junction at the middle of camp and I looked back. The blur of my friends pressed against the fence. The sweep of ochre dirt. The rows of galvanized-iron huts. The guard tower rising up beyond the fence. It was bleak, but it was home. A place where I belonged.

I was struck by the paradox: although I’d been released from camp. I’d never felt my enemy status so keenly till now. Ahead of us, a small crowd of onlookers was gathered at the top of the stairs. From a distance, they looked like a typical group of sightseers there to admire the ships, a handful of children among them. But as we neared, their mouths set hard. We were nearly on the gangway when one of the men shouted, “You should kill them!” “Yeah, shoot the bastards!” a woman cried. My chest felt tight. I thought back to the train journey to Loveday, when I’d see the woman with the little girl on the platform—the expression on her face.

“To give one’s life to one’s country, for the greater good of all—it’s the greatest sacrifice. They’re true heroes,” he said, shaking his head. Everyone around me nodded.

But as I thought of the men in their metal coffin, their final breath escaping from their lungs, I imagined them at peace with themselves, knowing what they had done. It is much harder to descend to the depths of suffering and then find a way to keep living. I know, because that is what I have done.

In the coffee shop, a dark figure came towards me. My heart fluttered when I realized it was Kayoko. She wore navy monpe trousers knotted above her waist and a matching coat. In the unfamiliar clothes, I hardly recognised my wife. Grey threaded her hair. Her cheeks had lost their fullness and her mouth was tight. We sat together, the hum of conversation surrounding us as we shared fragments of our pasts. She smiled when I told her about releasing the lanterns in Broome and the baseball competition at camp. She described the friends she had made at the factory where she worked, assembling munitions parts.

I’d clung to the ideal of discretion, when it was courage—and forgiveness—I’d needed all along. My silence had been weak.