The General Character Analysis

The General is a sickly man in the Japanese military who suffers from some sort of physical condition that Dr. Sadao Hoki treats. According to Sadao, the General will only be able to survive one more “attack”—he suffers from something that has to do with his gallbladder. Because Sadao can keep the General reasonably healthy and can tend to him so expertly, the General feels indebted to Sadao and is willing to help—and keep quiet—about Tom. The General promises to send a few assassins to Sadao’s house to silently kill Tom and do away with his body, releasing Sadao of the burden of having to figure out what to do with the prisoner. Ultimately, the General doesn’t follow through with the deal and sheepishly admits to forgetting about the situation altogether. This claim is treated as somewhat suspect in the story, leaving open the possibility that the General, too, didn’t want the American to die because he saw him as a fellow human rather than an enemy. This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that the General, like Sadao, went to college in America, and perhaps his Princeton education and connection to America forced him to see people of other races and nationalities as fellow humans rather than political enemies or objects of racial prejudice. However, it’s possible that the sickly General—whose very position implies fierce patriotism and a generally pro-war sensibility—truly did forget to send the assassins and did consider Tom an enemy. The General is possibly the same person as General Takima, though the story doesn’t confirm this.