For the four men who were to die, a Japanese meal and cigarettes were provided. A Buddhist monk attended. Choi Sang-min, who had never thought much about religion, remembered that his father, about whom he had also never thought much, had once said he was Chongdoist, and so the presence of the Buddhist monk made him angry.
Choi Sang-min looked down at his rice, miso soup and tempura. He longed for his mother’s spicy kimchi and hated the bland Japanese food. But hate and anger were no good to him now. He could not eat his last meal. If he ate his last meal, it would be his last meal. If he did not eat his last meal, he could not die until he had. Perhaps there would be other meals until he agreed which one would be his last. But he did not agree with this last meal. A last meal was an agreement with the inevitability of his death. And he did not agree with his death.
He smoked his cigarettes and said nothing as the other condemned men talked of loved ones. He did not agree with their talk, with a piece of paper against which his life seemed a cosmic force.
He said nothing after the meal as the guards carried the scales in, placed them down and gestured for him to mount them. They weighed Choi Sang-min. They measured his height. He knew why because the others had told him. How they knew was a mystery. They told him as if their knowledge of the gallows had come to them with their mother’s milk.
The hangman, they said, would set his hemp rope at the right length for a man of his height and weight in order to get the correct drop and maximum force to snap his neck as he fell. Then he would fill a sandbag to the same weight as Choi Sang-min and tie it to his hemp rope and leave it dangling overnight in order to stretch it, so that when tomorrow Choi Sang-min fell through the trapdoor there would be no bounce in the rope. With no bounce, his neck ought to snap immediately.
He remembered a Japanese officer who had shown remarkable poise the night before he was executed. When the guards came to weigh him, he told them in broken English that he was dying for Japan, that he was not ashamed of having made the POWs work hard for the Emperor, and that as a military man, he understood he was to die simply because his country had been defeated.
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.