Golden Kamuy chap 165 raised a terribly interesting question in the most clever way possible.

Do people feel guilty when killing other people?

If you feel like listening me ramble a bit about this, please keep on reading, though just keep in mind those are just my speculations and opinions. Some things hadn’t been confirmed by canon yet, so I might be completely off track.



So, do people feel guilty when killing other people?



I know, I know, everyone is about to answer ‘yes, if they’re normal, of course they do’, but we’re talking of how the whole thing is handled in a manga here. There’s a good amount of manga (and anime) in which the main character kills lot of people without a care and the reader doesn’t even bother to think he should feel guilty about.

Golden Kamuy has a huge share of characters being slaughtered, but we hardly weep for many of them and don’t really expect the characters to do the same.

In Golden Kamuy, although the topic is touched often, the real turning point is the overmentioned chap 165, when Yusaku, the noble boy, claims that everyone would feel guilty when killing someone and Ogata claims he doesn’t and the same happens to everyone else around him in that war. No one feels guilty according to Ogata.

Why this is such a bright choice?

Because, although the subject of not feeling guilty when killing had been raised many times in Golden Kamuy, it’s when Ogata counters that no, nobody feels guilty, that the readers all feel the wrongness of this statement… especially when we see that the following scene have Ogata murdering his own half brother who was actually a decent person and cared about him (true, we probably don’t know everything about Yusaku but I tend to think that, despite this, Yusaku was a good guy… but this is a long story for another post).

So why it didn’t ring a bell when previously characters talked about this?

By the way, do you remember when characters talked about this? Because it starts right in the first volume as it’s a topic often discussed by Sugimoto… but the most meaningful moment for me is when Sugimoto tries his hardest to persuade Asirpa not to feel sorry for Suzukawa’s death, whom they had forced to cooperate with them to save Shiraishi (chap 100).



Sugimoto tells her that, since Suzukawa was a bad guy he doesn’t have a human heart, so they don’t feel pain and you don’t have to waste your time feeling sorry for them.

Asirpa immediately calls this an idiocy (and Golden Kamuy will later show us how much of an idiocy this is when we’ll see how, despite being cruel criminals, O-gin and Sakamoto Keiichirou loved each other and didn’t even abandon their own child… contrary to a certain respectable army lieutenant general…) and asks Sugimoto if he’s telling her such idiocies because he believes her to be a child… and here it turns out the sad, terrible truth.

Sugimoto, who’s undoubtedly a good, kind, gentle guy, has forced himself to believe in such idiocy. And not just with Abashiri convicts or Suzukawa, who are often criminals who murdered innocent people (though not all of them, Shiraishi for example didn’t murder anyone) but with the Russian soldiers who were fighting him and that could have been the Russian version of himself, of Toraji, of Yusaku, of an adult, male version of Asirpa that was forced to go to the frontlines.

For a normal person, killing another human being, no matter the reason, is always a traumatic act. One of the main characteristic of your normal, ordinary person, is that he tends to empathize with the others, the physically closer they’re to him, the easier he sees their pain when they’re attacked, hurt, the easier, if he’s in a normal situation, he should feel prone not to inflict more pain. If one happens to cause someone’s death he should feel horrible because that’s how normal humans would feel.

Recent studies seems to have shown that, one of the reasons why psychopaths can murder so easily isn’t because they can’t empathize/understand others, but because, differently from us, it doesn’t come natural to them. They have to stop and think at doing it… and if they don’t, they’ve nothing that will stop them from doing the most terrible things.

Normal humans in normal situations instinctively do that. They don’t stop and remind themselves they should put in the other’s shoes, they just… connect.

War though, is against this basic human ability.

When he’s told to charge against the Russians, when the Russians are shooting at him, Sugimoto can’t stop dead in his track and ‘connect with the Russians’. He can’t stop and feel he’s hurting them, that what he’s doing to them is horrible (chap 1).

Army brainwashing and survival instinct take precedence. Sugimoto is desperate to survive, he doesn’t have the time to worry about how, to ensure his own survival, he’s murdering others (chap 24).



Sugimoto didn’t really invent something when he started thinking that the Russians were bad people, all the Armies drilled into their soldiers that, whoever they were fighting was bad and subhuman. No Army wants to have its soldiers stop during a charge and wept for the enemy they just murdered. No Army wants to have its soldiers come back from a battle and just be overwhelmed by guilt so that they can’t fight any longer, so they work to persuade the soldier that he did a good job murdering as many people as he could. They even reward him for murdering as many as possible.



It’s not as easy as it seems as soldiers are still humans, but any human has to find his own way to cope with trauma, and war is a giant traumatic experiences that hits you at any side. There’s trauma due to being forced to risk your life, there’s trauma due to seeing your friends being killed around you or horribly wounded, there’s trauma by being forced to kill others… and those are just the main three.

In order not to die and, at the same time, not to get mad with guilt and grief, Sugimoto had fundamentally persuaded himself that what the Army told him was right, that the Russians were sub humans that deserved to die and that he shouldn’t stop feeling guilt about them and, very likely, many others had done the same as Sugimoto.

And then when Golden Kamuy starts and he’s again pressured to kill, he pulls out again that copying mechanism. Whoever attacks him is evil, sub human. It’s not his fault, he’s not to blame, he shouldn’t feel guilty, he’s only trying to survive, can you really hold at fault a man for wanting to surivive? (chap 5)



Does it work? Does Sugimoto really not feel guilt when he kills someone as he seems to believe since he suggested Asirpa to adopt the same way of thinking in order for her to feel better?

Nope.

It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work at all.

Golden Kamuy just showed us that awesome thing that’s chap 167.

Please compare it with the previously shown chap 1.

We again see Sugimoto fighting as a beast… but this time we see Sugimoto is also crying as he watches his own hands covered in blood. What we’re seeing is not a memory but a dream which was likely caused by Sugimoto slowly losing consciousness… and it likely reveals Sugimoto’s true state.

Sugimoto fought as hard as he could to persuade himself it was okay to kill people otherwise they would kill him… but deep inside he wasn’t okay with what he was doing. Even though he buried his own feelings of pain so deep inside himself he think he was successful, they are there.

As his psychological defences lower, the truth comes out. Sugimoto preaches he knows a way not to feel guilty, not to feel bad, but he’s actually feeling terrible deep inside. He wasn’t feeling nothing when he killed, he felt horrible. His words, the words many soldiers probably said while being at war about wanting to kill the Russians, about not feeling anything when they killed them, were a lie they told to themselves to cover up their pain.

Tanigaki too will express something similar when he’ll acknowledge that, although he prayed for bears he murdered so that they would get reincarnated, he never did it for the men he killed (chap 23).

He didn’t feel guilty enough he would wish such things right then but, the most likely answer is that he simply didn’t have the time to indulge in such feelings. We see it even when he’s searching Kenkichi. He planned to shoot him in the back in order to have his revenge on him… but when the battle started he had no time for such thing, all he could do was to try to stay alive (chap 76).

Only later, when things will have calmed down and he’s with Nihei, he’s capable to begin facing his own guilt… and Nihei will help him to face his ghosts so that he will be able to pray for the man once he’ll die (chap 29).

Nihei himself will talk about his own guilt. He will try to dismiss killing the soldiers he murdered to escape by claiming they were worse than animals (chap 26)

…and he will try to apply the same thinking to the people he killed due to which he ended up in Abashiri… but he acknowledged than, by doing so, he denied his own humanity, he acted like a bear and not like a human… which hints at how he somehow understands he did something wrong. Look at his expression, it’s not the expression of a man who’s proud of having committed murder (chap 26).

And this is relevant as we’ll hear about Nihei talking about his son and how he uses his son’s rifle and how his son used to put a mark in the rifle for each person he killed.

In tales this is often done by who enjoys keeping his killing count… but Nihei counters this way. His son wasn’t one who would enjoy doing such things and the burden of the lives he took should have weighted on him greatly. By carrying the rifle around Nihei fundamentally carries his son’s guilt… which means Nihei too isn’t all right with the idea of killing people and so wasn’t his son (chap 114).

Long story short, if you listen to the lies people tell themselves, if you listen to their own copying mechanisms to protect themselves, Ogata is right, they aren’t feeling guilty, they’re all okay with murdering. If you dig deeper no one truly is… but not all of them are ready to face the fact they’re not okay.

Sugimoto was crying in his sleep in chapter 1 as well, but at the moment, his only source of pain seemed to be Toraji’s loss.



We saw how later (chap 24) he’ll have dreams of the war again but his only source of pain will look as if it were the fear for his own death as he was put in such situation.

Sugimoto, who’s a good person, was also feeling guilty for what he had to do… but he’s probably not ready to face it, considering the situation he’s in, considering he might have to murder more people.

Yet, Asirpa’s presence in his life had been a great help for him to deal with his feelings so I think by the end of Golden Kamuy Sugimoto will probably manage to face his own guilt for murdering people so horribly and, finally, heal.

Probably it won’t be as simple as just handing him out his favourite food (chap 100)…



…but I like to hope Sugimoto will manage to go back to his own self which is fundamentally what he truly wishes.



It’s worth to mention that Golden Kamuy doesn’t present just Sugimoto, who murdered people due to war, but also people who murdered people due to their ideals.

We’ve Wilk and Kiroranke for example, and while we don’t know much about Wilk, we can see that Kiro is a genuinely good guy, who can save lives (see chap 47),

who feels is willing to risk his life if he feels he had put someone in danger… (chap 161)

and will even apologize for it (chap 166)…



…and yet first blamed Wilk for a murder Wilk didn’t commit and he did this in front of Wilk’s daughter, causing her a lot of pain and guilt (chap 48)



…and then he orchestrated Wilk’s murder always in front of said daughter (chap 138),



took the girl away and is trying to manipulate her (chap 148).

How all this remotely connects with Kiro being a good guy who risked his life to save a person he just met? He couldn’t have done it for the show, he genuinely risked his life, so why?

Kiro excuses his own actions, put to silence his own sense of guilt with his own ideals. The cause that’s more important than the life of few people, even if among those few there was Wilk with whom he’d been friend by a lifetime, the cause that’s more important than everything (see chap 139).

Kiro believes sacrifices have to be made. Wilk changed so Kiro had to sacrifice him. From the way he talks about Wilk we can see he still have fond feelings for Wilk… but he buried them deep inside to reach his goal, his goal that pushed him, only fifteen, to try and murder the Russian emperor (chap 164).

His goal justifies everything, even the fact he had to escape from his homeland, even the fact he had to sacrifice Wilk, he had to manipulate Asirpa. Kiro is too deep in his goal to stop and think at the things he’s losing, at his sense of guilt. If he were to, not only he wouldn’t be able to go on, but all he lost till now would be for nothing.

Hijitaka is similar. He’s fighting with the great ambition to protect Japan (chap 153).



He’s fighting dirty, we see in Barato that he accepts to work for Hidoro… but after they take away Chieko, Hijitaka murders the Hidoro’s men that were previously guarding her for no other reason that, in this way, he could blame Umakichi’s gang. (chap 56).

Those men trusted him to be an ally and he just murdered them in cold blood and he will do worse to Sugimoto, as, although they seemed to get along so well, he’ll deliberately send him to the fake Nopperabo (feeding him with wrong info as well) so that Inudou would feel compelled to go where the real Nopperabou is (chap 132).

But, although Hijitaka apparently isn’t feeling guilty for the deaths he’s causing nor for having survived (chap 154),

…we know in his youth he pretended not to care in order to protect Nagakura… (chap 86)…

…and we’ve also Youichirou the manslayer to parallel him.

Youichirou murdered a lot of people to pursue a great goal and he looks unremorseful when he kills the ones attacking him… but deep down he was haunted by guilt to the point he’ll ask Hijitaka not to end his suffering but will die in pain (chap 154).

For those people too the guilt is surely there, but buried deep down and only when we look deep inside them we see it.

Or when they finally are ready to face it and confess it. Hijikata is probably feeling the same as Youichirou, but he’s forcing himself to cover it up with his great cause. Hijikata has to keep running, he can’t stop… even if he probably what he truly wants is what Nagakura suggested (chap 21).



His running is his way to cope with guilt.



So, let’s go back to Ogata, does he feel guilt? Is he too lying to himself or he’s being honestly unremorseful?

Ogata apparently used a copying technique that’s completely different from Sugimoto of Kiroranke (I’m saying apparently because we still don’t know all the truth so I might be mistaken).

Instead than pushing the blame on the opposite party and hating it, instead than lowering it to a sub human, or putting his whole faith in a great goal with whom to excuse his own actions, Ogata distanced himself from the whole thing.

He’s not thinking, he’s not allowing himself to think, he’s not allowing himself to rationalize his own feelings, when he kills he does it in a perfunctory, mechanical manner (chap 165).

We see that when he tried to rationalize why he killed Yusaku (it’s in the edited version of chap 103, the one available on volume only) he sort of had to think at why he did it. The answer doesn’t come to him immediately, which meant he hadn’t tried to rationalize the whole thing, to excuse it one way or the other. He’d done it and he’s explaining his own actions to himself only now.

His smile is wishful when he said he hoped his father would love him. It’s worth to mention it wasn’t so impossible for it to work, as Hanazawa needed a heir and an illegittimate son would have been better than nothing.

He probably wouldn’t have loved him… but he could have acknowledged him. This si the only moment in which we see Ogata trying to explain his own motivations for doing what he did, explaining them to Hanazawa, but probably also to himself.

He’s not bragging. In his own way he’s asking for help. He understands he’s damaged and he sort of hoped his parents’ love could fix it. He didn’t get it but, since he realized what he was aiming for only now… it’s likely he kept his own wishes and needs buried inside himself.

Differently from Sugimoto who dehumanized the ones he killed or from Kiroranke who excuses his own actions with great motivations, Ogata just buried everything, so that he wouldn’t be hurt by it.

But his situation is different from the others as Ogata’s troubles started when he was a small child with a mother that wasn’t anymore right in his head. To cope he learnt to turn his gaze away, to bury everything deep down. It’s, after all, a form of psychological defence that’s fitting for a neglected child, who’s mostly powerless and who’s learning to cope with trauma from a too young age.

On a sidenote back to Yusaku I know we saw a scene of Tsurumi telling Ogata that there had been a change of plans and that Yusaku shouldn’t be killed because he could be useful if correctly manipulated (chap 165)…



…but it’s very likely Yusaku couldn’t be used as Tsurumi wished (chap 164)…



…because we never see Ogata ‘corrupting’ him and he actually will claim his brother was a noble man, the noble man Ogata didn’t believe could exist (chap 103).

Yusaku wouldn’t agree to murder his own father to fuel with anger the soldiers’ spirit and then start a rebellion using the Ainu gold to fund the 7th division. And if Yusaku couldn’t agree, if Yusaku wouldn’t take part to Tsurumi’s project but would be a hinder to it, then Yusaku would have to be killed.

The key point now would be to know if Ogata acted independently like he did with Sugimoto, or if Tsurumi revised his order. However, as Ogata doesn’t connect Yusaku’s death with Sugimoto’s murder attempt, probably the circumstances about their shooting were different. I tend to think Tsurumi had to revise his order… though I won’t discharge the possibility Ogata anticipated him… yet Ogata didn’t excuse himself by blaming Tsurumi.



Order or not, Ogata knows he did it and, when he rationalizes about it, he admits to himself he did it for his own reasons.



So, long story short, does Ogata feel guilt?

Very likely the whole point of chap 165 is to prove he too feels guilt, just, like many others. He might be not ready to acknowledge it yet, he might have buried it so deep inside himself ihe believes it’s not existing and yet it’s there.

Chap 164/5 are huge hints in this sense.

Although they’re flashback chapters they’re flashback chapters from Ogata’s point of view. It’s him remembering/dreaming whose things. Ogata wouldn’t think back at Yusaku and then connect him with Asirpa if Yusaku had been a random kill he didn’t care about, nor would care to connect him to Asirpa if he wasn’t worried she could end up following his face.

People forget what really doesn’t touch them, put it aside and walks over… yet, Ogata hallucinates first and dreams later about Yusaku being kind and worried about him and connects it to Asirpa.

Like Sugimoto in his dream, when he’s burning with fever Ogata’s psychological defences are at his lower and the truth comes out even if in a pretty unclear manner… but Ogata had been burying things deep down way longer than Sugimoto had.

Sugimoto’s troubles started when he was an adult and his family got sick… and then he ended up involved in the war.

Ogata’s troubles started when he had birth and his father dumped him and his mother, who probably was already starting to show signs of insanity, and worsened when he came up with the dumb plan to have his father return by murdering his own mother.

It’s hinted Ogata loved his mother, even when she didn’t seem to acknowledge him anymore, that he hoped she would get better if she were to stop making his father’s favourite food, which, coincidentally, is also his favourite (chap 103).

As a child he had to cope with watching her grown insane, with being ignored by her, with all the consequences having an unmarried, insane mother he could have to face (which can go from social rejection to downright bullying but we’ve no info on what he went through… we can only guess things weren’t smooth because that’s how they worked back then), with murdering his own mother and all for nothing as his father won’t come back for her (chap 103).

This probably made Ogata much better than Sugimoto or all the others who went at war at burying his own feelings as… he had been doing it through all his life. He was already keeping everything at distance to protect himself from pain, he was already keeping himself unconnected.

Asirpa is the only one who’s slowly breaking up the wall, same way she did with Sugimoto… because, differently from Yusaku who, poor child, meant well and genuinely loved his brother but had no idea what he was doing as he came from a privileged position, Asirpa shared some similarities with Ogata and let him go at his own pace. She doesn’t give up on him but doesn’t impose either (chap 103).

She tries to get along with him (chap 127),

to find what he likes (chap 147),



to support him when he’s feeling down for a failure (chap 147)

to take care of him when he’s sick (chap 164).



Even if Ogata saw a parallel between her and Yusaku, Asirpa is more like the loving mother he never had, the one that accepts what he hunts for her and cooks food keeping him and his tastes into consideration.

Asirpa asks him what’s his favourite food, Asirpa offers him food to try even gives him big slices. Asirpa is with him when he’s sick.

Long story short, I think if there’s someone who can help Ogata connect with his own guilt, if there’s someone who can get him to pull out what’s inside him, that’s Asirpa.

On a not so completely unrelated note though, this whole guilt battle is probably what stops Sugimoto from getting friend with Ogata.

Sugimoto is a generally friendly person.

It took little before he got along with Shiraishi, he gets along with Hijitaka who tries to use Shiraishi to steal his skins and even disguised himself to get close to him, he gets along with Kiro even though Inkarmat told him the guy wants to betray them and might be the real killer, he gets along with Inkarmat, even though she is in contract with Tsurumi, he get along with Ienaga, who tried to eat Asirpa, with Tanigaki who’s basically deserting the 7th division… but holds against Ogata the fact he joined forced with Hijitaka, apparently betraying the 7th even though he knows that the 7th is fundamentally a rebel group (so they’re fundamentally betraying the Army) and he knows next to nothing about why Ogata decided to leave them (chap 81).

While Ogata isn’t exactly the friendliest person in the world, Sugimoto seems to find easier to trust and get along with anyone but him (with the result he ends up used and betrayed by Hijitaka and Kiro when they go to Abashiri) but this gets even more evident when they’re interacting with the fake Ainu. Even though they were suspicious like hell to the point even Ushiyama starts to find it odd, Sugimoto insists in believing them over Ogata until they make the fatal mistake of claiming Asirpa is interested in embroidery (chap 88).

Of course Sugimoto can be a little too naïve but in that situation it gets ridicule, he knew what that Kisarri was and how it was used… and yet his stubborness in believing the fake Ainu over Ogata probably has its own reason to be.

Sugimoto, in the first volume, ‘killed’ Ogata (chap 5).



Sure, actually Ogata managed to survive, but Sugimoto had no idea about it… and Ogata was the first person Sugimoto ‘killed’ after the war.

And immediately Sugimoto had to defend his actions to Asirpa by slipping in the same psychological defence mechanism that helped him through the war.

Ogata was a bad person that wanted to kill him. Sugimoto wasn’t being a murderer (even though he was about to kill him before Asirpa stopped him… and in that moment Ogata had not the weapons to kill Sugimoto) he only acted in self defence, and he didn’t really mean to make him fall but hey, it was better this way, otherwise they’ll be in troubles so… he’s not to blame. He even used Asirpa’s own words to defend her point, even if she was talking about a wild bear versus a human, not about humans fighting each other (chap 1).



It might seems like nothing but if we watch Sugimoto’s interaction with Goto in the first chapter, even though the latter had actively tried to kill Sugimoto, Sugimoto had managed to hold back and not kill him in retaliation when he had the chance (chap 1).



He hit him, sure, but he didn’t shoot him when the other was escaping out of instinct.

With Ogata he slipped in his old ‘mors tua vita mea’ habit, trying to kill him after he sent him on the ground and broke his arm and only Asirpa managed to stop him (chap 5)…



which made sad how, in the end, he believed he did it anyway by mistake… and, mind you, even though Sugimoto doesn’t show it, even though he had claimed he was again ready to kill people for his goal (chap 2),

doing it again should have been traumatic even if it again got buried.

What’s worse at the time Sugimoto didn’t know a single thing about Ogata.

He could have been just a soldier obeying orders for all he knew and Ogata didn’t immediately shoot him and Asirpa and even gave Sugimoto a chance to pull out of the fight and he wasn’t Russian, he was Japanese, they even had fought together in Port Arthur even if they hadn’t meet up…

Sugimoto should have found hard to push all this aside and reassure himself that it was well done, that he shouldn’t feel guilty over it.

So when Ogata turns out to be alive the interesting thing is that, although he’s surprised, he didn’t really feel relief he hadn’t killed him (chap 80).

even if, at the moment they end up in a temporal alliance… (chap 81)



Sugimoto will always be antagonistic with him (chap 80).

…remarking he doesn’t trust him nor likes to be allied to him (chap 82)…



looking satisfied when Asirpa tells him not to shoot as she doesn’t believe he could hit the woodcocks… (chap 83)



…trying to put him down when he gets them anyway even if he actually was jealous (chap 83)



…reporting him when he doesn’t say citatap (chap 83)…

…and well, we already saw in the whole fake Ainu thing how he will constantly discharge Ogata’s opinion but also sort of accusing him to be deliberately rude (chap 87).



When interacting with Ogata Sugimoto probably felt forced to confront with his past actions. What if Ogata was like Tanigaki, a nice guy? What if he had deserted for a good reason since well, the 7th was a rebellious group? Besides, although Ogata had attacked him, Sugimoto doesn’t know if he went for the kill or not. Ogata hadn’t shoot him when he could have, he decided to go for prisoner number 1 first, even if the man couldn’t escape while Sugimoto was the real threat, a man untied, with a military cap and therefore probably a soldier, who might also have weapons and be good at using them, which is a hint Ogata didn’t mean to kill Sugimoto and Asirpa right there (chap 4).



(if he planned to do it after questioning them or not that’s up to speculation)



If Ogata turned out as someone with a soul, then Sugimoto would be forced to face the fact he had almost killed a good person. At the time Ogata showed up Sugimoto wasn’t ready for this, wasn’t ready to face the fact he regretted killing the Russians, who were enemies, even less that he could have tried killing a good person.

Ogata had to be a bad guy. Sugimoto couldn’t trust him, couldn’t be friendly with him.

Because even if Ogata said he didn’t care if Sugimoto had almost killed him, if Sugimoto were to befriend him, Sugimoto would care, and would probably be unable to forgive himself.

Sure, in the end Ogata didn’t turn out to be a second Tanigaki and they ended up on ‘opposite sides’… but Sugimoto couldn’t know it right then… and he had proved more than once he completely fail in recognizing guys who could betray him (Goto, Henmi, the fake Ainu, Hijitaka when he disguised himself as an old man…) so we can’t think he just understood Ogata was there to backstab him. Sugimoto doesn’t get that sort of things, Sugimoto DECIDED he didn’t want to get along with Ogata (which probably sat well with Ogata as he DECIDED he didn’t want to get along with anyone and didn’t help the matter any…) and he likely did so not because Sugimoto is a jerk, but because Sugimoto would find hard to cope with what had happened otherwise.



On a sidenote I hope that, now that Sugimoto is getting closer to the Russian border, he’ll end up having to face the Russians, not as soulless enemies, but just as people, people he had fought and killed, people who were like him or the people he loves.

I think it would be important for his character development to overcome his beliefs about people being soulless or evil if they’re on the opposite side. But we’ll see what will happen when we’ll get to that point.

And so we get to the end of this long post.

Thank you to who took his time to listen to me ramble and speculate.

We’ll see in Golden Kamuy future developments if I understood things correctly or if I’ve completely messed up and if that will turn out to be the case, I apologize.

