Q.How did Dr. Sadao's father's upbringing impact his values and choices later in life? (The Enemy)
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →Dr. Sadao’s father instilled in him a deep sense of duty, scientific rationality, and a universal humanism that ultimately overrode narrow nationalism when he faced the moral crisis of saving an enemy soldier.
Dr. Sadao’s father was not merely a parent; he was the architect of his son’s conscience. From the very first lines of the story, we learn that Sadao’s father had a clear, deliberate plan for his son’s life. He did not raise Sadao to be a wealthy landowner or a traditional Japanese patriarch. Instead, he raised him to be a doctor — a healer whose first allegiance was to the craft of saving life, not to the transient passions of war.
The father’s method was one of rigorous, almost scientific, conditioning. He sent Sadao to America at a young age to study medicine, not just for the degree but to absorb a worldview where knowledge and skill transcended national boundaries. This was a radical choice for a Japanese man of his generation. It meant that Sadao’s formative years were spent in a foreign culture, learning to see patients as human beings first, and as enemies or allies second. The father’s own example was equally powerful: he was a man of few words but immense principle, a man who believed that “the sea” and “the land” were indifferent to human conflicts — a lesson in the permanence of nature and the fleeting nature of man-made wars.
The father’s influence is most visible in the quiet, unspoken code of conduct he passed down. He never explicitly told Sadao to save an enemy soldier; he simply built a son who could not do otherwise.
This upbringing created a profound internal conflict. On one hand, Sadao was a loyal Japanese citizen, aware of the wartime hatred for Americans. On the other, he was a surgeon trained to see a wound, not a flag. When the American prisoner of war washed up on his shore, Sadao’s first instinct was not to call the police. It was to examine the wound. That reflex — the doctor’s reflex — was the direct inheritance from his father. The father had taught him that a man’s duty to his profession was a sacred, almost feudal obligation, higher than the temporary duty to the state.
The father’s values also shaped Sadao’s understanding of honour. In traditional Japanese culture, honour was often tied to family name and social standing. But Sadao’s father redefined honour as integrity of purpose. He had sacrificed his own comfort to send Sadao abroad, and he expected that investment to yield a man of character, not a man of convenience. When Sadao decides to operate on the enemy soldier, he is not betraying his father’s teachings; he is fulfilling them. The father would have seen the abandonment of a wounded man as a cowardly act, a stain on the family’s honour far worse than any accusation of treason. …
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