Shinjiro Yatabe (a.k.a. General Tedeki)

Character Analysis

Yatabe-Tedeki is the flip-side of Baynes-Wegener: he's a military person traveling undercover for a secret meeting in Tagomi's office. Unlike Baynes, we don't get any POV sections from Yatabe-Tedeki, so we only hear about him from the outside.

For instance, Reiss's secretary Pferdehuf seems to remember that Tedeki was "Quite a fire-eater" (8.40). Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that Tedeki is a carnival entertainer, but that he was looking for a fight, which in this case meant that he wanted to compete with Germany to get into space. But when Tagomi meets him, he sees "a stern, coherent spirit there. No fogging of wits. Certainly lucid transmission of all the stable ancient traditions" (12.2). So is Tedeki an aggressive person, like Pferdehuf thinks, or a respecter of ancient traditions, like Tagomi thinks? Or is he somehow both?

We can't quite say since we never get that much direct evidence on Tedeki. But we can say that one of his most useful roles in the book is to explain to Baynes (and to the reader) about Tagomi's spiritual crisis after shooting the Nazis (12.220, 222). In that way, we can see that Tedeki is used here not so much as a character himself, but as a guide to the reader.