was a soldier in the

Imperial Japanese Army The was the official ground-based armed force of the Empire of Japan from 1868 to 1945. It was controlled by the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office and the Ministry of the Army, both of which were nominally subordinate to the Emperor o ...

memorialized by the Memorial Statue of the Hakkoda Death March in

Aomori is the capital city of Aomori Prefecture, in the Tōhoku region of Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 278,964 in 136,457 households, and a population density of 340 people per square kilometer spread over the city's total area of ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. In January 1902, 210 soldiers in the 5th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Battalion became trapped on the

Hakkōda Mountains The are an active volcanic complex in south-central Aomori Prefecture, Japan, in Towada-Hachimantai National Park. Often called or simply , the mountains are collectively listed as one of the 100 Famous Japanese Mountains. Its highest peak, ...

; this was the start of the

Hakkōda Mountains incident The occurred on January 23, 1902, when a group of Imperial Japanese Army soldiers became lost in a blizzard on the Hakkōda Mountains in Aomori Prefecture in northern Honshu, Japan, en route to Tashiro Hot Spring located in the Hakkōda Mountain ...

. Search parties discovered Gotō. The discovery led to the rescue of the other soldiers. His arms and legs were amputated as a result of

frostbite Frostbite is a skin injury that occurs when exposed to extreme low temperatures, causing the freezing of the skin or other tissues, commonly affecting the fingers, toes, nose, ears, cheeks and chin areas. Most often, frostbite occurs in the han ...

. After the incident, he retired from the army, returned to his hometown, became a member of the village assembly, and later died from

cerebral hemorrhage Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), also known as cerebral bleed, intraparenchymal bleed, and hemorrhagic stroke, or haemorrhagic stroke, is a sudden bleeding into the tissues of the brain, into its ventricles, or into both. It is one kind of bleed ...

. In

Jirō Nitta is the pen name of popular Japanese historical novelist . He was born in an area that is now part of the city of Suwa, Nagano Prefecture, Japan.

's ''Death March on Mount Hakkōda: A Documentary Novel'', a semi-fictional account of the disaster, Gotō is portrayed by the character Corporal Etō. Nitta, Jirō. Translated by James Westerhoven.
Death March on Mount Hakkōda
'. ''

Google Books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical c ...

''. via Stone Bridge Press, LLC. 1992. 193.

References

Japanese soldiers Military personnel from Miyagi Prefecture Japanese amputees 1879 births 1924 deaths Quadruple amputees {{Japan-mil-bio-stub