Tetsuya Ota was a Japanese soldier captured by the unit of Colonel Stallings during World War II. He carried the rank of First Lieutenant.
On The Terror: Infamy, Tetsuya Ota was portrayed by Kazuya Tanabe.
History[]
After being captured by Stalling's unit in Guadalcanal, he was tied to a pole and interrogated by Major Tebry Van Allen. Allen was able to get absolutely nothing out of him and was carried away on a stretcher after Ota bit his ear off.
Colonel Stallings sent in Chester Nakayama and Arthur Ogawa of the Japanese Linguist Program to "babysit" Ota until another interrogator could be arranged. Chester, however, begged Stallings to let him try to get something out Ota, as they were both Japanese, so he would likely have a better chance. Stallings was reluctant at first, since Chester wasn't a trained interrogator and had been behaving oddly recently, but finally relented.
Ota played off of Chester's fears, trying to convince Chester that he was a yurei. He told Chester that he would present him with the corpses of everyone he loved, even the youngest members of his family. Chester was spooked at first, but eventually came to realize that Ota was just playing him. He snapped a photo of his face and when it came out perfectly fine he realized that Ota couldn't be a yurei, due to the blurred photographs he had taken before back on Terminal Island and at the Colinas de Oro War Relocation Center.
Having established that Ota wasn't a yurei, he was able to establish a relationship with him. He talked with him, learning that he had no children and now likely never would. Ota told him that he believed in the old spirits and was a proud warrior for Japan, that he looked forward to the next life. He begged Chester to give him an honorable death.
Chester eventually realized that the names in a notebook carried by Ota were those of baseball players. He talked with Ota about baseball and learned that he once played against Lou Gehrig when he visited Japan with an all-star team. Chester eventually learned that Ota was to be sent to a P.O.W. camp in Guam, where he would face a new interrogator. He told Ota that the thing he liked best about baseball was that there's no time limit, that the game isn't over until you've been given one last chance. He freed Ota and gave him a ritual suicide knife found in his belongings. Ota committed suicide and as he died, told Chester of Admiral Takahashi's birth-date and birthplace, saying it was more than any white interrogator would ever get out of a Japanese person. ("Shatter Like a Pearl")