The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary

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by Ken Liu

Evan believed that time travel would make people care.

  When Darfur was merely a name on a distant continent, it was

  possible to ignore the deaths and atrocities. But what if your neighbors

  came to you and told you of what they had seen in their travels to

  Darfur? What if the victims' relatives showed up at the door to

  recount their memories in that land? Could you still ignore it?

  Evan believed that something similar would happen with time

  travel. If people could see and hear the past, then it would no longer be

  possible to remain apathetic.

  Excerpts from the televised hearing before the Subcommittee on Asia, the

  Pacific, and the Global Environment of the Committee on Foreign Affairs,

  House of Representatives, 11Xth Congress, courtesy of C- SPAN

  Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for

  giving me the opportunity to testify here today . I would also like to

  Testimony of Lillian C. Chang- Wyeth, witness:

  thank Dr. Wei and Dr. Kirino, whose work has made m y presence

  here today possible.

  I was born on January 5, 1962, in Hong Kong . My father, Jaiyi

  “Jimmy” Chang, had come to Hong Kong from mainland China after

  World War Two. There, he became a successful merchant of men's

  shirts and married my mother . Each y ear, we celebrated my birthday

  one day early. When I asked my mother why we did this, she said that

  it had something to do with the War.

  As a little girl, I didn't know much about my father's life before I

  was born . I knew that he had grown up in Japanese - occupied

  Manchuria, that his whole family was killed by the Japanese, and that

  he was rescued by Communist guerrillas . But he did not tell me any

  details.

  Only once did Father talk to me directly about his life during the

  War. It was the summer before I went to college, in 1980 . A

  traditionalist, he held a jíj īl ǐ ceremony for me where I would pick my

  bi ǎozì, or courtesy name . That is the name young Chinese people

  traditionally chose for themselves when they came of age, and by

  which name they would be known by their peers. It wasn't something

  that most Chinese, even the Hong Kong Chinese, did any more.

  We prayed together, bowing before the shrine to our ancestors,

  and I lit my joss sticks and placed them in the bronze incense brazier

  in the courtyard. For the first time in my life, instead of me pouring tea

  for him, my father poured tea for me. We lifted our cups and drank tea

  together, and my father told me how proud he was of me.

  I put down the teacup and asked him which of my older female

  relatives h e most admired so that I might choose a name that would

  honor her memory. That was when he showed me the only

  photograph he had of his family . I have brought it here today, and

  would like to enter it into the record.

  This picture was taken in 1940, on the occasion of my father's

  10th birthday. The family lived in Sanjiajiao, a village about twenty

  kilometers from Harbin, where they went to take this portrait in a

  studio . In this picture you can see my grandparents sitting together in

  the center . My father is standing next to my grandfather, and here,

  next to my grandmother, is my aunt, Changyi ( 暢怡). Her name

  means “smooth happiness.” Until my father showed me this picture, I

  did not know that I had an aunt.

  My aunt was not a pretty girl. You can see that she was born with

  a large, dark birthmark shaped like a bat on her face that disfigured

  her. Like most girls in her village, she never went to school and was

  illiterate. But she was very gentle and kind and clever, and she did all of

  the cooking and cleaning in the house starting at the age of eight . My

  grandparents worked in the fields all day, and as the big sister, Changyi

  was like a mother to my father . She bathed him, fed him, changed his

  swaddling clothes, played with him, and protected him from the othe r

  kids in the village . At the time this picture was taken, she was sixteen.

  What happened to her? I asked my father.

  She was taken, he said . The Japanese came to our village on

  January 5, 1941, because they wanted to make an example of it so that

  other v illages would not dare to support the guerrillas. I was eleven at

  the time and Changyi was seventeen . My parents told me to hide in the

  hole under the granary . After the soldiers bayoneted our parents, I saw

  them drag Changyi to a truck and drive her away.

  Where was she taken?

  They said they were taking her to a place called Pingfang, south of

  Harbin.

  What kind of place was it?

  Nobody knew. At the time the Japanese said the place was a

  lumber mill . But trains passing by there had to pull down their

  curtains, and the Japanese evicted all the villages nearby and patrolled

  the area heavily . The guerrillas who saved me thought it was probably

  a weapons depot or a headquarters building for important Japanese

  generals. I think maybe she was taken there to serve as a sex slave for

  the Japanese soldiers . I do not know if she survived.

  And so I picked my bi ǎozì to be Changyi ( 長憶) to honor my aunt,

  who was like a mother to my father. My name sounds like hers but it is

  written with different characters, and instead of “ smooth happiness,” it

  means “ long remembrance. ” We prayed that she had survived the War

  and was still alive in Manchuria.

  The next year, in 1981, the Japanese author Morimura Seiichi

  published The Devil's Gluttony, which was the first Japanese

  publication ever to talk about the history of Unit 731 . I read the

  Chinese translation of the book, and the name Pingfang suddenly took

  on a different meaning . For years, I had nightmares about what

  happened to my aunt.

  My father died in 2002. Before his death, he as ked that if I ever

  found out for sure what happened to my aunt, I should let him know

  when I made my annual visit to his grave. I promised him that I would.

  This is why, a decade later, I volunteered to undertake the journey

  when Dr. Wei offered this opportunity. I wanted to know what

  happened to my aunt. I hoped against hope that she had survived and

  escaped, even though I knew there were no Unit 731 survivors.

  I was one of the first to question Evan's decision to prioritize

  sending volunteers who are relatives of the victims of Unit 731 rather

  than professional historians or journalists. I understand that he

  wanted to bring peace to the victims' families, but it also meant large

  segments of history were consumed in private grief, and are now lost

  forever to the world . His technique, as you know, is destructive. Once

  he has sent an observer to a particular place at a particular time, the

  Bohm- Kirino particles are gone, and no one can ever go back there

  again.

  Chung- Nian Shih, Director, Department of Archaeology, National

  Independent University of Taiwan :

  There are moral arguments for and against his choice: is the

  suffering of the victims above all a private pain? Or should it primarily

  be seen as a part of our sha
red history?

  It's one of the central paradoxes of archaeology that in order to

  excavate a site so as to study it, we must consume it and destroy it in

  that process . Within the profession we are always debating over

  whether it's better to excavate a site now or to preserve it in situ until

  less destructive techniques could be developed . But without such

  destructive excavations, how can new techniques be developed?

  Perhaps Evan should also have waited until they developed a way

  to record the past without erasing it in the process . But by then it may

  have been too late for the families of the victims, who would benefit

  from those memories the most. Evan was forever struggling with the

  competing claims between the past and the present.

  I took my first trip five years ago, just a s Dr. Wei first began to

  send people back.

  Lillian C. Chang- Wyeth:

  I went to January 6, 1941, the day after my aunt was captured .

  I arrived on a field surrounded by a complex of brick buildings. It

  was very cold. I don't know exactly how cold, but Harbin in January

  usually stayed far below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Dr. Wei had taught

  me how to move with my mind only, but it was still shocking to

  suddenly find yourself in a place with no physical presence while

  feeling everything, a ghost. I was still getting used to moving around

  when I heard a loud “ whack, whack” sound behind me.

  I turned around and saw a line of Chinese prisoners standing in

  the field. They were chained together by their legs and wore just a thin

  layer of rags . But what struck me was that their arms were left bare,

  and they held them out in the freezing wind .

  A Japanese officer walked in front of them, striking their frozen

  arms with a short stick . “Whack, whack.”

  [Yamagata and his wife sit on chairs behind a long folding table . He is in

  his nineties. His hands are folded in front of him on the table, as are his

  wife's. He keeps his face placid and does not engage in any histrion ics . His

  voice is frail but clear underneath that of the translator's.]

  Interview with Shiro Yamagata, former member of Unit 731, courtesy of

  Nippon Broadcasting Co.

  We marched the prisoners outside with bare arms so that the arms

  would freeze solid quicker in the Manchurian air . It was very cold, and

  I did not like the times when it was my duty to march them out.

  We sprayed the prisoners with water to create frostbite quicker.

  To make sure that the arms have been frozen solid, we would hit them

  with a short stick . If we heard a crisp whack, it meant that the arms

  were frozen all the way through and ready for the experiments. It

  sounded like whacking against a piece of wood .

  I thought that was why we called the prisoners maruta, wood logs .

  Hey, how many logs did you saw today? We'd joke with each other. Not

  many, just three small logs.

  We performed those experiments to study the effects of frostbite

  and extreme temperatures on the human body . They were valuable.

  We learned that the best way to treat frostbite is to immerse the limb

  in warm water, not rubbing it . It probably saved many Japanese

  soldiers' lives . We also observed the effects of gangrene and disease as

  the frozen limbs died on the prisoners.

  I heard that there were experiments where we increased the

  pressure in an air -tight room until the person inside exploded, but I

  did not person ally witness them .

  I was one of a group of medical assistants who arrived in January

  1941. In order to practice our surgery techniques, we performed

  amputations and other surgery on the prisoners. We used both

  healthy prisoners and prisoners from the frostbite experiments. When

  all the limbs had been amputated, the survivors were used to test

  biological weapons.

  Once, two of my friends amputated a man's arms and reattached

  them to opposite sides of his body. I watched but did not participate . I

  did not th ink it was a useful experiment.

  I followed the line of prisoners into the compound. I walked

  around to see if I could find my aunt.

  Lillian C. Chang- Wyeth:

  I was very lucky, and after only about half an hour, I found where

  the women prisoners were kept . But when I looked through all the

  cells, I did not see a woman that looked like my aunt. I then continued

  walking around aimlessly, looking into all the rooms. I saw many

  specimen jars with preserved body parts. I remember that in one of the

  rooms I saw a very tall jar in which one half of a person's body, cleaved

  vertically in half, was floating.

  Eventually I came to an operating room filled with young Japanese

  doctors . I heard a woman scream, and I went in . One doctor was

  raping a Chinese woman on the ope rating table . There were several

  other Chinese women in the room, all of them naked and they were

  holding the woman on the table down so that the Japanese doctor

  could focus on the rape .

  The other doctors looked on and spoke in a friendly manner with

  each other. One of them said something, and everybody laughed,

  including the doctor who was raping the woman on the table . I looked

  at the women who were holding her down and saw that one of them

  had a bat - shaped birthmark that covered half of her face . She wa s

  talking to the woman on the table, trying to comfort her.

  What truly shocked me wasn't the fact that she was naked, or what

  was happening . It was the fact that she looked so young. Seventeen,

  she was a year younger than I was when I left for college . Except for

  the birthmark, she looked just like me from back then, and just like my

  daughter.

  [She stops]

  Representative Kotler : Ms. Chang, would you like to take a break?

  I'm sure the Subcommittee would understand —

  Lillian C. Chang- Wyeth

  After the first doctor was done, the woman on the table was

  brought away. The group of doctors laughed and joked amongst

  themselves. In a few minutes two soldiers returned with a naked

  Chinese man walking between them. The first doctor pointed to my

  aunt, and the other women pushed her onto the table without

  speaking. She did not resist .

  : No, thank you . I'm sorry . Please let me

  continue.

  The doctor then pointed to the Chinese man, and gestured

  towards my aunt . The man did not at first understand what was

  wanted of him. The doctor said something, and the two soldiers

  prodded the man with their bayonets, making him jump . My aunt

  looked up at him.

  They want you to fuck me, she said.

  Sometimes we took turns raping the women and girls . Many of us

  had not ever been with a woman or seen a live woman's organs. It was a

  kind of sex education.

  Shiro Yamagata:

  One of the problems the army faced was venereal disease. The

  military doctors examined the comfort women weekly and gave them

  shots, but the soldiers would rape the Russian and Chinese women

  and got infected all the time . We needed to understand better the

  dev
elopment of syphilis, in particular, and to devise treatments.

  In order to do so, we would inject some prisoners with syphilis and

  make the prisoners have sex with each other so that they could be

  infected the regular way . Of course we would not then touch these

  infected women. We could then study the effects of the disease on

  body organs . It was all research that had not been done before.

  The secon d time I went back was a year later, and this time I went

  back to June 8, 1941, about five months after my aunt's capture. I

  thought that if I picked a date much later my aunt might have already

  been killed. Dr. Wei was facing a lot of opposition, and he was

  concerned that taking too many trips to the era would destroy too

  much of the evidence. He explained that it would have to be my last

  trip.

  Lillian C. Chang- Wyeth:

  I found my aunt in a cell by herself . She was very thin, and I saw

  that her palms were covered with a rash, and t here were bumps around

  her neck from inflamed lymph nodes . I could also tell that she was

  pregnant. She must have been very sick because she was lying on the

  floor, her eyes open and making a light moan—”aiya, aiya ”—the whole

  time I was with her.

  I stayed with her all day, watching her. I kept on trying to comfort

  her, but of course she couldn't hear me or feel my touch. The words

  were for my benefit, not hers. I sang a song for her, a song that my

  father used to sing to me when I was little:

  萬里長城萬里長,長城外面是故鄉

  高粱肥,大豆香,遍地黃金少災殃。

  The Great Wall is ten thousand li long, on the

  other side is my hometown

  Rich sorghum, sweet soybeans, happiness spreads

  like gold on the ground.

  I was getting to know her and saying goodbye to her at the same

  time.

  To study the progress of syphilis and other venereal diseases, we

  would vivisect the women at various intervals after they were infected .

  It was important to understand the effects of the disease on living

  organs, and vivisection also provided valuable surgical practice . The

  vivisection was sometimes done with chloroform, sometimes not. We

  usually vivisected the subjects for the anthrax and cholera experiments

 

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