by Paula Guran
My father died in 2002. Before his death, he asked 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.
Chung-Nian Shih, Director, Department of Archaeology, National Independent University of Taiwan:
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.
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 shared 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.
Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:
I took my first trip five years ago, just as Dr. Wei first began to send people back.
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."
Interview with Shiro Yamagata, former member of Unit 731,
courtesy of Nippon Broadcasting Co.
[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 histrionics. His voice is frail but clear underneath that of the translator's.]
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 personally 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 think it was a useful experiment.
Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:
I followed the line of prisoners into the compound. I walked around to see if I could find my aunt.
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 operating 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 was 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: No, thank you. I'm sorry. Please let me continue.
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.
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.
Shiro Yamagata:
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.
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 development 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.
Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:
The second 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.
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 there 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.
Shiro Yamagata:
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 without use of anesthesia since anesthesia might have affected the results, and it was felt that the same would be true with the women with syphilis.
I do not remember how many women I vivisected.
Some of the women were very brave, and would lie down on the table without being forced. I learned to say, "bútòng, bútòng" or "it won't hurt" in Chinese to calm them down. We would then tie them to the table.
Usually the first incision, from thorax to stomach, would cause the women to scream horribly. Some of them would keep on screaming for a long while during the vivisection. We used gags later because the screaming interfered with discussion during the vivisections. Generally the women stayed alive until we cut open the heart, and so we saved that for last.
I remember once vivisecting a woman who was pregnant. We did not use chloroform initially, but then she begged us, "Please kill me, but do not kill my child." We then used chloroform to put her under before finishing her.
None of us had seen a pregnant woman's insides before, and it was very informative. I thought about keeping the fetus for some experiment, but it was too weak and died soon after being removed. We tried to guess whether the fetus was from the seed of a Japanese doctor or one of the Chinese prisoners, and I think most of us agreed in the end that it was probably one of the prisoners due to the ugliness of the fetus.
I believed that the work we did on the women was very valuable, and gained us many insights.
I did not think that the work we did at Unit 731 was particularly strange. After 1941, I was assigned to northern China, first in Hebei Province and then in Shanxi Province. In army hospitals, we military doctors regularly scheduled surgery practice sessions with live Chinese subjects. The army would provide the subjects on the announced days. We practiced amputations, cutting out sections of intestines and suturing together the remaining sections, and removing various internal organs.
Often the practice surgeries were done without anesthesia to simulate battlefield conditions. Sometimes a doctor would shoot a prisoner in the stomach to simulate war wounds for us to practice on. After the surgeries, one of the officers would behead the Chinese subject or strangle him. Sometimes vivisections were also used as anatomy lessons for the younger trainees and to give them a thrill. It was important for the army to produce good surgeons quickly, so that we could help the soldiers.
"John," last name withheld, high school teacher, Perth, Australia:
You know old people are very lonely, so when they want attention, they'll say anything. They would confess to these ridiculous made-up stories about what they did. It's really sad. I'm sure I can find some old Australian soldier who'll confess to cutting up some abo woman if you put out an ad asking about it. The people who tell these stories just want attention, like those Korean prostitutes who claim to have been kidnapped by the Japanese Army during the War.
Patty Ashby, homemaker, Milwaukee, Wisconsin:
I think it's hard to judge someone if you weren't there. It was during the War, and bad things happen during wars. The Christian thing to do is to forget and forgive. Dragging up things like this is uncharitable. And it's wrong to mess with time like that. Nothing good can come of it.
Sharon, actress, New York, New York:
You know, the thing is that the Chinese have been very cruel to dogs, and they even eat dogs. They have also been very mean to the Tibetans. So it makes you think, was it karma?
Shiro Yamagata:
On August 15, 1945, we heard that the Emperor had surrendered to America. Like many other Japanese in China at that time, my unit decided that it was easier to surrender to the Chinese Nationalists. My unit was then reformed and drafted into a unit of the Nationalist Army under Chiang Kai-Shek, and I continued to work as an army doctor assisting the Nationalists against the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. As the Chinese had almost no qualified surgeons, my work was very much needed, and I was treated well.
The Nationalists were no match for the Communists, however, and in January, 1949, the Communists captured the army field hospital I was staffed in, and took me prisoner. For the first month, we were not allowed to leave our cells. I tried to make friends with the guards. The Communists soldiers were very young and thin, but they seemed to be in much better spirits than their Nationalist counterparts.
After a month, we, along with the guards, were given daily lessons on Marxism and Maoism.
The War was not my fault and I was not to be blamed, I was told. I was just a soldier, deceived by the Showa Emperor and Hideki Tojo into fighting a war of invasion and oppression against the Chinese. Through studying Marxism, I was told, I would come to understand that all poor men, the Chinese and Japanese alike, were brothers. We were expected to reflect on what we did to the Chinese people, and to write confessions about the crimes we committed during the War. Our punishment would be lessened, we were told, if our confessions showed sincere hearts. I wrote confessions, but they were always rejected for not being sincere enough.
Still, because I was a doctor, I was allowed to work at the provincial hospital to treat patients. I was the most senior surgeon at the hospital and had my own staff.
We heard rumors that a new war was about to start between the United States and China in Korea. How could China win against the United States, I thought. Even the mighty Japanese Army could not stand against America. Perhaps I will be captured by the Americans next. I suppose I was never very good at predicting the outcomes of wars.
Food became scarce after the Korean War began. The guards ate rice with scallions and wild weeds, while prisoners like me were given rice and fish.
Why is this? I asked.
You are prisoners, my guard, who was only sixteen, said. You are from Japan. Japan is a wealthy country, and you must be treated in a manner that matched as closely as possible the conditions in your home country.
I offered the guard my fish, and he refused.
You do not want to touch the food that had been touched by a Japanese Devil? I joked with him. I was also teaching him how to read, and he would sneak me cigarettes.
I was a very good surgeon, and I was proud of my work. Sometimes I felt that despite the War, I was doing China a great deal of good, and I helped many patients with my skills.
One day, a woman came to see me in the hospital. She had broken her leg, and because she lived far from the hospital, by the time her family brought her to me, gangrene had set in, and the leg had to be amputated.
She was on the table, and I was getting ready to administer anesthesia. I looked into her eyes, trying to calm her. "Bútòng, bútòng."
Her eyes became very wide, and she screamed. She screamed and screamed, and scrambled off the table, dragging her dead leg with her until she was as far away from me as possible.
I recognized her then. She had been one of the Chinese girl prisoners that we had trained to help us as nurses at the army hospital during the War with China. She had helped me with some of the practice surgery sessions. I had slept with her a few times. I didn't know her name. She was just "Number Four" to me, and some of the younger doctors had joked about cutting her open if Japan lost and we had to retreat.
[Interviewer (off-camera): Mr. Yamagata, you cannot cry. You know that. We cannot show you being emotional on film. We have to stop if you cannot control yourself.]
I was filled with unspeakable grief. It was only then that I understood what kind of a life and career I had. Because I wanted to be a successful doctor, I did things that no human being should do. I wrote my confession then, and when my guard read my confession, he would not speak to me.
I served my sentence and was released and allowed to return to Japan in 1956.
I felt lost. Everyone was working so hard in Japan. But I didn't know what to do.
"You should not have confessed to anything," one of my friends, who was in the same unit with me, told me. "I didn't, and they released me years ago. I have a good job now. My son is going to be a doctor. Don't say anything about what happened during the War."