Unit 731

by Hal Gold

  The gloomy, sealed freight cars to which Miou referred ran over the tracks of the South Manchuria Railway. They represented a much different side to the efficient railroad from the one that had impressed Terry the travel writer.

  2

  A New Type of Warfare

  The Fortress/Bacteria Factory

  The Manchurian city of Harbin was a railroad hub, and a multicultural, multiracial center of commerce, art, and music. It had been developed by the Russians just a few years before the Russo-Japanese War broke out. White Russians who had fled their country settled in Harbin. They were not well off, but at least they were not living in Russia, which seemed more important. Many of the women were beautiful, and a lack of other employment opportunities made them turn to prostitution. The racial and cultural mix made Harbin a fascinating city.

  In 1932, a few months after Japanese troops moved into Harbin, Ishii and his associates followed them. Meanwhile, Japanese faced numerically superior Soviet troops along the Soviet-Manchurian border. An armed clash was expected, and Ishii planned to use his specialty to overcome his side's disadvantage.

  Ishii's operations started out in Harbin with a few hundred men, but too many eyes in an urban center were not what he and his confederates wanted. To maintain their facade of respectability, they had the Harbin facility concentrate on the socially accepted area of vaccines and other "proper" medical research. Meanwhile, for the work they wanted kept completely quiet, they soon found another place about one hundred kilometers to the south. The ever-dependable and expanding South Manchuria Railway provided a means of transporting equipment and, more important, human lab materials.

  The Japanese descended upon a poor neighborhood near an area known as Beiyinhe. There were about three hundred homes and shops there, with an extensive area of open land nearby to the south. Japanese troops came in and told the village headman that everyone had to clear out in three days; then Ishii and the army moved in. A large building of about one hundred rooms was kept for quarters while the facilities were being set up, and everything else was put to the torch. An area of five hundred square meters was designated a restricted military zone, and brick buildings started going up. The tract of land to the south was also forcibly appropriated and made into a Japanese military airport.

  Chinese laborers were recruited and driven hard at wages low even by local standards. Their Japanese overseers argued that low pay was sufficient because the cost of living was low. But with large families the general rule in China, the pay for construction workers was barely enough to feed the mouths that depended on them.

  With typical Japanese efficiency, the construction—comprising several hundred rooms—was finished in less than one year. Everything was veiled in secrecy. During construction, the laborers were under constant watch by Japanese guards, and their movements were limited. The number of laborers varied each day according to the work to be done. There were two sections to the complex. One contained offices, living quarters, dining areas, warehouses, and a parking lot. The other section contained the heart of the organization. In sequence as it concerned the victims, there were prisons, laboratories, and crematoria. There was also an area for munitions storage.

  The area containing the lab was especially restricted to Chinese workers, but at times they had to enter to carry in materials or large boxes. In such cases, precautions bordering on the comical were taken to assure that the Chinese would see nothing. They were ordered to get under huge willow baskets that covered their bodies. They would then pick up their loads, be led in by Japanese guards, deposit their burdens, and be led out of the restricted area. Then they could come out from under the baskets.

  The new facility was astounding to look at. It became known as Zhongma Fortress. (The character for fortress has also been translated as "castle," and it does, in fact, have that meaning in Japanese. In the original Chinese, however, it is applied to an entirely walled-in fortress city, a protection against enemy attacks. This is surely what the Japanese facility must have looked like to the outsiders.) A three-meter-high wall was topped with barbed wire and high-voltage electric wire. A twenty-four-hour guard was posted outside. Twin iron doors swung open to a drawbridge. The road in front of the facility was declared off-limits to the citizens, and people had to take a long way around to get to their destinations. Trains passing by on rails about a kilometer away were required to have their shades drawn.

  One rumor told of a young boy who was curious about the Fortress and went out to have a look. His body was found the next day; he had been killed by gunfire. But even walls and guns could not keep rumors of cries of pain and anguish inside the Fortress from circulating through the village. And, by 1936, it was well known among the Chinese that this was not just a prison, but a production facility for bacteria, and a murder shop.

  Some of the information on the facilities came from a shop owner in the area who went into the buildings after the Japanese had abandoned them. He described about thirty cells, and it seems that there were always about five to six hundred prisoners being held at any given time: the facility had the capacity to hold about one thousand. Another Chinese from the region was interviewed in more recent years about the Fortress:

  We heard rumors of people having blood drawn in there, but we never went near the place. We were too afraid.

  When construction started, there were about forty houses in our village, and a lot of people were driven out. About one person from each home was taken to work on the construction. People were gathered from villages from all around here, maybe about a thousand people in all.

  The only thing we worked on were the surrounding wall and the earthen walls. The Chinese that worked on the buildings were brought in from somewhere, but we didn't know where. After everything was finished, those people were killed.

  The prisoners wore leg shackles and sometimes hand shackles, as well. They were given a substantial diet, their staples being rice or wheat, with meat or fish and sufficient vegetables, and at times even liquor. The purpose was to keep them in a normal state of health to yield useful data when they were subjected to the tests. One of these tests consisted of taking blood samples. At least five hundred cubic centimeters was drawn at two- to three-day intervals. Some of the victims became progressively debilitated and wasted. Still, the blood drainage continued. Careful records were kept, and these experiments smack more of a combination of professional curiosity than of actual science: a simple, childlike curiosity to see how far a human being can be squeezed of blood until death occurs. Not all were drained to the point of death, though. Many were injected with poison when they could no longer serve as lab materials. Sometimes, when a subject was too weak to offer physical resistance, he would be killed with a blow to the head with an axe. The brain might then be used for further research.

  It is said that the life expectancy of prisoners at the Fortress was a maximum of one month.

  An earlier experiment tried to determine how long a person could live on just water. Food was withheld from prisoners, and some were given only ordinary water, while others received only distilled water. They were observed as they wasted away and died.

  By protecting its soldiers from disease in the Manchurian conflict thirty years earlier, Japan had earned international admiration by establishing itself as the world leader in military medicine. Now, the direction into which it channeled its medical energies had changed, and its ethics began to twist and mutate, as well. The leaders of Japan's military during the days of the Russo-Japanese War would undoubtedly have been appalled.

  End of the Fortress

  The escape from Zhongma Fortress in 1936 was a combination of clever planning, daring, and coincidental help from a natural phenomenon. It involved some forty people who had been imprisoned at Harbin, then transferred to Zhongma for blood drawing.

  A prisoner by the name of Li planned the jailbreak for the fifteenth day of the eighth month, a time of festivals marking autumn on the lunar calendar. The Japanese would be h
olding parties, and drinking, and prisoners would also be given special treats. Li knew that the Japanese guard would be bringing food and liquor, and after they were finished eating, the prisoners would hand the eating utensils out through the prison bars. Although the prisoners all had leg irons on, apparently their hands were free. When the utensils were handed back to the guard, Li grabbed his hand, dropped him with a blow to the head, grabbed the keys from around his waist, and opened the cells. Those who could, joined in the break. Others were too weak from repeated drawing of blood, and Li had no choice but to go on without them, leaving them to sure death while Li and his fellow prisoners seized their chance.

  They ran out into the compound, and fortune smiled upon them with a heavy downpour that knocked out the electric power, deactivating the searchlights and electric fence. The escapees came to the wall and made a human ladder. Placing himself at the bottom, Li urged the others up and over. He was the only one left, and as the others ran as well as they could with their leg shackles, there were shots and one final shout from Li. At least, it was a more merciful death than his other option at the hands of the Japanese researchers.

  Some ten of the escapees were gunned down. About twenty made it to the outside, but most of them either were killed or recaptured, or died from exposure, whose effects were compounded by the blood drawings. A few of the men came to a village and sought help from one of the residents. That person was interviewed in 1984 about the incident for a written account on the resistance movement. He recalls:

  That night I heard footsteps behind the house, then someone banging on the door. Outside there were seven men wearing leg shackles. My brother grabbed an axe to defend us, but when he heard their story he put down the axe, we took the men to a cave on the east side of the house, and we started breaking off the shackles. We were still working on them when the Japanese came to the edge of the village tracking down the escapees. So we thought of a way to free the men faster. First, we broke off a shackle from just one leg, so they could at least run while holding the other shackle. And then, they left the village.

  Later, they managed to meet up with the other remaining escapees and all eventually teamed up with resistance fighters. But the secret of the Fortress was out. The Japanese had managed to keep things quiet for five years, but at last the time had come for a move.

  Pingfang

  The new site was closer to the city of Harbin, just a short hop away on the South Manchuria Railway. The Chinese called the location Pingfang; the Japanese reading of the same characters is Heibo. Between 1936 and 1938, a series of villages in the Pingfang area were seized by the Ishii organization in acts of military eminent domain. Hundreds of families were forced to sell their homes and land at the paltry sums decided upon by the Japanese Occupation. Forced evacuation ended generations of attachment to the lands and family graves. Often, land was confiscated at the end of the short growing season, and families had to move out without even being allowed to harvest their crops for the coming winter.

  Surrounding buildings built by Chinese were limited to one story to keep out inquisitive eyes, and anyone—Japanese, Chinese, or otherwise—coming to Pingfang needed a pass. The airspace over the area was off-limits to all aircraft other than Japanese army planes; violators would be shot down. The headquarters was surrounded by a moat.

  The Pingfang complex would grow into a sprawling, walled city of more than seventy buildings on a six-square-kilometer tract of land. Work was pushed ahead hard. During the months that construction was possible, a Japanese construction company, the Suzuki Group, worked round the clock in two shifts, day and night. At the coldest time of the year, the water, ground, and concrete all froze, bringing work to a halt. Winter was so harsh that the very first thing installed in the buildings, when they were still only shells, was the central heating system. The complex was probably finished around 1939, but the exact time remains uncertain, since construction teams were still working well after experiments started.

  The prison blocks in the Pingfang compound were called "ro buildings." The term comes from the shapes of the Japanese syllabary character ro and the cell blocks, both of which are square. The Number 7 block held adult male prisoners, while Number 8 contained women and children. These prison blocks served the same purpose at Pingfang as cages for guinea pigs at conventional laboratories.

  Cells were either single- or multiple-occupancy, and were arranged side by side, each with its window facing the corridor. An aperture that could be opened from the corridor was provided so that prisoners could extend their arms to receive injections or have blood samples drawn. The window and opening of each cell were located near the floor so that prisoners could extend their arms while in a reclining position; as the tests progressed, victims became unable to stand. Each cell had a flush toilet to maintain cleanliness, a wooden floor, and concrete walls heavier than necessary, probably built with recollections of the escape at Zhongma. Even walls between cells were thirty to forty centimeters thick. Central heating and cooling systems, and a well-planned diet, protected the health of the prisoners to ensure that the data they produced was valid. Poor living conditions or the presence of other disease germs could confuse results.

  In all the gruesome professionalism that built the legacy of Unit 731, there was one touch of sardonic humor. As the massive Pingfang installation was under construction, local people began to ask what it was. The glib answer supplied was that the Japanese were building a lumber mill. Regarding this reply, one of the researchers joked privately, "And the people are the logs." From then on, the Japanese term for log, maruta, was used to speak of the prisoners whose last days were spent being torn apart or gassed by Japanese researchers. It is surprising how few Japanese realize the origin of this term, though the word itself never fails to come up when Unit 731 is discussed. The expression smacks of a racial attitude not even up to the level of disdain.

  Pingfang was equipped for disposing of its consumed human lab materials with three large incinerators—calling them crematoria would bestow undue dignity upon them. A former member who assisted in the burning commented, "The bodies always burned up fast because all the organs were gone; the bodies were empty."

  Ueda Yataro was a researcher working under a leader of one of the teams into which researchers and assistants were organized. He later woke up to the aberrant thinking which led him and others to participate in the activities of Unit 731. He recorded his experiences, disjointedly, in pages of handwritten notes. The following is an excerpt about one of the research projects that he worked on. His "material" was in a cell with four other maruta.

  He was already too weak to stand. The heavy leg irons bit at his legs. When he moved, they made a dull, clanking sound. His fellow cellmates sat around him, and watched him. Nobody spoke. The water in the toilet was running with an ominous sound.

  In the corridor outside the cell, the guards stood with their pistols strapped on. The commander of the guards was there also. The man's screams of death had no effect on them. This was an everyday occurrence. There was nothing special.

  To these guards, the people in here have already lost all rights. Their names have been exchanged for just a number written across the front of their shirts and the name maruta. They are referred to only as "Maruta Number X." They are counted not as one person or two persons but "one log, two logs." We are not concerned with where they are from, how they came here.

  The man looked like a farmer, covered with grime. He Was wasting away, and his cheekbones protruded. His eyes glared out from the dirt and the tattered cotton clothes he was wrapped in.

  The team leader was fully pleased with yesterday's results. We never had such a typical change in blood picture and rate of infection, and I was eagerly looking forward to see what changes would be present in today's blood sample. With high hopes, I came to the Number 7 cell block with the armed guards at my side. The maruta I was working on was on the verge of death. It would be disastrous if he died. Then I would not be able to get
a blood sample, and we would not obtain the important results of the tests we had been working on.

  I called his number. No answer came. I motioned through the window at the other four prisoners to bring him over. They sat there without moving. I screamed abusively at them to hurry up and bring him over to the window. One of the guards pulled out a gun, aimed it at them, and screamed in Chinese. Resigned, they gently lifted up the other man and brought him over to the window. More important to me than the man's death was the blood flowing in the human guinea pig's body at the moment just before his death.

  His hand was purplish and turning cold. He put his arm through the opening. I was elated. Filled with a sense of victory and holding down my inexpressible excitement, thinking forward to how the team leader would be waiting for these results, I reached for the hypodermic.

  I inserted the needle into the vein. It made a dull sound. I pulled the red-black blood into the hypodermic. Three cubic centimeters ... five cubic centimeters ... His face became paler. Before, he'd been moaning; now he could not even moan. His throat was making a tiny rasping sound like an insect. With resentment and anger in his eyes, he stared at me without even blinking. But that did not matter. I obtained a blood sample of ten cubic centimeters. For people in laboratory work, this is ecstasy, and one's calling to his profession. Showing compassion for a person's death pains was of no value to me.

  At the lab, I processed the blood sample quickly and then went back to look into the cell. His face occasionally twitched. His breath became shallower, and he went into his death throes.

  The other four men in the cell, who had the same fate waiting for them, could not contain their anger. They took water and poured it into the mouth of the dead man.

  This way, an irreplaceable life is trifled with to take the place of a guinea pig, and the result is one sheet of graph paper.