Unit 731

by Hal Gold

  Four or five soldiers, with drawn guns, opened the door to the cell. It made a heavy sound. They dragged the dead man out into the corridor and loaded him onto a hand cart. The other four men, knowing what their fate would be tomorrow, could not hold down the anger in their eyes as they watched their dead companion leave.

  The hand cart disappeared in the direction of the dissection room with the tall chimney looming above.

  Human experimentation gave researchers their first chance to actually examine the organs of a living person at will to see the progress of a disease. Vivisection was a new experience for the doctors of Japan. One former unit member explained that "the results of the effects of infection cannot be obtained accurately once the person dies because putrefactive bacteria set in. Putrefactive bacteria are stronger than plague germs. So, for obtaining accurate results, it is important whether the subject is alive or not."

  The research methods in Manchuria allowed doctors to induce diseases and examine their effects on organs at the first stages. Researchers worked with interpreters to ask about emerging symptoms, and took subjects out of cells at what they judged to be the time for optimum results. Anesthesia was optional. According to a former unit member: "As soon as the symptoms were observed, the prisoner was taken from his cell and into the dissection room. He was stripped and placed on the table, screaming, trying to fight back. He was strapped down, still screaming frightfully. One of the doctors stuffed a towel into his mouth, then with one quick slice of the scalpel he was opened up."

  Even with the intestines and organs exposed, a person does not die immediately. It is the same physical situation as ordinary surgery under anesthesia in which a person is operated on and restored. Witnesses at vivisections report that the victim usually lets out a horrible scream when the cut is made, and that the voice stops soon after that. The researchers then conduct their examination of the organs, remove the ones that they want for study, then discard what is left of the body. Somewhere in the process, the victim dies, through blood loss or removal of vital organs.

  A very brief video testimony was provided by Kurumizawa Masakuni. He was advanced in age and weak at the time of the interview, and only photographs of him appeared on screen. His voice was almost inaudible. He spoke of the time he was working on a woman victim who had awakened from anesthesia while being vivisected. The woman interviewing him asked what happened.

  "She opened her eyes."

  "And then?"

  "She hollered."

  "What did she say?"

  Kurumizawa could not answer, then began weeping feebly and murmured, "I don't want to think about it again."

  The interviewee apologized, waited a few seconds, and tried again for an answer. He gave it through sobs.

  "She said, 'It's all right to kill me, but please spare my child's life.'"

  Four months after this interview, Kurumizawa died.

  A similar incident is reported in Part 2 of this book. There is no way of knowing whether these two reports refer to the same episode. Women were captured and experimented upon, and a large number of babies were born in captivity. Some were born to women who had been brought in while pregnant. Others were born to women who became pregnant in forced sex acts during tests investigating the transmission of venereal disease.

  There are accounts of experiments being carried out on mothers and children. The gas chamber was one venue for these tests. Also, Part 2 of this book includes an account of three mothers with children used in an air drop of pathogens. It is conceivable that more than one mother voiced, as a last wish on the vivisection table, the wish to let her child live. No one ever did. The researchers wanted their data.

  Two modes of transportation were important to the unit's functioning. The railroad, the lifeline of Japan's industrial venture in Manchuria, was one indispensible part of the Ishii organization. Windowless cars of prisoners were carried from point of capture or imprisonment to a railroad siding at the Pingfang prison labs. One rare eyewitness account of an unloading told of prisoners bound with hands behind them and laid head-to-foot on a flatbed wagon for transfer from the freight car to the prison cells. After unloading their cargo, trains would return empty. It was an almost invisible way of shifting people out of circulation.

  The other important artery was the airfield built off to one side of the building complex within the unit grounds. Conscious as Ishii was of his own prospects for personal advancement, he made frequent trips to Tokyo's Army Medical College to present his work. The materials for presentation included more than graphs and drawings; he also displayed human specimens. The specimen jars themselves were made in Manchuria by a European-trained Japanese, and specimens were regular passengers on the flights from Pingfang to Tokyo. Some vessels contained extremities, specimens of arms, legs, and feet. Other jars contained organs. Some were heads. Still others were whole-body specimens. With this air connection putting Ishii a couple of hours away from his Tokyo base, Pingfang became a virtual specimen-supply annex to the Tokyo medical school. Return flights to Pingfang, for their part, carried supplies, including cages of rats.

  Doctors who knew the situation at the time have commented that this Pingfang-Tokyo air corridor was run on a very regular basis. Through this channel, the results of experiments came to Japan in the form of new bacteria, as well as preserved specimens of human subjects who had died from a range of artificially induced pathological conditions. These materials were made available not just to the army hospital, but to researchers throughout Japan. This gave universities the chance to study diseases not then in Japan, such as plague, cholera, and epidemic hemorrhagic fever (EHF). In this way, Unit 731 was performing the service of human experimentation for the entire Japanese medical community—civilian and military, public and confidential.

  A worker in materials procurement at the army hospital named Amano Ryuji comments on both aspects of the two-way traffic. "It was simple to bring those rats to Manchuria by plane. The plane brought the specimens of human bodies and parts into Tokyo for presentation and study, and carried rats back on the return trip. I saw large numbers of specimens of body parts at the Tokyo lab. Those are the bones that were dug up in Shinjuku [near the former site of the Army Medical College, some fifty years later]. I think that there are more bones there than were found. If someone looked they would discover more."

  The scope of the service comes into sharper focus when the dispersion of the organization is considered. In addition to the Pingfang central unit, there were units set up in Beijing, Nanjing, Guangzhou, and Singapore. In addition, some of these units had their own branch units. The total number of personnel reached some twenty thousand people. Human specimens were known to come to the Pingfang headquarters from other units, and since different units more or less specialized in certain areas of research, it can be assumed that sibling units supplied pathological specimens not available at Pingfang. All of these were candidates for the trip to Tokyo and the Japanese world of medical research. Meanwhile, the windowless trains and cars kept rolling, and the incinerators kept smoking.

  Satellite Facilities

  While the Pingfang facility was to become synonymous with human experimentation, the actual Unit 731 designation did not come into use until August 1941. It became a type of generic term, referring not only to the Pingfang-based unit, but also encompassing its sibling units in other locations, and even its predecessors. All units and facilities were coordinated by the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory in Tokyo. Some of the more important of the less well known facilities are described here.

  Anda

  This was an open-air testing ground one hundred twenty kilometers from Pingfang, about three hours by road. It was used for outdoor tests of plague, cholera, and other pathogens in experimental biological warfare bombs, and other methods of exposing human beings to pathogenic substances in open-air situations.

  Tests generally used from ten to forty people at a time, with subjects tied to crosses in circles of various sizes.
The tests involved an element of trial and error, and comparing results obtained from differently sized circles enabled researchers to determine ranges of effectiveness at various distances from the points where projectiles struck or infected insects were released. When biological warfare bombs were tested, each maruta was protected with headgear and a metal plate hung from the neck to cover the front part of the body. These protective devices prevented death or serious injury that would make it imposssible to obtain the needed data. Arms and legs were left exposed, so that they could be bitten by the disease-carrying insects. In some tests, subjects were tied to vertical boards that were anchored into the ground at various distances and patterns from points of release. Careful notes were made of wind and atmospheric conditions, and each person was marked with a number on his or her chest during each test for easy tracking of human specimens.

  Xinjing

  Under veterinarian Wakamatsu Yujiro, Unit 100 in Xinjing (present-day Changchun), concentrated its research on pathogens effective against domesticated animals. The horses and edible animals of the Soviet and Chinese armies were the targets of this research. Unit 100 was also a bacteria factory, producing large quantities of glanders, anthrax, and other pathogens.

  Sabotage was another focus of the operations here, and one experiment entailed mixing poisons with food to study their effects on subjects and to gain knowledge of appropriate dosages for various toxins. Additionally, extensive areas of land were cultivated for research into chemicals for crop destruction.

  Guangzhou

  The Guangzhou unit has been mentioned in documentary films and written reports, though its activities have not been fully clarified, nor had its existence even been decisively proven. In late October 1994, a private research mission from Japan went to Guangzhou to investigate the possibility of Japanese biological warfare activity there. They also located a former unit member in Japan, who provided them with additional evidence of a germ warfare unit's having been in Guangzhou.

  They learned from the former member that the unit, called Nami Unit 8604, was headquartered at Zhongshan Medical University. The building stands today very much as it did then, and information gleaned from Chinese government records and inhabitants of the area show that Unit 8604 was established in 1938. It was staffed by several hundred personnel.

  The Japan Times of November 9, 1994, reported on a seventy-seven-year-old former unit member, Maruyama Shigeru, who said that one experiment involved starving prisoners to death. This test would appear to be similar to the tests done at Harbin to determine how long a person can continue living on water alone.

  The former unit member also stated that a large number of Chinese refugees from Hong Kong died after they were given water containing typhus-causing bacteria provided by the Army Medical College in Tokyo. In addition, Maruyama talked of seeing victims being operated on almost every day. He recalled that many bodies were stored in the basement of the building.

  The Guangzhou unit, according to Maruyama, also raised rats for experiments in spreading plague. This addition to the Ishii organization's litany of experiments with rats and plague serves as yet further evidence that plague was high on the list of priorities in Japan's design for conquest by disease.

  A Chinese witness at Guangzhou volunteered that there was a pond of chemicals inside the university compound that was used to dissolve the bodies of the victims. It can be inferred that since this unit was established inside a previously existing medical facility, it did not have the incineration capabilities of the Harbin and Pingfang locations, which were custom-built and equipped with the facilities necessary for disposing of large numbers of bodies.

  Beijing

  After the Japanese evacuation at the end of the war, Chinese locals entered the facilities of Beijing-based Unit 1855 for a look behind its secrets. The building still exists, and a Japanese documentary program's video camera followed a bacteriologist who had been posted at the facility, as he described what had gone on in the days when he and his colleagues had worked there. "This is where large numbers of test tubes were all lined up on shelves," he narrated. "Each test tube was identified by a label showing what kind of bacteria it contained. Six of them contained plague germs."

  Unit 1855 had a branch in Chinan that was a combination prison and experiment center. On the same documentary, a Korean man, Choi Hyung Shin, told about his experience there as an interpreter.

  Choi first went to China when he was sixteen years old to attend school. After the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, there were attempts to replace Korean culture with Japanese culture, and all children received a Japanese education. Choi's trilingual ability made him useful to the Japanese doctors. Korean immigrants to China were among the victims of human experimentation, and Choi's interpreting between the Japanese researchers and their Korean and Chinese test subjects was vital to the acquisition of proper research data. He worked at the branch for almost two years during 1942 and 1943.

  When I first arrived there, some one hundred prisoners were already in the cells. Whenever the Japanese doctors made contact with the people being tested, they always did it through an interpreter.

  The test subjects were infected with plague, cholera, and typhus. Those not yet infected were kept in different rooms. There were large mirrors in the rooms with the subjects so that those undergoing testing could be observed better. I spoke with the prisoners using a microphone and looking through the glass panel, interpreting the questions from the doctors: "Do you have diarrhea? Do you have a headache? Do you feel chilly?" The doctors made very careful records of all the answers.

  With the typhus test, ten people were forced to drink a mixture of the germs, and five of them were administered vaccine. The two groups were kept separate from each other. The doctors watched them closely and questioned them through my interpretation, recording the answers. The vaccine proved effective with all five to whom it was administered. The other five suffered horribly.

  In the plague tests, the prisoners suffered with chills and fever, and groaned in pain . . . until they died. From what I saw, one person was killed every day.

  Constantly forced to be part of the morbid business of infection and killing, Choi faked appendicitis, which got him sick leave from his job and a chance to escape. Unfortunately, he was caught by kenpeitai officers and given the water torture with hot peppers mixed into the water. This caused him permanent lung damage, and he has been in and out of the hospital for the past fifty years.

  Singapore

  In September 1991, journalist Phan Ming Yen of the Singapore Straits Times broke the story that it had apparently been confirmed that a Japanese biological warfare installation—rumored but not proven to have existed—had operated in Singapore. He wrote his story after locating a man who claimed to have worked in the lab as a youth. Phan announced that "a Singapore connection has been mentioned fleetingly in some accounts, but no concrete evidence has been cited until now.

  "Confirmation of the Singapore secret laboratory was made following a Straits Times interview with Mr. Othman Wok, sixty-seven, former minister for social affairs, who said he worked as an assistant in the laboratory for over two years during the Japanese Occupation." According to the Straits Times article, the research unit, code-named Oka 9420, was situated in a building now occupied by the Drug Administration Division of the Ministry of Health, and "local historians contacted were unaware of the existence of the laboratory.

  Singapore was captured by the Japanese in February 1942. Several months later, Othman, then seventeen years old, found himself looking for employment in the occupied land, and his uncle, who worked in a Japanese-run laboratory, provided a recommendation that enabled Mr. Othman to get a job. His unwitting contribution to Japan's biological warfare program thus began.

  Seven Chinese, Indian, and Malay boys working in the lab were all assigned the task of picking fleas from rats and putting them into containers. The article quotes Othman Wok as saying, "It was an unforgettable experience.
It was the first time that I was doing something which made me feel like a medical student."

  Some forty rat catchers, apparently Japanese soldiers, would comb Singapore for the rodents and bring their haul into the lab. The rats would then be put to sleep with chloroform, and the boys would work at pulling the fleas from their bodies with pincers. Then the fleas were placed into containers with water, which prevented them from jumping around, and from there the Japanese staff took over. According to Othman, test tubes were prepared with one flea in each. The rats were injected with plague pathogens, their bellies were shaved, and the test tubes were inverted over the shaved area, allowing the fleas to feed on the rats and become plague carriers. "All this work was done by the Japanese in the same room where I worked," Othman recounted.

  The infected fleas were then transferred to kerosene cans which contained sand, dried horse blood, and an unidentified chemical. They were left to breed for about two weeks. Finally, the adult fleas and their offspring, all infected with plague, were transferred to flasks and shipped out. Concerning their destination, Mr. Othman said, "A driver who drove the trucks which transported the fleas to the railway station said that these bottles of fleas were sent off to Thailand." This information supports assertions that a Unit 731 branch operated in "neutral" Thailand, as well.

  The Singapore operation was veiled in the same secrecy that covered other installations. "During the two years I was working there," Mr. Othman is quoted as saying, "I never knew the actual purpose of my work. We were too afraid to ask."

  Without being told so, the boys knew that they were working with danger. Everybody had to wear white overalls, rubber gloves and boots, and white headgear. On one occassion a rat bit through the rubber glove of a Japanese staffer, and the man died. Another time, an Indian boy working there was bitten on the finger by a rat, but he was saved by being rushed to the hospital and having the tip of the finger amputated.