by Hal Gold
Othman left the laboratory in late 1944 for another job. After the war, he read of a Japanese biological warfare attack on Chongqing using fleas, and he stated in the article that "the thought that I could have been involved in something related to that still troubles and worries me." In the years intervening between the end of the war and his speaking to the Straits Times, he never spoke of his employment at Unit 9420.
In Japan, historian Matsumura Takao of Keio University credited the information from the former official with filling the gap between what had been strongly suspected about the Singapore operation and the lack of substantive proof. He also set about on his own search for information concerning the laboratory. He located the former head of the laboratory and got a story, albeit with credibility gaps. Phan of the Straits Times then followed up on his coverage in the newspaper's November 11, 1991 issue with a second piece on the issue. In an article headlined "Germ lab's head says work solely for research, vaccines . . . But Japanese professor sceptical about his claim," Phan followed the progress of Professor Matsumura's investigation into the issue, while also giving space to the former laboratory administrator's rebuttal.
The story gave the Japanese government a problem, and it issued the predictable and well-worn denial. Concerning this response, Phan wrote that "the Japanese government responded, saying that it had no records of such a laboratory—a claim which contrasted with those in U.S. Army documents which mentioned its existence." The documents of course are those which U.S. military authorities gathered from interviews with Unit 731 leaders forty-five years earlier, which made some passing mention of a Singapore unit.
The former head of the Singapore facility was "a retired doctor in his early eighties who refused to be identified." According to the article, "he said he was transferred to Singapore a week after the island was occupied in February, 1942 from the main branch of. . . Unit 731 in Harbin, Manchuria. Singapore was the headquarters of the Japanese Southern Army and the base to supply material to the war front. To prevent the outbreak of diseases in the city, strict bacteriological checks on water supply and fresh food were carried out." The retired doctor mentions soldiers catching rats in the city and conducting experiments with them, and comments, "Such behavior must have seemed odd to the people there and thus caused misunderstanding."
Did the people misunderstand? Or did they, in fact, understand all too well? The former laboratory chief talks of the large scale on which his facility operated—it employed all of one thousand members—and the fact that it was had been set up by people brought into Singapore by Naito Ryoichi, a prominent Unit 731 officer who later played an important role in the outfit's first negotiations with American occupation forces.
Matsumura's counterargument concerning the benign role allegedly played by the Singapore unit was also carried in the same newspaper: "The other four branches of the unit at Harbin, Guangzhou, Beijing and Nanjing were involved in the manufacture of germ warfare weapons. It would seem strange if the branch in Singapore was not involved in similar activities." More pointedly, he adds that it seemed odd to set up a laboratory for research on a disease in a place in which there was no epidemic. And he notes that the head of the lab, Naito, and other members had all come to Singapore after working in Harbin, where biological warfare weapons were manufactured.
In February 1995, a documentary on an Asahi Broadcasting Company program interviewed a former member, Takayama Yoshiaki, of the Singapore unit. His account of what he did in Singapore falls into the pattern of Japan's methodology for creating plague as a weapon. He recalls, "We raised fleas in oil cans. Then, the infected rats were put into mesh enclosures, and lowered into the cans. The fleas would bite the rats, and the fleas became infected."
The discovery of these facts regarding the Singapore unit throws light upon the geographical extent of Japan's biological warfare ambitions.
Hiroshima
The charming island of Okunoshima lies just a few minutes by boat from the port city of Hiroshima. In 1929, a factory on the island started producing poison gas for chemical warfare. A small museum has been established near the remains of the factory to remind people of what went on here. The curator is a former worker in what was a highly secretive, dangerous operation. Photos show the scars and disfigurements suffered by the workers.
The island's history as a center for chemical warfare production dates back to 1928, when the installation there engaged in production of mustard gas on an experimental basis. Equipment was imported from France, and workers were brought in from nearby rural communities on the Japanese mainland.
With the expansion of the war in the latter part of the 1930s, the Hiroshima plant increased production. Types of gases produced over the factory's lifetime include yperite, lewisite, and cyanogen. So important—and confidential—was the work done at the island that it actually disappeared from Japanese maps as the army moved more aggressively into China.
The workers themselves were ordered to the same secrecy as Unit 731 personnel. And, as with Unit 731, the Japanese government has shown a deep reluctance to admit that anything untoward went on at Okunoshima. For a long time, the government refused to acknowledge responsibility for assisting former workers at the factory there. Finally, it granted some of them recognition as poison gas patients and allowed them compensation, if far from sufficient. For all the destitution and respiratory and other health problems these people have suffered, though, they are comparatively lucky: many of their colleagues died before the government moved to grant them any form of assistance at all.
The plant on Okunoshima supplied some of the gas used in the human experimentation in Manchuria. A reported two million canisters of poison gas abandoned in China by the Japanese army has been a constant bone of contention between the two countries. China has been asking for its removal, while the Japanese government has appeared to be waiting for it simply to go away on its own. Finally, some fifty years after the end of World War II, Japan is reacting to pressure, time, and perhaps the incentive of benefits perceived to be had from good relations with an economically booming China. At last, the abandoned gas weapons are scheduled for deactivation. Poison gas does not seem to fit in well with a booming, mercantilistic atmosphere.
Ties to the Civilian Sector
The massive scale of the new buildings and grounds was not the only major change concerning Ishii Shiro's work when Unit 731 moved to Pingfang. The change in venue brought about a drastic revision in organization, as well. The first fortress/bacteria factory had been staffed only by military doctors and technicians. Now, however, Ishii aimed to move on from what had been a restricted exercise in military medicine, and involve the entire Japanese medical community. In order to attain this objective, Ishii once again needed to cash in on his talent for manipulation, this time to convince researchers to leave the security of their labs and join him in Manchuria. In the final analysis, Ishii's talent as an organizer would be evaluated as being greater than his research ability, despite the knack for invention testified to by his water purification systems and biological warfare bombs.
He went back to his alma mater in Kyoto, to Tokyo Imperial University, and to other leading medical universities, and coaxed professors and researchers to come to Manchuria. Attracted by the lure of expanding their research possibilities, some researchers went themselves, while others sent their students. The students would write up their research, then send it back to their professors, who would then use the data to prepare their own reports and advance themselves in the medical community. In defense of some of the people recruited, it must be acknowledged that not all of them knew what they were getting into and were themselves used by Ishii and his henchmen. There were also students who were pressured by their professors to go work with Ishii's organization. Defying a professor in Japan's strict academic hierarchy was (and remains even today) equivalent to career suicide.
The degree of civilian involvement in the human-experimentation units has been a matter of discussion in Japan
for some time, but a recent statement by a former unit member throws past estimates into a new light. In 1994, a former unit member by the name of Okijima, then seventy-eight years old, offered the following comment on the personnel of Unit 731: "Some things have to be corrected. There were no soldiers at Unit 731. They were all civilian employees."
"All" may be an exaggeration since the top leaders—Ishii, Lieutenant General Kitano Masaji, who took over charge of the unit in 1942, and some others—were in the military. Okishima's statement does imply, however, that there were more civilian researchers than conventional accounts would lead us to believe. It has also been repeatedly noted that many researchers came to Manchuria for a limited time, performed their work, and then were replaced by others in a constant cycle. This rotation would suggest the presence of civilian researchers who would come from their respective universities, work on particular projects, then return home with their results.
Like soldiers, civilians also had a variety of ranks, spanning the hierarchical spectrum from the equivalent of common grunts, up to generals. University researchers made up the majority of civilian employees at the Ishii organization, and their statuses were determined by the universities from which they hailed. Those from the elite Tokyo University and Kyoto University held the highest grades. (The Tama Unit in Nanjing, in particular, had deep ties with Tokyo University.) Each university researcher had his own lab when he was at the unit, and directed the course of the project he was working on.
Medical professionals were not the only civilians to be called into duty with Unit 731. The wartime militarization of Japan extended even down to the level of children in grade school. For instance, teachers were ordered to scan students' compositions for signs of anti-war sentiments among the parents. If any such tendencies surfaced, they would be reported to the school principal, and from there to the police, who would investigate the parents. Teachers were also used to whip up patriotic feelings in their students, and encourage them to join the Youth Corps.
Young and impressionable, inculcated with the values of obedience to authority and emperor worship, the Youth Corps served an important role in Ishii's organization. Boys from fifteen through seventeen years of age who eventually ended up at Unit 731 usually had no idea of what they were headed for. Many were sidetracked from their intended fields of activity to serve in Pingfang as assistants to researchers. They were put through a tough, accelerated schedule of study in biology, math, bacteriology, and foreign languages. Their work at the unit included carrying organs freshly removed from victims from the dissection rooms to labs where preservation or further research would take place. These services made the Youth Corps members important witnesses in later years. While they had not yet acquired the wisdom to comprehend the full significance or extent of the experiments in progress, they understood a great deal for their age. They were looked to as disciples to carry on Japan's future scientific and military adventures. They were the youngest members to witness the happenings, and many of them are still here today and have provided crucial testimony.
How was it possible for someone to bring together so large a number of scientific researchers, as Ishii did? Some critics say that the demand from the medical community was there, and Ishii answered it. The data traffic was organized so that when a researcher completed an experiment, its results were announced to Ishii. If a new substance were developed, for example, that report would be brought to him in his capacity as the representative of the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory. The report or substance (in the case of a vaccine, etc.) would then be sent to another Ishii unit for testing. If a professor were in Japan and his student were experimenting in China, the professor would receive the work of that student through the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory in Tokyo. If the results were incomplete, this information would be channeled back through the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory, and the experiments would continue further. In this way, the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory was a coordinating body that tied in civilian research in Japan with military research in Japan and overseas. Japanese military aggression made the human experimentation possible; the Japanese medical community was the silent inquisitor.
Ishii's Battlefield Debut
Despite the fact that Ishii's organization was officially a water purification and disease prevention unit, these missions were a distant second priority for it. Japanese military medicine had grown away from its Russo-Japanese War heritage. In 1937, however, it took a turn back toward its roots—protection of Japanese troops from disease—when, during some fighting, Japanese soldiers drank from a creek and many cases of cholera broke out. It was said that, because of the diarrhea, very few soldiers were fighting with their pants on. The Japanese suspected that the Chinese had contaminated the stream.
Ironically, Ishii, virtually all of whose career had been devoted to developing offensive biological warfare, played an important role in this brief return to defensive medicine. An invention of his, a portable water filtering system, was finally allowed to accompany the troops. The machine was a cylindrical mechanism about one meter in length and forty-five centimeters in diameter. Water was fed in at one end, and a hand crank forced the water under pressure through a filtering system of unglazed diatomite. This was the same material used in his bombs.
Ishii's device had not proven effective against cholera germs in tests to date, but the sense of urgency brought about by the combination of increasing numbers of incapacitated soldiers and Ishii's typical heavy-handed insistence convinced the army to put his system into operation. Five trucks carrying water filtration units and a team of about two hundred men started supplying drinking water to the Japanese fighting men, and, for reasons that remain unclear, cholera cases dropped sharply. Ishii was decorated and received a monetary award for his contribution to Japan's fighting forces. The praise he received caught the attention of American intelligence personnel who were interested in why the work of an army doctor was so highly regarded. This was the first time Ishii's name came to the attention of the American military.
Shortly thereafter, Ishii would be unleashed to pursue his real calling, offensive biological warfare. In 1938 and 1939, the Soviet and Japanese armies clashed in two full-scale encounters at the Manzhouguo border and former Mongolian border. The latter battle, which came to be known as the Nomonhan Incident, resulted in an overwhelming defeat of the Japanese forces. The clash, which saw the first field operation of the biological warfare unit, occurred in a desert region where water was scarce. Bidding a quick adieu to the water purification role that he had helped play in China, Ishii was undoubtedly more at home with his new mission: plans now called for his unit to cause epidemics by poisoning the water supply of the enemy.
In 1989, a journalist for the Asahi newspaper held a meeting with three former Youth Corps members of Unit 731. It was a quiet, private affair covered in the newspaper's August 24 edition with the headline "Typhoid Germs Thrown Downstream at Nomonhan Incident: Three Men Formerly Connected with Ishii Unit Testify After Fifty Years." The article reported their stating that "with our own hands, we threw large quantities of intestinal typhoid bacteria into the river during the Nomonhan Incident." But the tactic produced more questions than results.
According to the recollections of the three men, the use of typhoid germs was initiated by the Ishii unit after the Japanese sustained a heavy attack. By the latter part of August, it was clear that Japan's Manchurian army would be defeated, and the biological warfare operation would appear to have been undertaken out of desperation. According to the account in the article,
the upper reaches of the of the river were not far from the Japanese army camp. [Group Leader] Yamamoto's plan was to throw the pathogens into the river so that they would travel downstream to the Russo-Mongol army and infect the soldiers. We loaded the pathogens into two trucks and headed for the dumping area. There were fourteen or fifteen of us, including the leader. Over the next few days, we made two attempts to reach the river
, but couldn't make it because of heavy Russian artillery fire and the trucks' getting bogged down in soft ground. Then, on the third try we made it to the river. It was around early September. The location was one or two hours by truck from our camp, and we traveled at night, without lights, to a point near the dumping site. The pathogens were stored in twenty-two or twenty-three 18-liter oil drums. The cans were tied with straw rope, and we carried one in each hand. We crossed over swampy ground to the riverbank, watching the Soviet-Mongolian army's signal flares shooting up overhead from the opposite side. The pathogens were cultured in a vegetable gelatin. We opened the lids, and poured the jelly-like contents of the cans into the river. We carried the cans back with us so we wouldn't leave any evidence.
One of the men added that, at the time, he did not know what the pathogens were, but some time later, a hygiene specialist from a special operations team died in a hospital from typhoid, and he assumed that it was the same disease as the germs he had carried in the Nomonhan Incident.
The Asahi reporter also spoke with an instructor of military history at the Japanese Defense Agency who had known the leader of that action, Lieutenant Colonel Yamamoto, after the war. The instructor told of Yamamoto's receiving the Order of the Golden Kite for meritorious service at the time of the incident.
The Asahi article was capped off with a comment by Professor Tsuneishi Keiichi, a professor at Kanagawa University and probably Japan's leading expert on Unit 731: "The use of BW at the Nomonhan Incident is also recorded in testimony at the Khabarovsk military trials in 1949. But if intestinal typhoid germs are dumped into a river, they will become ineffective almost immediately. The Ishii unit people surely knew that. Rather than actually conducting biological warfare, it seems more likely that it was a method of gaining publicity for the unit, as well as a drill. But the Nomonhan Incident was definitely the first use of BW by the Japanese army."