Unit 731

by Hal Gold

  The Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Department was responsible for sanitary work wherever Japanese troops were in China. According to post-World War II testimony by Ishii to Lieutenant Colonel Arvo Thompson of the U.S. Army in 1946, Japan's initiation of biological warfare was defensive. There was always the danger that Chinese troops would themselves employ bacteriological tactics, and so the Japanese had no choice but to expand the scope of their biological countermeasures in step with the military operations then underway.

  Looking at the record of Ishii's fascination with biological warfare from his European tour, and his aggressive salesmanship of it to the army upper echelons, it seems clear that there was nothing defensive about Unit 731. The only thing remotely defensive about it was strident tone of the argument with which Ishii justified its existence.

  3

  Creating Pathology

  Rodents and Insects

  Rats and fleas, which have spread disease among human beings throughout the ages, were carefully cultivated by the Japanese biological warfare specialists. They harvested rats from Manchuria's rat population, and then enlisted schoolchildren to raise them. It required no difficult technique—just cages, food, and water. Ping-fang had rat cultivation cells—they remain today as part of its ruins—which were staffed by Youth Corps members.

  On February 26, 1995, the Asahi Broadcasting Company presented a documentary titled "The Mystery of the Rats That Went to the Continent." The camera followed a small group of local high school students in Saitama Prefecture on a project to research stories of farmers in the area who had raised rats during the war years. The students got on their bicycles and went around to different farms asking whether people knew anything about the story of rat farming during the war years. All of the farming families interviewed commented to the effect that "everybody around here was raising rats. It was a source of income." One family even had some of the old, wood-framed rat cages piled up in the shed, each cage built to house six rats. People questioned by the students claimed that they did not know that the rats were being used for spreading disease, although the students were not good enough actors to hide their disbelief. In all fairness to the farmers, however, the project did provide badly needed income, and they would probably have taken any information they received at face value.

  In the same area of the prefecture, there had been a center which raised animals for research. This facility was impressed into service as a collection agency for rats, and this fact probably explains why that region became so active in rat farming. The families in the locality brought the animals they had bred to the center, and from there they were transported to Tokyo and the Army Medical College, where they were put upon the return flights to the continent.

  It is interesting to note that after the war, the U.S. military kept the families in business. U.S. Army Unit 406 was established in Tokyo to research viruses, and now, in place of the Japanese vehicles, American jeeps became familiar sights in the villages as they came to collect their loads of rats. Perhaps the rate of pay improved with the occupation army.

  Producing fleas was slightly trickier. Han Xiao gives an account of flea production in his book Crimes of Unit 731. He tells of how in around 1940, the Suzuki Group construction company was putting a new wing on a building at Pingfang, and Chinese laborers from outside were working at one area in the huge compound. A strange rumor circulated among the workers about men who raised fleas. It started soon after the Japanese assembled a group of about ten prisoners all of whom were over fifty years old, and told them to carry their belongings into one of the sheds that served as living quarters.

  "Don't worry," the Japanese soldiers reassured them, "you're all over fifty years of age, so there's no need for you to work. Take it easy in here. All you have to do is produce one hundred fleas a day—big ones—and hand them over to us. This is your work."

  The prisoners were dressed in heavily padded clothes, and they were given four rules to obey: 1) Do not come into contact with other prisoners; 2) Never talk about this work to anyone; 3) Always sleep with your clothes on; and 4) Do the required work every day.

  After about a week, several Japanese dressed in white coveralls began to come every day, and they made the men take off their heavily padded pants and upper wear, turn them inside out, and pick out the fleas that had reached the size of about a match head. These were put into aluminum boxes, and the Japanese took them away. "The smaller fleas are not needed yet," the Japanese advised the men, "but it is prohibited to kill them." The men had to leave the small fleas in the padding until they grew, and in this way some eight hundred to one thousand a day were collected.

  The ten men had to go for water themselves and prepare their own meals in their sheds. They were given preventive injections at regular intervals. They were not permitted to remove their clothes or cut their hair even in the hottest weather.

  One day, a laborer who came to get water met one of the older men. They checked to see that no one was watching, and the older man told the story of the job he and his fellows were doing. From there, the story of "the ten old men who raise fleas" spread among the laborers. Without anyone realizing when, the ten men died in succession.

  Four Areas of Experimentation

  Of the myriad diseases and medical problems into which Unit 731 conducted its research, four areas are particularly prominent. Together, they represent a cross-section of Unit 731 's cruelty and perversion, while at the same time providing a glance across the spectrum of the scientific work it conducted.

  Cholera

  At the human-experiment centers, the first step into researching illness and possible vaccines against it involved getting prisoners sick by injecting them with germs. Once disease had been created in human beings, it would be spread to population centers. After it was ascertained that the disease had taken hold among the locals, the army and its researchers would move in to examine the victims, and test methods of treatment. One method of spreading cholera used domesticated animals as carriers.

  Dogs were used to spread cholera in a village about eight kilometers west of Chinan. Dogs caught in the village were fed pork laced with cholera germs, then returned to the village. When the disease finished incubating and became active, the dogs would vomit. Then other dogs would come along and eat the vomit, and they, too, would become infected. The dogs would also be stricken with diarrhea, and the feces would spread the disease among other dogs and to people. Some twenty percent of those who contracted the illness died. Survivors told of hearing the cries of sick people from their homes as they suffered.

  Former army captain Kojima Takeo, who was a unit member involved in this cholera campaign, added his own testimony about this strange experiment in an interview: "We were told that we were going out on a cholera campaign, and we were all given inoculations against cholera ten days before starting out. Our objective was to infect all the people in the area. The disease had already developed before we got there, and as we moved into the village everyone scattered. The only ones left were those who were too sick to move. The number of people coming down with the disease kept increasing. Cholera produces a face like a skeleton, vomiting, and diarrhea. And the vomiting and defecating of the people lying sick brought flies swarming around. One after the other, people died."

  Captain Kojima's further testimony in the second section of this book offers additional details on this type of operation, as well as other comments on the role of the army in Manchuria.

  Epidemic Hemorrhagic Fever (EHF)

  The Asahi newspaper of April 2, 1943 carried the following story.

  ANOTHER VICTORY SHOUT

  FOR MILITARY MEDICINE

  Strange Sickness in Northern Manchuria Conquered Pathogen for terrible hemorrhagic fever is discovered

  The Medical Corps of the invincible Imperial Army raises another victory shout, with a triumph over a strange and unusual disease in northern Manchuria that has been puzzling military and civilian medicine. It has been discovered t
hat the disease is carried by ticks. Not only has the method of transmission of the disease been discovered, but a preventive measure has been established, as well, and development of a treatment seems close at hand.

  The pathogen was unknown before this, and the discovery of a new type of carrier that spreads the disease is attracting widespread attention. On the fourth of this month, Tokyo University will hold a convention on parasitology at which [General] Kitano will present his findings. The name for the disease was decided by the army in February of last year. The disease has already been present, however, for many years in northern and eastern Manchuria. It was clearly identified in May 1938 by the Imperial Army. At that time, the disease took the name of the locality where it occurred and other names. The army exerted itself to identify this pathogen for the purposes of disease prevention within the army and to advance sanitation in Manchuria. After the incubation period, a high fever develops, and internal bleeding is present. The death rate is from fifteen to twenty percent.

  After Japanese troops moved into Manchuria in the 1930s, there were outbreaks of disease which mystified researchers. It was apparently a local disease which existed around the border area between China and the Soviet Union. Japanese activity in building railroads close to the Soviet border in 1938 had exposed Japanese army personnel to the illness. In 1941, Japanese and Soviet researchers found out almost simultaneously that the agent was a virus; previously, rickettsia bacteria had been suspect. Japanese researchers took advantage of this discovery to earmark the virus as a potential military asset.

  After Kitano presented his findings at the convention referred to in the Asahi article, he returned to Manchuria and worked on developing the disease into a weapon. In 1944, he published the findings of his research team in various periodicals, including the prestigious Nihon Byori Gakkaishi (Japan Journal of Pathology). In the project, research team members went into areas infested with the disease and collected rats. Ticks which were found on the bodies of the rats were removed, and approximately two hundred of these were ground and mixed into a saline solution. This mixture was then injected, according to the report, into the bodies of monkeys, which were then observed for symptoms of the disease. If the disease manifested in a subject, its blood would be drawn and injected into another subject. The second subject would then be closely observed for development of symptoms. When they appeared, that subject would be dissected, its organs removed, and parts of these ground fine. Then, a saline solution of the organ extract would be injected into another subject, and that subject observed for symptoms. This process was repeated continuously until the pathogen was successfully isolated.

  The contents outlined above appeared in an abstract in the medical journal. A medical doctor or researcher reading the manner in which the disease develops, and particularly the fever characteristics, should be able to recognize the subjects not as monkeys but humans. Most obvious is the account of body temperature: the "monkeys" recorded temperatures of up to 40.2 degrees Celsius. Even the sickest monkey's body temperature will never reach that point. Rather, the fever reported was in the range of where it would be for very sick human beings. Moreover, as Professor Tsuneishi points out, the test subjects used in this research were listed simply as "monkeys." Failure to identify the species of an animal in an experiment lowers the value of the paper reporting its results. Where monkeys were actually used, it was common practice to identify the type. Thus, it was an open secret that the simple and unscientific use of the term "monkey" by itself was a code which meant that the subjects were humans.

  The medical community knew this. The journal knew this. The readiness with which Kitano publicized this transparent sham—and its acceptance by Japan's medical community at large—is a sad testament to the lack of conflict between the ethical standards of the medical world in Japan and those of Unit 731.

  Plague

  Armies that want to use disease as a military weapon want something that acts fast and is fatal. Cholera, for instance, with its incubation period of about twenty days, would not generally be a feasible tactical weapon. (This helps explain the emphasis on vaccine research in the case of that disease; Unit 731's work with cholera would appear aimed more at preventing it among Japanese troops than making active use of it on the battlefield.) Plague, on the other hand, starts killing within three days, and has a long, illustrious history as a weapon of biological warfare. One of the earliest recorded uses of plague in warfare was in 1346 in the Crimea, where the Genoese army was besieged inside a walled fortress by the Mongols. When plague broke out among the latter, they turned this development to their advantage by throwing the dead, diseased bodies over the Genoese ramparts. After that, the Mongols unwittingly carried the plague through Asia, and the troops from Genoa carried it back to Europe, where it became the feared "Black Death."

  With its proven credentials as a terrible and effective instrument of war, plague was one of the first diseases focused in on by the Ishii unit researchers. They apparently placed a lot of weight on researching—and causing—this disease, and as many as six plague attacks were reportedly carried out. The best known of these operations are outlined here.

  In October 1940 a plague attack was conducted against the Kaimingjie area of the port city of Ningbo. This was a joint operation by Unit 731 and one of its affiliates, Nanjing-based Unit 1644. In this operation, plague germs mixed with wheat, corn, cloth scraps, and cotton were dropped from the air.

  Qian Guifa, a resident of the area attacked, was fourteen years old at the time and working in a cofu shop. He was infected, but managed to recover, and it is said that he is the only living person today who can bear witness to the Japanese biological warfare experiment at Ningbo. His testimony has been recorded in video documentary and in printed literature in Japan. He recounts: "One day, a Japanese plane flew over and kept circling. Then, it dropped something that looked like smoke. It was wheat flour and corn and other things. The next day people started getting sick. Three days later, the tofu shop owner's two children were dead, and other people were getting sick and dying. Nobody could understand what had happened. My own family died, one after the other. There was misery all around.

  "Everyone who died did so in pain and agony, going into convulsions. At first the bodies turned red, then after death they turned black."

  More than one hundred persons died within a few days after the attack. The affected area was closed to the public and remained sealed off until the 1960s, when it was ascertained positively that there was no further risk of infection.

  Government records still existing in China show the results of the plague attacks and the deaths which followed. A Chinese specialist on disease prevention and plague tells how he kept the disease from spreading to other areas.

  "On the twenty-ninth, three days after the Japanese plane came, I entered the Ningbo area that had been attacked. The first thing I did was separate the people seriously affected, those lightly affected, and the healthy ones. Then, I encircled the infected area of the attack zone with a wall about a meter deep and a meter and a half high, so that rats could not escape. Six hundred people were moved south. When November came, we burned everything in the enclosed area, and in this way we stopped the plague from spreading. According to my records, ninety-seven people died."

  Then, in September 1942, another attack was carried out by the two units, with Ishii himself commanding the operation. A survivor reports:

  I was fifteen years old at the time, and I remember everything clearly. The Japanese plane spread something that looked like smoke. A few days later we found dead rats all over the village. At the same time, people came down with high fevers and aches in the lymph nodes. Every day, people died. Crying could be heard all through the village.

  My mother and father—in all, eight people in my family—died. I was the only one in my family left. My mother had a high fever all day. She was crying for water, and clawing at her throat. Then, she let out a roar like a lion, and died before my eyes. Altoget
her, three hundred eighty people in the village died. At times, as many as twenty people died in one day.

  As soon as the first people started dying, Japanese came into the village wearing protective clothing and masks. The went around the village for three days, giving injections to the people. They administered two shots, one to the arm and one to the chest. Some of the people who got these shots also died.

  The Japanese researchers took over a house on top of a hill about a kilometer away from the attack area to use as a vivisection laboratory. Another plague attack survivor, Qian Tangjiang, gave his account of the biological warfare experiment: "We were told that if we went to Rin's house at the top of the hill, we would get treated. My friend told me that his wife went to the house for treatment, and later was seen strapped to a table with her body split open. Her feet were still moving; there's no doubt that she was dissected alive."

  A woman of the village, Wang Julian, also discussed the plague attack: "Five members of my family died. My mother and father both suffered from swollen lymph nodes, then a high fever. They died in agony. I was taken to Rin's house, also, and I was there for two days. Then, the next day, the Japanese went into the village again, and I ran away. The villagers gave me herbal medicines, and in time my fever went down and I lived through it."