Unit 731

by Hal Gold

  Also, according to Legal Section, there was not sufficient evidence on file against any of Ishii's subordinates to charge or hold them as crime suspects. The message did list possible superiors of Ishii who were then on trial, including Tojo and two other former commanders of the Kwantung Army. But neither Ishii nor his associates were listed as war criminals, and no American ally had filed charges of war crimes against them.

  SCAP was ready to let Ishii and his associates off the hook. Before the War Department could reach a decision, however, it had to know what opinion IPS held regarding the Ishii biological warfare group. The War Department requested information, and so Legal Section conferred with IPS. The latter body provided a list of biological warfare activities then known to it, and the statement that "strong circumstantial evidence exists of use of bacteria warfare."

  By this time, full translations of the affidavits made by a Major Karazawa to his Soviet captors had come into the hands of IPS. In these, it was stated that Karazawa was engaged in the manufacture of germs at the Ishii unit. More specifically, in 1940, Ishii and one hundred of his subordinates had conducted an experimental test in Hangzhou, central China, for which Karazawa claimed he had manufactured seventy kilograms of typhus bacilli, five kilograms of cholera bacilli, and five kilograms of plague-infected fleas. Bacteria were sprayed by plane over areas occupied by the Chinese army, following which a plague epidemic broke out at Ningbo. Karazawa also repeated information he had heard from Ishii about how he had experimented with cholera and plague on the mountain bandits of Manchuria, and that in 1942, when the Japanese army was retreating in central China, the Ishii group infected the vicinity of Chuxian and Yushan with typhoid and plague bacilli. Further testimony claimed that on several occasions during 1943 and 1944, the Japanese kenpeitai had furnished as fodder for human experimentation with plague and anthrax bacilli Manchurians "who had been sentenced to death." Karazawa even implicated people at the very top of Japan's military organization, claiming that Ishii had advised his staff that they were under orders from the General Staff in Tokyo to improve virus research.

  IPS had also obtained information on four locations in China where, in October and November of 1940, Japanese planes scattered wheat grains, and bubonic plague appeared shortly afterward. Yet, it still refrained from bringing Ishii to trial. Nor did it deem it worthwhile to call up members of the Ishii group to testiify against their superiors who were listed as defendants in the trials. In December 1946, after considering using the material in its hands as a basis for prosecution, IPS replied to SCAP, and by extension the War Department, that the evidence on hand was not sufficient to connect any of the accused with the Ishii detachments's secret activities. Its reply to SCAP and the War Department back in Washington, was couched along these lines.

  Some copies of these reports were labeled as being destined for the "Commander in Chief," so there can be little doubt that the U.S. president was informed of events in Tokyo, including the biological warfare intelligence coming into America's hands. In other words—to borrow the expression that that president himself made famous—on the decision not to prosecute the former members of Unit 731, the buck stopped right at Harry Shippe Truman's desk.

  America's decision not to prosecute Ishii and his men was not the final word on the matter, however. In July 1948, the Soviet army newspaper Red Star carried an article by a Col. Galkin, special correspondent on the newspaper for Japanese biological warfare. According to the article, the Japanese were preparing to use biological warfare on a large scale, and they had a huge bacteriological center in Manchuria. Galkin's piece did not state that Japanese biological warfare was intended for use against his country, and instead specifically pointed out that it was for use against China, the United States, and Britain. The Red Star article also did not mention Soviet citizens as victims of human experimentation. Still more surprising, the Soviet article did not mention the imperial order which had allegedly led to the establishment of the labs. There was only mention of Prince Mikasa acting as the emperor's representative.

  Some time later, however, a different version of events emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. In December 1949, in the city of Khabarovsk, on the railway line north of Vladivostok, twelve former members of Ishii's organization were placed on trial for war crimes. Soviet press reports told the U.S. State Department of the first installment of the trial results, and included "confessions" by several Japanese that the Japanese General Staff and War Ministry had set up secret labs in Manchuria in 1935-1936, for preparation and execution of bacteriological warfare. During court testimony, these were said to have been established on direct order from Emperor Hirohito. The Soviet account goes on to state that the Soviet Union was one of the intended targets of Japan's biological warfare efforts, that Soviet citizens were among the victims of experimental research, that bacteria were mass-produced for use in war, and that outposts along the Soviet border were established for the purpose of conducting biological warfare against the U.S.S.R.

  Soviet veracity was brought into question, as the State Department compared these accounts of the trial with the Red Army newspaper's earlier recounting of biological warfare activities. It is apparent that Moscow had hoped to use the Red Star article as a goad (assisted by the fact that the New York Times picked up the story, too, and brought it wide publicity back in the United States): how could the other Allies—specifically the U.S.—refuse to bring the former members of Unit 731 to trial when their own citizens had been victimized? The timing of the Russian trial, and the accounts of it, in which no special pains were taken to emphasize Japan's use of biological warfare against countries other than the Soviet Union, supports this viewpoint. The Tokyo war crimes trials had been wrapped up four months after the appearance of the Red Star article without Ishii or his cohorts ever making an appearance, and so the Soviets no longer had any incentive to dwell on any suffering other than their own.

  America wanted Ishii, Ishii's group, and the emperor protected. More than that, it wanted secrecy and exclusivity. The Soviets pressed to bring them all to trial, so that the secrets America had obtained from the Japanese could be made available to everyone (especially them). America won. And Unit 731 made its contribution to the Cold War. One might raise the question of what role the transfer of Japan's biological warfare potential to the U.S. played in pushing the Soviets to outdo America in nuclear capability. Again, Japanese-American collusion has prevented the question from being asked.

  5

  Unit 731 in Modern Times

  It is impossible to exaggerate the secrecy enveloping information about Unit 731 in the postwar era. As recently as June 26, 1995, the Japan Times reported that "a woman in Sendai . . . has recently discovered a résumé written by her late father showing that he worked for the secret Japanese army which researched germ warfare in China during World War II." The story of Unit 731 was not even handed down from parents to children (at least among the unit's erstwhile members).

  It should therefore be unsurprising that the history of Unit 731 has remained at the farthest periphery of Japan's collective consciousness since the end of the war. Yet, as in the case of the frostbite specialist Dr. Yoshimura, former upper-level members of the unit, together with their cooperating medical researchers in Japan, made great—and quiet—use of their data to further their careers in Japanese academia, science, industry, and politics. Still, the postwar history of Unit 731 is not confined to the stories of those former members who used their experience for their own personal gain. Like an invisible yet undeniably present ghost, the defunct outfit has continued to stalk Japan—and the world—in other ways, as well.

  The Teikoku Bank Incident

  In January 1948, a man walked into a branch of the Teikoku Bank ("Teigin," short for Teikoku Ginko) in Tokyo and identified himself as an official of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. He advised the bank manager that there was an epidemic in the area, and that all employees were requested to drink a preventive medicine that he had br
ought with him. It was good medicine, he reassured the banker, and his ministry had received it from GHQ (General Headquarters, Douglas MacArthur's office) itself. The manager dutifully gathered all employees of the bank for instructions.

  The so-called representative inserted a pipette into the liquid contents of a bottle he had brought and drew some off into a teacup. He demonstrated how the tongue should be extended first so that the liquid would go quickly and directly into the throat, then drank the substance in front of the employees. Next, he took a quantity of the liquid from the same bottle into each of sixteen cups, one for each person present. He instructed them to drink this in unison when he gave the word. Then, after a wait of one minute—which he would time precisely by his watch—they were to drink a second medicine. They all obediently followed his instructions. Twelve employees died, while the other four recovered to bear witness.

  While the criminal's modus operandi—poison as a robbery weapon—was odd to begin with, even odder was the crime's seeming lack of a motive. The murderer took a total of ¥181, 850 which was lying on some of the desks, but left much more untouched. It thus became apparent that some purpose other than robbery had brought him to the bank.

  Vexed at the peculiar nature of this crime, the police searched for suspects. Descriptions provided by the four survivors of the poisoning enabled law enforcement authorities to create the first montage photo in Japan. The photo, in turn, helped lead to the arrest of an artist by the name of Hirasawa Sadamichi.

  After being thoroughly grilled, and attempting suicide in prison, Hirasawa confessed. His confession, however, was less than convincing. His written statement, for example, claimed that "the poison was in a bottle similar in shape to a beer bottle, so I poured the substance from the bottle directly into the glasses." The bottles he carried were not shaped like beer bottles, according to the survivors, but wide-mouthed jars. And in describing the drinking vessels, he used the Japanese-Dutch word koppu, used in Japan to mean "drinking glass." Japanese-style teacups, from which the survivors said they drank, are referred to by another term.

  Another discrepancy is that the murderer used a pipette to transfer the substance from the bottle to each teacup. This, in fact, is how investigators assumed he duped his victims into thinking that he drank the same substance first. A harmless oil could easily be floated on the surface of the poison, and a pipette inserted into this top layer would draw off only the oil; subsequent insertions of the pipette would be deeper, so that the tube went beneath the oil layer and sucked out the poison underneath.

  At the time of the incident, Japanese law considered a confession proof of guilt; apparently, there was nothing other than his confession to support belief in his guilt. Even survivors brought in to view Hirasawa in a police lineup said he did not resemble the man who came to the bank. Soon after the Teigin Incident, the law was changed so that a confession on its own would not be considered a reasonable standard of proof to convict a defendant. In contemporary times, there would probably not be enough evidence against Hirasawa to convict him.

  Even the evidence that the state did have proved troublesome—and suspect. Keio University and Tokyo University each performed autopsies on six of the twelve victims chosen at random. Keio found that the poison was acetone cyanohydrin. Two to three months later, Tokyo University issued its findings: the poison was potassium cyanide. The sequence of events surrounding the release of these conflicting autopsy reports is one of the elements that casts an ever darker shadow over the findings, and strengthens suspicions of the incident's connection with Unit 731. The Keio results naming the murder poison as acetone cyanohydrin were released before Hirasawa was arrested. Then, some two to three months after Hirasawa's arrest, Tokyo University came out with its findings that the poison used was potassium cyanide.

  The type of poison used in the crime was a crucial factor in determining the direction in which the finger of accusation would point. Potassium cyanide was a poison with a long history, and it would not be unavailable to someone who really wanted it. An instantaneously acting poison, it would have been unsuitable for a sabotagestyle operation: the victim would succumb immediately upon ingesting the poison, and the identity of the poisoner would be obvious. Accordingly, the Tokyo University findings left room for suspicion.

  On the other hand, acetone cyanohydrin was a poison with a much different history and set of characteristics. The Japanese army had been searching for a poison that would not take effect until a short time after the victim drank it. It had tackled this problem at Noborito Army Research Center in Kawasaki, a laboratory for developing special weapons operating under the same secret army umbrella as Unit 731. Ishii's unit worked closely with Noborito by conducting human tests for products under development. Acetone cyanohydrin was produced under the Noborito poison development program. It had been tested on Chinese prisoners by the Ishii organization under the same ruse used at Teigin, the claim that it was a preventive medicine against a communicable disease. The test produced death in five to six minutes. Provocative, too, was the fact that two boxes of acetone cyanohydrin had disappeared from the Noborito laboratory in the confusion attending the end of the war.

  At the time of the incident, acetone cyanohydrin was not a garden-variety poison like potassium cyanide. It was available only to a very select handful of people—those working at Noborito, and relevant personnel attached to Unit 731. It is highly unlikely that someone like Hirasawa could ever have gotten his hands on it. If acetone cyanohydrin was, in fact, the poison used in the crime, then Hirasawa would be an unlikely suspect. If, on the other hand, the poison were potassium cyanide after all, then Hirasawa could be as suspect as anyone else.

  One question that naturally occurs and recurs is, Why would Hirasawa confess if he were innocent? Investigators into his background turned up evidence that he had been diagnosed as suffering from Korsakoff's Syndrome. This aberrant condition is characterized by irregular memory loss, for which the patient tries to compensate by creating falsehoods. A bigger and more important question, however, is this: Why did the two universities produce such completely different autopsy results?

  The head of the Japanese police investigation into the case reported to the occupation forces that the modus operandi in the Teigin murders bore a "similarity to the training received at the Arsenal [Noborito] laboratory." For that matter, Ishii himself, in one of his interrogation sessions with American military officers, commented on the Teigin murders, "I have the feeling that one of my men did it." These clues pointed the police in the direction of Japan's old biological warfare program, and the police investigation started by zeroing in on former Unit 731 members. A list of suspects was drawn up, and trails led to the army laboratory.

  Then, almost overnight, the direction of the investigation reversed and homed in on Hirasawa; the army laboratory vanished from the radar screens of law enforcement officials. It goes without saying that the Japanese authorities did not want an investigation that would end up publicizing Unit 731 to the outside world. More to the point, though, it is equally obvious that this change in investigative direction served the interests of the American military authorities, since it prevented the Ishii organization from emerging into the spotlight that Washington and SCAP had so vigorously tried to keep it out of.

  The U.S. and Japanese governments' reluctance to consider a possible Unit 731 role in the Teigin Incident would help provide a motive for falsification of the Tokyo University test results, if that is in fact what happened. Tokyo University had strong connections with the Ishii organization, supplying many of the doctors, researchers, and students to the units in China, and working with data provided through human experimentation. This elite (and government-overseen) school also has firm links with Japan's ruling class. Most Japanese politicians at the national level are Tokyo University graduates, and the school could be influenced by government pressure much more easily than Keio, a private university. Critics also point out that it is easier for a court to hand down a
judgment that agrees with the police and public prosecutor. Once the accusation focused on Hirasawa, it had to be supported by the discovery of a means of murder available to him. The secretly produced, generally unknown, and unavailable acetone cyanohydrin did not fit the needs of those who sought to convict Hirasawa.

  In the end, the judgment was handed down that the substance was potassium cyanide and Hirasawa was guilty. He was sentenced to death, but the paper which would have ordered his execution into effect was not stamped. It never was stamped through all the years that he spent in prison. Nobody wanted that responsibility. Hirasawa spent more than three decades under a death penalty that was never put into effect.

  Appalled at this apparent miscarriage of justice in which the evidence had been molded to fit the desired judgment, a small group of people pressed for a reexamination of the case. Their efforts to obtain a retrial continued all the way to the time of Hirasawa's death in jail in 1987, at the age of ninety-five. Today, the Teigin poisoning incident is a mystery that continues to provoke sporadic interest among Japanese. Some researchers into the crime go so far as to suspect that the murders were a postwar extension of Unit 731 activity. To them, the very careful one-minute timing between the first and second liquids was a possible reaction-time test. (This hypothesis posits that the second liquid was not necessarily anything poisonous, but just a decoy to give the criminal an excuse for timing his experiment.) This view is supported by rumors that the U.S. occupation forces were involved and that the bank employees were used as human test subjects. Along these lines, stories also circulated of a GHQ car's having been in the vicinity when the incident took place. These claims are unsubstantiated, though, and seem closer to the category of gossip than decisive proof.