Unit 731

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Unit 731 Page 12

by Hal Gold


  Ando Koji (Head, Dalian Laboratory) Professor, Tokyo University Laboratory for Communicable Diseases Head, Central Laboratory for Experimental Animals

  Asahina Masajiro (Typhus vaccine production team) National Institute of Health

  Futagi Hideo (Vivisection team leader) Cofounder, Green Cross Corporation

  Kasuga Tadayoshi (Dalian Laboratory) Kitasato Research Laboratory Ministry of Education, Pertussis (Whooping cough) Research Team

  Kimura Yasushi* (Professor, Kyoto University) Assistant head, Japan Medical Association President, Nagoya City University of Medicine

  Kitano Masaji (EHF research, frostbite research) Cofounder, Green Cross Corporation Special Committee for Antarctic Research Ministry of Education, Pertussis Research Team

  Kobayashi Rokuzo* (Professor, Keio University) Director, First Division, National Institute of Health

  Kojima Saburo* (Tokyo University Laboratory for Communicable Diseases) Director, Second Division, National Institute of Health

  Miyagawa Yoneji* (Head, Tokyo University Laboratory for Communicable Diseases) Toshiba Biophysics and Biochemistry Research Laboratory

  Murata Yoshisuke (Nanjing, Unit 1644) National Institute of Health

  Naito Ryoichi (Bacteriological research) Cofounder, Green Cross Corporation

  Ogata Tomio* (Assistant professor, Tokyo University Laboratory for Communicable Diseases) Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Tokyo University

  Ogawa Torn (Nanjing, Unit 1644) Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Nagoya City University

  Okamoto Kozo (Pathology research team) Dean, Faculty of Medicine, Kyoto University Dean, Faculty of Medicine, Kinki University

  Sonoguchi Tadao (Biological warfare development) Vice-principal, School of Hygiene of the Japan SelfDefense Forces.

  Tanaka Hideo (Plague-carrying fleas team) Dean, Faculty of Medicine, Osaka City University

  Toda Shozo* (Professor, Kyoto University) Member of the Special Committee for Antarctic Research President, Kanazawa University

  Yanagizawa Ken* (Tuberculosis research team) Head, (5th) National Institute of Health

  PART

  2

  TESTIMONIES

  Introduction

  The Unit 731 Exhibition started touring Japan in July 1993, and continued through December 1994. During that period of approximately one and a half years, it was presented at sixty-one locations. Some materials were borrowed from China, where a permanent memorial museum has been established. Actual photographs of the units are very rare, due to (alleged) destruction or the fact that they remain hidden in private or official corners. Much of the exhibition consisted of written, explanatory panels. This paucity of photographic and other graphic material itself points to a surprising result of the exhibit: organizers of the various local exhibitions repeatedly noted that, despite the large amount of written material on display, people took the time to read.

  This eagerness and receptivity with which people attended the exhibition, in turn, leads to another question, simultaneously encouraging and troubling. Do the Japanese people, as is often asserted, really want to be ignorant of their country's checkered past? Or is it just their textbook-censoring leadership that wishes for them to remain so?

  At the venues of the Unit 731 Exhibition, visitors were invited to write their impressions and comments. One sixteen-year-old high school student wrote that he had

  read books and articles on Unit 731, but this was my first time hearing talks by those who actually experienced it. In that sense, coming here today was extremely good. From the time I was in elementary school, I had heard stories from people who experienced bombing raids during the Pacific War. But even though we hear from various sources about our being victims of war, there is almost no talk about Japan's being an assailant. It is important to tell the story from both sides; especially to us in the generation that does not know war, the words of those who did experience it are most valuable. That is why it would be good to increase the places where these words could be heard.

  It took about two hours to come here from my home. If I hadn't come I would not have been able to hear these talks.

  It is the intention of the author to enable to reader, as best as possible, to share the experience of those who, like that high school student, were impressed and shocked by the words of those who were involved.

  Some of these recollections were tape-recorded at exhibition sites. Others came from booklets of the testimonies which were printed up afterward by the various localities where the exhibitions were staged, largely as a volunteer effort.

  Not all the speakers felt free to identify themselves. After living with their secrets for fifty years, a reversal of behavior had to come in stages. For most of the people testifying, this was the first stage.

  Speaking of these things for the first time in front of people, they reached back in time to reconstruct an ugly past while peeling down emotional barriers layered on through a half-century of silence. These catharses did not always come smoothly, and thoughts are sometimes left ragged by emotions. As a result, some narratives may seem a bit disjointed at times. Despite this tendency, however, meanings and sentiments come through with painful clarity.

  Persons are identified with the information available, or with that which they permitted. In some cases, it was relatives who wished for the speakers to keep their identities—and those of their families—confidential. In other cases, half a century was not yet enough to provide a completely healing balm for the scars left by Unit 731.

  Researcher attached to Unit 1644 (Anonymous)

  [The person who provided this testimony is compiling an account of his experiences at Unit 1644. He and his family are not yet in agreement about his releasing his name, and this excerpt was offered with that understanding.]

  I was working as a civilian employee at the Army Medical College in Tokyo. In July 1942, I was transferred to China, and the following month I was assigned to Unit 1644 in Nanjing. In October 1944, I became a member of the army as an enlisted man in the Hygiene Corps.

  An associated unit of Unit 731 was set up in Nanjing shortly after that city fell into Japanese hands. Equipment and people were transferred from Harbin. Facilities were great; we even had a swimming pool. The grounds and buildings were superior, of a quality not to be found in Japan. Under the regime of Jiang Jieshi, this had originally been a people's hospital. The front of the hospital complex extended two hundred meters, cut off by a high wall with a guard gate for egress. The grounds extended about seven hundred meters back from this front wall, and there was a large red cross at the top of the main building.

  Some buildings left over from earlier times served as facilities like a glass factory and a print shop. One part of the compound was made into a ranch for animals. A running creek separated the animal area from the rest of the compound, and kept the animals from wandering outside the ranch. There was a bridge with a gate over the creek for people to cross over.

  Unit 1644 was classified as a battalion, but our budget was the same as that normally allotted to a regiment. People working in the unit were military doctors, medical specialists, interpreters, and civilian employees.

  Our activities included developing preventative vaccines, tending the animals, and drawing the animals' blood for vaccine research and production. A water purification team carried equipment out to different areas for water treatment. I was assigned to the vaccine group. There were one hundred twenty of us, about ten percent of the total complement of the unit. Every day, I would be given information on the previous day's work, including which army doctor performed what work, what results had been obtained, and so forth. I had the job of writing down all these details in a research statement, then I stamped it "secret" and locked it in a safe.

  One day a Chinese man tried to take the written records. He was caught and arrested. Shortly afterward, an officer came from Japan, and I was promised an award; the war ended before I had a chance to get it.

  Everyone connected with huma
n experiments wore a special button on the side of his hat. The maruta were kept in cages on the top floor of a three-story building. The cages were referred to as rotsu [probably from the Japanese katakana character ro, which is square in shape; the prison block at Pingfang was called rogo for this reason], and the floor where they were kept was always just called the "third floor."

  One had to pass through the main offices in order to get to the third floor, where the cages were. The area where the prisoners were was sealed off with a door. One meter in front of the door and on its other side were disinfectant mats to prevent bacteriological contaminants from being carried outside on people's shoes.

  Inside the door, the room was about ten by fifteen meters with cages all in a row. Most of the maruta in the cages were just lying down. In the same room were oil cans with mice that had been injected with plague germs, and with fleas feeding on the mice. These were not the usual types of fleas, but a transparent variety. Around the perimeter of the room was a thirty-centimeter-wide trough of running water. [The purpose of the trough, which is wider than the distance over which the fleas can leap, is apparently to keep the fleas from going outside the room.]

  Next to the dissection room was the specimen room. Every year, when the new soldiers came in, the first job they got was cleaning up at night around the human specimen room. The other soldiers would put a dish of fireflies in the specimen room by the window facing the corridor. The fireflies swarming around the specimens of body parts created an eerie feeling, and some of the young recruits suffered emotional problems from the experience.

  Virologist attached to Unit 731 (Anonymous)

  In 1934, I graduated Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine. I then continued my research, specializing in virology. Ishii came on one of his trips to Kyoto looking for people to join him as civilian employees at the Army Medical College in Tokyo. One of the people he recruited was Okamoto Kozo. He gathered some people, but there were no virus specialists among them. Among those who went with Ishii were some of my acquaintances who had been senior to me in earlier days at university, so I joined also and became a civilian employee with pay and status equivalent to an army first lieutenant. I became qualified as an army lab technician, then, in 1939, I was transferred to the unit at Harbin. In 1942, as soon as Singapore was. taken over by the Japanese army, I was sent there to help in setting up a unit. I was there until October 1944, when I was sent back to Japan and assigned by the Ministry of Education to teach bacteriology at the Yamanashi Prefectural University of Medicine.

  At one stage, I worked at an important post in Yokohama studying the control of viruses in a range of temperatures. We worked on strengthening viruses that become weak in high temperatures and lose their virulence. The method involved dehydrating the viruses by reducing air pressure and lowering temperature, and our job was developing the machinery to accomplish this.

  The water filtration system that Ishii developed in Pingfang was used in Kyoto in the Fushimi district for treating water in saké brewing. The bacteria filter was checked at the army school, and after it passed the checks, it was sent to Manchuria. The checking was done by Naito Ryoichi.

  I began working at Pingfang in the spring of 1939. Since Japan is an island country with no borders with other countries, Japanese would be especially susceptible to bacteria and might be expected to succumb readily to pathogens encountered in foreign lands. Although researchers were conducting experiments, many did not think that a bacteriological war could or would really be prosecuted.

  Smallpox is endemic to Manchuria, but Manchurians have a degree of natural immunity to the disease. Even without vaccination, the death rate of those afflicted is below thirty percent, while the Japanese death rate was about eighty percent. The disease was epidemic in China and we had to develop a method of preventing it among members of the Japanese army. Test subjects were available in Manchuria. One could see the faces of those scarred by the disease. It was not necessary to use maruta for this purpose. Maruta were sent in by the kenpeitai in Harbin, but we did not have to use them for this disease.

  At that time, the general thinking at the unit was that it was necessary to sacrifice three maruta in order to save one hundred Japanese soldiers. For a technician though, if a maruta is sacrificed without a real reason, it is folly. Technicians have to go into animal cages and work in a dirty environment, but we get accustomed to this. There was much more resistance to going into cells with people.

  We worked in the city of Mudanjiang. It is the custom in China that when someone has smallpox a red curtain is hung in the window of the house. When we spotted one of these, we would go in and try to remove and isolate the patient. We used the opium dens as isolation centers, but when we tried taking patients there they would run away. The Manchurians even ran away when we tried to give them preventive vaccinations. With young girls, pock marks on the face mean that they could not be sold at a high price, so parents brought their daughters in for preventive vaccinations. Males were not so concerned with appearance and did not come in to be vaccinated.

  We set up a vaccination post at a railroad crossing where the people had to pass every day and forced vaccinations on them. We stamped the hand of each person to identify him or her as having been vaccinated. While the stamp was still wet, some people would transfer the stamp to the hand of a friend who did not want the vaccination. Of course, the character would come out backwards, so we were on the lookout for these. Later, local newspapers carried stories about the smallpox rate having been reduced through our efforts.

  In the summer of 1941, five different teams from Unit 731 were dispatched to different areas to treat outbreaks of disease. I was in a unit sent to a town with an outbreak of typhus to treat patients and carry out preventive measures. After that we were called back to Harbin, and then we went to Dalian and boarded a ship. It was not until we were at sea that we were told our destination. We were headed for Saigon. We were conducting water checks in Saigon and just waiting for "X-Day," the opening of war between Japan and the United States. At that time, the water wells in Saigon were under the control and protection of the French army. The Japanese army was very cautious about water supply from experiences in which retreating Chinese had poisoned wells. We kept these thoughts in mind when we moved into Saigon after Japan took over from the French.

  In February 1942, Singapore fell to Japan. I was separated from my unit, which went on to Palau, and I was transferred to help set up an Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit branch for the Southern Army in Singapore. I arrived less than one week after Singapore was occupied. The oil tanks were still burning from the battles.

  We established the unit at [the former] Raffles Medical University. The unit was set up by Naito Ryoichi and designated Oka 9420 and staffed by about one thousand persons. It was felt that such a large staff was necessary to handle the flow of Japanese personnel going to and coming in from Japan. There were no branch units at outside locations, so when there was an outbreak of disease, teams were dispatched from our unit. The unit leader was Major General Kitagawa Masataka. Within Unit 9420, disease prevention activities centered around two subunits. One was the Kono Unit, named for that unit's leader and specializing in malaria. I was in charge of the other unit, called the Umeoka Unit. My name was not appropriate for a military unit and so the Oka character was borrowed from the main unit's designation, and Ume added to form my subunit's name. [The inappropriateness was because the person testifying had an aristocratic name.]

  At the time, I was the only civilian subunit leader. My position was equivalent to that of a major. The car at my disposal bore a flag on the fender that was not an officer's flag but was made to look similar, so when I went through the streets soldiers saluted me.

  After the Singapore unit was set up in 1942, research into plague was carried on. One stage of this was highly dangerous and handled only by specially trained Japanese staff. But there were also cases of plague infection that occurred within the unit. As far as I kn
ow, the dangerous work was not handled by any of the young local boys employed there. Making the vaccine lymph itself was not dangerous, and the local people were enlisted to help in this work. I saw the Singapore Straits Times article about a man who worked there when he was a boy. He told of how they chloroformed rats and removed fleas from their bodies. The purpose of that work was to study the percentage of the fleas which are carriers of plague germs and so determine the probabilities of plague epidemics. The purposes for breeding fleas in the laboratory were to develop an antidote against plague and to produce fleas for research.

  When the fleas were handled, there was a chance that they could get into people's clothes. So, in that hot climate, people wore loincloths when handling the non-infected fleas. When a flea lands on the bare skin it is immediately discernible and can be brushed off. People wore rubber boots with the tops sealed against their legs with petroleum jelly to prevent fleas from entering.

  Singapore was at the front lines of the war and also was the base for the Japanese Southern Army and a supply center, sending materials out to other army units. Prevention of communicable diseases in Singapore was a high priority. The municipal water supply was checked every day, and fresh food supplies were also constantly checked. We performed hygiene checks to a degree never before seen in that area. None of the residents had ever seen such exacting checks carried out. Our activities seemed strange to the local people, soldiers catching rats in the city and bringing them in to have fleas picked from them.

  Toward the end of the war, Singapore fell rather early. Malaria was a major cause. The mosquitoes which carry the disease breed in the coral. There were two types of quinine used as preventive medicine; Japan produced a hydrochloride type, and Java produced a sulfate type. The latter was all that was available due to our supplies' being cut off, but it causes severe side effects in the stomach, and for this reason the soldiers refused to take it. This resulted in the malaria's spread. When the American subs started coming into Singapore, the Japanese army was too disabled by sickness to fight them off. Cut off from food and munitions, Singapore fell.

 

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