by Hal Gold
"They're burning again today," he said to me.
"Burning what?" I asked.
"Logs."
"But if there are no trees around, how come there are logs to burn?" I wondered.
Then he leveled with me and told me that it was corpses that were making the smoke. He added, "They're spies." In my fourteen-year-old innocence, I thought, "Ah! They were bad people."
T-SAN: In June 1945, we celebrated the anniversary of the founding of Unit 731. We were given special treats to eat.
K-SAN: That was a critical point in time for Unit 731. People were asking what would happen to the unit. Japan had a nonaggression pact with Russia, but that was a treaty made to be broken. The question was, When would they attack? Unit 731 was researching for war against the Soviets.
Unit 731 was not a combat unit. That meant that in the event of an attack, we would have to evacuate and run. The biggest problem would be destroying the evidence.
From May 1945, the lights in the office of the unit leader's office were burning bright. I knew then that something must be happening, but I was too low down in rank to be told what. I found out later that there were conferences of officers going on, and that things were getting bad.
As I mentioned, the point that was constantly under discussion was whether the Soviets would attack or not. And if so, when. Ishii was very democratic. He asked me, an absolute lowest ranking member of the unit, and in polite terms of address that one would normally direct to a person of importance, "What are your thoughts on the matter? Will they attack, or not?"
I answered, "They will."
"And when will it be?"
"After the harvest," I answered.
The educational officer was Lieutenant Colonel Nishi. He was in charge of another branch unit. He felt differently. "That's not correct," he said. "According to my information, they will not attack."
Ishii listened, then ordered Nishi to go to his unit, near the Russian border, and investigate. He never returned. He was captured by the Russians, put on trial at Khabarovsk, and sentenced to twenty-five years at hard labor.
Then it happened. The Soviets came into the war against Japan on August 9. Our unit had military men, civilians, and family members. We were issued small bottles of potassium cyanide to take if we were captured. Ishii was asked what steps were to be taken with the families.
"Let them commit suicide too," was the answer. Major General Kikuike spoke up against that, saying that "we're military men. We're ready to die at any time. But it isn't right for us to kill family members. The unit should take care of getting the families back to the mainland."
The Examination and Treatment Unit was inside the Pingfang compound. Those who could not kill themselves could go there and have it done for them. [In the end, the families were evacuated.]
Y-SAN: I was on security patrol at Togo Village after the families left. The Manchurians would come to steal things, and I was on guard. I also had to burn the remaining corpses. The team leader led us into the cells, and we pulled the corpses out and incinerated them. Then we disposed of the bones. There was a place where animal bones from meals were thrown, and we loaded the maruta bones into a truck and threw them into the same garbage dump. Those maruta had been killed by gas. When our team got to the cell blocks, the bodies were already pulled outside. We had to pour fuel oil on the bodies to keep them burning, because they kept piling up.
K-SAN: We started a new activity in our association. When people see the Unit 731 Exhibition, they think that the unit itself was evil and criticize it. That also contains some error. Our work now should be to leave the truth of history to the people of the future. We want to cooperate with people like Professor Tsuneishi and with groups researching this period. If scholars are going to make judgments, they need research materials, and we have the materials to offer. To make a flat judgment of equating Unit 731 with evil is unwise. So we decided to join with scholars and conduct academic surveys and research.
I first met Ishii Shiro in 1958, on August 17. He said that Unit 731 was an organization that was formed to save Japan, and that when the outfit's time came, it would be announced openly to the world. "You former unit members had no way to apologize," he said, and he bowed his head deeply. Unit 731 conducted research that was unique in the world, and it should be left to the world. On the other hand, there are various ways of thinking in our group. Ishii ordered his men to take the secret to the grave with them, didn't he?
T-SAN: Right. That's what we were told.
K-SAN: I had left for the battlefront, and I didn't hear it myself, so I was in a state of innocence. But I found out much later, in 1958, from Ishii directly. I thought it was time to be released from any obligation of silence. We were free from the muzzling order. Our Memorial Service Association had been formed three years earlier. But is anyone really living in hiding from his past as a member of 731? T-san, you were in the unit for only three or four months. Did you feel it was wrong to come out and reveal it?
T-SAN: No, I didn't feel that.
Y-SAN: There is still a problem of being told that it's wrong for any of us to talk about what we're carrying inside. It was only in 1991 that I made contact with three former Unit 731 men. After the war, I came home a soldier, wearing my army uniform. Then I received one thousand yen. Others, I heard, received three hundred and five hundred yen. That was hush money.
K-SAN: That was not hush money. The money was brought by an army officer. There were still Unit 731 members in Manchuria. That was salary, not hush money.
[This an area of disagreement among former members. Other reports of hush money, however, are convincing, since many payments of huge amounts were made two to three years after the war.]
K-SAN: The Youth Corps made Anda airfield. It was in a remote area that had dry fields with a high alkali content, so there were lots of weeds, and the soil was no good for crops. Unit 731 found that place and made it into an airfield. More than one hundred Youth Corps boys worked on it, leveling the ground with shovels. But first we had to burn the dry grass. That was a scary job. The fire flared up wild. Even the officer in charge was frightened. He screamed, "Put it out! Put it out!" A hot wind came blowing at us and burned our eyebrows. When we thought we had the fire under control, it would flare up in another place and come at us again. The Manchurians in the area had to run.
K-SAN: We were issued potassium cyanide by the team leader. That's why Unit 731 members were suspect when the Teigin Incident happened. The potassium cyanide was given to everyone. Maybe some fourteen-year-olds would have drunk it if they'd been captured by the Russians. That's what education does. We had to give the poison back after we reached Japan.
When we pulled out of Pingfang we were armed, so we were able to reach Pusan. On the way, we were attacked by Koreans.
T-SAN: After we'd burned the bodies, our next job was to destroy the prison cells. We chiseled holes in the wall, about as big around as your thumb, and the explosives experts planted dynamite. But it wouldn't break the walls down. Those facilities were built strong. Even the windows were tough to break.
Unit 731 had planes called Donru ["Big Dragon."] that were very effective in the war. They could launch torpedoes and flare shells, and they broke down the buildings with aerial torpedoes. At the time, the tallest building in Japan was the Marunouchi Building. The Pingfang building was several times higher. And the facilities were the best. There was a good boiler and heating system because of the cold winters.
K-SAN: I remember the night they woke us and ordered us to destroy the buildings and equipment. I had to go in to clean out the cells and there were pillows in there that were all bloody. Ordinary pillows, several of them in one room. That puzzled me.
It took us three days to destroy the facilities. We probably started on the tenth of August, because the Soviets came into Manchuria on the ninth. My elder sister was working on the army telephone switchboard in Xinjing. She called me and said that we'd be going home. I think that was before we
started breaking up the buildings, and before the Soviets came into the war. It might have been around the seventh or eighth that she called and told me that.
Y-SAN: I think the first time I saw Ishii was when we were getting ready to destroy the buildings. We were all mustered, getting orders from the officers. I was all the way in the back, and Ishii was sitting up front, so all I saw was the back of his head. In fact, I don't really know if it was Ishii.
When we left Pingfang, we all loaded onto a train and pulled out. There were food supplies already on board, and we traveled day and night. When we got to Changchun, the train engineer ran away and we sat there for two or three days until a replacement could be found. They had to bring him at gunpoint.
[The problem of the fleeing engineer is mentioned also by Akama Masako, who was evacuated on the same train. This is clarified by a Chinese historical researcher who came to Japan to attend the Iwate exhibition.]
Y-SAN: At the end of the war, Unit 731 members raced for the Korean border. Lines of communications were jammed, and confusion was everywhere. When the train got to Changchun it was known that the war was over. At least the leaders and the train engineer knew, and that's why the engineer fled. He was Chinese, and if he were to enter Korea he would be in trouble.
The officer in charge distributed potassium cyanide in small brown bottles, telling us, "If you're captured, drink this." The bottles were confiscated later, after we left Manchuria and the leaders felt that we had made good our escape from the Russians. Then, when we landed in Japan, we were told, "Don't contact other members of the unit. Say nothing to anyone about it."
I was there only three to four months, so there are many people who I wouldn't know. And we have nothing left from those days. They made us burn everything, even photos of our families that we had carried with us. So we don't remember names or faces.
Nurse attached to Unit 731 (Akama Masako)
[Akama went to Unit 731 as a nurse attached to the maternity section. Her husband and uncle were also in the unit, and her cousin worked in the boiler room, making four family members connected with 731.
She went back to China in recent years to apologize for the deeds of Unit 731. She met with the wife of a man who had been tortured and then sent to Unit 731, where he was sacrificed in the experiments. His name was found in old municipal records, and his crime was listed as transmitting anti-occupation information by wireless radio.
At her appearance before some one thousand people in Takatsuki, Osaka Prefecture, Akama spoke with difficulty, the result of advanced age and poor physical condition. She advised her listeners that this was the last time she would appear before an audience.]
With the syphilitic mothers, the doctor in charge of our team delivered the maruta babies himself instead of having the nurses do it, as would normally be the case. At that time, he would order me to stop the blood flow from the mother to the baby. The doctor would take a sample of the blood, then I would let small quantities of blood flow intermittently, as he took successive samples. The test tubes were all lined up on the shelf. He was checking to determine the intensity of the syphilis transmitted from mother to child, and the progression of the disease from the time of birth.
A researcher came running in, screaming that some maruta had escaped. They were caught by the Special Forces. That was the team under Ishii Shiro's brother, Ishii Takeo. Only someone who could be trusted was admitted to that team. They shot the escapees.
When it came time to evacuate, we got into a train and left the unit headquarters. It was a long train, maybe twenty or thirty cars. A soldier came running to me and said that a baby was going to be born in a freight car at the end of the train. We ran back through the cars. The wife of one of the unit members was there in labor, and there were soldiers with lots of medals. Surrounded by those high-ranking officers, I delivered the baby. That was August 15, 1945. We were passing through Xinjing. The train engineer ran away, and we couldn't move. Planes were flying overhead, keeping lookout; soldiers were around us. I was trembling in fear. This, I felt, was really war.
Then, we heard the emperor's words ending the war. We were always told to "work hard and Japan will definitely win." When I heard that we had lost, I was sad.
It grew dark. Ishii came over to us carrying a big candle and said, "I'm sending you all back home. When you get there, if any one of you gives away the secret of Unit 731, I personally will find you, even if I have to part the roots of the grasses to do it." He had a fearful, diabolical look on his face. My legs were shaking. And not just at me—at everyone. "Even if I have to part the grasses ..."
He told us never to go for a job in a public office. That order limited my husband's chances of employment in Japan. He couldn't apply for a job with a government agency, and he ended his life doing hard work. He wasn't made for that.
Kenpeitai officer (Naganuma Setsuji)
[Naganuma was eighty-one years old at the time he gave this talk. He spoke at Takatsuki City, Osaka Prefecture, in December 1994.]
I am a war criminal. I served in Manzhouguo [Manchukuo], that phony country created by Japan.
In August 1945, the Soviets invaded Manchuria. I was captured and imprisoned for five years in the Soviet Union, where I did forced labor on very meager rations. I was in my early thirties and still strong, so I managed to survive. A lot of those in their fifties and sixties died of malnutrition and exhaustion. There were too many prisoners for the Russians to handle—some six hundred thousand. They returned most of the prisoners to Japan and kept about one thousand of us considered to be war criminals.
Then we were sent to China and placed in a big prison that had been built by the Japanese army. We spent six years there, undergoing mental training—brainwashing.
When I was doing my work in Manchuria, I arrested a spy. He was a Korean who had taken part in his country's independence movement, then gone to the Soviet Union for education. He had come to Dalian through the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party and was a bright and efficient spy. He observed the movements of Japanese army baggage and equipment and other details of troop activity, and sent the information to the Soviet Union by wireless radio.
Then we found a connection to the Soviet consulate in Dalian. I was in charge of the squad that attacked the place. I took about sixty men, and we surrounded the consulate. We arrested everyone in the spy ring and found one wireless transmitter. We also found the names of spies in other cities, and they were arrested, too.
I received orders from my unit commander to send four of the arrested men to Unit 731. At that time I had no sense that I was a party to any killing. I only filed the papers and sent the men to Unit 731.
In 1992, a group of us former kenpeitai men went to China to apologize to the family members of the people we had sent to Unit 731. One woman, now about sixty, was the grandchild of one of the victims. She told us, "Our grandfather was killed by Unit 731 in experiments. He was killed because the kenpeitai sent him. If you hadn't sent him, he would have lived. You are killers just like those doctors." We prostrated ourselves in apology, and she kept pressing the fact home that we were partners in the crime—as guilty as the doctors of Unit 731.
And it's true! It is just as she said. Apologizing does not erase the crime. After I got out of prison in China, I spoke with my fellow former kenpeitai members. We were the aggressors. Most of the Japanese participants in the war were aggressors. Orders came from above—orders from the emperor—and people were killed because it couldn't be helped. According to international convention, those who kill in combat are not criminals. The three thousand people killed by Unit 731 were all sent there by the kenpeitai or the police. We thought we were doing good for the army by sending prisoners there. From the point of view of the families of the victims, even killing the kenpeitai would not be satisfaction enough, and I represent one of those kenpeitai.
When this Unit 731 Exhibition brought out testimonies like my own, many people were cynical and asked why we were silent fo
r so long. People come to these exhibitions and say, "I was in the Youth Corps then," and "I was doing this or that then." The pioneering group who went to develop Manchuria sometimes tell how they cooperated with Unit 731 without knowing, by providing rats for experiments, and they also say "We were accessories to the crime." My younger brother told me there's no need to talk about those days now. He told me to forget it, to be quiet about it. I became chairman of our senior citizens club, and I was told the same thing there. There's no use in talking about those things now. Forget it.
An honorary professor at Ibaraki University wrote in a newspaper article, "'The Japanese army committed all sorts of cruelties in China and Southeast Asia. Japanese children know nothing about it. Why? Because the parents say nothing about it."
I also said nothing. These days, there are all sorts of moves toward friendship with China and Asian nations— but without children's knowing these things it is impossible to establish real friendship. It is the duty of those who experienced war to tell these things to their children and grandchildren, to tell of the real horrors of war.
When I read that statement, it strengthened my resolve to speak out. Unit 731 is being written about in Japanese books now. People like Dr. Yamaguchi are studying it from a medical point of view, asking how it could have happened. But these are all peripheral issues. The main point is that the objective of Unit 731's work was the development of bacteriological weapons. The situation with Japan grew worse, and Ishii and the army knew that Japan was losing and Russia would attack. The Kwantung Army in Manchuria was emptied out, being dispatched to places like the Philippines and Okinawa. Japanese living in Manchuria were drafted to fill in the ranks, so there was no real Kwantung Army force in Manchuria at the time. Most were not well-educated. Ishii's idea was that when the Russians attacked, we would drop bacteriological weapons from the air and spread disease. His plan was to accumulate three hundred thousand rats, and fleas.