by Hal Gold
The American navy was attacked at Pearl Harbor, and the Japanese thought it was a victorious strike. Yet, within two years, America had built up its naval strength again. America is a machine society. But bacteriological warfare does not rely on machinery. So Ishii's idea was to kill all the attacking Russians with disease. Once killed, troops are not rebuilt like machinery. The Japanese army promised Chinese children money for bringing in rats, but later gave them a pencil for every rat. The end purpose of all this effort was war. In war, the side who kills more people wins. Bacteria can kill on a large scale, so Ishii pressed this forward.
Former kenpeitai buddies and I used to meet to drink, and we would talk about the war days. But nobody ever spoke about sending people to Unit 731. And of course the children were never told. I knew that what we did was wrong and did not want to tell my family about it. Then, one day, I called my family together—children and grandchildren—and told them that I was going to testify about what I did during the war. The was the first time I said anything about it. Overcoming my reluctance to speak that first time made it possible for me to tell my story repeatedly.
I was reading the impressions written down by visitors to one of these Unit 731 exhibits. A thirteen-year-old girl wrote, "I apologize for the people killed by the Japanese."
And a nineteen-year-old boy wrote, "The government spends all its time talking about low-level matters. If we keep going this way, the same situation will happen again."
People criticize the youth of today for spending their time reading comic books and watching TV; grownups accuse them of not knowing what's going on in the world. But, they are aware. They know what's going on. And the grownups had better be aware, also.
We kenpeitai men sent three thousand people to their deaths in Unit 731. I pray for the repose of their souls.
Army doctor (Yuasa Ken)
[This is a "composite" speech edited from several different talks given by the speaker. Yuasa spoke at several exhibitions around Japan in 1993 and 1994.]
This is not easy for me to speak about, but it is something I must confess. What I did was wrong. It is also true that it was forced on me by the government, but that does not reduce the size of my crime. It is something that happened a long time ago, but those who are not taught about the war are ill-educated.
A short while ago, the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Japan stated that Japanese aggression in China created twenty million [dead] victims. He later retracted that statement. There was no need for the retraction. The statement was true.
The Japanese army went to plunder and steal materials and to kill. Japan wanted iron, coal, and provisions, and the army drove into the mountains to prosecute the war. At the time, the Japanese used derogatory terms for the Chinese, like "Chinaman" and "Chink," and looked at them with contempt. When I was a child, we were told to despise the Chinese, despise the Koreans. "It's all right to conquer them. We have become elite, and should join with the Americans and British and conquer Asia." I hated war and killing, but around middle school and into college, I began to think that such ideas were unavoidable.
I was born into a doctor's family with a practice in our area. With the good fortune of that background, I graduated medical school. I wanted to serve in some village that had no doctor, or work in medical research, but circumstances did not permit it.
In 1941, I became a doctor and specialized in infectious diseases. I believed that under the emperor we were the greatest country in Asia. I became an army officer, different from ordinary people. I was proud to be under direct control of the emperor, and I was taught that if I believed in the emperor, my own happiness would come as an extension of that.
Some 1,700 or 1,800 of us from the Thirty-sixth Regiment in Iwate received training in hygiene, and in February 1942, we were sent overseas. Reflecting on it now brings the crime back to mind.
I was assigned to the army hospital in the southern part of Shanxi Province in China.
Why here? What was the purpose in carrying the war this deep into the country?
The purpose was robbery. Robbery was committed through use of equipment with high killing power. Kill anyone who resists, and use force to seize supplies, coal, and iron. And increase military power.
Shanxi Province had a population of thirty million. It was held by only sixty to seventy thousand Japanese troops through control of the cities, lines of communications, and railways. And in that way Japan stole its resources. It was an aggressive invasion, but we were forcibly indoctrinated to believe. That was the emperor system. The national anthem and the flag were awesome.
There was a railway line between our region and Dalian that was destroyed often by the Chinese. Japanese soldiers were stationed at places along the way, but there were vast stretches that could not be watched simulatneously. The People's Liberation Army used to come in and overturn trains and tear the rails apart. To prevent recurrences of such incidents, the Japanese army burned down the villages nearest to the damage. Or the villagers would be questioned about the whereabouts of the People's Liberation Army. Anyone who refused to answer was killed. This is how the entire country was occupied and held.
The Manchurian Incident of 1931 and the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937 happened under the pretext that we were protecting China from invasion by the U.S. and Great Britain. People were driven into a life in which human qualities were lost. The soldier's outlet for frustrations was the brothels of the comfort women. Any means was resorted to in order to raise one's rank and keep up the authority of the country. And in the army hospital, we practiced vivisection.
The battle line was being extended. We had to consider how to handle men who were wounded at the front. About half the army doctors did not know how to use a scalpel. Each method of treating sick and wounded soldiers at the front had a bearing on military strength. If men were sent behind the lines for treatment, it reduced the army's fighting strength considerably. One function of the army hospital was training doctors. Vivisection was used to practice for performing operations at the front lines. I operated on living Chinese for whom I had no hatred whatsoever to gain surgical ability in order to win the war.
The hospital I was assigned to was set up in an elementary school and a high school. There were seventy to eighty hygiene specialists, ten nurses, and ten army doctors and officers in our unit. Our job was to treat sick and wounded soldiers and send them back to the front lines.
One day I went into the school grounds. There were some Chinese soldiers of the resistance army and some peasants being held there, and Japanese soldiers were smoking and joking around among themselves. I still had a conscience then, and I asked if someone had done something bad enough to warrant an execution. The Japanese soldiers snickered derisively. "All resistance soldiers get executed," they answered. Living persons are good for scalpel practice, so people were brought in to the hospital by the kenpeitai to get cut up just like the maruta in Unit 731.
One day soon after I started at that assignment, the hospital head told us, "Today we will have surgery practice." I was startled. It was an order. There was no getting out of it. Normally, we dissected people who had died of such diseases as typhoid fever, dysentery, and tuberculosis. Now we were being taken to the dissection room for a different type of exercise. Soldiers came along as observers.
When we opened the door, there was a colonel waiting. We saluted. In the room were two Chinese who had been brought in by the kenpeitai. One looked like a soldier, the other was a farmer. There were two operating tables, and doctors and nurses; there were saws for cutting bones, and scissors and other equipment.
What did these people do? It must have been an act of patriotism. But I couldn't think about things like that back then. I only wanted to look good. We had an education in militarism, and in racism. We thought, "Ah! They surrendered to the Japanese army."
Everything started with a signal from the hospital head. One Chinese had big thighs and walked slowly and calmly. He lay down and had
no sign of fear, no stress on his face. He was composed. Someone else used him for surgery practice.
I went over and pushed the other one to the operating table. I had no feeling of apology or of doing anything bad. The farmer was resigned to his fate, and he lowered his head and walked forward. I didn't want to get my clothes dirty from him; I wanted to look sharp. He went as far as the operating table but didn't want to lie down. A nurse using broken Chinese told him, "We're using ether; it won't hurt, so lie down." She gave me a wry smile when she said that. She had been working there for a long time, and when I happened to meet her again much later and asked her about it, she didn't remember. She was handling so many vivisections it was routine. People who repeat evil acts do not remember them. There is no sense of doing wrong.
War means this, also. War is not just shooting. In order for Japan to win, all the Chinese were made prisoners, women's bellies were cut open, homes were burned. If you couldn't do this, then you weren't a loyal soldier of the emperor.
The scene in the room was not a typical one of preparing for an operation, but a clamor. It was practice for army doctors for winning a war. If you made a disagreeable face, when you returned home you would be called a traitor or turncoat. If it were just me alone, I could tolerate it; but the insulting looks would be cast on parents and siblings. Even if one despises an act, one must bear it. From there, a person becomes accustomed to it.
We all received practice. It was normal to smile at this. The crimes committed during our aggressive wars are forgotten, gone from memory. At the time they were "right." If you are praised, you must go ahead and perform.
Surgery began. The man was given ether and dissected. His appendix was so small that it was like looking for a burrowing worm. I had to cut and search repeatedly. The blood flow was stopped, nerves were cut, bones were cut with a saw, and a tracheotomy was performed. Blood and air escaped from his body, and blood came foaming up. Practice time was two hours. The man died, and his body was thrown into a hole and buried. The burial area near the operating room was full, so we had to dig a hole farther away. We had received a request from a Japanese pharmaceutical manufacturer; I scraped samples from the outer covering of his brain, placed them into ten 500-cc bottles with alcohol, and sent them to the company for rheumatism research.
The other man, the soldier, was still panting. The hospital head used him for hypodermic practice and injected air into him. Then, to kill him, he injected the same liquid used for anesthesia.
That was my first crime. After that, it was easy. Eventually I dissected fourteen Chinese.
Once, I instructed a hygiene specialist in anatomy. We had charts and models, but I thought that actual experience would be faster. I contacted the kenpeitai and received one person. I cut the belly and the chest. I explained the intestines, the kidneys, the liver, and the stomach—I was doing hideous things.
I also saw vivisections. Once I saw about forty doctors gathered. There was a man bound and squatting. The guard asked the doctors, "Are you ready?" and the prisoner was laid out and, without anesthetic, two cuts were made down his belly. The victim made a few gasps—the dissection was a botch—and he died soon. I saw four people dissected that way.
Once, at the Shanxi First Army Headquarters, there were some forty army doctors gathered from base and field hospitals. There was a lecture on military medicine, and afterward we were led to the prison cells. There were two Chinese in a cell. The jailer took out his pistol and fired two shots into each of their bellies. One of them was vivisected right there in the room. There was no anesthesia. While this was going on I heard four more shots fired. That meant two more people. Our object was to keep the person alive until the bullets were removed. Since we neither tried to administer ether nor stop the flow of blood, the men died soon.
At Unit 731, the special team carried out tests with poisons at the ends of prison blocks 1 and 2. There was an iron door, and even unit members needed permission to enter here. The special team members startled me when I first saw their unusual manner of dress. They wore white coverall suits, army hats, rubber boots, and pistols strapped to their sides. They first came here to supervise the preliminary construction work of the facilities, then later became the Special Team. They even had their own quarters. They were all from around Ishii's hometown, and the leader was Ishii Shiro's elder brother.
A secret order came to the hospitals in northern China: "The war is not going well. Perform vivisections!" Thousands, or tens of thousands, of doctors used live subjects for dissection practice and research. What are those people doing now? Among the sixty or seventy thousand Japanese who went to China, forty to fifty thousand are still alive in Japan. There may be some feeling of shame, but most have forgotten. Soldiers went to the comfort women, and they raped them. Then, the next day, they would regain their strength to attack the Chinese. That's all forgotten in the Japan of today. I also believed that when I went to the comfort women I was merely paying for services. That was the level of my consciousness.
It is said that there were twenty million victims of the war in China. But only ten to twenty percent of these were killed in gunfire exchange. Most—non-resisting old people, women, and children—were captured and slaughtered. Prisoners of war could not be taken to the front or allowed to escape, so they were killed in the manner of the Rape of Nanjing.
Those who were part of it do not come forward to tell the people how it was. Why? Because the Japanese have all forgotten about it.
When I was captured in China, I did not realize my own crimes. I thought I had been taken prisoner only because Japan lost the war; the Japanese army's education was thorough. While I was confessing, I read what other people had written, and I realized that what they had done was wrong. But I also had been performing dissections on living people. Those who commit evil acts first wonder if anybody knows about it. The Chinese told me, "You came here because you were ordered to do so. But you yourself murdered. So write down everything honestly."
Prisoners who had committed light crimes were given two and a half years. More serious offenders were forwarded to another location, and their cases reviewed after three and a half years.
I spent eleven years in prison. Shortly before I was released, I received a letter from the aged mother of someone who was killed. She wrote, "I saw you people take him away. I was choked with emotion, and I ran after you with my bound feet. Later I learned that he was taken to the army hospital and cut up alive. I cried. I couldn't eat."
In July 1956, I was released from prison The person who came to meet me asked, "Why were you considered a war criminal? You were tough and you worked hard." I told him he was wrong, and reminded him that he did the same things in China, also. He said, "Oh, that," and he thought back and grimaced. That man died six years ago. If I had not said anything about our past deeds, he would have died without realizing what he had done.
I was interviewed by a newspaper reporter at my home, and he commented that in spite of what I had done, I am still active as a doctor. "In Germany," he told me, "you would have been placed on trial."
It is not just the political and social sectors in Japan that ignore this past. The same tendency exists even in popular literature. European and American films take up the topic of soldiers who were in the Vietnam War coming down with psychological problems, developing neuroses, and even committing suicide. But in Japan, people who were guilty of atrocities in the war do not shudder from their crimes or commit suicide. It does not even happen in the popular literature. Why is it that, in this country, an offense is not considered a crime and people go on living without giving a second thought to such things? And in the midst of this, the economy has kept growing. This is Japan.
Twelve years ago I published a collection of my experiences in a book called Unerasable Memories. I gave copies to all my former army associates. Some people objected to my doing this, but at a gathering of former soldiers a while ago, an ex-high ranking officer commended me for it. "We did horrible th
ings then," he said. "I can't say anything to my family, but I want to speak about it here. Let's get together every year."
Everybody forgot. They did "great" things and got medals, and they don't think they did anything worse than kicking a dog. I asked if anyone had nightmares about what he did, and nobody seemed bothered. People said that they had nightmares only when they were children and didn't have their homework ready for school. They weren't bothered because they never considered it a dreadful thing to take a scalpel and cut open a living person.
The greatest crime, though, was not vivisection but joining the army as a medical doctor, treating sick and wounded soldiers to release them to fight again. This is the most criminal act: returning killer soldiers. The buildup of a big, invading army has been forgotten.
The present situation in Japan is cause for concern. Some people see a similarity with the 1930s. Are we now in a postwar era, or a prewar era? This is a strange atmosphere, and we are in the midst of a strange education.
Civilian employee of Unit 731 in Tokyo (Ishibashi Naokata)
[Ishibashi, born in 1920, spoke both in person at Unit 731 exhibits and on videotape.]
I was a civilian assistant at the Japanese army's laboratory facilities in Tokyo, near where the bones were found in Shinjuku in 1989. It was the beginning of the second year after the China Incident of the summer of 1937, and since the war was being expanded I expected to go to the front in China, but only ten days after assuming my post in Tokyo, I was ordered to the Ishii unit in Harbin. There were seventeen or eighteen of us civilian employees in the army, both minors and adults. We left Tokyo in early November 1938.
I was assigned to a team under the leadership of an army doctor. Our job was to examine the maruta delivered to Unit 731 by the kenpeitai. We took samples of their blood and stool, tested for kidney function, and collected other physical data. This information was used to determine a person's condition before the experiments. Without it, the data from bacteriological tests could not be compared.