Unit 731

by Hal Gold

  The maruta were supplied with good nutrition. They were fed so as to give them the same physical endurance as a soldier. Our team did not actually perform the tests of infection through injection or through germ bombs. Our work was similar to that of hospital technicians, so after the war, some of my associates found work as clinical technicians or X-ray technicians.

  In 1940, from August through November, we were planning for the plague attack on Ningbo. For our base, we used an airfield at a former Chinese Nationalist Party aviation school in Hangzhou at the mouth of the Tsientang River. From there, light planes took the plague-carrying fleas to Ningbo. They were slow planes, with speeds of no more than one hundred eighty to two hundred kilometers per hour, and I don't think they could fly above four thousand meters. An attacking fighter could have brought them down in one shot, if there had been an encounter. But no enemy planes came around.

  I know for sure there were fleas used in the drop. Fleas were bred at Harbin and often flown into Hangzhou by a transport plane, and then they were transferred to a light plane. Once, during a transfer, the fleas got loose and got all over the airport. There was a scare that everyone working in there would become infected, and a lot of commotion followed. We sprayed large quantities of insecticides over the airfield, and because of it extensive areas of grass died and turned a bright red.

  Finally, the fleas were dumped on the port city of Ningbo. I heard that sorghum, wheat, and rice polishings were mixed with the fleas. We were at that former aviation school base for four months. I believe that was the first of the big scale biological warfare attacks.

  During the time that the Ningbo attack was being planned, a group of us left Harbin by train for Hangzhou. It was a ten-day trip on a specially scheduled run. There were forty of us, and about the same number of men were coming by sea from Dalian by way of Shanghai. There were army doctors and hygiene specialist noncoms. From the Ei-1644 unit, the so-called Tama Unit in Nanjing, came a major general and several hygiene specialists. This was a joint operation.

  The year before, in 1939, the Kwantung Army and the Soviets had clashed at Nomonhan. Japan used bacteria, and two of my friends who are still living now were involved in that operation. According to them, typhoid was thrown into a tributary of the Hailar River. I had stayed back at Pingfang, and a lot of unit members, from headquarters staff to noncoms, went to Nomonhan. The work load on those of us who stayed behind increased, and we had to cover jobs outside our regular work. At that time, I worked at cultivating typhoid bacteria.

  As Professor Tsuneishi pointed out in his book, when these pathogens are thrown into a river, their ability to infect is quickly lost, so I never heard that we infected the Russian army. Ishii's Japanese-style thinking was wrong by a longshot. Wherever we Japanese go, we eat raw food and drink untreated water. But, the Chinese and the Russians do not drink water without boiling it.

  During the time I was stationed at Hangzhou, prisoners were brought in by the kenpeitai and secret police and accused of being guerrillas or soldiers posing as civilians. One day, when it was almost suppertime, we heard there was going to be a dissection. I went outside to where it was scheduled. There was a hole dug in the ground, and two Chinese men were blindfolded and sitting on the ground by the hole. Then, two Japanese soldiers decapitated them. Blood from the carotid artery shot up two meters into the air, as if it were gushing from a hose. The heads rolled into the hole, and the bodies were dissected right there on the spot. As soon as they were killed, the chest cavity was opened and the heart was removed and placed on a scale for weighing. The heart was still beating, and it made the scale weights clank together.

  The question is often asked why doctors who were supposed to be dedicated to saving people's lives ended up doing such evil deeds. I think it has to be seen against the background of the times. In 1937, when the SinoJapanese War started, there was a pronouncement to the effect that the first reserve troops stationed in Manchuria would not be mobilized. The only exception would be if there were a major incident at the Soviet border with no time for sending in troops and equipment from the Japanese mainland. Civilian employees would not be called up, and the salary was better than back in Japan. Employees could bring their families to live with them, and people working in university medical labs in Japan could dispense with the worry of being drafted into military medicine. Even going to work in an army hospital would be relatively all right, but a doctor assigned to a combat unit could be sent out to battle zones where the bullets are flying.

  I did not want to experiment on maruta. The major reason a lot of people joined was to protect health with hygiene, and the pay was good. At eighteen and nineteen years of age, we were getting higher salaries than the teachers who had educated us a long time ago, back in school.

  Manchuria from 1938 to 1940 was like heaven for Japanese. We heard that on the mainland even matches were government-rationed, while we had plenty of everything. I was not so enthusiastic about becoming employed by the army, but the salary was a big attraction. When I worked on the Ningbo biological attack, I was getting a salary of one hundred twenty yen a month. In 1940, the principal of an elementary school did not make that much. The cost of living was low, and I would have been inducted into the military in another one or two years anyway. I saw a chance to rearrange my life starting from scratch.

  I was in Unit 731 for two years and three months, up to the end of January 1940. After that, I was assigned to a border garrison.

  Someone asked whether I had seen any woman maruta. Personally, I saw only two, in the Number 8 prison block. One was a twenty-one-year-old, married Chinese woman; the other was an unmarried Soviet girl of nineteen. I asked where she came from and learned that she was from the Ukraine, very far away. Those women were not used in any experiments during the time that I was there. They said that they had not seen their faces in a mirror since being captured, and they begged me to get them one. I sneaked a mirror to them and told them to be careful that the kenpeitai or the jail guards didn't see it.

  Youth Corps member attached to Unit 731 (Ogasawra Akira)

  I joined the Youth Corps in 1943, on April 15. I was excited about airplanes, and I heard that if we went to the Kwantung Army headquarters we'd get to go up in a plane. I did not join Unit 731 from hearing about it and deciding to join. In May 1938, the year after the SinoJapanese War started, my eldest brother was killed in action in Xuzhou. My school teacher told me "Go get your brother's enemy. You've got to go kill the Chinks!"

  I took the exam for the Youth Air Corps School and passed. One week later I was contacted and told to report to the kenpeitai office in Shimonoseki. They called us together and the officer in charge said "All those who want to ride in a plane in the Kwantung Army, raise your hands." Some of us did, and then we were told to contact our families and advise them that we'd be leaving.

  I thought the Kwantung Army meant the Tokyo area. [In Japan, a term using the same characters refers to the Tokyo-Yokohama area; Japanese used a term with those characters to refer to the eastern region of China.] Two or three hours later, we left the port of Shimonoseki. The next morning we were docking in Pusan, though I had no idea where we were. I looked out and thought it strange that there were so many people wearing Korean-style clothes. From the ship, we were taken to a train, and we started out toward Manchuria.

  After we passed through Seoul, a lot of women boarded. Some of the fellows started teasing and making jokes about them, and they shot back, "We're going to work for the same Japanese army as you and you're making fun of us?" The sergeant in charge of our group told us that they were going to Manchuria to become comfort women, and we shouldn't fight with them.

  We got to Changchun, and that's when I learned that that's where the headquarters of the Kwantung Army was located. We were interviewed, and four of us who were from the same area were ordered to Harbin.

  When I got there, I had another surprise. On the station platform there was a statue of Ito Hirobumi, the former Japanese re
sident general of Korea who was killed by the Korean An Chang Gun. People paid respects to the statue. That surprise has stayed with me until today.

  [Ito was one of the founders of the new Japanese government after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. In the aftermath of her victory in the 1904-05 war with Russia, Japan occupied the Korean peninsula, and Ito took up the post of resident general in 1906. He thus became a symbol of oppression and was assassinated at Harbin Station in 1909. An Chang Gun was executed by the Japanese, and he became a hero to the Korean people. There is a memorial hall dedicated to him on the outskirts of Seoul.]

  At one time I had the job of cleaning the human specimen room. There were medical charts of the maruta used in the plague attacks at Anda, and I started reading through them. Some would die in two days, some in five or seven, sometimes in ten days or more. It was clearly written that these were charts of people used in experiments that exposed them to attacks by plague-carrying fleas. The records showed that every month between forty and sixty people were killed in these plague tests. I was working diligently at raising those fleas, as I had been instructed to do. Because of my education in emperor-ism and militarism, I never thought that what I was doing was wrong.

  Ten years ago, I moved to Hiroshima. I went to Peace Park and saw the message engraved there: "Sleep in peace. This mistake will never be repeated." I came to think that the mistake never to be repeated is not just the atomic bomb. The cruel and extremely inhuman behavior of Unit 731 must also never be repeated.

  Professor emeritus at Osaka University (Nakagawa Yonezo)

  [Nakagawa entered the medical department of Ishii Shiro's alma mater Kyoto Imperial University in 1945, going on, in later years, to become professor emeritus at Osaka University. The Japanese school year starts in April, so he had only a few months of student life before the war ended in August. This testimony is taken mainly from his address at the Unit 731 Exhibition in Osaka in the spring of 1994, supplemented by information he provided in personal meetings with the author.]

  When we first started studying at Kyoto, our instructor was an army doctor who told us that the practice of medicine is not for healing the sick and injured. Japan, he said, was fighting the world, and medicine itself must become a weapon.

  The instructor told us that animal tests alone were not sufficient for medical studies, and that human tests were also necessary. He said that such tests had actually been carried out, and showed us 16-mm movies that had been taken in Manchuria. One movie showed an experiment in which air was injected into the arms of living subjects to produce air embolisms. The films showed the victims in progressive stages of the condition, as they suffered to death.

  Another film the instructor showed us was a beheading, with blood spurting from the body.

  I believe that the Unit 731 research facilities were possibly the best in the world at the time. After they were blown up at the end of the war, the facts were revealed. This is a scar on Japanese medicine, but it goes beyond being a mere scar. Unit 731 came about as a result of the medical thinking in Japan.

  Some of the experiments had nothing to do with advancing the capability of germ warfare, or of medicine. There is such a thing as professional curiosity: "What would happen if we did such and such?" What medical purpose would be served by performing and studying beheadings? None at all. That was just playing around. Professional people, too, like to play.

  Member of the Hygiene Corps (Tomioka Heihachiro)

  [Tomioka served as a member on the Central Planning Committee for the Unit 731 Exhibition.]

  In April 1940, I took the exam for the Hygiene Corps, and in December of that year I reported to my unit. We boarded a ship for China, where we began a four-month training period.

  The object of training was to teach young people to be soldiers in the shortest possible time, and in order to do so, the men in charge hit the new recruits. There was not one day when we were not hit. Open-handed slapping does not hurt much, so they used fists. Sometimes, they would use the soles of tabi [Japanese-style footwear] so that the rubber treads would leave their marks on our faces. At times, they would use a belt, which was a little better; but sometimes they would use the buckle, and it would leave welts from the ear to the neck. Other times, they would use army boots, which have rivets on the soles. That would really knock you down.

  So, we went from one day to the next getting hit as part of our training. Why did we get hit? Perhaps our clothes were dirty. Perhaps our shoes had not been properly taken care of. Perhaps we had dust on our rifles. We got hit every day. We had to wash the officers' underwear, and if we didn't do it right we'd get hit. If one person did something wrong, it was considered everybody's responsibility, so they would make us pair off facing each other, and we'd have to slap each other's faces. If we didn't slap hard enough, we'd get hit.

  In a different kind of punishment, we'd have to hold ourselves up between two desks—one hand on each desk with our feet off the ground—then pedal as if in a bicycle race. Or, if we slipped up on something, they would make us display our shame to everybody by walking around to the different teams with a shoe in our mouths.

  There was one type of rifle called a Type 38. It had the emperor's chrysanthemum crest on the front end. We were taught that each rifle was lent to us by the emperor, and that we had to treat it with respect. If we handled it wrong, or in a manner that was not befitting its status, we were made to stand with the rifle at present arms, holding it with arms stretched out front, at shoulder height. We would have to stay that way for one or two hours, until given the order to put our arms down. That was rough; the rifle weighed about three kilograms.

  Every day, without fail, we would get hit. And that's where the spirit of absolute obedience is born. It's like training a dog. Humans and animals are the same. If you hit them, they learn to obey.

  One day we were told that instead of using straw dummies for bayonet practice we would use people. We were going to practice on five people who had been brought in by the kenpeitai. We were told that they were members of the anti-Japanese resistance movement, but when they brought in the prisoners, they were seventeen or eighteen years old.

  We were lined up in columns according to our unit, and the prisoners were tied in place. We were ordered to fix our bayonets. The boy at the front of the line was first. The commanding officer gave the orders: Forward! Back! Forward! Thrust!

  This was the first time I'd killed anyone. My legs were shaking. When you thrust, it should be done fast. I was afraid, though, and I closed my eyes, so I don't know where I stuck the person. About twenty-five of us in turn, one after the other, stuck the prisoner. By that time, his shirt looked like a beehive with flat holes instead of round ones. That's how we killed. There was a concept in our education that one does not become an adult until he has killed someone.

  Before that boy's breathing stopped, I heard him crying, "Mama, mama," and I realized that it's the same in China as in Japan.

  That is how we killed five Chinese for bayonet practice. After it was over, we threw the bodies into a pit and buried them. The location was at a mountain with no farms or anything else around. I never went back there again, and I have no idea what happened to the bodies after that.

  And that was the education for the Youth Corps. One does not become an adult without killing.

  About four months after that, we were transferred to another camp. The commander there asked us if we had ever killed anyone. We told him that yes, we had done it in our training course. He scoffed, saying that killing only one person didn't mean much. He said that there were two prisoners there right then, and told us we had to kill them. It was unavoidable, so we started by digging a hole. A prisoner of about forty years old who looked like a farmer was brought out. The officer commanded me, "Kill him!"

  The prisoner was not tied to a post, but was just standing with his hands tied behind his back. When I thrusted, the bayonet did not enter his body, and he fell to the ground. The unit officer screamed at me,
"Do you think you can kill a man like that?" And to show me how to do it, he demonstrated by killing the man with a single thrust. One could see that the unit leader was good. I followed his example and killed the other farmer, then dragged his body to the hole and buried him.

  Then, I had night watch in a high guard tower. The place where we killed the Chinese was right in front of the tower, and I was afraid to look in that direction. Most of the time I looked the other way. There was even a time during which I felt haunted, afraid that a ghost might come out from there.

  This is the way my training went, with my killing one or two people at a time until over five years I had finally, as an individual, killed a total of thirty-three people directly. In unison with others, I was party to the killings of more than seven hundred people. Sometimes a locality would be surrounded and then attacked, and it is not possible to know which person was killed by which soldier, but I share the responsibility, and I want to testify here to these facts also.

  In 1942, our unit took part in a siege in Shantung Province. We encircled an area with a circumference of one hundred sixty kilometers and conducted what we called a "rabbit hunt" inside the encircled area. At night, troops climbed mountains and traversed rivers with flaming torches. Everywhere one looked, the torches were burning. Our intention was that not one "rabbit" should escape. All the men we captured in that operation—young and old, alike—were made to march to the train. From there, they were put into freight cars and taken to Japan, where they were sacrificed working in the Hanaoka mines.