hollered.”
“What did she say?”
Kurumizawa could not answer, then began weeping feebly and murmured, “I don’t want to think about it again.”
The interviewee apologized, waited a few seconds, and tried again for an answer. He gave it through sobs.
“She said, ‘It’s all right to kill me, but please spare my child’s life.’”
Four months after this interview, Kurumizawa died.
A similar incident is reported in Part 2 of this book. There is no way of knowing whether these two reports refer to the same episode. Women were captured and experimented upon, and a large number of babies were born in captivity. Some were born to women who had been brought in while pregnant. Others were born to women who became pregnant in forced sex acts during tests investigating the transmission of venereal disease.
There are accounts of experiments being carried out on mothers and children. The gas chamber was one venue for these tests. Also, Part 2 of this book includes an account of three mothers with children used in an air drop of pathogens. It is conceivable that more than one mother voiced, as a last wish on the vivisection table, the wish to let her child live. No one ever did. The researchers wanted their data.
Two modes of transportation were important to the unit’s functioning. The railroad, the lifeline of Japan’s industrial venture in Manchuria, was one indispensable part of the Ishii organization. Windowless cars of prisoners were carried from point of capture or imprisonment to a railroad siding at the Pingfang prison labs. One rare eyewitness account of an unloading told of prisoners bound with hands behind them and laid head-to-foot on a flatbed wagon for transfer from the freight car to the prison cells. After unloading their cargo, trains would return empty. It was an almost invisible way of shifting people out of circulation.
The other important artery was the airfield built off to one side of the building complex within the unit grounds. Conscious as Ishii was of his own prospects for personal advancement, he made frequent trips to Tokyo’s Army Medical College to present his work. The materials for presentation included more than graphs and drawings; he also displayed human specimens. The specimen jars themselves were made in Manchuria by a European-trained Japanese, and specimens were regular passengers on the flights from Pingfang to Tokyo. Some vessels contained extremities, specimens of arms, legs, and feet. Other jars contained organs. Some were heads. Still others were whole-body specimens. With this air connection putting Ishii a couple of hours away from his Tokyo base, Pingfang became a virtual specimen-supply annex to the Tokyo medical school. Return flights to Pingfang, for their part, carried supplies, including cages of rats.
Doctors who knew the situation at the time have commented that this Pingfang-Tokyo air corridor was run on a very regular basis. Through this channel, the results of experiments came to Japan in the form of new bacteria, as well as preserved specimens of human subjects who had died from a range of artificially induced pathological conditions. These materials were made available not just to the army hospital, but to researchers throughout Japan. This gave universities the chance to study diseases not then in Japan, such as plague, cholera, and epidemic hemorrhagic fever (EHF). In this way, Unit 731 was performing the service of human experimentation for the entire Japanese medical community—civilian and military, public and confidential.
A worker in materials procurement at the army hospital named Amano Ryuji comments on both aspects of the twoway traffic. “It was simple to bring those rats to Manchuria by plane. The plane brought the specimens of human bodies and parts into Tokyo for presentation and study, and carried rats back on the return trip. I saw large numbers of specimens of body parts at the Tokyo lab. Those are the bones that were dug up in Shinjuku [near the former site of the Army Medical College, some fifty years later]. I think that there are more bones there than were found. If someone looked they would discover more.”
The scope of the service comes into sharper focus when the dispersion of the organization is considered. In addition to the Pingfang central unit, there were units set up in Beijing, Nanjing, Guangzhou, and Singapore. In addition, some of these units had their own branch units. The total number of personnel reached some twenty thousand people. Human specimens were known to come to the Pingfang headquarters from other units, and since different units more or less specialized in certain areas of research, it can be assumed that sibling units supplied pathological specimens not available at Pingfang. All of these were candidates for the trip to Tokyo and the Japanese world of medical research. Meanwhile, the windowless trains and cars kept rolling, and the incinerators kept smoking.
Satellite Facilities
While the Pingfang facility was to become synonymous with human experimentation, the actual Unit 731 designation did not come into use until August 1941. It became a type of generic term, referring not only to the Pingfang-based unit, but also encompassing its sibling units in other locations, and even its predecessors. All units and facilities were coordinated by the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory in Tokyo. Some of the more important of the less well known facilities are described here.
Anda
This was an open-air testing ground one hundred twenty kilometers from Pingfang, about three hours by road. It was used for outdoor tests of plague, cholera, and other pathogens in experimental biological warfare bombs, and other methods of exposing human beings to pathogenic substances in open-air situations.
Tests generally used from ten to forty people at a time, with subjects tied to crosses in circles of various sizes. The tests involved an element of trial and error, and comparing results obtained from differently sized circles enabled researchers to determine ranges of effectiveness at various distances from the points where projectiles struck or infected insects were released. When biological warfare bombs were tested, each maruta was protected with headgear and a metal plate hung from the neck to cover the front part of the body. These protective devices prevented death or serious injury that would make it impossible to obtain the needed data. Arms and legs were left exposed, so that they could be bitten by the disease-carrying insects. In some tests, subjects were tied to vertical boards that were anchored into the ground at various distances and patterns from points of release. Careful notes were made of wind and atmospheric conditions, and each person was marked with a number on his or her chest during each test for easy tracking of human specimens.
Xinjing
Under veterinarian Wakamatsu Yujiro, Unit 100 in Xinjing (present-day Changchun), concentrated its research on pathogens effective against domesticated animals. The horses and edible animals of the Soviet and Chinese armies were the targets of this research. Unit 100 was also a bacteria factory, producing large quantities of glanders, anthrax, and other pathogens.
Sabotage was another focus of the operations here, and one experiment entailed mixing poisons with food to study their effects on subjects and to gain knowledge of appropriate dosages for various toxins. Additionally, extensive areas of land were cultivated for research into chemicals for crop destruction.
Guangzhou
The Guangzhou unit has been mentioned in documentary films and written reports, though its activities have not been fully clarified, nor had its existence even been decisively proven. In late October 1994, a private research mission from Japan went to Guangzhou to investigate the possibility of Japanese biological warfare activity there. They also located a former unit member in Japan, who provided them with additional evidence of a germ warfare unit’s having been in Guangzhou.
They learned from the former member that the unit, called Nami Unit 8604, was headquartered at Zhongshan Medical University. The building stands today very much as it did then,
