factors have conspired to keep Unit 731’s activities from receiving the attention they so richly deserve. The decades of concealment of the outfit’s history were partly the fruit of the Japanese central government’s reputed skill at inactivity, along with its priority on avoiding all manners of controversy, whether domestic or international. Evidence also failed to surface simply because there were no survivors among the victims of Unit 731; all were eliminated before the end of the war. Then, there was the combination order-threat by commanding general Ishii Shiro himself that former unit members were to “take the secret to the grave.” Obedience to the command was probably not at all difficult for those surviving Japanese members of the unit who could have borne witness but would have felt scalpels turned in their own hearts were their children to ask, “Daddy! How could you do something like that?”—and feel it even more acutely in their later years when the question would be prefaced with “Grandpa.”
This last fact highlights an even more astonishing result of the exhibition. Surviving members of Unit 731 who had sworn to remain silent about their memories came out before the public to testify—to confess—and finally unburden their minds. After a half century of silence, they told. Some could tell all but their names, and retained that one secret before the public: an omission meaningful to them, but a minor exclusion for those of us more interested in their stories than in their identities. Others identified themselves openly. Some reached the point of weeping with equal openness, as they looked back through decades of silence to stir up ugly recollections.
But those who are coming forward now, after some half-century of silence, are among the most forceful in pressing for the story to be told. Additionally, a limited number of members of the post-war generation—scientists, doctors, writers—are searching out the survivors, doing their own research, and informing the public through writings and lectures. Outrage and shame span the generations. Exhibition sites generally have a desk where visitors may write their impressions and comments. Attendees from elementary school on up have recorded the shock of the history lesson.
There are several reasons why the code of silence has evaporated at this late hour. Whatever these motivations might be, however, we can be grateful that the grave did not get all the truth. One focus of this book will be the actual words of those who helped conduct Japan’s biological warfare human experimentation program.
The exhibition itself, the reactions it provoked, and the testimonies of former unit members who came forth and spoke out were all driving factors behind the creation of this book. It is as important for these events to be available to English-readers as it is that Japanese know them. Some of the testimonies and statements presented here were originally given at lecture programs which the author attended, recorded, and translated. At other programs in different parts of the country, testimonies were obtained with the cooperation of the local organizing committees. An independent team sought out former Unit 731 members and produced a video series which was another source. A few of the testimonies were told to other people who then reported on them at lectures or in print.
The recent declassification under the Freedom of Information Act of some documents that had been sealed for years also played an important role in the creation of this book. Events in the former Soviet Union likewise brought about a freeing of material formerly kept hidden away. Some Japanese documents have also been declassified, making them available to researchers. In the end, however, the most thought-provoking source of public information on Japan’s human experiments comes from those who were there, then emerged from silence and provided the personal accounts which lead us back to the crimes with distressing credibility. These firsthand recollections make mockery of statements which attempt to smooth down the edges of the cruelty and racism that made Unit 731 possible.
PART 1
Historical Overview
1
Background of Japanese Biological Warfare
A Proud Medical Tradition
In all wars up until the Russo-Japanese War, it had been known that the “silent enemy”—disease—took a greater toll of lives among fighting men than did bullets. With the outbreak of the conflict with Russia, Japan made history by resolving to learn from her mistakes. Chastened by the waste represented by sickness-induced casualties that she had suffered in her recent war with China, she paid an extraordinary amount of attention to curbing battlefield illness. By the beginning of the twentieth century, her scientists were already gaining fame for their work, and feathers in their caps included discovery of the causes of beri-beri and dysentery. One strain of bacteria, the Shiga bacillus, even carries the name of its Japanese discoverer, Dr. Shiga Kiyoshi. The Western press termed the Japanese “scientific fanatics,” a telling commentary on the lack of scientific awareness in other countries of the world, especially in military medicine. By contrast, Japan’s army had come to be a—if not the—world leader in this field.
A perspective on Japanese military medicine at the time of Japan’s war with Russia in 1904–05 is offered by a U.S. Army doctor, Louis Livingston Seaman. The Japanese granted him the privileges of a foreign military attaché, and he accompanied Japanese troops in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War. In addition to visiting field and base hospitals in Manchuria, he also observed hospitals in Japan. After the war, he published a book titled The Real Triumph of Japan: the Conquest of the Silent Foe. In it, he writes that
the history of warfare for centuries has proven that in prolonged campaigns the first, or open enemy, kills twenty per cent of the total mortality in the conflict, whilst the second, or silent enemy, kills eighty … This dreadful and unnecessary sacrifice of life, especially among the Anglo-Saxon races, is the most ghastly proposition of modern war, and the Japanese have gone a long way toward conquering or eliminating it …
I unhesitatingly assert that the greatest conquests of Japan have been in the humanities of war, in the stopping of the needless sacrifice of life through preventable disease …
In our war with Mexico, the proportion of losses was about three from disease to one from bullets, and in our great Civil War nearly the same proportion obtained … No lessons seem to have been learned from these frightful experiences, for later statistics show no improvement. In the French Campaign in Madagascar in 1894 fourteen thousand men were sent to the front, of whom twenty-nine were killed in action and seven thousand perished from preventable disease. In the Boer War in South Africa the English losses from disease were simply frightful, greater than even our Civil War record. But the crowning piece of imbecility was reserved for our war with Spain, where, in 1898, fourteen were needlessly sacrificed to ignorance and incompetency for every one who died on the firing line or from battle casualties.
The author points out how in Japan’s war with China in 1894, the Japanese ratio of losses from disease was about the same as that suffered by American soldiers suffered in two of the wars cited above. The experience gained from that clash in Manchuria, however, was put to good use a decade later, and the Japanese army’s ratio of combat casualties to those caused by disease turned around dramatically. Noting Japan’s success, he writes, “Only one and two-tenths percent of the entire army died of sickness or disease. Only one and one-half died of gunshot wounds, although twenty-four percent were wounded … This record is, I believe, unparalleled and unapproached in the annals of war.”
“Japan put into use the most elaborate and effective system of sanitation that has ever been practiced in war,” he wrote. For instance, “every hospital throughout Japan, and every base and field hospital in Manchuria, has its bacteriological laboratory.” The author praises
