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A New Type of Warfare

The Fortress/Bacteria Factory

The Manchurian city of Harbin was a railroad hub, and a multicultural, multiracial center of commerce, art, and music. It had been developed by the Russians just a few years before the Russo-Japanese War broke out. White Russians who had fled their country settled in Harbin. They were not well off, but at least they were not living in Russia, which seemed more important. Many of the women were beautiful, and a lack of other employment opportunities made them turn to prostitution. The racial and cultural mix made Harbin a fascinating city.

In 1932, a few months after Japanese troops moved into Harbin, Ishii and his associates followed them. Meanwhile, the Japanese faced numerically superior Soviet troops along the Soviet-Manchurian border. An armed clash was expected, and Ishii planned to use his specialty to overcome his side’s disadvantage.

Ishii’s operations started out in Harbin with a few hundred men, but too many eyes in an urban center were not what he and his confederates wanted. To maintain their facade of respectability, they had the Harbin facility concentrate on the socially accepted area of vaccines and other “proper” medical research. Meanwhile, for the work they wanted kept completely quiet, they soon found another place about one hundred kilometers to the south. The ever-dependable and expanding South Manchuria Railway provided a means of transporting equipment and, more important, human lab materials.

The Japanese descended upon a poor neighborhood near an area known as Beiyinhe. There were about three hundred homes and shops there, with an extensive area of open land nearby to the south. Japanese troops came in and told the village headman that everyone had to clear out in three days; then Ishii and the army moved in. A large building of about one hundred rooms was kept for quarters while the facilities were being set up, and everything else was put to the torch. An area of five hundred square meters was designated a restricted military zone, and brick buildings started going up. The tract of land to the south was also forcibly appropriated and made into a Japanese military airport.

Chinese laborers were recruited and driven hard at wages low even by local standards. Their Japanese overseers argued that low pay was sufficient because the cost of living was low. But with large families the general rule in China, the pay for construction workers was barely enough to feed the mouths that depended on them.

With typical Japanese efficiency, the construction—comprising several hundred rooms—was finished in less than one year. Everything was veiled in secrecy. During construction, the laborers were under constant watch by Japanese guards, and their movements were limited. The number of laborers varied each day according to the work to be done. There were two sections to the complex. One contained offices, living quarters, dining areas, warehouses, and a parking lot. The other section contained the heart of the organization. In sequence as it concerned the victims, there were prisons, laboratories, and crematoria. There was also an area for munitions storage.

The area containing the lab was especially restricted to Chinese workers, but at times they had to enter to carry in materials or large boxes. In such cases, precautions bordering on the comical were taken to assure that the Chinese would see nothing. They were ordered to get under huge willow baskets that covered their bodies. They would then pick up their loads, be led in by Japanese guards, deposit their burdens, and be led out of the restricted area. Then they could come out from under the baskets.

The new facility was astounding to look at. It became known as Zhongma Fortress. (The character for fortress has also been translated as “castle,” and it does, in fact, have that meaning in Japanese. In the original Chinese, however, it is applied to an entirely walled-in fortress city, a protection against enemy attacks. This is surely what the Japanese facility must have looked like to the outsiders.) A three-meter-high wall was topped with barbed wire and high-voltage electric wire. A twenty-four-hour guard was posted outside. Twin iron doors swung open to a drawbridge. The road in front of the facility was declared off-limits to the citizens, and people had to take a long way around to get to their destinations. Trains passing by on rails about a kilometer away were required to have their shades drawn.

One rumor told of a young boy who was curious about the Fortress and went out to have a look. His body was found the next day; he had been killed by gunfire. But even walls and guns could not keep rumors of cries of pain and anguish inside the Fortress from circulating through the village. And, by 1936, it was well known among the Chinese that this was not just a prison, but a production facility for bacteria, and a murder shop.

Some of the information on the facilities came from a shop owner in the area who went into the buildings after the Japanese had abandoned them. He described about thirty cells, and it seems that there were always about five to six hundred prisoners being held at any given time: the facility had the capacity to hold about one thousand. Another Chinese from the region was interviewed in more recent years about the Fortress:

We heard rumors of people having blood drawn in there, but we never went near the place. We were too afraid.

When construction started, there were about forty houses in our village, and a lot of people were driven out. About one person from each home was taken to work on the construction. People were gathered from villages from all around here, maybe about a thousand people in all.

The only thing we worked on were the surrounding wall and the earthen walls. The Chinese that worked on the buildings were brought in from somewhere, but we didn’t know where. After everything was finished, those people were killed.

The prisoners wore leg shackles and sometimes hand shackles, as well. They were given a substantial diet, their staples being rice or wheat, with meat or fish and sufficient vegetables, and at times even liquor. The purpose was to keep them in a normal state of health to yield useful data when they were subjected to the tests. One of these tests consisted of taking blood samples. At least five hundred cubic centimeters was drawn at two- to three-day intervals. Some of the victims became progressively debilitated and wasted. Still, the blood drainage continued. Careful records were kept, and these experiments smack more of a combination of professional curiosity than of actual science: a simple, childlike curiosity to see how far a human being can be squeezed of blood until death occurs. Not all were drained to the point of death, though. Many were injected with poison when they could no longer serve as lab materials. Sometimes, when a subject was too weak to offer physical resistance, he would be killed with a blow to the head with an axe. The brain might then be used for further research.

It is said that the life expectancy of prisoners at the Fortress was a maximum of one month.

An earlier experiment tried to determine how long a person could live on just water. Food was withheld from prisoners, and some were given only ordinary water, while others received only distilled water. They were observed as they wasted away and died.

By protecting its soldiers from disease in the Manchurian conflict thirty years earlier, Japan had earned international admiration by establishing itself as the world leader in military medicine. Now, the direction into which it channeled its medical energies had changed, and its ethics began to twist and mutate, as well. The leaders of Japan’s military during the days of the Russo-Japanese War would undoubtedly have been appalled.

End of the Fortress

The escape from Zhongma Fortress in 1936 was a combination of clever planning, daring, and coincidental help from a natural phenomenon. It involved some forty people who had been imprisoned at Harbin, then transferred to Zhongma for blood drawing.

A prisoner by the name of Li planned the jailbreak for the fifteenth day of the eighth month, a time of festivals marking autumn on the lunar calendar. The Japanese would be holding parties, and drinking, and prisoners would also be given special treats. Li knew that the Japanese guard would be bringing food and liquor, and after they were finished eating, the prisoners would hand the eating utensils out through the prison bars. Although the prisoners all had leg irons on, apparently their hands were free. When the utensils were handed back to the guard, Li grabbed his hand, dropped him with a blow to the head, grabbed the keys from around his waist, and opened the cells. Those who could, joined in the break. Others were too weak from repeated drawing of blood, and Li had no choice but to go on without them, leaving them to sure death while Li and his fellow prisoners seized their chance.

They ran out into the compound, and fortune smiled upon them with a heavy downpour that knocked out the electric power, deactivating the searchlights and electric fence. The escapees came to the wall and made a human ladder. Placing himself at the bottom, Li urged the others up and over. He was the only one left, and as the others ran as well as they could with their leg shackles, there were shots and one final shout from Li. At least, it was a more merciful death than his other option at the hands of the Japanese researchers.

Some ten of the escapees were gunned down. About twenty made it to the outside, but most of them either were killed or recaptured, or died from exposure, whose effects were compounded by the blood drawings. A few of the men came to a village and sought help from one of the residents. That person was interviewed in 1984 about the incident for a written account on the resistance movement. He recalls:

That night I heard footsteps behind the house, then someone banging on the door. Outside there were seven men wearing leg shackles. My brother grabbed an axe to defend us, but when he heard their story he put down the axe, we took the men to a cave on the east side of the house, and we started breaking off the shackles. We were still working on them when the Japanese came to the edge of the village tracking down the escapees. So we thought of a way to free the men faster. First, we broke off a shackle from just one leg, so they could at least run while holding the other shackle. And then, they left the village.

Later, they managed to meet up with the other remaining escapees and all eventually teamed up with resistance fighters. But the secret of the Fortress was out. The Japanese had managed to keep things quiet for five years, but at last the time had come for a move.

Pingfang

The new site was closer to the city of Harbin, just a short hop away on the South Manchuria Railway. The Chinese called the location Pingfang; the Japanese reading of the same characters is Heibo. Between 1936 and 1938, a series of villages in the Pingfang area were seized by the Ishii organization in acts of military eminent domain. Hundreds of families were forced to sell their homes and land at the paltry sums decided upon by the Japanese Occupation. Forced evacuation ended generations of attachment to the lands and family graves. Often, land was confiscated at the end of the short growing season, and families had to move out without even being allowed to harvest their crops for the coming winter.

Surrounding buildings built by Chinese were limited to one story to keep out inquisitive eyes, and anyone—Japanese, Chinese, or otherwise—coming to Pingfang needed a pass. The airspace over the area was off-limits to all aircraft other than Japanese army planes; violators would be shot down. The headquarters was surrounded by a moat.

The Pingfang complex would grow into a sprawling, walled city of more than seventy buildings on a six-square-kilometer tract of land. Work was pushed ahead hard. During the months that construction was possible, a Japanese construction company, the Suzuki Group, worked round the clock in two shifts, day and night. At the coldest time of the year, the water, ground, and concrete all froze, bringing work to a halt. Winter was so harsh that the very first thing installed in the buildings, when they were still only shells, was the central heating system. The complex was probably finished around 1939, but the exact time remains uncertain, since construction teams were still working well after experiments started.

The prison blocks in the Pingfang compound were called “ro buildings.” The term comes from the shapes of the Japanese syllabary character ro and the cell blocks, both of which are square. The Number 7 block held adult male prisoners, while Number 8 contained women and children. These prison blocks served the same purpose at Pingfang as cages for guinea pigs at conventional laboratories.

Cells were either single- or multiple-occupancy, and were arranged side by side, each with its window facing the corridor. An aperture that could be opened from the corridor was provided so that prisoners could extend their arms to receive injections or have blood samples drawn. The window and opening of each cell were located near the floor so that prisoners could extend their arms while in a reclining position; as the tests progressed, victims became unable to stand. Each cell had a flush toilet to maintain cleanliness, a wooden floor, and concrete walls heavier than necessary, probably built with recollections of the escape at Zhongma. Even walls between cells were thirty to forty centimeters thick. Central heating and cooling systems, and a well-planned diet, protected the health of the prisoners to ensure that the data they produced was valid. Poor living conditions or the presence of other disease germs could confuse results.

In all the gruesome professionalism that built the legacy of Unit 731, there was one touch of sardonic humor. As the massive Pingfang installation was under construction, local people began to ask what it was. The glib answer supplied was that the Japanese were building a lumber mill. Regarding this reply, one of the researchers joked privately, “And the people are the logs.” From then on, the Japanese term for log, maruta, was used to speak of the prisoners whose last days were spent being tom apart or gassed by Japanese researchers. It is surprising how few Japanese realize the origin of this term, though the word itself never fails to come up when Unit 731 is discussed. The expression smacks of a racial attitude not even up to the level of disdain.

Pingfang was equipped for disposing of its consumed human lab materials with three large incinerators—calling them crematoria would bestow undue dignity upon them. A former member who assisted in the burning commented, “The bodies always burned up fast because all the organs were gone; the bodies were empty.”

Ueda Yataro was a researcher working under a leader of one of the teams into which researchers and assistants were organized. He later woke up to the aberrant thinking which led him and others to participate in the activities of Unit 731. He recorded his experiences, disjointedly, in pages of handwritten notes. The following is an excerpt about one of the research projects that he worked on. His “material” was in a cell with four other maruta.

He was already too weak to stand. The heavy leg irons bit at his legs. When he moved, they made a dull, clanking sound. His fellow cellmates sat around him, and watched him. Nobody spoke. The water in the toilet was running with an ominous sound.

In the corridor outside the cell, the guards stood with their pistols strapped on. The commander of the guards was there also. The man’s screams of death had no effect on them. This was an everyday occurrence. There was nothing special.

To these guards, the people in here have already lost all rights. Their names have been exchanged for just a number written across the front of their shirts and the name maruta. They are referred to only as “Maruta Number X.” They are counted not as one person or two persons but “one log, two logs.” We are not concerned with where they are from, how they came here.

The man looked like a farmer, covered with grime. He was wasting away, and his cheekbones protruded. His eyes glared out from the dirt and the tattered cotton clothes he was wrapped in.

The team leader was fully pleased with yesterday’s results. We never had such a typical change in blood picture and rate of infection, and I was eagerly looking forward to see what changes would be present in today’s blood sample. With high hopes, I came to the Number 7 cell block with the armed guards at my side. The maruta I was working on was on the verge of death. It would be disastrous if he died. Then I would not be able to get a blood sample, and we would not obtain the important results of the tests we had been working on.

I called his number. No answer came. I motioned through the window at the other four prisoners to bring him over. They sat there without moving. I screamed abusively at them to hurry up and bring him over to the window. One of the guards pulled out a gun, aimed it at them, and screamed in Chinese. Resigned, they gently lifted up the other man and brought him over to the window. More important to me than the man’s death was the blood flowing in the human guinea pig’s body at the moment just before his death.

His hand was purplish and turning cold. He put his arm through the opening. I was elated. Filled with a sense of victory and holding down my inexpressible excitement, thinking forward to how the team leader would be waiting for these results, I reached for the hypodermic.

I inserted the needle into the vein. It made a dull sound. I pulled the red-black blood into the hypodermic. Three cubic centimeters … five cubic centimeters … His face became paler. Before, he’d been moaning; now he could not even moan. His throat was making a tiny rasping sound like an insect. With resentment and anger in his eyes, he stared at me without even blinking. But that did not matter. I obtained a blood sample of ten cubic centimeters. For people in laboratory work, this is ecstasy, and one’s calling to his profession. Showing compassion for a person’s death pains was of no value to me.

At the lab, I processed the blood sample quickly and then went back to look into the cell. His face occasionally twitched. His breath became shallower, and he went into his death throes.

The other four men in the cell, who had the same fate waiting for them, could not contain their anger. They took water and poured it into the mouth of the dead man.

This way, an irreplaceable life is trifled with to take the place of a guinea pig, and the result is one sheet of graph paper.

Four or five soldiers, with drawn guns, opened the door to the cell. It made a heavy sound. They dragged the dead man out into the corridor and loaded him onto a hand cart. The other four men, knowing what their fate would be tomorrow, could not hold down the anger in their eyes as they watched their dead companion leave.

The hand cart disappeared in the direction of the dissection room with the tall chimney looming above.

Human experimentation gave researchers their first chance to actually examine the organs of a living person at will to see the progress of a disease. Vivisection was a new experience for the doctors of Japan. One former unit member explained that “the results of the effects of infection cannot be obtained accurately once the person dies because putrefactive bacteria set in. Putrefactive bacteria are stronger than plague germs. So, for obtaining accurate results, it is important whether the subject is alive or not.”

The research methods in Manchuria allowed doctors to induce diseases and examine their effects on organs at the first stages. Researchers worked with interpreters to ask about emerging symptoms, and took subjects out of cells at what they judged to be the time for optimum results. Anesthesia was optional. According to a former unit member: “As soon as the symptoms were observed, the prisoner was taken from his cell and into the dissection room. He was stripped and placed on the table, screaming, trying to fight back. He was strapped down, still screaming frightfully. One of the doctors stuffed a towel into his mouth, then with one quick slice of the scalpel he was opened up.”

Even with the intestines and organs exposed, a person does not die immediately. It is the same physical situation as ordinary surgery under anesthesia in which a person is operated on and restored. Witnesses at vivisections report that the victim usually lets out a horrible scream when the cut is made, and that the voice stops soon after that. The researchers then conduct their examination of the organs, remove the ones that they want for study, then discard what is left of the body. Somewhere in the process, the victim dies, through blood loss or removal of vital organs.

A very brief video testimony was provided by Kurumizawa Masakuni. He was advanced in age and weak at the time of the interview, and only photographs of him appeared on screen. His voice was almost inaudible. He spoke of the time he was working on a woman victim who had awakened from anesthesia while being vivisected. The woman interviewing him asked what happened.

“She opened her eyes.”

“And then?”

“She 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, and information gleaned from Chinese government records and inhabitants of the area show that Unit 8604 was established in 1938. It was staffed by several hundred personnel.

The Japan Times of November 9, 1994, reported on a seventy-seven-year-old former unit member, Maruyama Shigeru, who said that one experiment involved starving prisoners to death. This test would appear to be similar to the tests done at Harbin to determine how long a person can continue living on water alone.

The former unit member also stated that a large number of Chinese refugees from Hong Kong died after they were given water containing typhus-causing bacteria provided by the Army Medical College in Tokyo. In addition, Maruyama talked of seeing victims being operated on almost every day. He recalled that many bodies were stored in the basement of the building.

The Guangzhou unit, according to Maruyama, also raised rats for experiments in spreading plague. This addition to the Ishii organization’s litany of experiments with rats and plague serves as yet further evidence that plague was high on the list of priorities in Japan’s design for conquest by disease.

A Chinese witness at Guangzhou volunteered that there was a pond of chemicals inside the university compound that was used to dissolve the bodies of the victims. It can be inferred that since this unit was established inside a previously existing medical facility, it did not have the incineration capabilities of the Harbin and Pingfang locations, which were custom-built and equipped with the facilities necessary for disposing of large numbers of bodies.

Beijing

After the Japanese evacuation at the end of the war, Chinese locals entered the facilities of Beijing-based Unit 1855 for a look behind its secrets. The building still exists, and a Japanese documentary program’s video camera followed a bacteriologist who had been posted at the facility, as he described what had gone on in the days when he and his colleagues had worked there. “This is where large numbers of test tubes were all lined up on shelves,” he narrated. “Each test tube was identified by a label showing what kind of bacteria it contained. Six of them contained plague germs.”

Unit 1855 had a branch in Chinan that was a combination prison and experiment center. On the same documentary, a Korean man, Choi Hyung Shin, told about his experience there as an interpreter.

Choi first went to China when he was sixteen years old to attend school. After the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, there were attempts to replace Korean culture with Japanese culture, and all children received a Japanese education. Choi’s trilingual ability made him useful to the Japanese doctors. Korean immigrants to China were among the victims of human experimentation, and Choi’s interpreting between the Japanese researchers and their Korean and Chinese test subjects was vital to the acquisition of proper research data. He worked at the branch for almost two years during 1942 and 1943.

When I first arrived there, some one hundred prisoners were already in the cells. Whenever the Japanese doctors made contact with the people being tested, they always did it through an interpreter.

The test subjects were infected with plague, cholera, and typhus. Those not yet infected were kept in different rooms. There were large mirrors in the rooms with the subjects so that those undergoing testing could be observed better. I spoke with the prisoners using a microphone and looking through the glass panel, interpreting the questions from the doctors: “Do you have diarrhea? Do you have a headache? Do you feel chilly?” The doctors made very careful records of all the answers.

With the typhus test, ten people were forced to drink a mixture of the germs, and five of them were administered vaccine. The two groups were kept separate from each other. The doctors watched them closely and questioned them through my interpretation, recording the answers. The vaccine proved effective with all five to whom it was administered. The other five suffered horribly.

In the plague tests, the prisoners suffered with chills and fever, and groaned in pain … until they died. From what I saw, one person was killed every day.

Constantly forced to be part of the morbid business of infection and killing, Choi faked appendicitis, which got him sick leave from his job and a chance to escape. Unfortunately, he was caught by kenpeitai officers and given the water torture with hot peppers mixed into the water. This caused him permanent lung damage, and he has been in and out of the hospital for the past fifty years.

Singapore

In September 1991, journalist Phan Ming Yen of the Singapore Straits Times broke the story that it had apparently been confirmed that a Japanese biological warfare installation—rumored but not proven to have existed—had operated in Singapore. He wrote his story after locating a man who claimed to have worked in the lab as a youth. Phan announced that “a Singapore connection has been mentioned fleetingly in some accounts, but no concrete evidence has been cited until now.

“Confirmation of the Singapore secret laboratory was made following a Straits Times interview with Mr. Othman Wok, sixty-seven, former minister for social affairs, who said he worked as an assistant in the laboratory for over two years during the Japanese Occupation.” According to the Straits Times article, the research unit, code-named Oka 9420, was situated in a building now occupied by the Drug Administration Division of the Ministry of Health, and “local historians contacted were unaware of the existence of the laboratory.”

Singapore was captured by the Japanese in February 1942. Several months later, Othman, then seventeen years old, found himself looking for employment in the occupied land, and his uncle, who worked in a Japanese-run laboratory, provided a recommendation that enabled Mr. Othman to get a job. His unwitting contribution to Japan’s biological warfare program thus began.

Seven Chinese, Indian, and Malay boys working in the lab were all assigned the task of picking fleas from rats and putting them into containers. The article quotes Othman Wok as saying, “It was an unforgettable experience. It was the first time that I was doing something which made me feel like a medical student.”

Some forty rat catchers, apparently Japanese soldiers, would comb Singapore for the rodents and bring their haul into the lab. The rats would then be put to sleep with chloroform, and the boys would work at pulling the fleas from their bodies with pincers. Then the fleas were placed into containers with water, which prevented them from jumping around, and from there the Japanese staff took over. According to Othman, test tubes were prepared with one flea in each. The rats were injected with plague pathogens, their bellies were shaved, and the test tubes were inverted over the shaved area, allowing the fleas to feed on the rats and become plague carriers. “All this work was done by the Japanese in the same room where I worked,” Othman recounted.

The infected fleas were then transferred to kerosene cans which contained sand, dried horse blood, and an unidentified chemical. They were left to breed for about two weeks. Finally, the adult fleas and their offspring, all infected with plague, were transferred to flasks and shipped out. Concerning their destination, Mr. Othman said, “A driver who drove the trucks which transported the fleas to the railway station said that these bottles of fleas were sent off to Thailand.” This information supports assertions that a Unit 731 branch operated in “neutral” Thailand, as well.

The Singapore operation was veiled in the same secrecy that covered other installations. “During the two years I was working there,” Mr. Othman is quoted as saying, “I never knew the actual purpose of my work. We were too afraid to ask.”

Without being told so, the boys knew that they were working with danger. Everybody had to wear white overalls, rubber gloves and boots, and white headgear. On one occasion a rat bit through the rubber glove of a Japanese staffer, and the man died. Another time, an Indian boy working there was bitten on the finger by a rat, but he was saved by being rushed to the hospital and having the tip of the finger amputated.

Othman left the laboratory in late 1944 for another job. After the war, he read of a Japanese biological warfare attack on Chongqing using fleas, and he stated in the article that “the thought that I could have been involved in something related to that still troubles and worries me.” In the years intervening between the end of the war and his speaking to the Straits Times, he never spoke of his employment at Unit 9420.

In Japan, historian Matsumura Takao of Keio University credited the information from the former official with filling the gap between what had been strongly suspected about the Singapore operation and the lack of substantive proof. He also set about on his own search for information concerning the laboratory. He located the former head of the laboratory and got a story, albeit with credibility gaps. Phan of the Straits Times then followed up on his coverage in the newspaper’s November 11, 1991, issue with a second piece on the issue. In an article headlined “Germ lab’s head says work solely for research, vaccines … But Japanese professor skeptical about his claim,” Phan followed the progress of Professor Matsumura’s investigation into the issue, while also giving space to the former laboratory administrator’s rebuttal.

The story gave the Japanese government a problem, and it issued the predictable and well-worn denial. Concerning this response, Phan wrote that “the Japanese government responded, saying that it had no records of such a laboratory—a claim which contrasted with those in U.S. Army documents which mentioned its existence.” The documents of course are those which U.S. military authorities gathered from interviews with Unit 731 leaders forty-five years earlier, which made some passing mention of a Singapore unit.

The former head of the Singapore facility was “a retired doctor in his early eighties who refused to be identified.” According to the article, “he said he was transferred to Singapore a week after the island was occupied in February, 1942 from the main branch of … Unit 731 in Harbin, Manchuria. Singapore was the headquarters of the Japanese Southern Army and the base to supply material to the war front. To prevent the outbreak of diseases in the city, strict bacteriological checks on water supply and fresh food were carried out.” The retired doctor mentions soldiers catching rats in the city and conducting experiments with them, and comments, “Such behavior must have seemed odd to the people there and thus caused misunderstanding.”

Did the people misunderstand? Or did they, in fact, understand all too well? The former laboratory chief talks of the large scale on which his facility operated—it employed all of one thousand members—and the fact that it was had been set up by people brought into Singapore by Naito Ryoichi, a prominent Unit 731 officer who later played an important role in the outfit’s first negotiations with American occupation forces.

Matsumura’s counterargument concerning the benign role allegedly played by the Singapore unit was also carried in the same newspaper: “The other four branches of the unit at Harbin, Guangzhou, Beijing and Nanjing were involved in the manufacture of germ warfare weapons. It would seem strange if the branch in Singapore was not involved in similar activities.” More pointedly, he adds that it seemed odd to set up a laboratory for research on a disease in a place in which there was no epidemic. And he notes that the head of the lab, Naito, and other members had all come to Singapore after working in Harbin, where biological warfare weapons were manufactured.

In February 1995, a documentary on an Asahi Broadcasting Company program interviewed a former member, Takayama Yoshiaki, of the Singapore unit. His account of what he did in Singapore falls into the pattern of Japan’s methodology for creating plague as a weapon. He recalls, “We raised fleas in oil cans. Then, the infected rats were put into mesh enclosures, and lowered into the cans. The fleas would bite the rats, and the fleas became infected.”

The discovery of these facts regarding the Singapore unit throws light upon the geographical extent of Japan’s biological warfare ambitions.

Hiroshima

The charming island of Okunoshima lies just a few minutes by boat from the port city of Hiroshima. In 1929, a factory on the island started producing poison gas for chemical warfare. A small museum has been established near the remains of the factory to remind people of what went on here. The curator is a former worker in what was a highly secretive, dangerous operation. Photos show the scars and disfigurements suffered by the workers.

The island’s history as a center for chemical warfare production dates back to 1928, when the installation there engaged in production of mustard gas on an experimental basis. Equipment was imported from France, and workers were brought in from nearby rural communities on the Japanese mainland.

With the expansion of the war in the latter part of the 1930s, the Hiroshima plant increased production. Types of gases produced over the factory’s lifetime include yperite, lewisite, and cyanogen. So important—and confidential—was the work done at the island that it actually disappeared from Japanese maps as the army moved more aggressively into China.

The workers themselves were ordered to the same secrecy as Unit 731 personnel. And, as with Unit 731, the Japanese government has shown a deep reluctance to admit that anything untoward went on at Okunoshima. For a long time, the government refused to acknowledge responsibility for assisting former workers at the factory there. Finally, it granted some of them recognition as poison gas patients and allowed them compensation, if far from sufficient. For all the destitution and respiratory and other health problems these people have suffered, though, they are comparatively lucky: many of their colleagues died before the government moved to grant them any form of assistance at all.

The plant on Okunoshima supplied some of the gas used in the human experimentation in Manchuria. A reported two million canisters of poison gas abandoned in China by the Japanese army has been a constant bone of contention between the two countries. China has been asking for its removal, while the Japanese government has appeared to be waiting for it simply to go away on its own. Finally, some fifty years after the end of World War II, Japan is reacting to pressure, time, and perhaps the incentive of benefits perceived to be had from good relations with an economically booming China. At last, the abandoned gas weapons are scheduled for deactivation. Poison gas does not seem to fit in well with a booming, mercantilistic atmosphere.

Ties to the Civilian Sector

The massive scale of the new buildings and grounds was not the only major change concerning Ishii Shiro’s work when Unit 731 moved to Pingfang. The change in venue brought about a drastic revision in organization, as well. The first fortress/bacteria factory had been staffed only by military doctors and technicians. Now, however, Ishii aimed to move on from what had been a restricted exercise in military medicine, and involve the entire Japanese medical community. In order to attain this objective, Ishii once again needed to cash in on his talent for manipulation, this time to convince researchers to leave the security of their labs and join him in Manchuria. In the final analysis, Ishii’s talent as an organizer would be evaluated as being greater than his research ability, despite the knack for invention testified to by his water purification systems and biological warfare bombs.

He went back to his alma mater in Kyoto, to Tokyo Imperial University, and to other leading medical universities, and coaxed professors and researchers to come to Manchuria. Attracted by the lure of expanding their research possibilities, some researchers went themselves, while others sent their students. The students would write up their research, then send it back to their professors, who would then use the data to prepare their own reports and advance themselves in the medical community. In defense of some of the people recruited, it must be acknowledged that not all of them knew what they were getting into and were themselves used by Ishii and his henchmen. There were also students who were pressured by their professors to go work with Ishii’s organization. Defying a professor in Japan’s strict academic hierarchy was (and remains even today) equivalent to career suicide.

The degree of civilian involvement in the human-experimentation units has been a matter of discussion in Japan for some time, but a recent statement by a former unit member throws past estimates into a new light. In 1994, a former unit member by the name of Okijima, then seventy-eight years old, offered the following comment on the personnel of Unit 731: “Some things have to be corrected. There were no soldiers at Unit 731. They were all civilian employees.”