Page 55 - Marutas of Unit 731

Corps. Some Youth Corps members were just 15-17 when they started
working at Unit 731. ey went through rigorous training in biolog y, foreign

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languages, math, and bacteriolog y. Most of them became assistants to
researchers at Unit 731 where their main duty was to remove organs from a

human body during a vivisection. According to former Youth Class Member

at Unit 731, Shinotsuka Ryu, “At rst I was ter ri ed, my legs were shaking,

they told me I could use the longest brush. Aer the vivisection, the victims
were unrecognizable. I was ordered to put their organs into containers. We

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used them to cultivate bacteria.”
It was estimated that about 3000 people went through human

experimentations in Unit 731 from 1940 to 1945. However, that is

considered a low estimate since the capacity of the prisons was a lot higher
and some victims did not sur vive for more than an average of two weeks.

e Reports of A, G, and Q by Shozo Kondo Toshu are examples of such

vivisection experiments. Each rep ort was 350 to 800 pages long and

represented only a small fraction of the met hods used to turn human lives
into data points for scienti c papers. e author’s reports sounded ver y

removed from the human lives that were lost through his research.

Report “A” described how victims react to anthrax. About 30 subjects

were used in that study and the reports of different e ects of anthrax was

ver y objective. ere were no notes on the subjects’ names, gender,
ethnicities, or identi cation of any kind. However, the age range of the

subjects averaged from 20s to 30s. Although there was no de nite gender

listed for the subjects, the presence of testicles examined as an organ showed

all the test subjects were males. All subjects infected with anthrax in the

study sur vived around 2-4 days.