Page 114 - Unit 731 Testimony

An associated unit of Unit 731 was set up in Nanjing shortly after that
city fell into Japanese hands. Equipment and people were transferred from
Harbin. Facilities were great; we even had a swimming pool. The grounds

and buildings were superior, of a quality not to be found in Japan. Under the
regime of Jiang Jieshi, this had originally been a people's hospital. The front
of the hospital complex extended two hundred meters, cut off by a high wall
with a guard gate for egress. The grounds extended about seven hundred
meters back from this front wall, and there was a large red cross at the top
of the main building.

Some buildings left over from earlier times served as facilities like a
glass factory and a print shop. One part of the compound was made into a
ranch for animals. A running creek separated the animal area from the rest
of the compound, and kept the animals from wandering outside the ranch.
There was a bridge with a gate over the creek for people to cross over.

Unit 1644 was classified as a battalion, but our budget was the same as
that normally allotted to a regiment. People working in the unit were
military doctors, medical specialists, interpreters, and civilian employees.

Our activities included developing preventative vaccines, tending the
animals, and drawing the animals' blood for vaccine research and
production. A water purification team carried equipment out to different
areas for water treatment. I was assigned to the vaccine group. There were
one hundred twenty of us, about ten percent of the total complement of the

unit. Every day, I would be given information on the previous day's work,
including which army doctor performed what work, what results had been
obtained, and so forth. I had the job of writing down all these details in a
research statement, then I stamped it "secret" and locked it in a safe.

One day a Chinese man tried to take the written records. He was
caught and arrested. Shortly afterward, an officer came from Japan, and I
was promised an award; the war ended before I had a chance to get it.
Everyone connected with human experiments wore a special button on

the side of his hat. The maruta were kept in cages on the top floor of a
three-story building. The cages were referred to as rotsu [probably from the
Japanese katakana character ro, which is square in shape; the prison block
at Pingfang was called rogo for this reason], and the floor where they were
kept was always just called the "third floor."