Page 115 - Unit 731 Testimony

One had to pass through the main offices in order to get to the third
floor, where the cages were. The area where the prisoners were was sealed
off with a door. One meter in front of the door and on its other side were

disinfectant mats to prevent bacteriological contaminants from being
carried outside on people's shoes.
Inside the door, the room was about ten by fifteen meters with cages
all in a row. Most of the maruta in the cages were just lying down. In the
same room were oil cans with mice that had been injected with plague

germs, and with fleas feeding on the mice. These were not the usual types
of fleas, but a transparent variety. Around the perimeter of the room was a
thirty-centimeter-wide trough of running water. [The purpose of the trough,
which is wider than the distance over which the fleas can leap, is apparently
to keep the fleas from going outside the room.]

Next to the dissection room was the specimen room. Every year, when
the new soldiers came in, the first job they got was cleaning up at night
around the human specimen room. The other soldiers would put a dish of
fireflies in the specimen room by the window facing the corridor. The
fireflies swarming around the specimens of body parts created an eerie

feeling, and some of the young recruits suffered emotional problems from
the experience.

Virologist attached to Unit 731 (Anonymous)

In 1934, I graduated Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine. I then
continued my research, specializing in virology. Ishii came on one of his
trips to Kyoto looking for people to join him as civilian employees at the
Army Medical College in Tokyo. One of the people he recruited was
Okamoto Kozo. He gathered some people, but there were no virus
specialists among them. Among those who went with Ishii were some of

my acquaintances who had been senior to me in earlier days at university,
so I joined also and became a civilian employee with pay and status
equivalent to an army first lieutenant. I became qualified as an army lab
technician, then, in 1939, I was transferred to the unit at Harbin. In 1942, as
soon as Singapore was. taken over by the Japanese army, I was sent there to

help in setting up a unit. I was there until October 1944, when I was sent