Page 118 - Unit 731 Testimony

to handle the flow of Japanese personnel going to and coming in from
Japan. There were no branch units at outside locations, so when there was
an outbreak of disease, teams were dispatched from our unit. The unit

leader was Major General Kitagawa Masataka. Within Unit 9420, disease
prevention activities centered around two subunits. One was the Kono Unit,
named for that unit's leader and specializing in malaria. I was in charge of
the other unit, called the Umeoka Unit. My name was not appropriate for a
military unit and so the Oka character was borrowed from the main unit's
designation, and Ume added to form my subunit's name. [The
inappropriateness was because the person testifying had an aristocratic

name.]
At the time, I was the only civilian subunit leader. My position was
equivalent to that of a major. The car at my disposal bore a flag on the
fender that was not an officer's flag but was made to look similar, so when I

went through the streets soldiers saluted me.
After the Singapore unit was set up in 1942, research into plague was
carried on. One stage of this was highly dangerous and handled only by
specially trained Japanese staff. But there were also cases of plague

infection that occurred within the unit. As far as I know, the dangerous
work was not handled by any of the young local boys employed there.
Making the vaccine lymph itself was not dangerous, and the local people
were enlisted to help in this work. I saw the Singapore Straits Times article
about a man who worked there when he was a boy. He told of how they
chloroformed rats and removed fleas from their bodies. The purpose of that

work was to study the percentage of the fleas which are carriers of plague
germs and so determine the probabilities of plague epidemics. The purposes
for breeding fleas in the laboratory were to develop an antidote against
plague and to produce fleas for research.
When the fleas were handled, there was a chance that they could get

into people's clothes. So, in that hot climate, people wore loincloths when
handling the non-infected fleas. When a flea lands on the bare skin it is
immediately discernible and can be brushed off. People wore rubber boots
with the tops sealed against their legs with petroleum jelly to prevent fleas
from entering.

Singapore was at the front lines of the war and also was the base for
the Japanese Southern Army and a supply center, sending materials out to