Page 119 - Unit 731 Testimony

other army units. Prevention of communicable diseases in Singapore was a
high priority. The municipal water supply was checked every day, and fresh
food supplies were also constantly checked. We performed hygiene checks

to a degree never before seen in that area. None of the residents had ever
seen such exacting checks carried out. Our activities seemed strange to the
local people, soldiers catching rats in the city and bringing them in to have
fleas picked from them.
Toward the end of the war, Singapore fell rather early. Malaria was a

major cause. The mosquitoes which carry the disease breed in the coral.
There were two types of quinine used as preventive medicine; Japan
produced a hydrochloride type, and Java produced a sulfate type. The latter
was all that was available due to our supplies' being cut off, but it causes
severe side effects in the stomach, and for this reason the soldiers refused to
take it. This resulted in the malaria's spread. When the American subs

started coming into Singapore, the Japanese army was too disabled by
sickness to fight them off. Cut off from food and munitions, Singapore fell.
In China, the rat is a deity of happiness. Handling rats the way we did
must have appeared foreign to the Chinese. In Manchuria, pneumonic

plague became epidemic during the dry season, and we were working on a
method of preventing this, but the Manchurians did not realize it.
Naturally occurring epidemics are dependent upon circumstances such
as temperature, humidity, and rainfall. Without the concurrence of certain

conditions, an epidemic will not occur. Even today, there are certain
elements relating to epidemics that are not clear. For example, pickled
vegetables depend on the action of microorganisms. Each year produces
slightly different results, and even vegetables processed the same year
under the same climatic conditions will sometimes vary from one barrel to
the next. Artificially induced epidemics, however, are not dependent on
such factors.

A case of plague was discovered in Saigon, and I was called there to
investigate. Saigon was the base for Japan's advance into Thailand, and the
army commanders weighed the question of whether there was a chance of

the disease's becoming epidemic. There was a fear that if it happened,
goods and equipment could not be unloaded at port. I suggested calling off
the advance and was reprimanded, and then I was given time to research the
chances of a plague epidemic.