Page 12 - Unit 731 Testimony

eyes to history. The efforts of local governments, in conjunction with high
degrees of volunteer activity in their areas, can be credited with bringing the
Unit 731 Exhibition before the eyes of Japanese in sixty-one locations over

the course of a year and a half. The exhibition, in whose final days this
book was begun, was arranged by a central organizing committee in Tokyo,
and each locality which wanted to plan a local exhibition had to raise its
own funds and find its own venue. There was, of course, an admission fee
to enter the exhibit, and so for the visitors it could be considered a self-
financed course in the history omitted by orthodox education.

The shock to the Japanese people was predictable. In spite of the
occasional documentary coverage or newspaper article, Unit 731 was
largely unknown and unthought of. It sat safely outside the scope of the
consciousness of most Japanese. True, some attention was drawn to Unit
731 when the Japanese government was taken to court for not permitting

factual accounts of it in school textbooks, but even those with some
knowledge of the Ishii organization had their eyes opened at the exhibits.
Several factors have conspired to keep Unit 731's activities from
receiving the attention they so richly deserve. The decades of concealment

of the outfit's history were partly the fruit of the Japanese central
government's reputed skill at inactivity, along with its priority on avoiding
all manners of controversy, whether domestic or international. Evidence
also failed to surface simply because there were no survivors among the
victims of Unit 731; all were eliminated before the end of the war. Then,
there was the combination order-threat by commanding general Ishii Shiro

himself that former unit members were to "take the secret to the grave."
Obedience to the command was probably not at all difficult for those
surviving Japanese members of the unit who could have borne witness but
would have felt scalpels turned in their own hearts were their children to
ask, "Daddy! How could you do something like that?"—and feel it even
more acutely in their later years when the question would be prefaced with
"Grandpa."

This last fact highlights an even more astonishing result of the
exhibition. Surviving members of Unit 731 who had sworn to remain silent
about their memories came out before the public to testify—to confess—

and finally unburden their minds. After a half century of silence, they told.
Some could tell all but their names, and retained that one secret before the
public: an omission meaningful to them, but a minor exclusion for those of