Page 121 - Unit 731 Testimony

unit members. This lecture was presented at the Unit 731 Exhibition in
Takatsuki City, Osaka Prefecture, in December 1994. J

A Korean woman who served in the Japanese military brothels used
the Japanese name Haruko. [This was a popular name for non-Japanese
women, including comfort women, to adopt.] A Japanese soldier she knew
developed a fever, and "Haruko" heard of this and went to take care of him.
A personal warmth grew between the two. After that, they were both
transferred to Burma, "Haruko" to an army brothel, the soldier to his new

duty post. In Burma, the soldier searched for the comfort woman who had
helped him, inquiring at the military brothels there, but without success
In 1944, with the war going badly for Japan, the soldier was sent to

work at a quarantine station in Harbin. And there fate brought him into a
meeting again with "Haruko." It was a brief meeting; the soldier expressed
his gratitude with some small gifts, including a fountain pen and some
money, and asked for a way to contact "Haruko" in the future. Japan was
headed for defeat, and he looked forward to meeting her again after the war.

They never did meet. Then, in recent years the comfort woman
problem started surfacing. Survivors among them who suffered shame and
stigma for decades have slowly started coming forward, some seeking
apology from Japan, others seeking compensation. With all this attention
focused on the comfort women of the thirties and forties, the former soldier,
now in his eighties, is sending out an appeal to help him search once more

for "Haruko."
The former soldier contacted me, and I went to visit him. He told me
his story, that he had been a technician and a member of Unit 731 working
in the plague research section. But he had another job, giving health

examinations to comfort women. Once a week, the women were examined
for venereal disease, and he was working in this capacity when he met
"Haruko" at the quarantine station in Harbin in 1944.
His work with the comfort women involved taking blood samples from

them and sending the samples to Unit 731 for analysis. I have searched out
another member of Unit 731 who was also assigned to examining comfort
women for venereal disease. He visited the various brothels, at times
examining up to one hundred women a day.

Studies of venereal disease were fairly extensive, yet many Japanese
books on Unit 731 make no mention of this area. I went into the records of