Page 123 - Unit 731 Testimony

woman. In vivisections on living persons, sometimes chloroform is used to
put the victim to sleep; at times it is not, and the person is cut open fully
conscious. This particular Chinese woman, he told me, was put under

chloroform but regained consciousness on the table. She started getting up,
screaming, "Go ahead and kill me, but please don't kill my child!"
"There were four or five of us working on the vivisection," he told me.
"We held her down, applied more anesthesia, and continued."

He told me that he has carried that memory ever since. He felt that
bringing it out would place the other surviving members of the team in a
difficult position, so for fifty years he had been determined to take that "to
hell" with him.

I managed to find one more person who had been a member of the
Futagi team for a limited time. He had been a candidate to become a subunit
leader under Ishii; he did not get this position but later became Ishii's
private driver and assistant. Here is what he told me:

"At first we infected women with syphilis by injection. But this
method did not produce real research results. Syphilis is normally
transmitted through direct contact. Investigating the course of the disease
can offer no useful results unless it is acquired this way. And so we

followed a system of direct infection through sexual contact. The reason
Unit 731 researched venereal disease was because of the Japanese army's
practice of using comfort women. By learning how the disease develops we
tried to find a way to protect Japanese soldiers from sexually transmitted
disease.

"We were very limited in methods of treating venereal disease at the
time, mainly just one type of injection. And a Japanese soldier catching
venereal disease would not only be barred from promotion but in some
units he would be reduced in rank and placed in detention while he was
being treated for it. So, to an army man, catching venereal disease was a
disgrace and a setback. As a result, many infected soldiers kept quiet about

their infection and tried to get cured secretly. Venereal disease grew into a
very serious problem in the military.
"In Siberia, for example, the prices for going to a comfort woman
station were prohibitively high compared with the salary of the Japanese

soldier. So the soldiers took their pleasures by raping local Russian women.
This led to an outbreak of venereal disease, with huge numbers of Japanese