Page 128 - Unit 731 Testimony

responsible for all affairs dealing with the emperor and the imperial family.
One may assume that tapes being delivered to the ministry were bound for
the emperor.] I was attached to the National Hygiene Laboratory then, and I

was taken there in an official car with a driver, the unit leader's flag on the
fender. I was just this Youth Corps boy, and yet the guard gave me a
respectful salute when I handed him the briefcase. It had cans of 16-mm
film, probably records of the boss's experiments, and its destination was an
imperial conference.

I preserved a lot of human lab specimens in Formalin. Some were
heads, others were arms, legs, internal organs, and some were entire bodies.
There were large numbers of these jars lined up, even specimens of children
and babies. When I first went into that room, I felt sick and couldn't eat for
days. But I soon got used to it. Specimens of entire bodies were labeled and
identified by nationality, age, sex, and the date and time of death. Names

were not identified. There were Chinese, Russians, and Koreans, and also
Americans, Britons, and Frenchmen. Specimens could have been dissected
at this unit or sent in from other subunits; I couldn't tell.
The glass specimen cases were made by a unit member who had

studied glass manufacture in Europe. He made pipettes and all types of
glass lab equipment, and he gave me presents of small glass birds he made.
I was given work to do during dissections. I had jobs like carrying
buckets full of blood and internal organs. Once, I was allowed to use a

scalpel and cut open a maruta. I made a long cut from the neck down and
cut the body open. It's simple—anyone can do it. After that, the specialists
did the fine work.
In order to obtain accurate data from dissection, researchers want to

have the maruta in as normal a state as possible. Usually they were put to
sleep with chloroform, but some were tied down and cut open while fully
conscious. At first the maruta would let out a hideous scream, but soon the
voice would stop. The organs would be removed, conditions such as color
and weight would be compared with healthy conditions, and then the organs
would be preserved.

One unit team experimented by infecting wheat and watermelon seeds
with typhoid and cholera, then cultivating the seeds to determine how the
disease was retained in the crops. I heard that the purpose was planting
disease-transmitting seeds in enemy territory.