Page 129 - Unit 731 Testimony

Each of Japan's kamikaze pilots was given a drink of Imperial saké
before leaving on their missions. A Unit 731 member once told me that
"that saké is laced with a stimulant that was developed in Unit 731."

Afterwards, I heard that the stimulant suppresses fear and agitates the pilots
to throw themselves into the attack.
I saw the movie Black Sun 731 [a Hong Kong production]. In it, the
commanding officer bullies the youth squad boys. That was not completely
accurate. Research was the first priority. There was harmony among us, and

we Youth Corps boys were handled carefully.
At Xinjing I worked with the hygiene team conducting what they
called "manju" exams. [A manju is a bun filled with sweet bean jam; the

word is a slang term for a woman's sex organ.] The official name was
"disease prevention exams." We went from one brothel to the next,
checking the women for syphilis. They had to get on their hands and knees
with their buttocks raised for the exam. On a busy day we examined up to
one hundred eighty women.

Syphilis would cause a woman's "manju" to swell up. Once during an
examination, pus discharged from the woman's organ and hit the examiner
in the face. A sample of her blood was taken to the unit for analysis and
proved syphilitic.

There was an exchange of doctors coming and going from all parts of
Japan. Each worked on his own research project and directed it at the unit.
One was a former president of the present Iwate Prefectural University
Hospital. He came to study bacteriology and became one of the most
prominent researchers in Japan in typhoid, cholera, and dysentery. The man
who taught me dissection is a leading professor at Kanazawa Medical

University.
After I came back to Japan, I worked at making lab specimens.

In the summer of 1940 a plague spread into the capital city of Xinjing.
One of the other former Unit 731 members says that it was spread by the

unit. I have no way of knowing that, but we were called out and we
enclosed the entire affected area in a sheet-metal wall about a meter high,
then burned everything inside the enclosure to the ground. Next we
examined all the Japanese and Chinese who had lived there. We also
secured the areas where the houses had been burned.