Page 136 - Unit 731 Testimony

maruta. When were drinking saké together with the officers we asked about
those Chinese. We were told, "That's not for you to ask!"

The third time I brought a load of Chinese out to the plain, there were
two or three trucks that were returning empty stopped by the side of the
road. I pulled my truck over, and there was an old man sitting there on a
mat rush holding a skylark. I started up the truck again and heard some
gunshots. I stopped and looked back, and the old man was lying dead.
Later, I asked a researcher about it. He told me, "Don't ever say a word

about that. He was a spy."
There was an airfield near the unit headquarters. There were lots of
planes, and when they took off in the morning it was noisy. Planes from

other units used to land there often. I was once told that a plane that had just
left had gone for a plague germ attack on the Chinese army. But a civilian
researcher told us, "The bacteria that you fellows cultivated were spread in
Nanjing, or somewhere in China." Once, someone said that the bacteria that
we made had been cultivated well, and four or five Chinese had died. We
cheered ourselves. "We're medal earners," we said. We were really proud.

There was a big smokestack in the unit. On some days it poured
smoke, sometimes there was none. It was far from our barracks. Once, we

asked what was burning. The answer was "prisoners."
The building with the stack was near the barracks for the education
officers. One day when I walked by there, the wives of the officers were

polishing brass objects that looked like trophies. Someone told me, "Those
are bombs."
Afterward, I asked a civilian researcher about them. He told me, "The
bacteria that you fellows made were loaded into those and dropped for
dispersal. Maybe in Chongqing, or Shanghai." That was around June 1941.

I watched the wives polishing the bombs in the corridor of the
building. Then I noticed, farther inside at a wide space in the corridor, there
was a human specimen in a jar. The jar was the size of a person, and what

looked like a young Russian soldier was preserved inside in liquid. His
body was cut in half, lengthwise. I realized later that it was a White
Russian.
There were other specimen jars there, also, but they were all covered
over with cloths, and I couldn't see what was inside. I figured that perhaps