Page 137 - Unit 731 Testimony

the Russian specimen should have been covered, too, and someone had
removed the cover.

Just then, an officer saw me, screamed, "That's forbidden!" and I ran
out. That evening, the officer in charge of our barracks said to us, "The
person who saw the preserved Russian specimen, raise your hand." Nobody
raised a hand. He got angry and ordered us to slap each other's faces. "All
right," he said. "That was self-punishment. Now tell me truthfully, who saw
the Russian specimen?" I thought it was all right now, so I raised my hand.

Then the officer hit me on the head with a kendo fencing stave.
The Special Forces men had taken a lot of photos. They were big:
bodies with no heads, with no feet, with swollen bellies. That was from

water torture. They force water into the body to swell up the belly. My
buddy Mikami told me, "I saw the whole thing. It was really hideous." I
told him, "That's war." I killed people for the country—for the emperor.
That was my belief then.

In August 1941, we got on a train to be transferred, but I didn't know
where we were headed. When we got to Harbin, the officer in charge told us
we were going to Hailar. After four or five days on the train, we arrived
near the Russian border. A truck met us at the station. There were members

of all different teams and units among us. We were ordered, "Epidemic
Prevention and Water Supply Unit members, take one step forward." They
split our group up, and I was in the group sent to Unit 543. That was a
branch unit of Unit 731 in Hailar. I was stationed there for three years, until
1944. Our barracks was right in front of the station, an old Russian
barracks, and I remember hearing the trains coming and going during the

night.
We conducted field tests of water quality. We were supposed to work
through October, until the cold weather sets in, but actually we worked in
the winter also. We loaded tents, charcoal, vessels, and other equipment into
two trucks and took off with a team of about fifteen people. There were

army doctors, hygiene specialists, and noncommissioned officers.
We drove up near the Nomonhan region. We drew water samples into
test tubes and labeled them with the place, date, and time of sampling, and a

code. When we found rivers frozen, we had to break through the ice to get
samples. We drove around taking samples like that for about one or two