Page 151 - Unit 731 Testimony

Then we were sent to China and placed in a big prison that had been
built by the Japanese army. We spent six years there, undergoing mental
training—brainwashing.

When I was doing my work in Manchuria, I arrested a spy. He was a
Korean who had taken part in his country's independence movement, then
gone to the Soviet Union for education. He had come to Dalian through the
headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party and was a bright and efficient
spy. He observed the movements of Japanese army baggage and equipment

and other details of troop activity, and sent the information to the Soviet
Union by wireless radio.
Then we found a connection to the Soviet consulate in Dalian. I was in

charge of the squad that attacked the place. I took about sixty men, and we
surrounded the consulate. We arrested everyone in the spy ring and found
one wireless transmitter. We also found the names of spies in other cities,
and they were arrested, too.
I received orders from my unit commander to send four of the arrested

men to Unit 731. At that time I had no sense that I was a party to any
killing. I only filed the papers and sent the men to Unit 731.
In 1992, a group of us former kenpeitai men went to China to

apologize to the family members of the people we had sent to Unit 731.
One woman, now about sixty, was the grandchild of one of the victims. She
told us, "Our grandfather was killed by Unit 731 in experiments. He was
killed because the kenpeitai sent him. If you hadn't sent him, he would have
lived. You are killers just like those doctors." We prostrated ourselves in
apology, and she kept pressing the fact home that we were partners in the
crime—as guilty as the doctors of Unit 731.

And it's true! It is just as she said. Apologizing does not erase the
crime. After I got out of prison in China, I spoke with my fellow former
kenpeitai members. We were the aggressors. Most of the Japanese
participants in the war were aggressors. Orders came from above—orders

from the emperor—and people were killed because it couldn't be helped.
According to international convention, those who kill in combat are not
criminals. The three thousand people killed by Unit 731 were all sent there
by the kenpeitai or the police. We thought we were doing good for the army
by sending prisoners there. From the point of view of the families of the