Page 154 - Unit 731 Testimony

1994.]

This is not easy for me to speak about, but it is something I must
confess. What I did was wrong. It is also true that it was forced on me by
the government, but that does not reduce the size of my crime. It is
something that happened a long time ago, but those who are not taught
about the war are ill-educated.

A short while ago, the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Japan
stated that Japanese aggression in China created twenty million [dead]
victims. He later retracted that statement. There was no need for the
retraction. The statement was true.

The Japanese army went to plunder and steal materials and to kill.
Japan wanted iron, coal, and provisions, and the army drove into the
mountains to prosecute the war. At the time, the Japanese used derogatory
terms for the Chinese, like "Chinaman" and "Chink," and looked at them
with contempt. When I was a child, we were told to despise the Chinese,
despise the Koreans. "It's all right to conquer them. We have become elite,

and should join with the Americans and British and conquer Asia." I hated
war and killing, but around middle school and into college, I began to think
that such ideas were unavoidable.

I was born into a doctor's family with a practice in our area. With the
good fortune of that background, I graduated medical school. I wanted to
serve in some village that had no doctor, or work in medical research, but
circumstances did not permit it.
In 1941, I became a doctor and specialized in infectious diseases. I

believed that under the emperor we were the greatest country in Asia. I
became an army officer, different from ordinary people. I was proud to be
under direct control of the emperor, and I was taught that if I believed in the
emperor, my own happiness would come as an extension of that.

Some 1,700 or 1,800 of us from the Thirty-sixth Regiment in Iwate
received training in hygiene, and in February 1942, we were sent overseas.
Reflecting on it now brings the crime back to mind.
I was assigned to the army hospital in the southern part of Shanxi

Province in China.
Why here? What was the purpose in carrying the war this deep into the
country?