Page 156 - Unit 731 Testimony

and ten army doctors and officers in our unit. Our job was to treat sick and
wounded soldiers and send them back to the front lines.

One day I went into the school grounds. There were some Chinese
soldiers of the resistance army and some peasants being held there, and
Japanese soldiers were smoking and joking around among themselves. I
still had a conscience then, and I asked if someone had done something bad
enough to warrant an execution. The Japanese soldiers snickered derisively.
"All resistance soldiers get executed," they answered. Living persons are

good for scalpel practice, so people were brought in to the hospital by the
kenpeitai to get cut up just like the maruta in Unit 731.
One day soon after I started at that assignment, the hospital head told

us, "Today we will have surgery practice." I was startled. It was an order.
There was no getting out of it. Normally, we dissected people who had died
of such diseases as typhoid fever, dysentery, and tuberculosis. Now we were
being taken to the dissection room for a different type of exercise. Soldiers
came along as observers.

When we opened the door, there was a colonel waiting. We saluted. In
the room were two Chinese who had been brought in by the kenpeitai. One
looked like a soldier, the other was a farmer. There were two operating
tables, and doctors and nurses; there were saws for cutting bones, and
scissors and other equipment.

What did these people do? It must have been an act of patriotism. But I
couldn't think about things like that back then. I only wanted to look good.
We had an education in militarism, and in racism. We thought, "Ah! They
surrendered to the Japanese army."

Everything started with a signal from the hospital head. One Chinese
had big thighs and walked slowly and calmly. He lay down and had no sign
of fear, no stress on his face. He was composed. Someone else used him for
surgery practice.

I went over and pushed the other one to the operating table. I had no
feeling of apology or of doing anything bad. The farmer was resigned to his
fate, and he lowered his head and walked forward. I didn't want to get my
clothes dirty from him; I wanted to look sharp. He went as far as the
operating table but didn't want to lie down. A nurse using broken Chinese

told him, "We're using ether; it won't hurt, so lie down." She gave me a wry
smile when she said that. She had been working there for a long time, and