Page 159 - Unit 731 Testimony

of today. I also believed that when I went to the comfort women I was
merely paying for services. That was the level of my consciousness.

It is said that there were twenty million victims of the war in China.
But only ten to twenty percent of these were killed in gunfire exchange.
Most—non-resisting old people, women, and children—were captured and
slaughtered. Prisoners of war could not be taken to the front or allowed to
escape, so they were killed in the manner of the Rape of Nanjing.

Those who were part of it do not come forward to tell the people how
it was. Why? Because the Japanese have all forgotten about it.

When I was captured in China, I did not realize my own crimes. I
thought I had been taken prisoner only because Japan lost the war; the
Japanese army's education was thorough. While I was confessing, I read
what other people had written, and I realized that what they had done was
wrong. But I also had been performing dissections on living people. Those
who commit evil acts first wonder if anybody knows about it. The Chinese
told me, "You came here because you were ordered to do so. But you

yourself murdered. So write down everything honestly."
Prisoners who had committed light crimes were given two and a half
years. More serious offenders were forwarded to another location, and their

cases reviewed after three and a half years.
I spent eleven years in prison. Shortly before I was released, I received
a letter from the aged mother of someone who was killed. She wrote, "I saw
you people take him away. I was choked with emotion, and I ran after you
with my bound feet. Later I learned that he was taken to the army hospital

and cut up alive. I cried. I couldn't eat."
In July 1956, I was released from prison The person who came to meet
me asked, "Why were you considered a war criminal? You were tough and

you worked hard." I told him he was wrong, and reminded him that he did
the same things in China, also. He said, "Oh, that," and he thought back and
grimaced. That man died six years ago. If I had not said anything about our
past deeds, he would have died without realizing what he had done.
I was interviewed by a newspaper reporter at my home, and he

commented that in spite of what I had done, I am still active as a doctor. "In
Germany," he told me, "you would have been placed on trial."
It is not just the political and social sectors in Japan that ignore this

past. The same tendency exists even in popular literature. European and