Page 161 - Unit 731 Testimony

I was a civilian assistant at the Japanese army's laboratory facilities in
Tokyo, near where the bones were found in Shinjuku in 1989. It was the
beginning of the second year after the China Incident of the summer of

1937, and since the war was being expanded I expected to go to the front in
China, but only ten days after assuming my post in Tokyo, I was ordered to
the Ishii unit in Harbin. There were seventeen or eighteen of us civilian
employees in the army, both minors and adults. We left Tokyo in early
November 1938.

I was assigned to a team under the leadership of an army doctor. Our
job was to examine the maruta delivered to Unit 731 by the kenpeitai. We
took samples of their blood and stool, tested for kidney function, and
collected other physical data. This information was used to determine a
person's condition before the experiments. Without it, the data from
bacteriological tests could not be compared.

The maruta were supplied with good nutrition. They were fed so as to
give them the same physical endurance as a soldier. Our team did not
actually perform the tests of infection through injection or through germ
bombs. Our work was similar to that of hospital technicians, so after the

war, some of my associates found work as clinical technicians or X-ray
technicians.
In 1940, from August through November, we were planning for the
plague attack on Ningbo. For our base, we used an airfield at a former

Chinese Nationalist Party aviation school in Hangzhou at the mouth of the
Tsientang River. From there, light planes took the plague-carrying fleas to
Ningbo. They were slow planes, with speeds of no more than one hundred
eighty to two hundred kilometers per hour, and I don't think they could fly
above four thousand meters. An attacking fighter could have brought them
down in one shot, if there had been an encounter. But no enemy planes
came around.

I know for sure there were fleas used in the drop. Fleas were bred at
Harbin and often flown into Hangzhou by a transport plane, and then they
were transferred to a light plane. Once, during a transfer, the fleas got loose

and got all over the airport. There was a scare that everyone working in
there would become infected, and a lot of commotion followed. We sprayed
large quantities of insecticides over the airfield, and because of it extensive
areas of grass died and turned a bright red.