Page 163 - Unit 731 Testimony

on a scale for weighing. The heart was still beating, and it made the scale
weights clank together.

The question is often asked why doctors who were supposed to be
dedicated to saving people's lives ended up doing such evil deeds. I think it
has to be seen against the background of the times. In 1937, when the
SinoJapanese War started, there was a pronouncement to the effect that the
first reserve troops stationed in Manchuria would not be mobilized. The
only exception would be if there were a major incident at the Soviet border

with no time for sending in troops and equipment from the Japanese
mainland. Civilian employees would not be called up, and the salary was
better than back in Japan. Employees could bring their families to live with
them, and people working in university medical labs in Japan could
dispense with the worry of being drafted into military medicine. Even going
to work in an army hospital would be relatively all right, but a doctor

assigned to a combat unit could be sent out to battle zones where the bullets
are flying.
I did not want to experiment on maruta. The major reason a lot of
people joined was to protect health with hygiene, and the pay was good. At

eighteen and nineteen years of age, we were getting higher salaries than the
teachers who had educated us a long time ago, back in school.
Manchuria from 1938 to 1940 was like heaven for Japanese. We heard
that on the mainland even matches were government-rationed, while we had

plenty of everything. I was not so enthusiastic about becoming employed by
the army, but the salary was a big attraction. When I worked on the Ningbo
biological attack, I was getting a salary of one hundred twenty yen a month.
In 1940, the principal of an elementary school did not make that much. The
cost of living was low, and I would have been inducted into the military in
another one or two years anyway. I saw a chance to rearrange my life
starting from scratch.

I was in Unit 731 for two years and three months, up to the end of
January 1940. After that, I was assigned to a border garrison.

Someone asked whether I had seen any woman maruta. Personally, I
saw only two, in the Number 8 prison block. One was a twenty-one-year-
old, married Chinese woman; the other was an unmarried Soviet girl of
nineteen. I asked where she came from and learned that she was from the
Ukraine, very far away. Those women were not used in any experiments