Page 166 - Unit 731 Testimony

[Nakagawa entered the medical department of Ishii Shiro's alma mater
Kyoto Imperial University in 1945, going on, in later years, to become
professor emeritus at Osaka University. The Japanese school year starts in

April, so he had only a few months of student life before the war ended in
August. This testimony is taken mainly from his address at the Unit 731
Exhibition in Osaka in the spring of 1994, supplemented by information he
provided in personal meetings with the author.]
When we first started studying at Kyoto, our instructor was an army

doctor who told us that the practice of medicine is not for healing the sick
and injured. Japan, he said, was fighting the world, and medicine itself must
become a weapon.

The instructor told us that animal tests alone were not sufficient for
medical studies, and that human tests were also necessary. He said that such
tests had actually been carried out, and showed us 16-mm movies that had
been taken in Manchuria. One movie showed an experiment in which air
was injected into the arms of living subjects to produce air embolisms. The
films showed the victims in progressive stages of the condition, as they
suffered to death.

Another film the instructor showed us was a beheading, with blood
spurting from the body.

I believe that the Unit 731 research facilities were possibly the best in
the world at the time. After they were blown up at the end of the war, the
facts were revealed. This is a scar on Japanese medicine, but it goes beyond
being a mere scar. Unit 731 came about as a result of the medical thinking
in Japan.

Some of the experiments had nothing to do with advancing the
capability of germ warfare, or of medicine. There is such a thing as
professional curiosity: "What would happen if we did such and such?"
What medical purpose would be served by performing and studying
beheadings? None at all. That was just playing around. Professional people,

too, like to play.

Member of the Hygiene Corps (Tomioka

Heihachiro)