Page 169 - Unit 731 Testimony

The prisoner was not tied to a post, but was just standing with his
hands tied behind his back. When I thrusted, the bayonet did not enter his
body, and he fell to the ground. The unit officer screamed at me, "Do you

think you can kill a man like that?" And to show me how to do it, he
demonstrated by killing the man with a single thrust. One could see that the
unit leader was good. I followed his example and killed the other farmer,
then dragged his body to the hole and buried him.
Then, I had night watch in a high guard tower. The place where we

killed the Chinese was right in front of the tower, and I was afraid to look in
that direction. Most of the time I looked the other way. There was even a
time during which I felt haunted, afraid that a ghost might come out from
there.

This is the way my training went, with my killing one or two people at
a time until over five years I had finally, as an individual, killed a total of
thirty-three people directly. In unison with others, I was party to the killings
of more than seven hundred people. Sometimes a locality would be
surrounded and then attacked, and it is not possible to know which person
was killed by which soldier, but I share the responsibility, and I want to

testify here to these facts also.
In 1942, our unit took part in a siege in Shantung Province. We
encircled an area with a circumference of one hundred sixty kilometers and
conducted what we called a "rabbit hunt" inside the encircled area. At night,

troops climbed mountains and traversed rivers with flaming torches.
Everywhere one looked, the torches were burning. Our intention was that
not one "rabbit" should escape. All the men we captured in that operation—
young and old, alike—were made to march to the train. From there, they
were put into freight cars and taken to Japan, where they were sacrificed
working in the Hanaoka mines.

[Koreans and Chinese were brought in and beaten into forced labor at the
Hanaoka mines to produce fuel for Japan's war machine. As in other

Japanese forced-labor projects, such as the Burma-Siam Railroad, the death
rate was high. Books and articles on the Hanaoka mines have appeared over
the years, but redress from the government seems as remote as it has been
with the comfort women problem.]