Page 172 - Unit 731 Testimony

prevention patrol, and water testing patrol. These are the subjects we had to
absorb in a short time.

Our instructor told us about the situation with the war—that Japan was
losing. The unit leader came around during instruction period and told us,
"Education is like your own internal organs. It brings out your ability. So I
want you to apply yourselves."

Studying under a schedule like this every day, it was only natural that
in the afternoons we would get sleepy. The instructor woke us up by telling
us stories about his own experiences. Once, he recalled the time when he
was part of an operation in the city of Jilin. They carried plague bacteria
there and conducted tests. The method involved placing the pathogens into

buns and then wrapping them in paper. The Unit 731 men went to an area of
the city where children were playing, and started eating buns similar to
those in which they had planted the germs. The children saw the men
eating, and came over. Then, the men gave the children the infected buns.
Two or three days later, the strategy team went to the village to investigate,
and noted stories about outbreaks of disease.

There were vegetable gardens at the unit. Gardens on one side were for
growing food for us; the gardens on the other side were used for testing
cholera germs for use as plant pathogens, but I heard later that those tests
ended in failure.

People who were arrested on the Chinese mainland as spies, then tried
in a military court in Harbin and found guilty, were sent to Unit 731 and
placed into prison blocks for medical experiments There were always
guards at the entrance. Every day, a covered truck came in from Harbin
with three or four maruta. Our instructor told us that, in the prison blocks,

the maruta were being infected with plague, cholera, typhus, and syphilis.
He said that one test entailed injecting typhoid germs into a person's side.
We did not have the authority to enter the blocks and could only hear about
what went on inside from our instructor. He related that, on entering the
dissection room, one first had to put on heavy rubber clothes, then a
disinfectant mist was sprayed from above. He said that about three or four

people at a time worked on a dissection. While one person worked with the
scalpel, another next to him measured time—for example, how much time
elapsed from injection until dehydration set in, and how long it would take
for death to occur.