Page 173 - Unit 731 Testimony

I thought that this was a cruel thing that the Japanese army was doing,
but that I had to resign myself to it.

In July, we heard news that the Special Attack Forces [the kamikaze
and other suicide units] would be taking off from the Unit 731 airfield. If

we were called to go, we would have to resign ourselves to death. I would
have been resigned to my fate, in line with the teachings of the Buddhist
saint, Amida.
In August, a message came to the unit that Sato Take, the Japanese
ambassador to Moscow, had gone to speak with Molotov with a request for

peace. On the morning of the ninth, Molotov's reply came: at midnight, the
Soviets would invade Manchuria. This message went to the War Ministry,
which in turn ordered us to "stop 731 research. Blow up facilities
immediately and evacuate."

Early the next morning, we started the job of evacuation. About one
hundred people pulled out first and headed for the Korean border. Unit 731
got the Russian message before any other unit, but we did not know
whether Molotov's statement was true or not, so the maruta were not killed
yet.

At the morning muster on August 9, an officer on a white horse
galloped around the compound telling us that the Soviets had attacked, and
we were to pay close attention to unit orders from now on. The first thing
we were told to do was destroy any evidence on us that we were connected

with Unit 731. The next day, three of us were assigned to go into the prison
blocks. This was an area I had been prohibited from entering until now. In
one block, three maruta were lying on the floor, but most of them had
already been taken outside. We dug a hole and piled up several alternating
layers of logs and maruta, one on top of the other. None of us knew what
the other people were doing; we each worked in our own group. The upper-
ranking officers sent their families, along with their important documents,
to Tokyo from the Unit 731 airfield. The unit leader's house was in Tokyo,

and I think that that's where the documents were all taken.
We had to blow up the prison cells. They were numbered 1 through 12.
I went into the Number 12 cell to place explosives into the walls. The walls

were white, and on one there was a message written in blood: "Down with
Japanese imperialism. Long live President Jiang [Chiang]!" The blood had
not darkened yet, so it had to have been written very recently. And it was