Page 183 - Unit 731 Testimony

A lot of university professors were connected with Unit 731.
Especially upper-level people, like in the Ministry of Health and Welfare
and those concerned with vaccines. They all had some connection with the

Ishii unit in some way. They never said anything about it, but they all
received pay for working there. Those are the people who built the
foundation of today's Japan.

Captain, Japanese Imperial Army (Kojima Takeo)

[Kojima spoke at Tsukuba City in Ibaraki Prefecture.]
Perhaps there are some people here at this Unit 731 Exhibition who

think that this was all there was to Japanese aggression at the time. Unit 731
was merely one segment of the dark shadow of Japan's aggression, and I
would like to tell of my experience in this.
I graduated university in 1939, and in December of that year I joined
the army. I was sent to the Kwantung Army in Shantung Province, where I

spent six years, until the end of the war.
I learned Russian, and in May 1945, I was transferred to Intelligence,
where I spent four months gathering data and listening in on and decoding

Russian messages. After four months of this, it was as good as knowing
nothing at all. Finally, they attacked. When they did, they did not use any
coded telegraphic terms or coded text in their communications. Everything
was sent in normal Russian.
We established the location of the Russian incursion with radio

direction finders. We knew that after crossing the border, they had made a
quick advance of eighty kilometers. That distance meant that they were not
infantry, but mechanized units. Shortly after the attack, we retreated to the
Korean border. There, I was captured and sent to a camp in Siberia. I was
there for three years, and for two years after that I was transferred from one

camp to another.
I was in the army for six years, and Siberia for five. In October 1949,
the present country of China was born. Of the Japanese who had been in
China and were then being held prisoner in Russia, 1,050 of us who were
designated war criminals were sent back to China. We were incarcerated in