Page 20 - Unit 731 Testimony

after World War II, the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare ordered a
change to eliminate the anti-Soviet connotation. A simple change of one of
the ideographs in favor of one that resembled it left the pronunciation,

seirogan, unchanged, while turning the name of the medicine into a term
with no particular meaning. Even today, seirogan can be found in any
pharmacy in Japan.
The Japanese success in minimizing deaths from illness proved that
they were correct in attaching equal priority to germs and bullets, and soon

after the war's end, a Department of Field Disease Prevention was
established. It was a natural outgrowth of the lessons learned in Manchuria
and a peacetime continuation of what the American medical observer
termed "the most elaborate and effective system of sanitation ever practiced
in war." Commendable though this move was, though, it had its dark side.
The original bacteriological aims of Japan were soon to be warped in the

direction of causing, rather than preventing and curing, disease. And the
fiber of the high morality of Japanese troops, praised by the American
surgeon and foreign journalists and observers in Manchuria, would be shred
and rewoven into racist ugliness at the hands of the Japanese military and
medical elites.

Ishii Shiro

Ishii Shiro was born on June 25, 1892 in the village of Chiyoda, in an
area about two hours' drive from what is today central Tokyo. His family

was one of the wealthier ones in the region by village standards, with
respectable land holdings that gave them the aura of rural aristocrats. This
economic status earned respect and, more importantly, loyalty from the
surrounding inhabitants. Ishii would put this loyalty to good use for himself
in the coming years.

In 1916, Ishii entered Kyoto Imperial University. It was a prestigious
establishment, and its medical department was especially known for its
work in bacteriology. The "Schweitzer of Japan," Noguchi Hideyo, in
addition to honors and awards he earned in the United States and Europe,
received his Doctorate of Medicine from this university in 1911.

As a student, Ishii seemed to have had personality problems: more
succinctly, he created problems for others. He was pushy, inconsiderate, and
selfish. In harmony with these personality traits, he was also a ladder-