Page 22 - Unit 731 Testimony

Protection of one's own troops was still also part of the thinking about
germs, a continuation of the military hygiene success of the Russo-Japanese
War. While Ishii was a researcher at Kyoto, in fact, he was dispatched to

help cure an epidemic that had broken out in a region of Japan, and during
the course of his work he developed a water filtration system that could be
transported along with troops. In general, however, he brought a new
approach to military thinking about bacteriology. Why not enlist the "silent
enemy" as a "silent ally"? He traveled frequently to Tokyo, still shaking
hands with the top leaders of the army high command, still social-climbing,
and still pleading his case for the development of bacteriological research as

a weapon for offensive warfare.
The army had a policy of sending certain officers overseas to study
foreign military facilities. Ishii left Japan in the spring of 1928 on a costly
tour whose expenses came partly out of his own pocket. He spent more than

two years visiting over twenty European countries, the United States, and
Canada. Despite the fact that his own money was involved in funding his
travel, however, his object was public-spirited: the furtherance of chemical
and bacteriological warfare as Japanese military orthodoxy. He researched
the history of gas weapons during World War I, and he studied what various
countries were doing in the fields of bacteriological and gas warfare.

The climate he found in Japan when he returned in 1930 was more
conducive to these thoughts than when he had left. Nationalism burned
hotter. The old slogan of "a wealthy country, a strong army" that had
attended the launch of the Meiji Restoration six decades earlier was echoing

among the upper echelons of the military establishment. One of the men
Ishii convinced to sponsor his efforts was the Minister of the Army, who
coincidentally had the same family name as the president of Ishii's
university. Araki Sadao—found guilty of overall conspiracy and waging
war against China at the war crimes trials in Tokyo—was impressed with
Ishii's findings and ambitions and set the army into action along the lines
mapped out by Ishii.

Manchuria

The South Manchuria Railway was the Japanese-operated nerve center

of the growing Manchurian economy, within which Japan had been
developing a commercial and industrial base since 1904. It was also one of