Page 26 - Unit 731 Testimony

oppose it. Groups and individuals kept up the anti-Japanese struggle long
after official resistance had stopped, giving the Japanese an excuse to use
them as research materials through all the years that the experiments

continued. Some members of the resistance were captured and interrogated
by the kenpeitai, then sent to the experimental labs.
Members of the kenpeitai were under orders of the army, and were
specially selected for their rigid, oppressive, and unyielding personalities.
They were given such jobs as catching spies and interrogating suspects, and

were authorized to use torture if they were so inclined. The kenpeitai spoke
with daggers. They knew how to stare down a person, and how to use the
voice to intimidate a suspect. People from an earlier era sometimes
mentioned the fearsome way that these protectors of Japanese aims could
shake a person with words, but even their descriptions failed to do justice to
the reality. This is neither romanticizing nor exaggeration. Among the

testimonies recorded in this book are those of former kenpeitai officers. One
man, eighty years old, came out and told his audience, "I am a war
criminal." For more than thirty minutes, that voice penetrated. In this case,
it was turned against himself and the deeds he performed "for the country,
for the emperor." Even at the age of eighty, that former kenpeitai officer
was able to give an idea of what it must really have felt like to be stopped
by himself or one of his comrades back in those dark days.

The kenpeitai served as a human materials procurement arm for Unit
731 and its associated outfits. A former kenpeitai officer from Dalian, Miou
Yutaka, tells how the prisoners were handled: "We were the Special

Handling forces of the kenpeitai, in charge of taking prisoners for the
experiments of 731. We knew the prisoners would be used in experiments
and not come back.
"We tied them with ropes around their waists, and their hands behind
the backs. They couldn't move. We took them by train in a closed car, then

the Unit 731 truck would meet us at the station. It was a strange truck—
black with no windows. A strange-looking vehicle."
The gloomy, sealed freight cars to which Miou referred ran over the

tracks of the South Manchuria Railway. They represented a much different
side to the efficient railroad from the one that had impressed Terry the
travel writer.