Page 38 - Unit 731 Testimony

A worker in materials procurement at the army hospital named Amano
Ryuji comments on both aspects of the two-way traffic. "It was simple to
bring those rats to Manchuria by plane. The plane brought the specimens of

human bodies and parts into Tokyo for presentation and study, and carried
rats back on the return trip. I saw large numbers of specimens of body parts
at the Tokyo lab. Those are the bones that were dug up in Shinjuku [near the
former site of the Army Medical College, some fifty years later]. I think
that there are more bones there than were found. If someone looked they
would discover more."

The scope of the service comes into sharper focus when the dispersion
of the organization is considered. In addition to the Pingfang central unit,
there were units set up in Beijing, Nanjing, Guangzhou, and Singapore. In
addition, some of these units had their own branch units. The total number
of personnel reached some twenty thousand people. Human specimens were

known to come to the Pingfang headquarters from other units, and since
different units more or less specialized in certain areas of research, it can be
assumed that sibling units supplied pathological specimens not available at
Pingfang. All of these were candidates for the trip to Tokyo and the
Japanese world of medical research. Meanwhile, the windowless trains and
cars kept rolling, and the incinerators kept smoking.

Satellite Facilities

While the Pingfang facility was to become synonymous with human

experimentation, the actual Unit 731 designation did not come into use until
August 1941. It became a type of generic term, referring not only to the
Pingfang-based unit, but also encompassing its sibling units in other
locations, and even its predecessors. All units and facilities were
coordinated by the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory in Tokyo.
Some of the more important of the less well known facilities are described
here.

Anda

This was an open-air testing ground one hundred twenty kilometers
from Pingfang, about three hours by road. It was used for outdoor tests of
plague, cholera, and other pathogens in experimental biological warfare
bombs, and other methods of exposing human beings to pathogenic

substances in open-air situations.