Page 40 - Unit 731 Testimony

They learned from the former member that the unit, called Nami Unit
8604, was headquartered at Zhongshan Medical University. The building
stands today very much as it did then, and information gleaned from

Chinese government records and inhabitants of the area show that Unit
8604 was established in 1938. It was staffed by several hundred personnel.
The Japan Times of November 9, 1994, reported on a seventy-seven-
year-old former unit member, Maruyama Shigeru, who said that one
experiment involved starving prisoners to death. This test would appear to

be similar to the tests done at Harbin to determine how long a person can
continue living on water alone.
The former unit member also stated that a large number of Chinese

refugees from Hong Kong died after they were given water containing
typhus-causing bacteria provided by the Army Medical College in Tokyo.
In addition, Maruyama talked of seeing victims being operated on almost
every day. He recalled that many bodies were stored in the basement of the
building.

The Guangzhou unit, according to Maruyama, also raised rats for
experiments in spreading plague. This addition to the Ishii organization's
litany of experiments with rats and plague serves as yet further evidence
that plague was high on the list of priorities in Japan's design for conquest
by disease.

A Chinese witness at Guangzhou volunteered that there was a pond of
chemicals inside the university compound that was used to dissolve the
bodies of the victims. It can be inferred that since this unit was established
inside a previously existing medical facility, it did not have the incineration
capabilities of the Harbin and Pingfang locations, which were custom-built

and equipped with the facilities necessary for disposing of large numbers of
bodies.

Beijing
After the Japanese evacuation at the end of the war, Chinese locals

entered the facilities of Beijing-based Unit 1855 for a look behind its
secrets. The building still exists, and a Japanese documentary program's
video camera followed a bacteriologist who had been posted at the facility,
as he described what had gone on in the days when he and his colleagues
had worked there. "This is where large numbers of test tubes were all lined