Page 41 - Unit 731 Testimony

up on shelves," he narrated. "Each test tube was identified by a label
showing what kind of bacteria it contained. Six of them contained plague
germs."

Unit 1855 had a branch in Chinan that was a combination prison and
experiment center. On the same documentary, a Korean man, Choi Hyung
Shin, told about his experience there as an interpreter.

Choi first went to China when he was sixteen years old to attend
school. After the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, there were attempts
to replace Korean culture with Japanese culture, and all children received a
Japanese education. Choi's trilingual ability made him useful to the
Japanese doctors. Korean immigrants to China were among the victims of

human experimentation, and Choi's interpreting between the Japanese
researchers and their Korean and Chinese test subjects was vital to the
acquisition of proper research data. He worked at the branch for almost two
years during 1942 and 1943.

When I first arrived there, some one hundred prisoners were already in
the cells. Whenever the Japanese doctors made contact with the people
being tested, they always did it through an interpreter.

The test subjects were infected with plague, cholera, and typhus.
Those not yet infected were kept in different rooms. There were large
mirrors in the rooms with the subjects so that those undergoing testing
could be observed better. I spoke with the prisoners using a

microphone and looking through the glass panel, interpreting the
questions from the doctors: "Do you have diarrhea? Do you have a
headache? Do you feel chilly?" The doctors made very careful records
of all the answers.
With the typhus test, ten people were forced to drink a mixture of

the germs, and five of them were administered vaccine. The two
groups were kept separate from each other. The doctors watched them
closely and questioned them through my interpretation, recording the
answers. The vaccine proved effective with all five to whom it was
administered. The other five suffered horribly.

In the plague tests, the prisoners suffered with chills and fever,
and groaned in pain . . . until they died. From what I saw, one person
was killed every day.