Page 47 - Unit 731 Testimony

invention testified to by his water purification systems and biological
warfare bombs.

He went back to his alma mater in Kyoto, to Tokyo Imperial
University, and to other leading medical universities, and coaxed professors
and researchers to come to Manchuria. Attracted by the lure of expanding
their research possibilities, some researchers went themselves, while others
sent their students. The students would write up their research, then send it
back to their professors, who would then use the data to prepare their own

reports and advance themselves in the medical community. In defense of
some of the people recruited, it must be acknowledged that not all of them
knew what they were getting into and were themselves used by Ishii and his
henchmen. There were also students who were pressured by their professors
to go work with Ishii's organization. Defying a professor in Japan's strict
academic hierarchy was (and remains even today) equivalent to career

suicide.
The degree of civilian involvement in the human-experimentation
units has been a matter of discussion in Japan for some time, but a recent
statement by a former unit member throws past estimates into a new light.

In 1994, a former unit member by the name of Okijima, then seventy-eight
years old, offered the following comment on the personnel of Unit 731:
"Some things have to be corrected. There were no soldiers at Unit 731.
They were all civilian employees."

"All" may be an exaggeration since the top leaders—Ishii, Lieutenant
General Kitano Masaji, who took over charge of the unit in 1942, and some
others—were in the military. Okishima's statement does imply, however,
that there were more civilian researchers than conventional accounts would
lead us to believe. It has also been repeatedly noted that many researchers
came to Manchuria for a limited time, performed their work, and then were
replaced by others in a constant cycle. This rotation would suggest the

presence of civilian researchers who would come from their respective
universities, work on particular projects, then return home with their results.
Like soldiers, civilians also had a variety of ranks, spanning the

hierarchical spectrum from the equivalent of common grunts, up to
generals. University researchers made up the majority of civilian employees
at the Ishii organization, and their statuses were determined by the
universities from which they hailed. Those from the elite Tokyo University