Page 53 - Unit 731 Testimony

3

Creating Pathology

Rodents and Insects

Rats and fleas, which have spread disease among human beings
throughout the ages, were carefully cultivated by the Japanese biological
warfare specialists. They harvested rats from Manchuria's rat population,

and then enlisted schoolchildren to raise them. It required no difficult
technique—just cages, food, and water. Ping-fang had rat cultivation cells
—they remain today as part of its ruins—which were staffed by Youth
Corps members.

On February 26, 1995, the Asahi Broadcasting Company presented a
documentary titled "The Mystery of the Rats That Went to the Continent."
The camera followed a small group of local high school students in Saitama
Prefecture on a project to research stories of farmers in the area who had
raised rats during the war years. The students got on their bicycles and went
around to different farms asking whether people knew anything about the
story of rat farming during the war years. All of the farming families

interviewed commented to the effect that "everybody around here was
raising rats. It was a source of income." One family even had some of the
old, wood-framed rat cages piled up in the shed, each cage built to house
six rats. People questioned by the students claimed that they did not know
that the rats were being used for spreading disease, although the students

were not good enough actors to hide their disbelief. In all fairness to the
farmers, however, the project did provide badly needed income, and they
would probably have taken any information they received at face value.
In the same area of the prefecture, there had been a center which raised
animals for research. This facility was impressed into service as a collection

agency for rats, and this fact probably explains why that region became so
active in rat farming. The families in the locality brought the animals they
had bred to the center, and from there they were transported to Tokyo and