Page 55 - Unit 731 Testimony

One day, a laborer who came to get water met one of the older men.
They checked to see that no one was watching, and the older man told the
story of the job he and his fellows were doing. From there, the story of "the

ten old men who raise fleas" spread among the laborers. Without anyone
realizing when, the ten men died in succession.

Four Areas of Experimentation

Of the myriad diseases and medical problems into which Unit 731
conducted its research, four areas are particularly prominent. Together, they
represent a cross-section of Unit 731 's cruelty and perversion, while at the
same time providing a glance across the spectrum of the scientific work it
conducted.

Cholera

At the human-experiment centers, the first step into researching illness
and possible vaccines against it involved getting prisoners sick by injecting
them with germs. Once disease had been created in human beings, it would
be spread to population centers. After it was ascertained that the disease had
taken hold among the locals, the army and its researchers would move in to
examine the victims, and test methods of treatment. One method of

spreading cholera used domesticated animals as carriers.
Dogs were used to spread cholera in a village about eight kilometers
west of Chinan. Dogs caught in the village were fed pork laced with cholera

germs, then returned to the village. When the disease finished incubating
and became active, the dogs would vomit. Then other dogs would come
along and eat the vomit, and they, too, would become infected. The dogs
would also be stricken with diarrhea, and the feces would spread the disease
among other dogs and to people. Some twenty percent of those who
contracted the illness died. Survivors told of hearing the cries of sick people
from their homes as they suffered.

Former army captain Kojima Takeo, who was a unit member involved
in this cholera campaign, added his own testimony about this strange
experiment in an interview: "We were told that we were going out on a

cholera campaign, and we were all given inoculations against cholera ten
days before starting out. Our objective was to infect all the people in the
area. The disease had already developed before we got there, and as we