Page 64 - Unit 731 Testimony

the open—temperatures that reached as low as minus seventy degrees
Celsius.

Some experiments resulted in the flesh and muscle falling from the
bones. Others left the bones so brittle that they were shattered by the blows
from the clubs. Either way, the eventual result was the same: gangrene and
the rotting away of extremities. Several former Unit 731 members have
commented on seeing victims of the experiments. They reported that the
victims "had no hands ... no feet."

A miniature model of a frostbite experiment was displayed at the Unit
731 exhibitions: It depicts an experiment being performed on a Russian
prisoner. Chinese were also used as fodder for the freezing experiments, and

some of the victims were women. Yoshimura conducted his frostbite
experiments right up until the end of the war. One of the discoveries for
which Yoshimura subsequently became famous was that the previously
standard treatment of rubbing frozen limbs until they thawed was not the
most efficient way of restoring them. Through trial and error, he showed
that the best treatment was placing the affected parts in warm water
between thirty-seven degrees (normal human body temperature) and forty

degrees Celsius. There is no way to count the number of people and human
limbs he consumed in arriving at this finding.
After the war, Yoshimura became an eminent authority on polar human
biology. He held university posts and later became president of the Kyoto

Prefectural University of Medicine. Newspaper articles later came out
accusing him of conducting human experimentation, but he denied the
accusations. Then, in 1982, a Japanese newspaper carried an article on a
paper which Yoshimura presented at a meeting of the Japan Physiology
Society. Interestingly, the article identified him only as "A." However, the
article's mention of his age, a description of the school of which he was
president, the fact of his residence in Kyoto, and other clues made "A's"

identity quite clear.
The article was headlined "Human Experimentation Blatantly
Presented in Lecture." It announced that "a former member of Unit 731

presented the results of his human experimentation on frostbite in
Manchuria at a meeting of the Japan Physiology Society. The results of his
wartime research were printed in the society's journal, and the medical
community directed heavy criticism against the group and its behavior.