Page 73 - Unit 731 Testimony

postwar story of the outfit begins in September 1945, with the docking of
the American ship Sturgess in Yokohama. Among those on board was
Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders. A highly regarded microbiologist who

had been a lecturer at Columbia University, Sanders had entered the
military and been attached to Camp Detrick (later Fort Detrick) in
Maryland, the American military's center for biological weapons research
and development. The work done there would have been at the heart of
retaliation which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had threatened for
what he termed Japan's "inhumane form of warfare" in China through
biological weaponry.

As the Sturgess worked its way toward the western part of Tokyo Bay
and the port of Yokohama, Naito Ryoichi waited on the pier. Naito, one of
the men closest to Ishii, and the number-two man in Ishii's research
laboratory in Tokyo, already had a history of duplicitous dealing with

foreigners. Before the war, he had studied in Germany and in the U.S., at
the University of Pennsylvania. During his stay in America, he had walked
into the Rockefeller Institute in New York with a letter of introduction from
the Japanese embassy in Washington and a request for samples of yellow
fever virus. His reason for the request, he had explained to the people at the
institute, was that upon his return to Japan, he would be working for the
Japanese army in Manchuria in developing a vaccine for the disease. When

the Americans refused, perhaps because of mounting U.S.-Japanese
tensions over the latter country's aggression in China, he attempted to resort
to bribery. In the end, he came back to Japan without the yellow fever
viruses.

Back in Japan, Naito wrote up secret reports on ways of increasing the
virulence of pathogens, methods of bacteriological warfare, and other
subjects that were being handled in the Ishii organization.
As the crew of the Sturgess threw the ship's berthing lines onto the

dock, Naito purposefully awaited it, ready to play his role in launching Unit
731 into its postwar odyssey. Japan's information network had found out
that Sanders would be on board, and that he would be in charge of
investigating Japan's biological warfare activities. Years later, Sanders
himself described the scene this way in an interview: "My mission was

biological warfare.