Page 75 - Unit 731 Testimony

Japanese military, with all the departments "implicated, plus or minus."
Obviously, as much as America wanted the information, the Japanese had
an equal interest in avoiding the "justice" of the Soviet legal system, at

whose hands their fate would be easy enough to predict. His gambit
appeared to have succeeded.
Sanders took the document to General Douglas Mac-Arthur, the
Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), and from there the
balance of options was weighed. There was information that America

wanted, and on an exclusive basis. That would mean America's turning its
back on the forthcoming war crimes trials and striking a deal, independently
of the judiciary proceedings, with the men who had the data. Sanders recalls
MacArthur as having said, "Well, if you feel that you cannot draw out the
information, we are not given to torture." So, deprived of the stick of
physical duress, the American microbiologist went back to Naito with a

carrot instead. MacArthur would assure Naito that in exchange for the
information, the informants would not be brought to trial. "This made a
deep impression, and the data came in waves after that... we could hardly
keep up with it."

In December 1994, a written record of several meetings that took place
between Sanders and top-echelon Japanese officers surfaced in the home of
an eighty-four-year-old Japanese former staff officer. It was published in the
Spring 1995 issue of the Japanese quarterly magazine Senso Sekinin Kenkyu
(The Report on Japan's War Responsibility), with the agreement that the
owner's identity remain confidential. The record was written in Japanese by

the Japanese interpreter at the meetings, and excerpts appeared in the
article. The meetings took place at MacArthur's headquarters in the Dai-Ichi
Sogo Building on October 9, 11, and 16, 1946. The interpreter for the first
two meetings is listed as Kamei Kan'ichiro, "a member of the House of
Representatives with very strong ties to unit leader Ishii." (Kamei's
continuing involvement with postwar Unit 731 members and their
bargaining efforts belies claims over the years that the government was in

the dark about Ishii's activities.) Questioning proceeded along the lines of
how and why the unit was formed, development of different types of
biological warfare bombs and outdoor tests of these, what happened at the
time of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, the system of culturing bacteria
using incubators, production of vaccine, and other germane issues.