Page 77 - Unit 731 Testimony

have interacted not on the basis of victor and vanquished, but more like
peers: Sanders the scholar looking through his colleague Naito's
microscope. Naito, a mild-mannered man described as "friendly" even by a

Singaporean who had worked for him cultivating rats, was also crafty
enough to play ping-pong with the information Sanders wanted, so that
Sanders' first reports on his investigations advised his superiors that
biological warfare in the Japanese army had been an "unimportant minor
activity." He covered himself though, by expressing doubt that all had been
revealed.

Shortly after the initial doors of information had been pried open by
Sanders' threat of the Communists' participation in the investigations, and
knowing that Mac-Arthur had promised immunity to former members of
Unit 731, Ishii felt sufficiently protected to come out from hiding. Then,
while the Allies were tied up with the burden of preparing for the upcoming

war crimes tribunal, Ishii was placed under house arrest. There, he was
made available for questioning by the successor to Murray Sanders,
Lieutenant Colonel Arvo Thompson.
Sent by Camp Detrick to continue the investigation into biological

warfare activities, Thompson was not as soft as Sanders, not so easy to
brush off with evasive answers. Thompson reached closer to the scope of
the experiments but the magnificence of Ishii's organizational skills and the
scale of the unit's operations eluded him, as well. He concluded that civilian
scientists and research facilities were not involved.

One thing the Japanese have demonstrated throughout history is their
ability to form complex—at times, frustratingly byzantine—organizations
to coordinate complicated activities. Feudal Japan in the seventeenth
through nineteenth centuries was made up of some two hundred fifty feudal
domains (the number fluctuating as new ones were created, others
abolished) with a complex and clearly defined bureaucracy at the center. No

European country had such a precision-cut hierarchy of interknit functions
and responsibilities. The shogunate also organized what is considered the
world's first secret police as an arm of government, as well as an
espionage network. The fact that Japan had a fully developed money
economy by the early seventeenth century—even to the point of using a

variety of paper credits in major business transactions—is another
indication of an advanced sense of organization.