Page 78 - Unit 731 Testimony

Ishii's empire was, in a sense, a mirror image of the feudal webwork,
even down to the police network. Lingering Confucian relationships
between established researchers and their disciples meant that medical

students were under the control of their instructors. Data from the
prison/research cells circulating back through Tokyo and out to the nation's
medical research facilities tied the military and civilian medical worlds
together in a complicated, logical framework. The development of
biological weapons was, in fact, sometimes a cover for ordinary medical
research using extraordinary methods available to the Japanese only in the
Ishii organization. This was one aspect of the machinery which eluded the

Americans. The net was broad and deep, yet to the Americans, still
invisible.
Thompson left Japan without getting too much closer to reality. Back
at Camp Detrick, his findings were evaluated but led to no firm

conclusions.

Superpower Jockeying
Meanwhile, in the first week of May 1946, about four months after

Ishii was first interviewed, the International Military Tribunal for the Far
East convened. From initial appearances, it should have made sense for the
Americans to want to question members of Unit 731. Indications of
biological warfare activities by the Japanese had trickled into Allied hands
even well before the end of the war. Also, Japanese POWs, many of whom

had backgrounds in military hygiene and related fields, served as a
significant source of accounts. Reports of Japanese biological warfare
activities in China had even prompted a warning from the American
president as early as 1943 that if they were not halted, the U.S. would
retaliate "in full measure."

Among other examples of American wartime discoveries of Japan's
bacteriological warfare is an official U.S. research report titled "Japanese
Violations of the Laws of War," dated June 1945. It catalogues some
evidence of Japanese biological warfare, and it is certain that it reached the
highest levels of the American government: one copy of the report was
labeled "Personal copy for General of the Army Douglas MacArthur." It

carries the statement of a prisoner captured on May 12, 1944. His family
name of Rin would be Chinese, not Japanese, but he was listed as a
Japanese POW of the Americans. He stated that he had been a civilian