Page 81 - Unit 731 Testimony

MacArthur's office agreed to the dispatch of qualified personnel.
Washington then informed SCAP that a Doctor Norbert H. Fell had been
selected by the Chemical Warfare Service, and he would leave for Japan in

the first week of April. Upon Fell's arrival in Japan, the same Kamei
Kan'ichiro who had translated for Sanders pushed his way onto the scene to
"assist." Immunity from war crimes had not yet been fully granted, though
its possibility was hanging in the air. Kamei was hinting that there were
people who had information which would prove of interest to the
Americans, but they were not very willing to talk about it for fear of being
brought into the trials. And this time, in a reversal of Sanders' tactic against

Naito, Kamei made use of the Communist threat against the Americans.
Kamei, according to Fell's report, claimed that he knew people
formerly with Unit 731 who were afraid of giving information to the U.S.
because the Russians would get hold of it. Holding out the incentive of

Japanese silence before Red interrogators, Kamei said that those Japanese
felt that the best thing for them now would be to tell Moscow nothing.
These pragmatics aside, Kamei also resorted to a pious "we were victims"
defense—that the Soviets had been engaging in biological warfare against
the Japanese, and "we had to think about defensive measures." Japan, he
claimed, knew about Soviet biological warfare work from captured Soviet
spies in Manchuria, and there had been no other recourse for Japan but to

work on defensive biological warfare. Then, in the course of this research,
they had discovered the offensive aspects.
Meanwhile, anonymous and signed reports had been coming in to the

American authorities in Tokyo from people who had been victims of the
system, enlisted in one unsuspecting way or other into Ishii's research
network. A limited few identified themselves, accusing Ishii and
Wakamatsu, the veterinarian who had run Unit 100 in Xinjing.
As information started coming into the hands of the American

investigators, it came with attempts to conceal the organizational reach of
the machinery of human experimentation; even as they confessed, the
informants tried to save their own skins. Ishii, it was claimed, was a
renegade having nothing to do with the legitimate line of command or
military authority. The Japanese medical profession was not involved. The

emperor knew nothing. People's consciences may have been smarting and
moving them to come clean—but not to the point of suppressing the instinct
for self-preservation, or their continuing loyalty to Emperor Hirohito.