Page 90 - Unit 731 Testimony

demonstrated how the tongue should be extended first so that the liquid
would go quickly and directly into the throat, then drank the substance in
front of the employees. Next, he took a quantity of the liquid from the same

bottle into each of sixteen cups, one for each person present. He instructed
them to drink this in unison when he gave the word. Then, after a wait of
one minute—which he would time precisely by his watch—they were to
drink a second medicine. They all obediently followed his instructions.
Twelve employees died, while the other four recovered to bear witness.

While the criminal's modus operandi—poison as a robbery weapon—
was odd to begin with, even odder was the crime's seeming lack of a
motive. The murderer took a total of ¥181, 850 which was lying on some of
the desks, but left much more untouched. It thus became apparent that some
purpose other than robbery had brought him to the bank.

Vexed at the peculiar nature of this crime, the police searched for
suspects. Descriptions provided by the four survivors of the poisoning
enabled law enforcement authorities to create the first montage photo in
Japan. The photo, in turn, helped lead to the arrest of an artist by the name
of Hirasawa Sadamichi.

After being thoroughly grilled, and attempting suicide in prison,
Hirasawa confessed. His confession, however, was less than convincing.
His written statement, for example, claimed that "the poison was in a bottle
similar in shape to a beer bottle, so I poured the substance from the bottle

directly into the glasses." The bottles he carried were not shaped like beer
bottles, according to the survivors, but wide-mouthed jars. And in
describing the drinking vessels, he used the Japanese-Dutch word koppu,
used in Japan to mean "drinking glass." Japanese-style teacups, from which
the survivors said they drank, are referred to by another term.

Another discrepancy is that the murderer used a pipette to transfer the
substance from the bottle to each teacup. This, in fact, is how investigators
assumed he duped his victims into thinking that he drank the same
substance first. A harmless oil could easily be floated on the surface of the
poison, and a pipette inserted into this top layer would draw off only the oil;

subsequent insertions of the pipette would be deeper, so that the tube went
beneath the oil layer and sucked out the poison underneath.
At the time of the incident, Japanese law considered a confession proof
of guilt; apparently, there was nothing other than his confession to support