Page 92 - Unit 731 Testimony

produced death in five to six minutes. Provocative, too, was the fact that
two boxes of acetone cyanohydrin had disappeared from the Noborito
laboratory in the confusion attending the end of the war.

At the time of the incident, acetone cyanohydrin was not a garden-
variety poison like potassium cyanide. It was available only to a very select
handful of people—those working at Noborito, and relevant personnel
attached to Unit 731. It is highly unlikely that someone like Hirasawa could
ever have gotten his hands on it. If acetone cyanohydrin was, in fact, the

poison used in the crime, then Hirasawa would be an unlikely suspect. If,
on the other hand, the poison were potassium cyanide after all, then
Hirasawa could be as suspect as anyone else.

One question that naturally occurs and recurs is, Why would Hirasawa
confess if he were innocent? Investigators into his background turned up
evidence that he had been diagnosed as suffering from Korsakoff's
Syndrome. This aberrant condition is characterized by irregular memory
loss, for which the patient tries to compensate by creating falsehoods. A
bigger and more important question, however, is this: Why did the two
universities produce such completely different autopsy results?

The head of the Japanese police investigation into the case reported to
the occupation forces that the modus operandi in the Teigin murders bore a
"similarity to the training received at the Arsenal [Noborito] laboratory."
For that matter, Ishii himself, in one of his interrogation sessions with

American military officers, commented on the Teigin murders, "I have the
feeling that one of my men did it." These clues pointed the police in the
direction of Japan's old biological warfare program, and the police
investigation started by zeroing in on former Unit 731 members. A list of
suspects was drawn up, and trails led to the army laboratory.

Then, almost overnight, the direction of the investigation reversed and
homed in on Hirasawa; the army laboratory vanished from the radar screens
of law enforcement officials. It goes without saying that the Japanese
authorities did not want an investigation that would end up publicizing Unit
731 to the outside world. More to the point, though, it is equally obvious

that this change in investigative direction served the interests of the
American military authorities, since it prevented the Ishii organization from
emerging into the spotlight that Washington and SCAP had so vigorously
tried to keep it out of.