Page 93 - Unit 731 Testimony

The U.S. and Japanese governments' reluctance to consider a possible
Unit 731 role in the Teigin Incident would help provide a motive for
falsification of the Tokyo University test results, if that is in fact what

happened. Tokyo University had strong connections with the Ishii
organization, supplying many of the doctors, researchers, and students to
the units in China, and working with data provided through human
experimentation. This elite (and government-overseen) school also has firm
links with Japan's ruling class. Most Japanese politicians at the national
level are Tokyo University graduates, and the school could be influenced by
government pressure much more easily than Keio, a private university.

Critics also point out that it is easier for a court to hand down a judgment
that agrees with the police and public prosecutor. Once the accusation
focused on Hirasawa, it had to be supported by the discovery of a means of
murder available to him. The secretly produced, generally unknown, and
unavailable acetone cyanohydrin did not fit the needs of those who sought
to convict Hirasawa.

In the end, the judgment was handed down that the substance was
potassium cyanide and Hirasawa was guilty. He was sentenced to death, but
the paper which would have ordered his execution into effect was not
stamped. It never was stamped through all the years that he spent in prison.
Nobody wanted that responsibility. Hirasawa spent more than three decades

under a death penalty that was never put into effect.
Appalled at this apparent miscarriage of justice in which the evidence
had been molded to fit the desired judgment, a small group of people

pressed for a reexamination of the case. Their efforts to obtain a retrial
continued all the way to the time of Hirasawa's death in jail in 1987, at the
age of ninety-five. Today, the Teigin poisoning incident is a mystery that
continues to provoke sporadic interest among Japanese. Some researchers
into the crime go so far as to suspect that the murders were a postwar
extension of Unit 731 activity. To them, the very careful one-minute timing
between the first and second liquids was a possible reaction-time test. (This

hypothesis posits that the second liquid was not necessarily anything
poisonous, but just a decoy to give the criminal an excuse for timing his
experiment.) This view is supported by rumors that the U.S. occupation
forces were involved and that the bank employees were used as human test
subjects. Along these lines, stories also circulated of a GHQ car's having
been in the vicinity when the incident took place. These claims are