Page 96 - Unit 731 Testimony

the U.S. Army Medical Corps, the names of some ten former Unit 731
members, including Kitano, appear.

Another U.S. Army medical officer's report on his work with former
Unit 731 members and EHF includes the comment that, according to
information provided by the Japanese, research in Manchuria ended with
the end of World War II, and "the transmissible agent was lost at the time of
surrender." If it was not lost—there was only the word of the Japanese
researchers to support the claim that it was—did it reappear in Korea

through some sort of secret collaboration between Occupation authorities
and Japan's biological warfare experts?
This conveniently timed outbreak in Korea of a disease in which Unit

731 was the world's leading storehouse of knowledge, and other already-
documented postwar cooperation between that outfit and the Americans,
suggests that Unit 731 's role in the Korean War was not simply confined to
controlling and curing the disease. Rather, the facts available appear to
encourage the belief that the Americans, assisted by their former Japanese
enemies, carried out against the North Koreans biological warfare attacks
which ended up backfiring.

Meanwhile, the Manchurian bomb from China's Unit 731 museum
continues posing the question of whether it is mere Red propaganda, or a
relic of U.S.-Unit 731 collaboration in the Korean War.

Shinjuku Shock

In the 1980s, Tokyo decided to center its municipal functions in
Shinjuku Ward, and the area experienced a construction boom of hotels and
government buildings. Shinjuku represented all the well-worn compliments

paid to active localities. It was growing, moving ahead, looking to the
future—and then Shinjuku shocked Japan back into the past. In June 1989,
large quantities of human bones were unearthed at a construction
excavation site for a new facility of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The
location was at the site of the former Army Medical College, where Ishii

had lectured on his experiments and displayed preserved human specimens
brought in from Unit 731. Ironically, police investigations concluded that
there was no violent crime involved, and plans were made to cremate the
bones. At that point, however, activist citizens put pressure on the ward
government to scrutinize the matter further. There was strong reason to