Unit 731. Hal Gold
the trip to Tokyo and the Japanese world of medical research. Meanwhile, the windowless trains and cars kept rolling, and the incinerators kept smoking.
Satellite Facilities
While the Pingfang facility was to become synonymous with human experimentation, the actual Unit 731 designation did not come into use until August 1941. It became a type of generic term, referring not only to the Pingfang-based unit, but also encompassing its sibling units in other locations, and even its predecessors. All units and facilities were coordinated by the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory in Tokyo. Some of the more important of the less well known facilities are described here.
Anda
This was an open-air testing ground one hundred twenty kilometers from Pingfang, about three hours by road. It was used for outdoor tests of plague, cholera, and other pathogens in experimental biological warfare bombs, and other methods of exposing human beings to pathogenic substances in open-air situations.
Tests generally used from ten to forty people at a time, with subjects tied to crosses in circles of various sizes. The tests involved an element of trial and error, and comparing results obtained from differently sized circles enabled researchers to determine ranges of effectiveness at various distances from the points where projectiles struck or infected insects were released. When biological warfare bombs were tested, each maruta was protected with headgear and a metal plate hung from the neck to cover the front part of the body. These protective devices prevented death or serious injury that would make it impossible to obtain the needed data. Arms and legs were left exposed, so that they could be bitten by the disease-carrying insects. In some tests, subjects were tied to vertical boards that were anchored into the ground at various distances and patterns from points of release. Careful notes were made of wind and atmospheric conditions, and each person was marked with a number on his or her chest during each test for easy tracking of human specimens.
Xinjing
Under veterinarian Wakamatsu Yujiro, Unit 100 in Xinjing (present-day Changchun), concentrated its research on pathogens effective against domesticated animals. The horses and edible animals of the Soviet and Chinese armies were the targets of this research. Unit 100 was also a bacteria factory, producing large quantities of glanders, anthrax, and other pathogens.
Sabotage was another focus of the operations here, and one experiment entailed mixing poisons with food to study their effects on subjects and to gain knowledge of appropriate dosages for various toxins. Additionally, extensive areas of land were cultivated for research into chemicals for crop destruction.
Guangzhou
The Guangzhou unit has been mentioned in documentary films and written reports, though its activities have not been fully clarified, nor had its existence even been decisively proven. In late October 1994, a private research mission from Japan went to Guangzhou to investigate the possibility of Japanese biological warfare activity there. They also located a former unit member in Japan, who provided them with additional evidence of a germ warfare unit’s having been in Guangzhou.
They learned from the former member that the unit, called Nami Unit 8604, was headquartered at Zhongshan Medical University. The building stands today very much as it did then, and information gleaned from Chinese government records and inhabitants of the area show that Unit 8604 was established in 1938. It was staffed by several hundred personnel.
The Japan Times of November 9, 1994, reported on a seventy-seven-year-old former unit member, Maruyama Shigeru, who said that one experiment involved starving prisoners to death. This test would appear to be similar to the tests done at Harbin to determine how long a person can continue living on water alone.
The former unit member also stated that a large number of Chinese refugees from Hong Kong died after they were given water containing typhus-causing bacteria provided by the Army Medical College in Tokyo. In addition, Maruyama talked of seeing victims being operated on almost every day. He recalled that many bodies were stored in the basement of the building.
The Guangzhou unit, according to Maruyama, also raised rats for experiments in spreading plague. This addition to the Ishii organization’s litany of experiments with rats and plague serves as yet further evidence that plague was high on the list of priorities in Japan’s design for conquest by disease.
A Chinese witness at Guangzhou volunteered that there was a pond of chemicals inside the university compound that was used to dissolve the bodies of the victims. It can be inferred that since this unit was established inside a previously existing medical facility, it did not have the incineration capabilities of the Harbin and Pingfang locations, which were custom-built and equipped with the facilities necessary for disposing of large numbers of bodies.
Beijing
After the Japanese evacuation at the end of the war, Chinese locals entered the facilities of Beijing-based Unit 1855 for a look behind its secrets. The building still exists, and a Japanese documentary program’s video camera followed a bacteriologist who had been posted at the facility, as he described what had gone on in the days when he and his colleagues had worked there. “This is where large numbers of test tubes were all lined up on shelves,” he narrated. “Each test tube was identified by a label showing what kind of bacteria it contained. Six of them contained plague germs.”
Unit 1855 had a branch in Chinan that was a combination prison and experiment center. On the same documentary, a Korean man, Choi Hyung Shin, told about his experience there as an interpreter.
Choi first went to China when he was sixteen years old to attend school. After the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, there were attempts to replace Korean culture with Japanese culture, and all children received a Japanese education. Choi’s trilingual ability made him useful to the Japanese doctors. Korean immigrants to China were among the victims of human experimentation, and Choi’s interpreting between the Japanese researchers and their Korean and Chinese test subjects was vital to the acquisition of proper research data. He worked at the branch for almost two years during 1942 and 1943.
When I first arrived there, some one hundred prisoners were already in the cells. Whenever the Japanese doctors made contact with the people being tested, they always did it through an interpreter.
The test subjects were infected with plague, cholera, and typhus. Those not yet infected were kept in different rooms. There were large mirrors in the rooms with the subjects so that those undergoing testing could be observed better. I spoke with the prisoners using a microphone and looking through the glass panel, interpreting the questions from the doctors: “Do you have diarrhea? Do you have a headache? Do you feel chilly?” The doctors made very careful records of all the answers.
With the typhus test, ten people were forced to drink a mixture of the germs, and five of them were administered vaccine. The two groups were kept separate from each other. The doctors watched them closely and questioned them through my interpretation, recording the answers. The vaccine proved effective with all five to whom it was administered. The other five suffered horribly.
In the plague tests, the prisoners suffered with chills and fever, and groaned in pain … until they died. From what I saw, one person was killed every day.
Constantly forced to be part of the morbid business of infection and killing, Choi faked appendicitis, which got him sick leave from his job and a chance to escape. Unfortunately, he was caught by kenpeitai officers and given the water torture with hot peppers mixed into the water. This caused him permanent lung damage, and he has been in and out of the hospital for the past fifty years.
Singapore
In September 1991, journalist Phan Ming Yen of the Singapore Straits Times broke the story that it had apparently been confirmed that a Japanese biological warfare installation—rumored but not proven to have existed—had operated in Singapore. He wrote his story after locating a man who claimed to have worked in the lab as a youth. Phan announced that “a Singapore connection has been mentioned fleetingly in some accounts, but no concrete evidence has been cited until now.
“Confirmation