Unit 731. Hal Gold
had leg irons on, apparently their hands were free. When the utensils were handed back to the guard, Li grabbed his hand, dropped him with a blow to the head, grabbed the keys from around his waist, and opened the cells. Those who could, joined in the break. Others were too weak from repeated drawing of blood, and Li had no choice but to go on without them, leaving them to sure death while Li and his fellow prisoners seized their chance.
They ran out into the compound, and fortune smiled upon them with a heavy downpour that knocked out the electric power, deactivating the searchlights and electric fence. The escapees came to the wall and made a human ladder. Placing himself at the bottom, Li urged the others up and over. He was the only one left, and as the others ran as well as they could with their leg shackles, there were shots and one final shout from Li. At least, it was a more merciful death than his other option at the hands of the Japanese researchers.
Some ten of the escapees were gunned down. About twenty made it to the outside, but most of them either were killed or recaptured, or died from exposure, whose effects were compounded by the blood drawings. A few of the men came to a village and sought help from one of the residents. That person was interviewed in 1984 about the incident for a written account on the resistance movement. He recalls:
That night I heard footsteps behind the house, then someone banging on the door. Outside there were seven men wearing leg shackles. My brother grabbed an axe to defend us, but when he heard their story he put down the axe, we took the men to a cave on the east side of the house, and we started breaking off the shackles. We were still working on them when the Japanese came to the edge of the village tracking down the escapees. So we thought of a way to free the men faster. First, we broke off a shackle from just one leg, so they could at least run while holding the other shackle. And then, they left the village.
Later, they managed to meet up with the other remaining escapees and all eventually teamed up with resistance fighters. But the secret of the Fortress was out. The Japanese had managed to keep things quiet for five years, but at last the time had come for a move.
Pingfang
The new site was closer to the city of Harbin, just a short hop away on the South Manchuria Railway. The Chinese called the location Pingfang; the Japanese reading of the same characters is Heibo. Between 1936 and 1938, a series of villages in the Pingfang area were seized by the Ishii organization in acts of military eminent domain. Hundreds of families were forced to sell their homes and land at the paltry sums decided upon by the Japanese Occupation. Forced evacuation ended generations of attachment to the lands and family graves. Often, land was confiscated at the end of the short growing season, and families had to move out without even being allowed to harvest their crops for the coming winter.
Surrounding buildings built by Chinese were limited to one story to keep out inquisitive eyes, and anyone—Japanese, Chinese, or otherwise—coming to Pingfang needed a pass. The airspace over the area was off-limits to all aircraft other than Japanese army planes; violators would be shot down. The headquarters was surrounded by a moat.
The Pingfang complex would grow into a sprawling, walled city of more than seventy buildings on a six-square-kilometer tract of land. Work was pushed ahead hard. During the months that construction was possible, a Japanese construction company, the Suzuki Group, worked round the clock in two shifts, day and night. At the coldest time of the year, the water, ground, and concrete all froze, bringing work to a halt. Winter was so harsh that the very first thing installed in the buildings, when they were still only shells, was the central heating system. The complex was probably finished around 1939, but the exact time remains uncertain, since construction teams were still working well after experiments started.
The prison blocks in the Pingfang compound were called “ro buildings.” The term comes from the shapes of the Japanese syllabary character ro and the cell blocks, both of which are square. The Number 7 block held adult male prisoners, while Number 8 contained women and children. These prison blocks served the same purpose at Pingfang as cages for guinea pigs at conventional laboratories.
Cells were either single- or multiple-occupancy, and were arranged side by side, each with its window facing the corridor. An aperture that could be opened from the corridor was provided so that prisoners could extend their arms to receive injections or have blood samples drawn. The window and opening of each cell were located near the floor so that prisoners could extend their arms while in a reclining position; as the tests progressed, victims became unable to stand. Each cell had a flush toilet to maintain cleanliness, a wooden floor, and concrete walls heavier than necessary, probably built with recollections of the escape at Zhongma. Even walls between cells were thirty to forty centimeters thick. Central heating and cooling systems, and a well-planned diet, protected the health of the prisoners to ensure that the data they produced was valid. Poor living conditions or the presence of other disease germs could confuse results.
In all the gruesome professionalism that built the legacy of Unit 731, there was one touch of sardonic humor. As the massive Pingfang installation was under construction, local people began to ask what it was. The glib answer supplied was that the Japanese were building a lumber mill. Regarding this reply, one of the researchers joked privately, “And the people are the logs.” From then on, the Japanese term for log, maruta, was used to speak of the prisoners whose last days were spent being tom apart or gassed by Japanese researchers. It is surprising how few Japanese realize the origin of this term, though the word itself never fails to come up when Unit 731 is discussed. The expression smacks of a racial attitude not even up to the level of disdain.
Pingfang was equipped for disposing of its consumed human lab materials with three large incinerators—calling them crematoria would bestow undue dignity upon them. A former member who assisted in the burning commented, “The bodies always burned up fast because all the organs were gone; the bodies were empty.”
Ueda Yataro was a researcher working under a leader of one of the teams into which researchers and assistants were organized. He later woke up to the aberrant thinking which led him and others to participate in the activities of Unit 731. He recorded his experiences, disjointedly, in pages of handwritten notes. The following is an excerpt about one of the research projects that he worked on. His “material” was in a cell with four other maruta.
He was already too weak to stand. The heavy leg irons bit at his legs. When he moved, they made a dull, clanking sound. His fellow cellmates sat around him, and watched him. Nobody spoke. The water in the toilet was running with an ominous sound.
In the corridor outside the cell, the guards stood with their pistols strapped on. The commander of the guards was there also. The man’s screams of death had no effect on them. This was an everyday occurrence. There was nothing special.
To these guards, the people in here have already lost all rights. Their names have been exchanged for just a number written across the front of their shirts and the name maruta. They are referred to only as “Maruta Number X.” They are counted not as one person or two persons but “one log, two logs.” We are not concerned with where they are from, how they came here.
The man looked like a farmer, covered with grime. He was wasting away, and his cheekbones protruded. His eyes glared out from the dirt and the tattered cotton clothes he was wrapped in.
The team leader was fully pleased with yesterday’s results. We never had such a typical change in blood picture and rate of infection, and I was eagerly looking forward to see what changes would be present in today’s blood sample. With high hopes, I came to the Number 7 cell block with the armed guards at my side. The maruta I was working on was on the verge of death. It would be disastrous if he died. Then I would not be able to get a blood sample, and we would not obtain the important results of the tests we had been working on.
I called his number. No answer came. I motioned through the window at the other four prisoners to bring him over. They sat there without moving. I screamed abusively at them to hurry up and bring him over to the window. One of the guards pulled out a gun, aimed it at them, and screamed in Chinese. Resigned, they gently lifted up the other man and brought him over to the window. More important to me than the man’s death was the blood flowing in the human guinea pig’s body at the moment just before his death.