Tgk1946's Blog

From The River at the Centre of the World (Simon Winchester, 1996) pp 136-9

For some years it has been known that the Japanese occupation troops in China had set up a huge biological experimentation camp at a place called Pingshan, near Harbin in Manchuria. I had been there once: it had been called Unit 731, and what was left of it, in the squalid outskirts of a cold and windy industrial town, was a most unutterably depressing place. There was a small museum among the coal heaps, showing photographs of some of the victims who had been experimented upon, who had been given ghastly diseases while they were still alive, and observed in the throes of their agonizing deaths. The fields where women had been crucified naked and left soaked in winter to freeze and have their frostbitten limbs plunged later into boiling water were still there. The stakes to which men were tied while bombs containing typhus bacilli were exploded near them, they remained as well. Tables where men had been injected with gasoline, or horse urine, or prussic acid, and where children had been dissected alive . . . The Japanese, commanded by a man named Ishii, had not regarded their prisoners as humans at all – they called them maruta, logs of wood. And on a wooden log you may perform any indignity you like.

Shortly before I left for the Yangtze a new book was published, telling in great detail the story of another camp, but this time in Nanjing. Called Unit Ei 1644, it was commanded by a general named Masuda Tomosada. It was just as terrible a place as Pingshan, set down next to an old hospital on Zhong Shan Road East, close to the old Ming Palace, which was then and still is now a museum. Of the Japanese compound the ten foot walls, electrified fences, a four-storey research annexe there remains no evidence. Lily and I went to the exact address, but all we found was a shopping arcade and a car showroom. There was a black Rolls Royce car on display, a 1993 Silver Spur. The salesman was asking for three million yuan but warned that taxes would amount to another million, at the very least. ‘I have been trying to sell it for a year. Business is a little slow. I can’t say why.’

The Rolls-Royce in China was known as a Lao-si Lai-si, its closest phonetic equivalent. There were two others in the city, the salesman said, one owned by the head of Nanjing Petrochemical Corporation, the other parked in the basement of our hotel. But perhaps if I wasn’t interested in the Rolls Royce, I might care for a Ferrari? I asked if he knew that he was selling his cars on the site of an old Japanese death camp, and all he said was that in Japan ‘they have many of these cars. Very rich people, the Japanese.’

Next door Lily ran into a man she knew from the time she lived in Nanjing. He ran a hairdressing salon, his own business, and he was doing very well. He had no idea that he was blowdrying and coiffing where once Japanese technicians had murdered scores of people, all in the so-called interests of biological science. He shuddered theatrically. ‘Their hair is very different from ours. You can always tell a Japanese girl by her haircut. Much neater. Much tidier.’

The Japanese had also been tidy in the way they organized their camp. They had called the captured citizens of the Chinese capital zaimoku – lumber – and no indignity was too great for them either. The ‘lumber storage unit’ was on the top floor of the research building. Prisoners, brought to what they had thought was a prison hospital, were fed copiously and nutritiously in a refectory on the floor below as they were prepared for the coming experiments. Then they were taken upstairs to what the guards called ‘the rooms that did not open’. White coated technicians were brought in to the room interpreters told the prisoners that they were doctors, would give them injections to cure their ailments. But the injections were of bizarrely horrific substances, with names as sinister sounding as their effects: nitrile prussiate, cyanide hydric, arsenite, acetone, crystallised blowfish poison, and the distilled venoms of cobras, habu snakes and a vile reptile called an amagasu. The scientists watched unemotionally as the victims choked and screamed towards paralysis and spasm, and in most cases, death. If not dead by chemicals, then since they were now hopelessly contaminated and useless for further work by a bullet in the head, and quick incineration in the camp furnace.

The Japanese bred fleas in Nanjing, too, which they infected with a variety of bacilli and had released in distant parts of China, experimenting once again on the possible effectiveness of biological warfare. They manufactured phials of anthrax and plague and paratyphoid, all designed to be used in poisoning wells and rivers. Plague was proudly referred to as a Nanjing speciality.

The experiments continued for six years. The Zhong Shan East Road camp had been set up on 18 April 1939 as the Central China Anti-Epidemic Water Supply Unit. It was closed, in a frantic hurry, in the early days of August 1945 . The remaining ‘lumber’ was murdered and burned. The files were destroyed, the buildings were levelled. General Masuda fled home to Japan. He was detained by the Americans and, it has subsequently been revealed, he exchanged the information he had on this grotesque biology for immunity from prosecution. None of those involved in this terrible trade were tried: the world may have loathed what they had done, but eagerly accepted the data from all their terrible tests. It was one of the uglier examples of the end retroactively justifying the means particularly since the means were carried out by Orientals, and not by those living in the supposedly civilized West.
General Masuda died when his motorcycle hit a truck east of Tokyo, in 1952. He is remembered a little among the old people of Nanjing; but it goes without saying that neither he, nor any other Japanese, is missed.

But as to why all these things happened no one then or since has come up with any kind of acceptable answer.

As Lily came away from the Film at the Massacre Museum she said she had found it difficult to breathe, she was so horrified. Her chest had tightened in a way she had never experienced before.

‘Why did they kill all those civilians, those innocent people? Why couldn’t they just kill the Chinese soldiers? There seems to have been no point in it! I really cannot bring myself to like the Japanese, you know.’ The gifts in a glass cabinet plastic flowers, a child’s painting, bottles of sake-seemed to her tawdry, puny, and not sincere enough. Only one thing cheered her: the surrender table, which had a room to itself, and around which Chiang-Kai shek had made the Japanese sit on child sized chairs, so that their stature appeared as diminished as they deserved.

I asked her about the grudging, half hearted apologies that had been occasionally wrested from the Japanese, now that the war has faded somewhat by time. She thought for a moment.

‘I cannot believe we will not meet them again one day. I think one day they will have to answer for What they did. They Were powerful then. But we are becoming more so now. We will get our own back for all this, I think. I hope.’ I have heard Chinese say many times that they believe that if they ever do go to war, serious war, it will one day be against the Japanese, against the detested ‘little people’. From the strength of feeling in Nanjing, a feeling that is so strong and palpable it infects the very air, I can well believe it. One day, the city seems to be constantly murmuring, we will teach those little people a lesson.