Baring the Shame
In 1943 as a bright-eyed 14-year-old, Akira Ogasawara join< the Japanese army, partly because the recruiters promised him a ride in an airplane. Instead of getting his flight, he was assigned to a secret medical unit that performed experiments on prisoner’s ii Manchuria. Now 65 and a construction worker, he is still tormented by the memory of his two years with Unit 731 as it worked on developing a "germ bomb," which Tokyo hoped would help win Work War H . "I myself did not put any prisoner under the knife, " he tells a mostly middle-aged audience of about 50 people at Hachioji, near Tokyo. "But when I think that the rats and fleas I bred were used experiments which killed so many people, I feel that it's task to tell everyone that such things took place. " The audience stirs uneasily, sharing a hideous secret from the past.
Until the early 1980s, few Japanese were eager to learn about events like Unit 731 's activities in Manchuria, a region in northern China conquered and governed by the Japanese army from 1932 to 1945. Untold thousands of Russians, Koreans and Chinese suspected anti-Japanese activities were brought to the Unit 731 base at Pinang, near Harbin. Clinically referred to as marital , or "logs, they were initially treated well since the experiments required healthy sub-?. Eventually, however, some of the prisoners were infected with contagious diseases— typhoid, tetanus, anthrax, syphilis — or opined with mustard gas, others, stripped and tied to poles, were exposed to the ~ 20°C Manchu an winter to develop frostbite and subquently gangrene. Some were even disserted while still alive, ac-)riding (o former unit members. At least 3,000 prisoners perished.
Ogasawara says he did not understand the real nature of 731's until several months after his arrival at Pinfang, when he was signed to clean up a restricted that contained human remains t which researchers had been experimenting. Ordered to keep silent be court-martialed, he was put to work breeding fleas and rats, were used to spread genus. Sometimes, he recalls, prisoners stained to die in the experiments waved at him from their cells, offing him. "1 was only a little shaven headed kid, " he explains, they probably thought I was one of them. '
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