Dispatches

By Jeffery C. Rubin

IN 1943 AS A BRIGHT-EYED 14-YEAR-OLD, AKIRA OGASAWARA JOINED 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 prisoners in 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 World War II. "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 in experiments which killed so many people, I feel that it's my 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 of anti-Japanese activities were brought to the ! Unit 731 base at Pinfang, near Harbin. Clinically referred to as maruta, or "logs," they were initially treated well since the experiments required healthy subjects. Eventually, however, some of the prisoners were infected with contagious diseases -- typhoid, tetanus, anthrax, syphilis -- or poisoned with mustard gas; others, stripped and tied to poles, were exposed to the -20 degreesC Manchurian winter to develop frostbite and subsequently gangrene. Some were even dissected while still alive, according to former unit members. At least 3,000 prisoners perished.

Ogasawara says he did not understand the real nature of 731's work until several months after his arrival at Pinfang, when he was assigned to clean up a restricted room that contained human remains on which researchers had been experimenting. Ordered to keep silent or be court-martialed, he was put to work breeding fleas and rats, which were used to spread germs. Sometimes, he recalls, prisoners destined to die in the experiments waved at him from their cells, offering him food. "I was only a little shaven-headed kid," he explains. "They probably thought I was one of them."

In the late summer of 1945 the surviving inmates were put to death, and Ogasawara was among the men assigned to dispose of the bodies. After the war, senior officers of Unit 731 captured by the Soviets were sent to Siberian labor camps. The U.S. agreed not to prosecute unit members in exchange for the death camp's medical data.

Today an exhibition about Unit 731, complete with photographs and artifacts, is touring Japan, with 40 stops planned around the country; Ogasawara -- along with other former unit members -- offers his testimony at the exhibition whenever he can. For a Japan that still has not totally come to terms with the wartime past, his words are painful reminders of one of the darkest chapters in the country's history.

With reporting by Satsuki Oba/Tokyo