Word: ogasawara
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...