Unit 731: Firsthand Accounts of Japan's Wartime Human Experimentation Program

by Hal Gold

Some experiments resulted in the flesh and muscle falling from the bones. Others left the bones so brittle that they were shattered by the blows from the clubs. Either way, the eventual result was the same: gangrene and the rotting away of extremities. Several former Unit 731 members have commented on seeing victims of the experiments. They reported that the victims “had no hands … no feet.” A miniature model of a frostbite experiment was displayed at the Unit 731 exhibitions: It depicts an experiment being performed on a Russian prisoner. Chinese were also used as fodder for the freezing experiments, and some of the victims were women. Yoshimura conducted his frostbite experiments right up until the end of the war. One of the discoveries for which Yoshimura subsequently became famous was that the previously standard treatment of rubbing frozen limbs until they thawed was not the most efficient way of restoring them. Through trial and error, he showed that the best treatment was placing the affected parts in warm water between thirty-seven degrees (normal human body temperature) and forty degrees Celsius. There is no way to count the number of people and human limbs he consumed in arriving at this finding.