What happened to her? I asked my father.
She was taken, he said. The Japanese came to our village on January 5, 1941, because they wanted to make an example of it so that other villages would not dare to support the guerrillas. I was eleven at the time and Changyi was seventeen. My parents told me to hide in the hole under the granary. After the soldiers bayoneted our parents, I saw them drag Changyi to a truck and drive her away.
Where was she taken?
They said they were taking her to a place called Pingfang, south of Harbin.
What kind of place was it?
Nobody knew. At the time the Japanese said the place was a lumber mill. But trains passing by there had to pull down their curtains, and the Japanese evicted all the villages nearby and patrolled the area heavily. The guerrillas who saved me thought it was probably a weapons depot or a headquarters building for important Japanese generals. I think maybe she was taken there to serve as a sex slave for the Japanese soldiers. I do not know if she survived.
And so I picked my bi?ozì to be Changyi (長憶) to honor my aunt, who was like a mother to my father. My name sounds like hers but it is written with different characters, and instead of “smooth happiness,” it means “long remembrance.” ?We prayed that she had survived the War and was still alive in Manchuria.
The next year, in 1981, the Japanese author Morimura Seiichi published ?The Devil’s Gluttony, which was the first Japanese publication ever to talk about the history of Unit 731. I read the Chinese translation of the book, and the name Pingfang suddenly took on a different meaning. For years, I had nightmares about what happened to my aunt.
My father died in 2002. Before his death, he asked that if I ever found out for sure what happened to my aunt, I should let him know when I made my annual visit to his grave. I promised him that I would.
This is why, a decade later, I volunteered to undertake the journey when Dr. Wei offered this opportunity. I wanted to know what happened to my aunt. I hoped against hope that she had survived and escaped, even though I knew there were no Unit 731 survivors.
Chung-Nian Shih, Director, Department of Archaeology, National Independent University of ??Taiwan:
I was one of the first to question Evan’s decision to prioritize sending volunteers who are relatives of the victims of Unit 731 rather than professional historians or journalists. I understand that he wanted to bring peace to the victims’ families, but it also meant large segments of history were consumed in private grief and are now lost forever to the world. His technique, as you know, is destructive. Once he has sent an observer to a particular place at a particular time, the Bohm-Kirino particles are gone, and no one can ever go back there again.
There are moral arguments for and against his choice: is the suffering of the victims above all a private pain? Or should it primarily be seen as a part of our shared history?
It’s one of the central paradoxes of archaeology that in order to excavate a site so as to study it, we must consume it and destroy it in that process. Within the profession we are always debating over whether it’s better to excavate a site now or to preserve it in situ until less destructive techniques could be developed. But without such destructive excavations, how can new techniques be developed?
Perhaps Evan should also have waited until they developed a way to record the past without erasing it in the process. But by then it may have been too late for the families of the victims, who would benefit from those memories the most. Evan was forever struggling with the competing claims between the past and the present.
Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:
I took my first trip five years ago, just as Dr. Wei first began to send people back.
I went to January 6, 1941, the day after my aunt was captured.
I arrived on a field surrounded by a complex of brick buildings. It was very cold. I don’t know exactly how cold, but Harbin in January usually stayed far below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Dr. Wei had taught me how to move with my mind only, but it was still shocking to suddenly find yourself in a place with no physical presence while feeling everything, a ghost. I was still getting used to moving around when I heard a loud whack, whack sound behind me.
I turned around and saw a line of Chinese prisoners standing in the field. They were chained together by their legs and wore just a thin layer of rags. But what struck me was that their arms were left bare, and they held them out in the freezing wind.
A Japanese officer walked in front of them, striking their frozen arms with a short stick. Whack, whack.
Interview with Shiro Yamagata, former member of Unit 731, courtesy of Nippon Broadcasting Co.
[Yamagata and his wife sit on chairs behind a long folding table. He is in his nineties. His hands are folded in front of him on the table, as are his wife’s. He keeps his face placid and does not engage in any histrionics. His voice is frail but clear underneath that of the translator’s.]
We marched the prisoners outside with bare arms so that the arms would freeze solid quicker in the Manchurian air. It was very cold, and I did not like the times when it was my duty to march them out.
We sprayed the prisoners with water to create frostbite quicker. To make sure that the arms have been frozen solid, we would hit them with a short stick. If we heard a crisp whack, it meant that the arms were frozen all the way through and ready for the experiments. It sounded like whacking against a piece of wood.
I thought that was why we called the prisoners maruta, wood logs. Hey, how many logs did you saw today? We’d joke with each other. Not many, just three small logs.
We performed those experiments to study the effects of frostbite and extreme temperatures on the human body. They were valuable. We learned that the best way to treat frostbite is to immerse the limb in warm water, not rubbing it. It probably saved many Japanese soldiers’ lives. We also observed the effects of gangrene and disease as the frozen limbs died on the prisoners.
I heard that there were experiments where we increased the pressure in an airtight room until the person inside exploded, but I did not personally witness them.
I was one of a group of medical assistants who arrived in January 1941. In order to practice our surgery techniques, we performed amputations and other surgery on the prisoners. We used both healthy prisoners and prisoners from the frostbite experiments. When all the limbs had been amputated, the survivors were used to test biological weapons.
Once, two of my friends amputated a man’s arms and reattached them to opposite sides of his body. I watched but did not participate. I did not think it was a useful experiment.
Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:
I followed the line of prisoners into the compound. I walked around to see if I could find my aunt.
I was very lucky, and after only about half an hour, I found where the women prisoners were kept. But when I looked through all the cells, I did not see a woman that looked like my aunt. I then continued walking around aimlessly, looking into all the rooms. I saw many specimen jars with preserved body parts. I remember that in one of the rooms I saw a very tall jar in which one half of a person’s body, cleaved vertically in half, was floating.