Shiro Yamagata:
On August 15, 1945, we heard that the Emperor had surrendered to America. Like many other Japanese in China at that time, my unit decided that it was easier to surrender to the Chinese Nationalists. My unit was then reformed and drafted into a unit of the Nationalist Army under Chiang Kai-Shek, and I continued to work as an army doctor assisting the Nationalists against the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. As the Chinese had almost no qualified surgeons, my work was very much needed, and I was treated well.
The Nationalists were no match for the Communists, however, and in January, 1949, the Communists captured the army field hospital I was staffed in and took me prisoner. For the first month, we were not allowed to leave our cells. I tried to make friends with the guards. The Communists soldiers were very young and thin, but they seemed to be in much better spirits than their Nationalist counterparts.
After a month, we, along with the guards, were given daily lessons on Marxism and Maoism.
The War was not my fault and I was not to be blamed, I was told. I was just a soldier, deceived by the Shōwa Emperor and Hideki Tōjō into fighting a war of invasion and oppression against the Chinese. Through studying Marxism, I was told, I would come to understand that all poor men, the Chinese and Japanese alike, were brothers. We were expected to reflect on what we did to the Chinese people and to write confessions about the crimes we committed during the War. Our punishment would be lessened, we were told, if our confessions showed sincere hearts. I wrote confessions, but they were always rejected for not being sincere enough.
Still, because I was a doctor, I was allowed to work at the provincial hospital to treat patients. I was the most senior surgeon at the hospital and had my own staff.
We heard rumors that a new war was about to start between the United States and China in Korea. How could China win against the United States? I thought. Even the mighty Japanese Army could not stand against America. Perhaps I will be captured by the Americans next. I suppose I was never very good at predicting the outcomes of wars.
Food became scarce after the Korean War began. The guards ate rice with scallions and wild weeds, while prisoners like me were given rice and fish.
Why is this? I asked.
You are prisoners, my guard, who was only sixteen, said. You are from Japan. Japan is a wealthy country, and you must be treated in a manner that matched as closely as possible the conditions in your home country.
I offered the guard my fish, and he refused.
You do not want to touch the food that had been touched by a Japanese Devil? I joked with him. I was also teaching him how to read, and he would sneak me cigarettes.
I was a very good surgeon, and I was proud of my work. Sometimes I felt that despite the War, I was doing China a great deal of good, and I helped many patients with my skills.
One day, a woman came to see me in the hospital. She had broken her leg, and because she lived far from the hospital, by the time her family brought her to me, gangrene had set in, and the leg had to be amputated.
She was on the table, and I was getting ready to administer anesthesia. I looked into her eyes, trying to calm her. “Bútòng, bútòng.”
Her eyes became very wide, and she screamed. She screamed and screamed, and scrambled off the table, dragging her dead leg with her until she was as far away from me as possible.
I recognized her then. She had been one of the Chinese girl prisoners that we had trained to help us as nurses at the army hospital during the War with China. She had helped me with some of the practice surgery sessions. I had slept with her a few times. I didn’t know her name. She was just “#4” to me, and some of the younger doctors had joked about cutting her open if Japan lost and we had to retreat.
[Interviewer (off-camera): Mr. ?Yamagata, you cannot cry. ?You know that. ??We cannot show you being emotional on film. ??We have to stop if you cannot control yourself.]
I was filled with unspeakable grief. It was only then that I understood what kind of a life and career I had. Because I wanted to be a successful doctor, I did things that no human being should do. I wrote my confession then, and when my guard read my confession, he would not speak to me.
I served my sentence and was released and allowed to return to Japan in 1956.
I felt lost. Everyone was working so hard in Japan. But I didn’t know what to do.
“You should not have confessed to anything,” one of my friends, who was in the same unit with me, told me. “I didn’t, and they released me years ago. I have a good job now. My son is going to be a doctor. Don’t say anything about what happened during the War.”
I moved here to Hokkaido to be a farmer, as far away from the heart of Japan as possible. For all these years I stayed silent to protect my friend. And I believed that I would die before him and so take my secret to the grave.
But my friend is now dead, and so, even though I have not said anything about what I did all these years, I will not stop speaking now.
Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:
I am speaking only for myself, and perhaps for my aunt. I am the last connection between her and the living world. And I am turning into an old woman myself.
I don’t know much about politics, and don’t care much for it. I have told you what I saw, and I will remember the way my aunt cried in that cell until the day I die.
You ask me what I want. I don’t know how to answer that.
Some have said that I should demand that the surviving members of Unit 731 be brought to justice. But what does that mean? I am no longer a child. I do not want to see trials, parades, spectacles. The law does not give you real justice.
What I really want is for what I saw to never have happened. But no one can give me that. And so I resort to wanting to have my aunt’s story remembered, to have the guilt of her killers and torturers laid bare to the gaze of the world, the way that they laid her bare to their needle and scalpel.
I do not know how to describe those acts other than as crimes against humanity. They were denials against the very idea of life itself.
The Japanese government has never acknowledged the actions of Unit 731, and it has never apologized for them. Over the years, more and more evidence of the atrocities committed during those years have come to life, but always the answer is the same: there is not enough evidence to know what happened.
Well, now there is. I have seen what happened with my own eyes. And I will speak about what happened, speak out against the denialists. I will tell my story as often as I can.
The men and women of Unit 731 committed those acts in the name of Japan and the Japanese people. I demand that the government of Japan acknowledge these crimes against humanity, that it apologize for them, and that it commit to preserving the memory of the victims and condemning the guilt of those criminals so long as the word justice still has meaning.
I am also sorry to say, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, that the government of the United States has also never acknowledged or apologized for its role in shielding these criminals from justice after the War or in making use of the information bought at the expense of torture, rape, and death. I demand that the government of the United States acknowledge and apologize for these acts.
That is all.
Representative Hogart:
I would like to again remind members of the public that they must maintain order and decorum during this hearing or risk being forcibly removed from this room.
Ms. Chang-Wyeth, I am sorry for whatever it is you think you have experienced. I have no doubt that it has deeply affected you. I thank the other witnesses as well for sharing their stories.