Lt. Gen. of Medical Corps Ishii, commander of the Anti-epidemic group N731.
Colonel Kikuchi, Chief of the 1st Section of the Anti-epidemic group N731.
Colonel Ōta, Chief of the 4th Section (and prior to that, chief of the 2nd Section) of the Anti-epidemic group N731.
‘These persons’, we continued, ‘are to testify about research work on bacteria carried out by them for the purpose of using bacteria in warfare and also about cases of mass murders of people as the result of those experiments. I believe that it would be expedient to take preliminary measures preventing the spreading of information concerning this investigation before the investigation is completed and the materials are presented to the Tribunal, i.e., to take from these witnesses certificates to the effect that they promise not to tell anybody about the investigation of these matters and to conduct the preliminary interrogations not in the premises of the War Ministry building.
‘In connection with the above-said, I ask you to render us assistance through the IPS in conducting the interrogations of the said persons on January 13, in premises specially assigned for this purpose, and after taking from them certificates containing promises not to speak about the investigation.
‘Besides that,’ we concluded, ‘I request you to provide the Soviet Division of the IPS with certificates of the whereabouts of Lt. Col. Murakami Takashi, former chief of the 2nd Section of the Anti-epidemic group N731, and Nakatome Kinzo, former chief of the General Affairs Section of the same group. These certificates are needed for the purpose of submitting them to the Tribunal.’
Both Comrade Vasiliev and I felt the letter carried just the right amounts of deference and contempt, promise and threat. Still, I could not help but feel – given all we know that they know and all they know that we know – that our knees were bent, our caps in hands. Then again, if the child does not cry, the mother cannot know it is hungry. And as long as I get my hour with Ishii, I do not care if I have to beg.
January 12, 1947
Early this morning, before the light, I walked down to Tokyo Bay and I stood on the docks and waited for the dawn. As I watched the faint winter sun struggle up the heavy winter sky, I thought of the thousands of dawns I had seen, the thousands of miles I had walked, over these past ten years, to stand there on those docks, in this city, in that dawn, on this day.
And maybe it was the water and the light, maybe the hour and the season, but I was suddenly beset with childhood memories of post-revolutionary Petrograd in that eerie winter of 1917-18, when the city and its people seemed to have broken free of their moorings, when the city and its people seemed to be floating off somewhere unknown.
Roads are never straight for long; they twist and they turn, they rise and fall, fork and diverge. With or without maps, there are always choices to be made; always choices and always consequences, whether you stay or whether you go, choices and consequences, consequences and farewells.
All those farewells, some said and some unsaid, but all those people still gone, floating off somewhere, somewhere unknown, somewhere down the river, somewhere behind me.
For behind me this morning, on those grey docks, were the ruins of Tokyo, the ruins of Japan, of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, of our Russian Motherland and our Soviet Republics, of Germany and of Europe, all lain flat out behind me, everywhere and everyone collapsed, the cities and the people, the people still suffering.
But in front of me, across that bay, across the ocean, I knew there was America; an America not in ruins, for America has no ruins. America does not know invasion. America does not know siege. America does not know surrender. America does not know defeat. America does not know suffering as the rest of the world knows suffering.
Between their West and our East, there is not only a curtain, there is a vastness – across plains and over mountains, from the sea to the sky – a vastness and a sorrow. Two worlds now divided, as Comrade Andrei Alexandrovich Zhadanov observed, into the Imperialistic and the Democratic.
And this city and these people would seem to have made their choice, to have chosen their side. And once again, they seem to have chosen the wrong side of the river; once