Eventually, I came to an operating room filled with young Japanese doctors. I heard a woman scream, and I went in. One doctor was raping a Chinese woman on the operating table. There were several other Chinese women in the room, all of them naked and they were holding the woman on the table down so that the Japanese doctor could focus on the rape.
The other doctors looked on and spoke in a friendly manner with each other. One of them said something, and everybody laughed, including the doctor who was raping the woman on the table. I looked at the women who were holding her down and saw that one of them had a bat-shaped birthmark that covered half of her face. She was talking to the woman on the table, trying to comfort her.
What truly shocked me wasn’t the fact that she was naked, or what was happening. It was the fact that she looked so young. Seventeen, she was a year younger than I was when I left for college. Except for the birthmark, she looked just like me from back then, and just like my daughter.
[She stops]
Representative Kotler: Ms. Chang, would you like to take a break? I’m sure the Subcommittee would understand—
Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth: No, thank you. I’m sorry. Please let me continue.
After the first doctor was done, the woman on the table was brought away. The group of doctors laughed and joked amongst themselves. In a few minutes two soldiers returned with a naked Chinese man walking between them. The first doctor pointed to my aunt, and the other women pushed her onto the table without speaking. She did not resist.
The doctor then pointed to the Chinese man and gestured toward my aunt. The man did not at first understand what was wanted of him. The doctor said something, and the two soldiers prodded the man with their bayonets, making him jump. My aunt looked up at him.
They want you to fuck me, she said.
Shiro ?Yamagata:
Sometimes we took turns raping the women and girls. Many of us had not ever been with a woman or seen a live woman’s organs. It was a kind of sex education.
One of the problems the army faced was venereal disease. The military doctors examined the comfort women weekly and gave them shots, but the soldiers would rape the Russian and Chinese women and got infected all the time. We needed to understand better the development of syphilis, in particular, and to devise treatments.
In order to do so, we would inject some prisoners with syphilis and make the prisoners have sex with each other so that they could be infected the regular way. Of course we would not then touch these infected women. We could then study the effects of the disease on body organs. It was all research that had not been done before.
Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:
The second time I went back was a year later, and this time I went back to June 8, 1941, about five months after my aunt’s capture. I thought that if I picked a date much later my aunt might have already been killed. Dr. Wei was facing a lot of opposition, and he was concerned that taking too many trips to the era would destroy too much of the evidence. He explained that it would have to be my last trip.
I found my aunt in a cell by herself. She was very thin, and I saw that her palms were covered with a rash, and there were bumps around her neck from inflamed lymph nodes. I could also tell that she was pregnant. She must have been very sick because she was lying on the floor, her eyes open and making a light moan—“aiya, aiya”—the whole time I was with her.
I stayed with her all day, watching her. I kept on trying to comfort her, but of course she couldn’t hear me or feel my touch. The words were for my benefit, not hers. I sang a song for her, a song that my father used to sing to me when I was little:
萬里長城萬里長 , 長城外面是故鄉
高粱肥 , 大豆香 , 遍地黃金少災殃。
The Great Wall is ten thousand li long, on the other side is my hometown
Rich sorghum, sweet soybeans, happiness spreads like gold on the ground.
I was getting to know her and saying good-bye to her at the same time.
Shiro Yamagata:
To study the progress of syphilis and other venereal diseases, we would vivisect the women at various intervals after they were infected. It was important to understand the effects of the disease on living organs, and vivisection also provided valuable surgical practice. The vivisection was sometimes done with chloroform, sometimes not. We usually vivisected the subjects for the anthrax and cholera experiments without use of anesthesia since anesthesia might have affected the results, and it was felt that the same would be true with the women with syphilis.
I do not remember how many women I vivisected.
Some of the women were very brave, and would lie down on the table without being forced. I learned to say, “bútòng, bútòng” or “it won’t hurt” in Chinese to calm them down. We would then tie them to the table.
Usually the first incision, from thorax to stomach, would cause the women to scream horribly. Some of them would keep on screaming for a long while during the vivisection. We used gags later because the screaming interfered with discussion during the vivisections. Generally the women stayed alive until we cut open the heart, and so we saved that for last.
I remember once vivisecting a woman who was pregnant. We did not use chloroform initially, but then she begged us, “Please kill me, but do not kill my child.” ?We then used chloroform to put her under before finishing her.
None of us had seen a pregnant woman’s insides before, and it was very informative. I thought about keeping the fetus for some experiment, but it was too weak and died soon after being removed. We tried to guess whether the fetus was from the seed of a Japanese doctor or one of the Chinese prisoners, and I think most of us agreed in the end that it was probably one of the prisoners due to the ugliness of the fetus.
I believed that the work we did on the women was very valuable and gained us many insights.
I did not think that the work we did at Unit 731 was particularly strange. After 1941, I was assigned to northern China, first in Hebei Province and then in Shanxi Province. In army hospitals, we military doctors regularly scheduled surgery practice sessions with live Chinese subjects. The army would provide the subjects on the announced days. We practiced amputations, cutting out sections of intestines and suturing together the remaining sections, and removing various internal organs.
Often the practice surgeries were done without anesthesia to simulate battlefield conditions. Sometimes a doctor would shoot a prisoner in the stomach to simulate war wounds for us to practice on. After the surgeries, one of the officers would behead the Chinese subject or strangle him. Sometimes vivisections were also used as anatomy lessons for the younger trainees and to give them a thrill. It was important for the army to produce good surgeons quickly, so that we could help the soldiers.
“John,” last name withheld, high school teacher, Perth, Australia:
You know old people are very lonely, so when they want attention, they’ll say anything. They would confess to these ridiculous made-up stories about what they did. It’s really sad. I’m sure I can find some old Australian soldier who’ll confess to cutting up some abo woman if you put out an ad asking about it. The people who tell these stories just want attention, like those Korean prostitutes who claim to have been kidnapped by the Japanese Army during the War.
Patty Ashby, homemaker, Milwaukee, Wisconsin:
I think it’s hard to judge someone if you weren’t there. It was during the War, and bad things happen during wars. The Christian thing to do is to forget and forgive. Dragging up things like this is uncharitable. And it’s wrong to mess with time like that. Nothing good can come of it.
Sharon, actress, New ?York, New ?York:
You know, the thing is that the Chinese have been very cruel to dogs, and they even eat dogs. They have also been very mean to the Tibetans. So it makes you think, was it karma?