Comparing the images for quality, I chose several newspapers and hastened into the street still burnished with morning light. That’s when I saw him—S—his now old man’s shape bearing the shadow of his younger self, his ornithic neck bobbing forward, his once languid gait sped up to a near footloose shuffle. I opened my mouth to address him. But what was there to say? Had I been a different man, able to withstand the gaze of those who’d surely be quick to condemn me for what they too might have done in my position, I might have braved the attention of the one man who may yet have the right to judge me. But I am not that man. Humans may be adaptable, but that says nothing about our ability to change.
* * *
—
ALL TOLD, I spent twenty-four months in Pingfang. Officially, we were the Bōeki kyūsuibu, the Anti-Epidemic Water Sanitation Unit, Unit 731, a defensive research unit. Materially, Pingfang spanned three hundred hectares, its fertile land dappled with forests and meadows, its innumerable structures—headquarters, laboratories, dormitories, airfield, greenhouses, pool—luxuriously accommodated within its fold. Locally, we were known as a lumber mill, our pair of industrial chimneys continually emptying into the impending sky.
I remember the first time I stood beneath one of these chimneys. Having finished a procedure, we had followed the gurney out, the damp air white with frost, the bare earth crunching underfoot. S, like the rest of us, was in a morose mood; our work, bacteriological in nature, was making useful gains, but we had not succeeded in developing the antidote we had been after, and I, for one, had become increasingly restless. By then it was 1940; the war, gridlocking in China, was beginning to fan southward, and I was convinced that if Yasushi had indeed enlisted, he would end up in the tropics, where the fruits of our work would be most vital.
I do not know why I risked airing these thoughts. Perhaps it was my way of acknowledging my son. I approached S. Until then we had all been careful to keep to the professional, repeating stock answers, but S was sympathetic. He chatted openly, agreeing with my prognosis, adding only that the war might reach American shores before pushing farther south—an unentertained notion at the time. I was about to press him on the feasibility, indeed the audacity, of such a course, but just then a flare of heat drew our attention, and the gurney, now emptied of our maruta—yes, that’s what we called them: logs—pulled us back to our duty.
Because, you see, that was what Pingfang was built for, its immaculate design hiding in plain view what we still hoped to control: the harvesting of living data. For how else could we compete? Our small nation, poor in resources and stymied by embargoes egregiously imposed by the imperial West. Our one chance lay in our ability to minimize loss, the most urgent being that of our troops, all too often wasted by war’s most efficient enemy: infectious diseases. But war spares no time; again and again we found ourselves beating against the very wall that had always been the bane of medical science. In other words, our problem was ethical; Pingfang sought to remove it. The solution was nothing we dared imagine, but what we, in medicine, had all perhaps dreamed of. We merely had to continue administering shots, charting symptoms, studying our cultures—all the things we had always done in our long medical careers—except when we filled our syringes it was not with curatives but pathogens; when we wielded our scalpel it was not for surgery but vivisection; and when we reached for tissue samples they were not animal but human. This was perhaps Pingfang’s greatest accomplishment: its veneer of normalcy. We carried on; the lives of our soldiers, indeed our entire nation, depended upon us.
I do not know who came up with the term “maruta.” Possibly its usage preceded us. The first time we saw them we were in the hospital ward, where they looked like any patients, intubated under clean sheets changed daily. The second time we saw them it was at the prison ward, where they looked like any prisoners, uniformed and wary. Both times, I remember the hush that fell over us as we registered exactly what we were being shown before we were briskly ushered away. By the time we were given full rein over our research, we were using the term, counting up the beds, tallying our maruta in preparation for our next delivery. Indeed, I believe it was a cargo transfer that I witnessed that morning on the train to Harbin.
I was asked to inspect such a cargo just once. Woken abruptly, I was summoned by an officer waiting in an idling jeep. Throughout the ride, I was bleary, my mind cottony with sleep, and once I gleaned the purpose of the trip—a preliminary health scan—I shut out the chatter and arrived unprepared for the secluded station, the small squadron of military guards patrolling the length of the curtained train, the cargo’s white tarp peeled back to reveal twelve prisoners strapped to planks and gagged by leather bits.
My first reaction was morbid fascination, my mind unable to resolve the image of these people packed like this, and the term “maruta” acquired a horrific appropriateness that struck a nerve. I began to laugh, a sputtering sound that elicited a disapproving glance from the officer who pressed me forward. How they managed to survive I could not imagine. Trembling with exhaustion, they lay in their thin prisoner’s clothes, wet and stinking of their own unirrigated waste, until one by one they were unfastened, forced to stand, their movements minced by the shackles that still bound their hands and feet. No one protested, the only shouts coming from the guards as they stripped and prodded them, the tips of their knives shredding their garments, exposing them first to the cold, then to the water as a pair of soldiers hosed them down.
Had I been able to, I would have abandoned my post, and perhaps I made as if to do so, for the officer gripped my arm, his placid face nicked by repulsion, though it was unclear for whom or what. As the water dripped away, and the maruta were toweled off, I was led to the nearest plank, where four women, now manacled together, sat shivering. They were all in their twenties and thirties, their eyes black with recrimination and their chattering bodies so violently pimpled by the cold I could hardly palpate them. The second plank was an all-male group, each man, wiry with work, irradiated by a humiliation so primal my hands began to shake. The third and final plank was a mixed group, perhaps a family. One woman grew so agitated by my attempts to minister to a limp girl that I barely registered the man pulled from the train and added to the cargo. This new prisoner was my age, in good health and spirited enough to have risked the curtains to “spy” from the train window. He was brought to me to be tranquilized, and though I must have complied, I remember nothing else, only the leering heat of the soldiers snapped to attention behind me, and then, later, the vague relief that flooded me when the next day I stepped into my ward and did not recognize a single face.
Lumber mills?
I do not believe anyone was so naïve.
* * *
—
PINGFANG’S OPERATION expanded with the war, its defensive function superseded by its natural twin: the development of biological weapons. This offensive capability had been pursued from the start, mostly in the form of small-scale tests surreptitiously deployed as creative endnotes to our ongoing anti-insurgency missions, but it did not peak until the war took that fatal turn toward America. By then, many of us had been dispatched to newly conquered regions or strategic teaching posts back home, but news continued to reach us, mostly as rumors but sometimes through familiar details we recognized in news reports. As the war entered its final throes, Pingfang rose in importance. By the time Germany began its retreat, Pingfang, already anticipating a Russian offensive, had begun testing, for example, the human threshold for the northern freeze. How they planned to use the data I do not know. With so few resources and little infrastructure left, there would have been no way to manufacture, let alone distribute, any new equipment. Why these tests struck me as crueler I also do not know. Perhaps the obvious brutality of the method touched my conscience. Or perhaps it was simply a defensive reflex, the mind’s protective instinct that indicts another in the attempt to save itself. After all, if I had been in their position, I too would have likely carried out these experiments, meticulously freezing and thawing the living body to observe the behavior of frostbite or assess the tactical viability of a thoroughly numbed soldier. While some of us still insist on our relative humanity, I do not believe we can quibble over such fine points as degree.