Singapore was captured by the Japanese in February 1942. Several months later, Othman, then seventeen years old, found himself looking for employment in the occupied land, and his uncle, who worked in a Japanese-run laboratory, provided a recommendation that enabled Mr. Othman to get a job. His unwitting contribution to Japan’s biological warfare program thus began.
Seven Chinese, Indian, and Malay boys working in the lab were all assigned the task of picking fleas from rats and putting them into containers. The article quotes Othman Wok as saying, “It was an unforgettable experience. It was the first time that I was doing something which made me feel like a medical student.”
Some forty rat catchers, apparently Japanese soldiers, would comb Singapore for the rodents and bring their haul into the lab. The rats would then be put to sleep with chloroform, and the boys would work at pulling the fleas from their bodies with pincers. Then the fleas were placed into containers with water, which prevented them from jumping around, and from there the Japanese staff took over. According to Othman, test tubes were prepared with one flea in each. The rats were injected with plague pathogens, their bellies were shaved, and the test tubes were inverted over the shaved area, allowing the fleas to feed on the rats and become plague carriers. “All this work was done by the Japanese in the same room where I worked,” Othman recounted.
The infected fleas were then transferred to kerosene cans which contained sand, dried horse blood, and an unidentified chemical. They were left to breed for about two weeks. Finally, the adult fleas and their offspring, all infected with plague, were transferred to flasks and shipped out. Concerning their destination, Mr. Othman said, “A driver who drove the trucks which transported the fleas to the railway station said that these bottles of fleas were sent off to Thailand.” This information supports assertions that a Unit 731 branch operated in “neutral” Thailand, as well.
The Singapore operation was veiled in the same secrecy that covered other installations. “During the two years I was working there,” Mr. Othman is quoted as saying, “I never knew the actual purpose of my work. We were too afraid to ask.”
Without being told so, the boys knew that they were working with danger. Everybody had to wear white overalls, rubber gloves and boots, and white headgear. On one occasion a rat bit through the rubber glove of a Japanese staffer, and the man died. Another time, an Indian boy working there was bitten on the finger by a rat, but he was saved by being rushed to the hospital and having the tip of the finger amputated.
Othman left the laboratory in late 1944 for another job. After the war, he read of a Japanese biological warfare attack on Chongqing using fleas, and he stated in the article that “the thought that I could have been involved in something related to that still troubles and worries me.” In the years intervening between the end of the war and his speaking to the Straits Times, he never spoke of his employment at Unit 9420.
In Japan, historian Matsumura Takao of Keio University credited the information from the former official with filling the gap between what had been strongly suspected about the Singapore operation and the lack of substantive proof. He also set about on his own search for information concerning the laboratory. He located the former head of the laboratory and got a story, albeit with credibility gaps. Phan of the Straits Times then followed up on his coverage in the newspaper’s November 11, 1991, issue with a second piece on the issue. In an article headlined “Germ lab’s head says work solely for research, vaccines … But Japanese professor skeptical about his claim,” Phan followed the progress of Professor Matsumura’s investigation into the issue, while also giving space to the former laboratory administrator’s rebuttal.
The story gave the Japanese government a problem, and it issued the predictable and well-worn denial. Concerning this response, Phan wrote that “the Japanese government responded, saying that it had no records of such a laboratory—a claim which contrasted with those in U.S. Army documents which mentioned its existence.” The documents of course are those which U.S. military authorities gathered from interviews with Unit 731 leaders forty-five years earlier, which made some passing mention of a Singapore unit.
The former head of the Singapore facility was “a retired doctor in his early eighties who refused to be identified.” According to the article, “he said he was transferred to Singapore a week after the island was occupied in February, 1942 from the main branch of … Unit 731 in Harbin, Manchuria. Singapore was the headquarters of the Japanese Southern Army and the base to supply material to the war front. To prevent the outbreak of diseases in the city, strict bacteriological checks on water supply and fresh food were carried out.” The retired doctor mentions soldiers catching rats in the city and conducting experiments with them, and comments, “Such behavior must have seemed odd to the people there and thus caused misunderstanding.”
Did the people misunderstand? Or did they, in fact, understand all too well? The former laboratory chief talks of the large scale on which his facility operated—it employed all of one thousand members—and the fact that it was had been set up by people brought into Singapore by Naito Ryoichi, a prominent Unit 731 officer who later played an important role in the outfit’s first negotiations with American occupation forces.
Matsumura’s counterargument concerning the benign role allegedly played by the Singapore unit was also carried in the same newspaper: “The other four branches of the unit at Harbin, Guangzhou, Beijing and Nanjing were involved in the manufacture of germ warfare weapons. It would seem strange if the branch in Singapore was not involved in similar activities.” More pointedly, he adds that it seemed odd to set up a laboratory for research on a disease in a place in which there was no epidemic. And he notes that the head of the lab, Naito, and other members had all come to Singapore after working in Harbin, where biological warfare weapons were manufactured.
In February 1995, a documentary on an Asahi Broadcasting Company program interviewed a former member, Takayama Yoshiaki, of the Singapore unit. His account of what he did in Singapore falls into the pattern of Japan’s methodology for creating plague as a weapon. He recalls, “We raised fleas in oil cans. Then, the infected rats were put into mesh enclosures, and lowered into the cans. The fleas would bite the rats, and the fleas became infected.”
The discovery of these facts regarding the Singapore unit throws light upon the geographical extent of Japan’s biological warfare ambitions.
Hiroshima
The charming island of Okunoshima lies just a few minutes by boat from the port city of Hiroshima. In 1929, a factory on the island started producing poison gas for chemical warfare. A small museum has been established near the remains of the factory to remind people of what went on here. The curator is a former worker in what was a highly secretive, dangerous operation. Photos show the scars and disfigurements suffered by the workers.
The island’s history as a center for chemical warfare production dates back to 1928, when the installation there engaged in production of mustard gas on an experimental basis. Equipment was imported from France, and workers were brought in from nearby rural communities on the Japanese mainland.
With the expansion of the war in the latter part of the 1930s, the Hiroshima plant increased production. Types of gases produced over the factory’s lifetime include yperite, lewisite, and cyanogen. So important—and confidential—was the work done at the island that it actually disappeared from Japanese maps as the army moved more aggressively into China.
The workers themselves were ordered to the same secrecy as Unit 731 personnel. And, as with Unit 731, the Japanese government has shown a deep reluctance to admit that anything untoward went on at Okunoshima. For a long time, the government refused to acknowledge responsibility for assisting former workers at the factory there. Finally, it granted some of them recognition as poison gas patients and allowed them compensation, if far from sufficient. For all the