Activities
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A special project code-named Maruta used human beings for experiments. Test subjects were gathered from the surrounding population and were sometimes referred to euphemistically as "logs" (丸太, maruta?). This term originated as a joke on the part of the staff because the official cover story for the facility given to the local authorities was that it was a lumber mill. In an account by a man who worked as a "junior uniformed civilian employee" of the Japanese Army in Unit 731, the term Maruta came from German, meaning medical experiment, used in such contexts as, "How many logs fell?"
The test subjects were selected to give a wide cross section of the population and included common criminals, captured bandits and anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners, and also people rounded up by the Kempetai for alleged "suspicious activities". They included infants, the elderly, and pregnant women.
Read more about this topic: Unit 731
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Juggling produces both practical and psychological benefits.... A woman’s involvement in one role can enhance her functioning in another. Being a wife can make it easier to work outside the home. Being a mother can facilitate the activities and foster the skills of the efficient wife or of the effective worker. And employment outside the home can contribute in substantial, practical ways to how one works within the home, as a spouse and as a parent.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)
“Minds do not act together in public; they simply stick together; and when their private activities are resumed, they fly apart again.”
—Frank Moore Colby (1865–1925)