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:
“When mundane, lowly activities are at stake, too much insight is detrimental—far-sightedness errs in immediate concerns.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Justice begins with the recognition of the necessity of sharing. The oldest law is that which regulates it, and this is still the most important law today and, as such, has remained the basic concern of all movements which have at heart the community of human activities and of human existence in general.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)