Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II

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In Japan, wartime memory is highly contested within Japan. They've been battling over these issues since 1945. Sometimes it's important just for Koreans and Chinese and Americans to understand what's going on within Japan. That path is contrived; to try to get to reconciliation by agreeing on what happened." Silvester, Christopher (2006-04-29). "Electrocuted, gassed, frozen, boiled alive". Daily Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Archived from the original on 2022-01-10 . Retrieved 2019-05-31.

Ruling recognizes Unit 731 used germ warfare in China". The Japan Times. 2002-08-28 . Retrieved 2023-01-03. Felton, Mark. The devil's doctors: Japanese Human Experiments on Allied Prisoners of War, Pen & Sword, 2012. ISBN 978-1848844797 While Unit731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials, those captured by the United States were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered during their human experiments. [6] The United States helped cover up the human experimentations and handed stipends to the perpetrators. [1] The Americans co-opted the researchers' bioweapons information and experience for use in their own biological warfare program, much like what had been done with Nazi German researchers in Operation Paperclip. [7] [8] Immune from prosecution as war criminals, many of Unit 731’s doctors went on to prominent careers in universities, hospitals, and industry, rising to positions that included governor of Tokyo, president of the Japanese Medical Association, and head of the Japanese Olympic Committee. The ringleader, Dr. Shiro Ishii, quietly returned to private practice and died in 1959 of throat cancer at the age of 67. There are unit members who were known to be interned at the Fushun War Criminals Management Centre and Taiyuan War Criminals Management Centre after the war, who then went on to be repatriated to Japan and founded the Association of Returnees from China and testified about Unit 731 and the crimes perpetrated there.

Neuman, William Lawrence (2008). Understanding Research. Pearson/Allyn and Bacon, p. 65. ISBN 0205471536 Harris, S.H. (2002) Factories of Death. Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–1945, and the American Cover-up, revised ed. Routledge, New York. A special project, codenamed Maruta, used human beings for experiments. Test subjects were gathered from the surrounding population and sometimes euphemistically referred to as "logs" ( 丸太, maruta), used in such contexts as "How many logs fell?" This term originated as a joke on the part of the staff because the official cover story for the facility given to local authorities was that it was a lumber mill. According to a junior uniformed civilian employee of the Imperial Japanese Army working in Unit731, the project was internally called "Holzklotz," German for log. [21] In a further parallel, the corpses of "sacrificed" subjects were disposed of by incineration. [22] Researchers in Unit731 also published some of their results in peer-reviewed journals, writing as though the research had been conducted on nonhuman primates called "Manchurian monkeys" or "long-tailed monkeys." [23] With plague, fleas were used as a carrier and transported in a ceramic bomb,” the unit member added. “At first, glass bombs were tried, but they did not work well. Rats weigh about 600 grams. They were infected with plague, then they were infested with 3,000 to 6,000 fleas each and loaded into the ceramic bomb. When the bomb is dropped and breaks, the fleas scatter.”

Watts, Jonathan (2002-08-28). "Japan guilty of germ warfare against thousands of Chinese". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2018-09-11 . Retrieved 2018-10-02.As it stands, Sheldon Harris’s Factories of Death (1994) estimates the loss of life at 200,000, with Daniel Barenblatt’s A Plague Upon Humanity (2008) putting it as high as 580,000. There is not a lot of detail of the atrocities but enough to visualize. There is too much detail in the minutia of military units, ranks, names, degrees, etc. The most appalling thing I learned was the United States' complicity in none of the leaders of Unit 731 being tried for war crimes. And the leaders on Unit 731 going on to have successful lives and careers built on their crimes during the war. Quite the contrast from Germany. Man, Medicine, and the State: The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century (2006) p. 187 Frostbite testing After victims were infected, they were vivisected at different stages of infection, so that internal and external organs could be observed as the disease progressed. Testimony from multiple guards blames the female victims as being hosts of the diseases, even as they were forcibly infected. Genitals of female prisoners that were infected with syphilis were called "jam-filled buns" by guards. [71] Under the auspices of weapons development and intentional infection of diseases, prisoners were injected with various biological agents including plague, typhus, cholera, anthrax, and syphilis.

Through Gobi and Khingan [ ru] (1981); Coproduction of USSR, Mongolia, Eastern Germany. Miniseries (two episodes). Established for the purpose of developing biological and chemical weapons, Unit 731 exceeded by a year the duration of the Third Reich. While biological and chemical weapons were not new to warfare, Japanese testing on human subjects was unparalleled even by the Nazis. The Japanese government has also failed to grant the OSI meaningful access to these and related records after the war, while European countries, on the other hand, have been largely cooperative, [136] the cumulative effect of which is that information pertaining to identifying these individuals is, in effect, impossible to recover. Deafening silence". The Economist. 24 February 2011. p.48. Archived from the original on 3 March 2011 . Retrieved 16 March 2011.

The English Führer (2023) by Rory Clements involves the use of biological weapons developed by Unit 731. [139]

Nakagawa Yonezo [ ja], professor emeritus at Osaka University, studied at Kyoto University during the war. While he was there, he watched footage of human experiments and executions from Unit731. He later testified about the playfulness of the experimenters: [25] While male prisoners were often used in single studies, so that the results of the experimentation on them would not be clouded by other variables, women were sometimes used in bacteriological or physiological experiments, sex experiments, and as the victims of sex crimes. The testimony of a unit member that served as a guard graphically demonstrated this reality: Operations and experiments continued until the end of the war. Ishii had wanted to use biological weapons in the Pacific War since May1944, but his attempts were repeatedly snubbed. Harris, Sheldon. "Factories of Death" (PDF). p.222. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2021-08-08 . Retrieved 2019-05-31.

Felton, Mark. The Devil's Doctors: Japanese Human Experiments on Allied Prisoners of War, Chapter 10 Biohazard: Unit 731 and the American Cover-Up" (PDF). University of Michigan–Flint. p.5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-07-31 . Retrieved 2019-05-31.