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

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Unit 731: Japan discloses details of notorious chemical warfare division". the Guardian. April 17, 2018. Archived from the original on September 5, 2021 . Retrieved September 24, 2021. One of the most moving passages is the first hand account of the meeting of Yutaka Mio, a Japanese, and Yibing Wang, Chinese. Mio was part of a unit which would rounded up people suspected of anti-Japanese resistance and sent them to Unit 731, knowing they would die. Wang's father was among those who died. In the intervening years, Wang had sought what happened to his brother, Mio had sought to atone for what happened in China. They met in 1995. The transcript of their meeting is carried in full. Conventional weapons tests were also carried out. Victims were tied to stakes and used to determine the operational range of flamethrowers, grenades, and various kinds of shells and bombs. Japanese microbiologist Dr. Shiro Ishii, head of Unit 731.

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. Japan’s medical institutions enabled the work of Unit 731 by supplying Dr. Ishii with top Japanese scientists and physicians who would be labeled Hikokumin (traitors) if they refused to take part. Most medical professionals saw their work as noble service to the Emperor; the fact that they were killing non-Japanese meant nothing to them. Pure Evil: Wartime Japanese Doctor Had No Regard for Human Suffering". Medical Bag. 2014-05-28. Archived from the original on 2017-03-29 . Retrieved 2017-03-28.

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. RARE) Yoshimura Hisato (excerpt of a telephone interview conducted by Mainichi Shimbun)". Vimeo. Archived from the original on 2021-10-07 . Retrieved 2021-10-07. Japanese Medical Atrocities in World War II". www.vcn.bc.ca. Archived from the original on 2019-06-18 . Retrieved 2019-05-10. 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]

a b "CIA Special Collection ISHII, SHIRO_0005" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-08-09 . Retrieved 2019-09-18. 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]I unhesitatingly assert that the greatest conquest of Japan has been in the humanities of war, in the stopping of the needless sacrifice of life through preventable disease. Japan is the first country in the world to recognize that the greatest enemy in war is not the opposing army, but a foe more treacherous and dangerous—preventable disease, as found lurking in every camp—whose fatalities in every great war of history have numbered from four to twenty times as many as those of mines, bullets, and shells. In 1936, Emperor Hirohito issued a decree authorizing the expansion of the unit and its integration into the Kwantung Army as the Epidemic Prevention Department. [16] It was divided at that time into the "Ishii Unit" and "Wakamatsu Unit", with a base in Xinjing. From August1940 on, the units were known collectively as the "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army" or "Unit731" short. [17]