Official silence during the American occupation of Japan, Post-occupation Japanese media coverage and debate, Significance in postwar research on bio-warfare and medicine, Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II (Pacific Theater). The Special Team was then ordered to vivisect Sud. [69][70] In addition to Chinese casualties, 1,700 Japanese troops in Zhejiang during Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign were killed by their own biological weapons while attempting to unleash the biological agent, indicating serious issues with distribution. [66] This original data is seen in the attached figure. Plague fleas, infected clothing, and infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets. His reference to it at the trial is believed to have been accidental. These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells, as well as other areas, with anthrax- and plague-carrier fleas, typhoid, cholera, or other deadly pathogens. Mucous and bloody diarrhea. 431968pp. They also carried out biological wars by contaminating water and farmlands with disease-carrying germs. The Japanese defense counsel argued that the claim was vague and uncorroborated and it was dismissed by the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence. Researchers mostly slipped back into civilian life in occupied Japan as if nothing had ever happened, many of them becoming prominent members of university faculty. The Truth of Unit 731: Elite medical students and human experiments (2017). The Unit 731 complex. [19], A special project, codenamed Maruta, used human beings for experiments. It was surgery for most, autopsies for the rest. September 9, 1940, 7 am: Tired and exhausted. Approximately 30 kilograms (66lb) of bubonic plague bacteria could be produced in a few days. A Unit 731 doctor operates on a patient that is part of a bacteriological experiment. Abdominal pain. In 1984, Japanese historian Tsuneishi Keiichi translated and published over 4,000 pages of U.S. documents on Japanese biological warfare. Scientists in Unit 731 also experimented on their test subjects through pregnancy and rape. government. November 1940. The unit is estimated to have killed between 200,000 and 300,000 people. [62] Yoshimura's lack of remorse was evident in an article he wrote for the Journal Of Japanese Physiology in 1950 in which he admitted to using 20 children and a three-day-old infant in experiments which exposed them to zero-degree-Celsius ice and salt water. . Unit member Naeo Ikeda wrote: In my experience, when A type blood 100 cc was transfused to an O type subject, whose pulse was 87 per minute and temperature was 35.4 degrees C, 30 minutes later the temperature rose to 38.6 degrees with slight trepidation. Unit731 tested many different chemical agents on prisoners and had a building dedicated to gas experiments. These resulted in loss of life and extreme suffering. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi responded that the Japanese government did not then possess any records related to Unit731, but recognized the gravity of the matter and would publicize any records located in the future. Date unspecified. At least 12 large-scale bioweapon field trials were carried out, and at least 11 Chinese cities attacked with biological agents. Unit 731 (Japanese: 731, Hepburn: Nana-san-ichi Butai),[note 1] short for Manshu Detachment731 and also known as the Kamo Detachment[3]:198 and the Ishii Unit,[5] was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in lethal human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing during the Second Sino-Japanese War (19371945) and World War II. At that time we understood in our hearts that justice was not on our side". Japanese discussions of Unit731's activity began in the 1950s, after the end of the American occupation of Japan. But before Unit 731 was broken up in 1945, it committed some of the most torturous human experiments in recorded history. The program received generous support from the Japanese government until the end of the war in 1945. After Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, Ishii Shiro created Unit 731 and began testing biological weapons on unwilling human test subjects. Body temperature 37 degrees Celsius. [120][121], Also in 1981, the first direct testimony of human vivisection in China was given by Ken Yuasa. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. It is known that victims were also starved before these tests began. [citation needed], In August2002, the Tokyo district court ruled for the first time that Japan had engaged in biological warfare. Despite innocent beginnings as a research and public health agency, Unit 731 eventually grew into an assembly line for weaponized diseases that, if fully deployed, could have killed everyone on Earth several times over. And out of all the areas in which World War II was fought, none were active as long as what would come to be known as the Pacific Theater. In addition to the accusations of propaganda, the US also asserted that the trials were to only serve as a distraction from the Soviet treatment of several hundred thousand Japanese prisoners of war; meanwhile, the USSR asserted that the US had given the Japanese diplomatic leniency in exchange for information regarding their human experimentation. September 1937. These experiments also showed how easily we can rationalize these kinds of actions if we believe that we are doing it for the greater good. Its records were mostly burned, destroying any useful information the team had managed to generate in 13 years of research. 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. [35]:xii,173 The American historian Sheldon H. Harris states that over 200,000 died. [6] American occupation authorities monitored the activities of former unit members, including reading and censoring their mail. [107] Sanders took this information to General Douglas MacArthur, who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers and responsible for rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupations. [110], The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal heard only one reference to Japanese experiments with "poisonous serums" on Chinese civilians. "[68] The children of these women were tested in ways similar to their parents, with specific emphasis on determining how longer infection periods affected the effectiveness of treatments. Female prisoners were forced to become pregnant for use in experiments. Body temperature 37 degrees Celsius. [109] The Americans believed that the research data was valuable and did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons. Mucous and bloody erosions across the shoulder girdle. That guard would then telephone to the "Special Team" in the inner-prison (Shiro Ishii's brother was head of this Special Team). Date unspecified. Sometimes he did this by dousing the limb with hot water, sometimes by holding it close to an open fire, and other times by leaving the subject untreated overnight to see how long it took for the persons own blood to thaw it out. Prisoners were also repeatedly subjected to rape by guards. Located in the Pingfang district of what is now China, most of . These bold ones were shot". [131], In 1997, international lawyer Knen Tsuchiya filed a class action suit against the Japanese government, demanding reparations for the actions of Unit731, using evidence filed by Professor Makoto Ueda of Rikkyo University. The frostbitten hands of a Chinese person who was taken outside in winter by Unit 731 personnel for an experiment on how best to treat frostbite. One prisoner was a 21-year-old Chinese woman, the other a Soviet girl who was 19years of age. A few years after World War I, the Geneva Protocol prohibited the use of chemical and biological weapons during wartime in 1925. During biological bomb experiments, researchers dressed in protective suits would examine the dying victims. As the war drew to a close in 1945, the Japanese demolished Unit 731 and most of the other research facilities in China to destroy . But that didn't stop a Japanese army medical officer named Shiro . Unit731 staff included approximately 300 researchers, including doctors and bacteriologists. Unit 731 started out as a research unit, investigating the effects of disease and injury on the fighting ability of an armed force. Some prisoners, including Russian and Chinese, were frantically roaming the corridors and kept yelling and shouting. He stated that there were at least over 10,000 victims of internal experiments at the Unit and that he himself vivisected thousands. Unit731 was divided into eight divisions: Unit731 had other units underneath it in the chain of command; there were several other units under the auspice of Japan's biological weapons programs. [94], Despite the prison's status as a highly secure building, at least one unsuccessful escape attempt did occur. One member of Unit 731 later recalled that very sick and unresisting captives would be laid out on the slab so a line could be inserted into their carotid artery. The accusations of both the US and the USSR were true[citation needed], and it is believed that the Japanese had also given information to the Soviets regarding their biological experimentation for judicial leniency. Two prisons are hidden in the center of the main building. [84], No one who entered Unit731 came out alive. The complex contained various factories. "[33], Unit731 and its affiliated units (Unit 1644 and Unit 100, among others) were involved in research, development and experimental deployment of epidemic-creating biowarfare weapons in assaults against the Chinese populace (both military and civilian) throughout World WarII. November 1940. Study methods in these experiments were barbaric. Fetal survival and damage to mother's reproductive organs were objects of interest. Additionally, Unit731 Youth Corps member Yoshio Shinozuka testified that his friend junior assistant Mitsuo Hirakawa was vivisected as a result of being accidentally infected with plague.[59]. Finally, when a prisoners body was all used up, they would typically be shot or killed by lethal injection, though some may have been buried alive. Proteinuria. Two hours later the temperature was 37.7 degrees, and three hours later the subject recovered. A contemporary treatment, a primitive chemotherapy agent called Salvarsan, was sometimes administered over a period of months to observe the side effects, however. On 6May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington in order to inform it that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii, can probably be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'war crimes' evidence". One element of the unit, called Maruta, took this research a little further than the usual bounds of medical ethics by observing injuries and the course of disease on living patients. Members of Unit 731 were not immune from being subjects of experiments. He gave up the idea, left and locked the door, then later went on to his experimental work. From August1940 on, the units were known collectively as the "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army" () or "Unit731" (731) for short. A former member of the Special Team (who insisted on anonymity) recalled in 1995 his first vivisection conducted at the Unit: He didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. Unit members orchestrated forced sex acts between infected and noninfected prisoners to transmit the disease, as the testimony of a prison guard on the subject of devising a method for transmission of syphilis between patients shows: Infection of venereal disease by injection was abandoned, and the researchers started forcing the prisoners into sexual acts with each other. Unit 731 researchers conduct bacteriological experiments with captive child subjects in Nongan County of northeast Chinas Jilin Province. ; Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity", Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Biohazard: Unit 731 and the American Cover-Up", "The 1925 Geneva Protocol: China's CBW Charges Against Japan at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal", "Unmasking Horror A special report. Its head was Lieutenant Shiro Ishii. The Supreme Court of Japan ruled in 1997 that the testimony was indeed sufficient and that requiring it to be removed was an illegal violation of freedom of speech. [17], His younger brother, Prince Mikasa, toured the Unit 731 headquarters in China, and wrote in his memoir that he watched films showing how Chinese prisoners were "made to march on the plains of Manchuria for poison gas experiments on humans. The report describes conditions of every subject precisely without mentioning what happened to them in the long run. Twenty subjects were divided into three groups and placed in combat emplacements, trenches, gazebos, and observatories. It was based in the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China) and had active branch offices throughout China and Southeast Asia. RT @EzbyThor: Japan's notorious Unit 731 personnel not only avoided punishment, they were even encouraged to continue their abominable experiments on mentally ill patients in Japan. Then, over several days, prisoners were eventually drained of blood and deprived of nutrients and water. "Medicine itself must become a weapon," said Nakagawa Yonezo, Professor Emeritus at Osaka University. The testimony of a unit member that served as a guard graphically demonstrated this reality: One of the former researchers I located told me that one day he had a human experiment scheduled, but there was still time to kill. It also operated a secret research and experimental school in Shinjuku, central Tokyo. [The subjects] suffered such agony they were digging their nails into each other's flesh". His perverted imagination was captured by the possibilities of biological and chemical warfare, and in the Japan of the 1920s and '30s, he found supporters in the increasingly nationalistic and fanatical military. Presiding judge Koji Iwata ruled that Unit731, on the orders of the Imperial Japanese Army headquarters, used bacteriological weapons on Chinese civilians between 1940 and 1942, spreading diseases, including plague and typhoid, in the cities of Quzhou, Ningbo, and Changde. They sweated themselves to death under the heat of several hot dry fans. Researchers performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body. [67], 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. While they have added over 60,000names to the watchlist, they have only been able to identify under 100 Japanese participants. November 1940. The occupying US government undertook the cover-up of Japanese war crimes after the end of World War II, granting political immunity to military personnel who had engaged in human experimentation and other crimes against humanity, predominantly in mainland China. The United States refused to acknowledge the trials, branding them communist propaganda. David C. Rapoport. Some of Unit731's satellite (branch) facilities are still in use by various Chinese industrial companies. [52][53] Massive amounts of blood were drained from some prisoners in order to study the effects of blood loss according to former Unit731 vivisectionist Okawa Fukumatsu. Unit 731 was housed within 150 buildings with a staff of 3,000. The facility itself was built in 1935 as a replacement for the Zhongma Fortress, and Ishii and his team used it to expand their capabilities. At first, these patients were volunteers from the ranks of the army, but as the experiments reached the limits of what could be non-invasively observed, and as the supply of volunteers dried up, the unit turned to the study of Chinese POWs and civilian captives. [64][user-generated source? Unit 731 was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes committed by the Japanese armed forces. Other suspected Japanese war criminals who were never indicted include three postwar prime ministers: Hatoyama Ichir (19541956), Kishi Nobusuke (19571960), and Ikeda Hayato (19601964).[100]. Eyelids edematous, swollen. Williams, Peter, and Wallace, David (1989). While Unit731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December1949 Khabarovsk war crime trials, those captured by the United States were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered during their human experiments. These bacteria were injected into subjects regularly, and the resulting infections were studied. Yoshio Tamura, an assistant in the Special Team, recalled that Yoshio Sud, an employee of the first division at Unit731, became infected with bubonic plague as a result of the production of plague bacteria. [102], Unit731 had branches in Linkou (Branch162), Mudanjiang, Hailin (Branch643), Sunwu (Branch673), Toan, and Hailar (Branch543). To determine effectiveness, Unit 731 herded captives together on a firing range and blasted them from varying ranges by multiple Japanese weapons, such as the Nambu 8mm pistol, bolt-action rifles, machine guns, and grenades. Corporal Kikuchi Norimitsu testified that he was told by another unit member that a prisoner "had shown violence and had struck the experimenter with a door handle" and then "jumped out of the cell and ran down the corridor, seized the keys and opened the iron doors and some of the cells. Thousands of prisoners were killed in cruel human experiments at Unit 731, which was based near the northeastern China city of Harbin, north of the Korean peninsula and on a border with Russia. Listen above to the History Uncovered podcast, episode 51: Unit 731, also available on Apple and Spotify. Flamethrowers were also tested, on both covered and exposed skin. Unit 731 (Japanese: 731, Hepburn: Nana-san-ichi Butai), short for Manshu Detachment 731 and also known as the Kamo Detachment: 198 and the Ishii Unit, was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in lethal human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing . Ishii organized a secret research group, the "Tg Unit", for chemical and biological experimentation in Manchuria. The disturbances and upheavals that these invasions caused shook China to its very foundations, triggered a civil war and a famine that probably killed more people than currently live in Canada and Australia combined, and lasted until the countrys Soviet liberation in 1945. After I had watched for about ten minutes, I could not stand it any more, and left the area. To name a few, prisoners were exposed to tetrodotoxin (pufferfish or fugu venom), heroin, Korean bindweed, bactal, and castor-oil seeds (ricin). He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. Then their general symptoms and damage to skin, eye, respiratory organs, and digestive organs were observed at 4hours, 24 hours, and 2, 3, and 5days after the shots. [37] Some of these bombs were designed with porcelain shells, an idea proposed by Ishii in 1938. Ishii ordered every member of the group to disappear and "take the secret to the grave". Parts of organs, such as the brain, lungs, and liver, were removed from others. The design of the facilities made them hard to destroy by bombing. All levels of the Japanese court system found the suit baseless. Unit 731 was a Japanese biological warfare research unit that operated during WWII. Date unspecified. All under the auspices of the US govt, ofc. [117] As the chief of the unit, Shiro Ishii was granted immunity from prosecution for war crimes by the American occupation authorities, because he had provided human experimentation research materials to them. An expedition to Nanjing involved spreading typhoid and paratyphoid germs into the wells, marshes, and houses of the city, as well as infusing them in snacks distributed to locals. Skeleton crews of Ishii's Japanese troops blew up the compound in the final days of the war to destroy evidence of their activities, but many were sturdy enough to remain somewhat intact. Unit 731 - Japans Secret Human Experiments Disturban History 236K subscribers Subscribe 22K 702K views 1 year ago Formed in response to western powers developing their own chemical and. There was a Chinese woman in there who had been used in a frostbite experiment. Weapon Test in Unit 731 Experiments It is common to test weapons before going to the war, but it is uncommon to test weapons on living humans. When AB type blood 120 cc was transfused to an O type subject, an hour later the subject described malaise and psychroesthesia in both legs. The two Russians opened their handcuffs, took the keys, and opened some other cells while yelling. As part of Marutas study in limb injuries, Hisato routinely submerged captives limbs in a tub of water filled with ice and had them held until the arm or leg had frozen solid and a coat of ice had formed over the skin. He was about to rape her anyway, then he saw that her sex organ was festering, with pus oozing to the surface. The prisoners brought to Zhongma included common criminals, captured bandits, anti-Japanese partisans, as well as political prisoners and people rounded up on trumped up charges by the Kempeitai. Unit 731 was the creation of a brutal psychopath, Lieutenant-General Ishii Shiro. Weakness of all four extremeties. The tales of World War II are replete with innumerable accounts . At death, the corpses would only weigh 1/5 normal bodyweight.". First, the Imperial Army of Japan wanted to. [1], Some test subjects were selected to gather a wide cross-section of the population and included common criminals, captured bandits, anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners, homeless and mentally disabled people, which included infants, men, the elderly and pregnant women, as well as those rounded up by the Kenpeitai military police for alleged "suspicious activities". And to study the effects of high G-forces on pilots and falling paratroopers, Unit 731 personnel loaded human beings into large centrifuges and spun them at higher and higher speeds until they lost consciousness and/or died, which usually happened around 10 to 15 Gs, though young children showed a lower tolerance for acceleration forces. From 1948 to 1958, less than five percent of the documents were transferred onto microfilm and stored in the US National Archives before they were shipped back to Japan.[118]. When AB type blood 100 cc was transfused to a B type subject, there seemed to be no side effect. [103], While Tokyo courts acknowledged in 2002 that Unit731 has been involved in biological warfare research, as of 2011[update] the Japanese government had made no official acknowledgment of the atrocities committed against test subjects and rejected the Chinese government's requests for DNA samples to identify human remains (including skulls and bones) found near an army medical school. Army Engineer Hisato Yoshimura conducted experiments by taking captives outside, dipping various appendages into water of varying temperatures, and allowing the limb to freeze. [6], One graduate of Unit 1644, Masami Kitaoka, continued to perform experiments on unwilling Japanese subjects from 1947 to 1956. Sixty minutes later the pulse was 106 per minute and the temperature was 39.4 degrees. [113] The lead prosecuting attorney at the Khabarovsk trial was Lev Smirnov, who had been one of the top Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials. [11] Japan decided to build Unit 731 in Manchuria because the occupation not only gave the Japanese an advantage of separating the research station from their island, but also gave them access to as many Chinese individuals as they wanted for use as human experimental subjects. One element of the unit, called "Maruta," took this research a little further than the usual bounds of medical ethics by observing injuries and the course of disease on living patients. Ministries in Tokyo ordered the destruction of all incriminating materials, including those in Pingfang. "Unit 731" (2021), single from German Deathstep producer Kroww. To determine the best course of treatment for varying degrees of shrapnel wounds sustained on the field by Japanese Soldiers, Chinese prisoners were exposed to direct bomb blasts. Unit 731, Japan's biological warfare program, was formed in 1932 under the leadership of the notorious Gen. Shiro Ishii, chief medical officer of the Japanese army. 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