Doctors of Depravity

By CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
02 Mrz 2007

After more than 60 years of silence, World War II's most enduring and horrible secret is being
nudged into the light of day. One by one the participants, white-haired and mildmannered,
line up to tell their dreadful stories before they die.
Akira Makino is a frail widower living near Osaka in Japan. His only unusual habit is to
regularly visit an obscure little town in the southern Philippines, where he gives clothes to
poor children and has set up war memorials.
Mr Makino was stationed there during the war. What he never told anybody, including his
wife, was that during the four months before Japan's defeat in March 1945, he dissected ten
Filipino prisoners of war, including two teenage girls. He cut out their livers, kidneys and
wombs while they were still alive. Only when he cut open their hearts did they finally perish.
These barbaric acts were, he said this week, "educational", to improve his knowledge of
anatomy. "We removed some of the organs and amputated legs and arms. Two of the victims
were young women, 18 or 19 years old. I hesitate to say it but we opened up their wombs to
show the younger soldiers. They knew very little about women - it was sex education."
Why did he do it? "It was the order of the emperor, and the emperor was a god. I had no
choice. If I had disobeyed I would have been killed." But the vivisections were also a revenge
on the "enemy" - Filipino tribespeople whom the Japanese suspected of spying for the
Americans.
1

Mr Makino's prisoners seem to have been luckier than some: he anaesthetised them before
cutting them up. But the secret government department which organised such experiments in
Japanese-occupied China took delight in experimenting on their subjects while they were still
alive.
A jovial old Japanese farmer who in the war had been a medical assistant in a Japanese army
unit in China described to a U.S. reporter recently what it was like to dissect a Chinese
prisoner who was still alive.
Munching rice cakes, he reminisced: "The fellow knew it was over for him, and so he didn't
struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. But when I picked up the
scalpel, that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he
screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony.
"He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he
stopped.
"This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it
was my first time." The man could not be sedated, added the farmer, because it might have
distorted the experiment.
The place where these atrocities occurred was an undercover medical experimentation unit of
the Imperial Japanese Army. It was known officially as the Anti-Epidemic Water Supply and
Purification Bureau - but all the Japanese who worked there knew it simply as Unit 731.
It had been set up as a biological warfare unit in 1936 by a physician and army officer, Shiro
Ishii. A graduate of Kyoto Imperial University, Ishii had been attracted to germ warfare by the
1925 Geneva Protocol banning biological weapons. If they had to be banned under
international law, reasoned Ishii, they must be extremely powerful.
Ishii prospered under the patronage of Japan's army minister. He invented a water filter which
was used by the army, and allegedly demonstrated its effectiveness to Emperor Hirohito by
urinating into it and offering the results to the emperor to drink. Hirohito declined, so Ishii
drank it himself.
A swashbuckling womaniser who could afford to frequent Tokyo's upmarket geisha houses,
Ishii remained assiduous in promoting the cause of germ warfare. His chance came when the
Japanese invaded Manchuria, the region in eastern China closest to Japan, and turned it into a
puppet state.
Given a large budget by Tokyo, Ishii razed eight villages to build a huge compound - more
than 150 buildings over four square miles - at Pingfan near Harbin, a remote, desolate part of
the Manchurian Peninsula.
Complete with an aerodrome, railway line, barracks, dungeons, laboratories, operating rooms,
crematoria, cinema, bar and Shinto temple, it rivalled for size the Nazis' infamous death camp
of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The numbers of prisoners were lower. From 1936 to 1942 between 3,000 and 12,000 men,
women and children were murdered in Unit 731. But the atrocities committed there were
physically worse
2

than in the Nazi death camps. Their suffering lasted much longer - and not one prisoner
survived.
At Unit 731, Ishii made his mission crystal clear. "A doctor's God-given mission is to block
and treat disease," he told his staff, "but the work on which we are now to embark is the
complete opposite of those principles."
The strategy was to develop biological weapons which would assist the Japanese army's
invasion of south-east China, towards Peking.
There were at least seven other units dotted across Japanese-occupied Asia, but they all came
under Ishii's command. One studied plagues; another ran a bacteria factory; another
conducted experiments in human food and water deprivation, and waterborne typhus.
Another factory back in Japan produced chemical weapons for the army. Typhoid, cholera
and dysentery bacteria were farmed for battlefield use.
Most of these facilities were combined at Unit 731 so that Ishii could play with his box of
horrors. His word was law. When he wanted a human brain to experiment on, guards grabbed
a prisoner and held him down while one of them cleaved open his skull with an axe. The brain
was removed and rushed to Ishii's laboratory.
Human beings used for experiments were nicknamed "maruta" or "logs" because the cover
story given to the local authorities was that Unit 731 was a lumber mill. Logs were inert
matter, a form of plant life, and that was how the Japanese regarded the Chinese "bandits",
"criminals" and "suspicious persons" brought in from the surrounding countryside.
Shackled hand and foot, they were fed well and exercised regularly. "Unless you work with a
healthy body you can't get results," recalled a member of the Unit.
But the torture inflicted upon them is unimaginable: they were exposed to phosgene gas to
discover the effect on their lungs, or given electrical charges which slowly roasted them.
Prisoners were decapitated in order for Japanese soldiers to test the sharpness of their swords.
Others had limbs amputated to study blood loss - limbs that were sometimes stitched back on
the opposite sides of the body. Other victims had various parts of their brains, lungs or liver
removed, or their stomach removed and their oesophagus reattached to their intestines.
Kamada, one of several veterans who felt able to speak out after the death of Emperor
Hirohito, remembered extracting the plague-infested organs of a fully conscious "log" with a
scalpel.
"I inserted the scalpel directly into the log's neck and opened the chest," he said. "At first
there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent."
Other experiments involved hanging prisoners upside down to discover how long it took for
them to choke to death, and injecting air into their arteries to test for the onset of embolisms.
Some appear to have had no medical purpose except the administering of indescribable pain,
such as injecting horse urine into prisoners' kidneys.
3

Those which did have a genuine medical value, such as finding the best treatment for frostbite
- a valuable discovery for troops in the bitter Manchurian winters - were achieved by
gratuitously cruel means.
On the frozen fields at Pingfan, prisoners were led out with bare arms and drenched with cold
water to accelerate the freezing process.
Their arms were then hit with a stick. If they gave off a hard, hollow ring, the freezing process
was complete. Separately, naked men and women were subjected to freezing temperatures
and then defrosted to study the effects of rotting and gangrene on the flesh.
People were locked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, or they were put
into centrifuges and spun to death like a cat in a washing machine. To study the effects of
untreated venereal disease, male and female "logs" were deliberately infected with syphilis.
Ishii demanded a constant intake of prisoners, like a modern-day Count Dracula scouring the
countryside for blood. His victims were tied to stakes to find the best range for flamethrowers, or used to test grenades and explosives positioned at different angles and distances.
They were used as targets to test chemical weapons; they were bombarded with anthrax.
All of these atrocities had been banned by the Geneva Convention, which Japan signed but
did not ratify. By a bitter irony, the Japanese were the first nation to use radiation against a
wartime enemy. Years before Hiroshima, Ishii had prisoners' livers exposed to X-rays.
His work at Pingfan was applauded. Emperor Hirohito may not have known about Unit 731,
but his family did. Hirohito's younger brother toured the Unit, and noted in his memoirs that
he saw films showing mass poison gas experiments on Chinese prisoners.
Japan's prime minister Hideki Tojo, who was executed for war crimes in 1948, personally
presented an award to Ishii for his contribution in developing biological weapons. Vast
quantities of anthrax and bubonic plague bacteria were stored at Unit 731. Ishii manufactured
plague bombs which could spread fatal diseases far and wide. Thousands of white rats were
bred as plague carriers, and fleas introduced to feed on them.
Plague fleas were then encased in bombs, with which Japanese troops launched biological
attacks on reservoirs, wells and agricultural areas.
Infected clothing and food supplies were also dropped. Villages and whole towns were
afflicted with cholera, anthrax and the plague, which between them killed over the years an
estimated 400,000 Chinese.
One victim, Huang Yuefeng, aged 28, had no idea that by pulling his dead friend's socks on
his feet before burying him he would be contaminated.
All he knew was that the dead were all around him, covered in purple splotches and lying in
their own vomit. Yuefeng was lucky: he was removed from a quarantine centre by a friendly
doctor and nursed back to health.
But four relatives died. Yuefeng told Time magazine: "I hate the Japanese so much that I
cannot live with them under the same sky."
4

The plague bombing was suspended after the fifth bacterial bombing when the wind changed
direction and 1,700 Japanese troops were killed.
Before Japan surrendered, Ishii and army leaders were planning to carry the war to the U.S.
They proposed using "balloon bombs" loaded with biological weapons to carry cattle plague
and anthrax on the jet stream to the west coast of America.
Another plan was to send a submarine to lie off San Diego and then use a light plane carried
on board to launch a kamikaze mission against the city. The war ended before these suicidal
attacks could be authorised.
As well as Chinese victims, Russians, Mongolians, Koreans and some prisoners of war from
Europe and the U.S. also ended up in the hands of Ishii, though not all at Unit 731.
Major Robert Peaty, of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, was the senior British officer at
Mukden, a prisoner-of-war camp 350 miles from Pingfan. Asked, after the war, what it was
like, Peaty replied: "I was reminded of Dante's Inferno - abandon hope, all ye who enter here."
In a secret diary, Peaty recorded the regular injections of infectious diseases, disguised as
harmless vaccinations, which were given to them by doctors visiting from Unit 731. His entry
for January 30, 1943, records: "Everyone received a 5cc typhoid-paratyphoid A inoculation."
On February 23, his entry read: "Funeral service for 142 dead. 186 have died in 5 days, all
Americans." Further "inoculations" followed.
Why, then, after the war, were nearly all the scientists at Unit 731 freed? Why did Dr Josef
Mengele, the Nazi 'Angel of Death' at Auschwitz, have to flee to South America and spend
the rest of his life in hiding, while Dr Shiro Ishii died at home of throat cancer aged 67 after a
prosperous and untroubled life?
The answer is that the Japanese were allowed to erase Unit 731 from the archives by the
American government, which wanted Ishii's biological warfare findings for itself.
In the autumn of 1945, General MacArthur granted immunity to members of the Unit in
exchange for research data on biological warfare.
After Japan's surrender, Ishii's team fled back across China to the safety of their homeland.
Ishii ordered the slaughter of the remaining 150 "logs" in the compound and told every
member of the group to "take the secret to the grave", threatening death to anybody who went
public.
Vials of potassium cyanide were issued in case anyone was captured. The last of his troops
blew up the compound.
From then on, a curtain of secrecy was lowered. Unit 731 was not part of the Tokyo War
Crimes Tribunal. One reference to "poisonous serums" being used on the Chinese was
allowed to slip by for lack of evidence.
Lawyers for the International Prosecution Section gathered evidence which was sent directly
to President Truman. No more was heard of it.
5

The Americans took the view that all this valuable research data could end up in the hands of
the Soviets if they did not act fast. This was, after all, the kind of information that no other
nation would have had the ruthlessness to collect.
Thus the Japanese were off the hook. Unlike Germany, which atoned for its war crimes, Japan
has been able to deny the evidence of Unit 731. When, as now, it does admit its existence, it
refuses Chinese demands for an apology and compensation on the grounds that there is no
legal basis for them - since all compensation issues had been settled by a treaty with China in
1972.
Many of the staff at Unit 731 went on to prominent careers. The man who succeeded Ishii as
commander of Unit 731, Dr Masaji Kitano, became head of Green Cross, once Japan's largest
pharmaceutical company.
Many ordinary Japanese citizens today would like to witness a gesture of atonement by their
government. Meanwhile, if they want to know what happened, they can visit the museum that
the Chinese government has erected in the only building at Pingfan which was not destroyed.
It does not have the specimens kept at Unit 731: the jars containing feet, heads and internal
organs, all neatly labelled; or the six-foot-high glass jar in which the naked body of a Western
man, cut vertically in two pieces, was pickled in formaldehyde.
But it does give an idea of what this Asian Auschwitz was like. In the words of its curator:
"This is not just a Chinese concern; it is a concern of humanity."

Unit 731
Wikipedia,

Body disposal at Unit 731.

Unit 731 (731 Nana-san-ichi butai?) was a covert biological and chemical warfare
research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human
6

experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (19371945) and World War II. It was
responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel.
Officially known by the Imperial Japanese Army as the Kempeitai Political Department and
Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory, it was initially set up under the Kempeitai
military police of the Empire of Japan to develop weapons of mass destruction for potential
use against Chinese, and possibly Soviet forces.

Description
Unit 731 was based in the Pingfang district of the city of Harbin in the puppet state of
Manchukuo.

Shiro Ishii, commander of Unit 731

More than ten thousand people,[1] from which around 600 every year were provided by the
Kempeitai,[2] were subjects of the experimentation conducted by Unit 731.
Those were both civilian and military of Chinese, Russian, American and other nationalities
as well as some Japanese criminals from the Japanese mainlands.[3] The victims who died in
the camp included at least 25 victims from the former Soviet Union, Mongolia and Korea.
[4]
Some American and European Allied prisoners of war also died at the hands of Unit 731.[4]
According to the 2002 International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare,
the number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human
experiments is around 580,000.[5] According to other sources, the use of biological weapons
researched in Unit 731's bioweapons and chemical weapons programs resulted in possibly as
many as 200,000 deaths of military personnel and civilians in China.[6]
Unit 731 was the headquarters of many subsidiary units used by the Japanese to research
biological warfare; other units included Unit 516 (Qiqihar), Unit 543 (Hailar), Unit 773
(Songo unit), Unit 100 (Changchun), Unit Ei 1644 (Nanjing), Unit 1855 (Beijing), Unit 8604
(Guangzhou), Unit 200 (Manchuria) and Unit 9420 (Singapore).
Many of the scientists involved in Unit 731 went on to prominent careers in post-war politics,
academia, business, and medicine. Some were arrested by Soviet forces and tried at the
Khabarovsk War Crime Trials; others, who surrendered to the Americans, were granted
amnesty in exchange for access to the data collected by them.[7]
7

On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to
Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be
obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence
channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence."[8] The deal was concluded in
1948.
Because of their brutality, Unit 731's actions have now been declared by the United Nations to
have been crimes against humanity.

Formation
In 1932, General Shiro Ishii (), chief medical officer of the Japanese Army and
protg of Army Minister Sadao Araki was placed in command of the Army Epidemic
Prevention Research Laboratory. He and his men built the Zhong Ma Prison Camp (whose
main building was known locally as the Zhongma Fortress), a prison/experimentation camp in
Beiyinhe, a village 100 kilometers south of Harbin on the South Manchurian Railway.
Ishii organized a secret research group, the "Togo Unit", for the conduct of various chemical
and biological investigations. In 1935, a jailbreak, and later, an explosion (believed to be an
attack) forced Ishii to shut down Zhongma Fortress. He later moved to Pingfang,
approximately 24 kilometers south of Harbin, to set up a new and much larger facility.[9]
In 1936, Emperor Shwa authorized, by imperial decree, the expansion of this unit and its
integration into the Kwantung Army as the Epidemic Prevention Department.[10] It was
divided at the same time into the "Ishii Unit" and "Wakamatsu Unit" with a base in Hsinking.
From August 1940, all these units were known collectively as the "Epidemic Prevention and
Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army ()"[11] or "Unit
731" ( 731 ) for short.

Activities
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" ( maruta?).[12] This term originated as a joke on the part of the staff due to the fact
that the official cover story for the facility given to the local authorities was that it was a
lumber mill.[13]
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 secret police for alleged "suspicious activities". They included
infants, the elderly, and pregnant women.

Vivisection

Prisoners of war were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia.[14][12]

Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases.
Scientists performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the
effects of disease on the human body. These were conducted while the patients were
alive because it was feared that the decomposition process would affect the results.[15]
8

[12]

The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children, and infants.

[16]

Vivisections were also performed on pregnant women, sometimes impregnated by

doctors, and the fetus removed.[17]
Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss.[12]
Those limbs that were removed were sometimes re-attached to the opposite sides of
the body.[12]
Some prisoners' limbs were frozen and amputated, while others had limbs frozen then
thawed to study the effects of the resultant untreated gangrene and rotting.
Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and the esophagus reattached
to the intestines.[12]
Parts of the brain, lungs, liver, etc. were removed from some prisoners.[18][14][12]

In 2007, Doctor Ken Yuasa testified to the Japan Times that "I was afraid during my first
vivisection, but the second time around, it was much easier. By the third time, I was willing to
do it." He believes at least 1,000 persons, including surgeons, were involved in vivisections
over mainland China.[19]

Weapons testing

Human targets were used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in
different positions.[12]
Flame throwers were tested on humans.[12]
Humans were tied to stakes and used as targets to test germ-releasing bombs, chemical
weapons and explosive bombs.[12]

Germ warfare attacks

Prisoners were injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations, to

study their effects.[12]
To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were
deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea, then studied[12].
Prisoners were infested with fleas in order to acquire large quantities of diseasecarrying fleas for the purposes of studying the viability of germ warfare[citation needed].
Plague fleas, infected clothing, and infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped
on various targets. The resulting cholera, anthrax, and plague were estimated to have
killed around 400,000 Chinese civilians.[12]
Tularemia was tested on Chinese civilians.[20]
Unit 731 and its affiliated units (Unit 1644, Unit 100, et cetera) were actively involved
not only in research and development, but also in experimental deployment of
epidemic-creating biowarfare weapons in assaults against the Chinese populace (both
civilian and military) throughout World War II. Plague-infested fleas, bred in the
laboratories of Unit 731 and Unit 1644, were spread by low-flying airplanes upon
Chinese cities, coastal Ningbo in 1940, and Changde, Hunan Province, in 1941. This
military aerial spraying killed thousands of people with bubonic plague epidemics.[21]

Other experiments
Prisoners were subjected to other experiments such as:
9

being hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death.[12]
having air injected into their arteries to determine the time until the onset of embolism.
[12]

having horse urine injected into their kidneys.[12]

being deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death.
being placed into high-pressure chambers until death.
being exposed to extreme temperatures and developed frostbite to determine how long
humans could survive with such an affliction, and to determine the effects of rotting
and gangrene on human flesh.[12]
having experiments performed upon prisoners to determine the relationship between
temperature, burns, and human survival.
being placed into centrifuges and spun until dead.
having animal blood injected and the effects studied.
being exposed to lethal doses of x-ray radiation.
having various chemical weapons tested on prisoners inside gas chambers.
being injected with sea water to determine if it could be a substitute for saline.

Biological warfare
Japanese scientists performed tests on prisoners with plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism and
other diseases.[22] This research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the
flea bomb used to spread the bubonic plague.[23] Some of these bombs were designed with
ceramic (porcelain) shells, an idea proposed by Ishii in 1938.
These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture,
reservoirs, wells, and other areas with anthrax, plague-carrier fleas, typhoid, dysentery,
cholera, and other deadly pathogens. During biological bomb experiments, scientists dressed
in protective suits would examine the dying victims. Infected food supplies and clothing were
dropped by airplane into areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces. In addition,
poisoned food and candies were given out to unsuspecting victims and children, and the
results examined.

Unit members

Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii

Lieutenant Colonel Ryoichi Naito
Dr. Masaji Kitano
Yoshio Shinozuka
Yasuji Kaneko

Divisions
Unit 731 was divided into eight divisions:

Division 1: Research on bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, typhoid and tuberculosis

using live human subjects. For this purpose, a prison was constructed to contain
around three to four hundred people.
Division 2: Research for biological weapons used in the field, in particular the
production of devices to spread germs and parasites.
Division 3: Production of shells containing biological agents. Stationed in Harbin.
10

Division 4: Production of other miscellaneous agents.

Division 5: Training of personnel.
Divisions 68: Equipment, medical and administrative units.

Facilities

One of the buildings is open to visitors

The Unit 731 complex covered six square kilometers and consisted of more than 150
buildings. The design of the facilities made them hard to destroy by bombing. The complex
contained various factories. It had around 4,500 containers to be used to raise fleas, six giant
cauldrons to produce various chemicals and around 1,800 containers to produce biological
agents. Approximately 30 kg of bubonic plague bacteria could be produced in several days.
Some of Unit 731's satellite facilities are in use by various Chinese industrial concerns. A
portion has been preserved and is open to visitors as a War Crimes Museum.
Tons of biological weapons (and some chemicals) were stored in various places in
northeastern China throughout the war. The Japanese attempted to destroy evidence of the
facilities after disbanding. In August 2003, 29 people were hospitalized after a construction
crew in Heilongjiang inadvertently dug up chemical shells that had been buried deep in the
soil more than 50 years before.

[Anta testing site

This site was an open air testing area about 120 km from the Pingfang facility.

Hsinking (Changchun) HQ
Headquarters of "Wakamatsu Unit" (Unit 100), under command of veterinarian Wakamatsu
Yujiro. This facility dedicated itself to both the study of animal vaccines to protect Japanese
resources, and, especially, veterinary biological-warfare. Diseases were tested for use against
the Soviet and Chinese horses and other livestock. In addition to these tests, Unit 100 ran a
bacteria factory to produce the pathogens needed by other units. Biological sabotage testing
was also handled at this facility: everything from poisons to chemical crop destruction.

Peking (Peiping) HQ
This HQ served as the headquarters of Unit 1855. It was also an experimental branch unit
based at Tsinan, Shantung. Pandemic diseases were extensively studied at this facility.

Nanking HQ
11

This section was the headquarters of the "Tama Unit" (Unit Ei 1644) and conducted extensive
joint projects and operations with Unit 731.

Kwangtung (Canton) HQ
The headquarters of the "Nami Unit" (Unit 8604). This installation conducted human
experimentation in food and water deprivation as well as water-borne typhus. In addition, this
facility served as the main rat-farm for the medical units to provide them with bubonic plague
vectors for experiments.[citation needed]

Syonan (Singapore) HQ
Formed in 1942, by Ryoichi Naito, Unit 9420 had approximately 1000 personnel based at the
Raffles Medical University. The unit was commanded by Major General Kitagawa Masataka
and supported by the Japanese Southern Army Headquarters.
There were two main sub units: the "Kono Unit," which specialized in malaria, and "Umeoka
Unit," which dealt with the plague. In addition to disease experiments, this facility served as
one of the main rat catching and processing centers. Evidence points towards this facility
supplying a medical sub-unit operating in Thailand, with diseases for unknown operations and
or experiments.[citation needed]

Hiroshima HQ
A top secret factory in kunoshima produced chemical weapons for the Japanese military and
medical units. Starting with mustard gas production in 1928, the factory moved on to such
poisons as Lewisite, and Cyanogen. During the 1930s, as the war in China grew worse, the
island the factory sat on was removed from most maps to strengthen secrecy and security.

Manchuria HQ (Unit 200)

This unit was associated directly with Unit 731, and worked mainly in plague research.

Manchuria HQ (Unit 571)

This section, with unknown headquarters, was another unit that worked directly and
extensively with Unit 731.

Special Mobile Teams

Special units led by Ishii Shiro's elder brother and only staffed with members from Ishii's
home town operated separately from the regular medical organizations as roving researchers
and trouble shooters.[citation needed]

Special Operations units

12

Units with special and unknown assignments in Manchuria and the Asian mainland. It has
been suggested that nuclear weapons research was conducted in Manchuria towards the end of
the war by this branch.[citation needed]

Disbanding and the end of World War II

Information sign at the site today.

Operations and experiments continued until the end of the war. Ishii had wanted to use
biological weapons in the Pacific conflict since May 1944, but his attempts were repeatedly
foiled by poor planning and Allied intervention.
With the Russian invasion of Manchukuo and Mengjiang in August 1945, the unit had to
abandon their work in haste. The members and their families fled to Japan.
Ishii ordered every member of the group "to take the secret to the grave", threatening to find
them if they failed, and prohibiting any of them from going into public work back in Japan.
Potassium cyanide vials were issued for use in the event that the remaining personnel were
captured.[12]
Skeleton crews of Ishii's Japanese troops blew the compound up in the final days of the war to
destroy evidence of their activities, but most were so well constructed that they survived
somewhat intact as a testimony to what had happened there.
After Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, Douglas MacArthur became the
Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupation.
MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing
America with their research on biological warfare.
The United States believed that the research data was valuable because the Allies had never
publicly conducted or condoned such experiments on humans due to moral and political
revulsion. The United States also did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to
acquire data on biological weapons, not to mention the military benefits of such research.[24]
The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal heard only one reference to Japanese experiments with
"poisonous serums" on Chinese civilians. This took place in August 1946 and was instigated
by David Sutton, assistant to the Chinese prosecutor. The Japanese defense counselor argued
that the claim was vague and uncorroborated and it was dismissed by the tribunal president,
Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence. The subject was not pursued further by Sutton, who
13

was likely aware of Unit 731's activities. His reference to it at the trial is believed to have
been accidental.
Although publicly silent on the issue at the Tokyo trials, the Soviet Union pursued the case
and prosecuted twelve top military leaders and scientists from Unit 731 and its affiliated
biological-war prisons Unit 1644 in Nanjing, and Unit 100 in Changchun, in the Khabarovsk
War Crime Trials. Included among the prosecuted for war crimes including germ warfare was
General Otozo Yamada, the commander-in-chief of the million-man Kwantung Army
occupying Manchuria.
Many Russian civilians, including women and children, and Soviet POWs held by Japan were
killed in chemical and biological warfare experiments by Unit 731, along with the Chinese
people, American POWs, Russian and other nationalities.[25] The trial of those captured
Japanese perpetrators was held in Khabarovsk in December 1949.
A lengthy partial transcript of the trial proceedings was published in different languages the
following year by a Moscow foreign languages press, including an English language edition:
Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with
Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons (Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House, 1950). (French language: Documents relatifs au procs des anciens
Militaires de l'Arme Japonaise accuss d'avoir prpar et employ l'Arme Bactriologique /
Japanese language:
/ Chinese language:
)
This book remains an invaluable resource for historians on the organization and activities of
the Japanese biological warfare "death factory" lab-prisons. The lead prosecuting attorney at
the Khabarovsk trial was Lev Smirnov, who had been one of the top Soviet prosecutors at the
Nuremberg Trials.
After World War II, the Soviet Union built a biological weapons facility in Sverdlovsk using
documentation captured from Unit 731 in Manchuria.[26]
The Japanese doctors and army commanders who had perpetrated the Unit 731 atrocities and
germ warfare experiments received sentences from the Khabarovsk court ranging from two to
25 years in a Siberian labor camp.
Some former members of Unit 731 became part of the Japanese medical establishment. Dr.
Masaji Kitano led Japan's largest pharmaceutical company, the Green Cross. Others headed
U.S.-backed medical schools or worked for the Japanese health ministry. Shiro Ishii in
particular moved to Maryland to work on bio-weapons research.[27]

Cultural depictions and representations

Japanese author Morimura Seiichi published the book The Devil's Gluttony (
) in 1981, followed by The Devil's Gluttony: A Sequel in 1983, which were the first
Japanese language publications to reveal the history of Unit 731 in Japan.
The Chinese movie Men Behind the Sun, 1987, is a graphic film about the atrocities
committed by Unit 731, as is the Russian film Philosophy of a Knife, directed by
Andrey Iskanov and released in 2008.
14

The television show The X-Files weaves Unit 731 into its complex government
conspiracy mythology. In the episodes "Nisei" and "731", Japanese scientists given
amnesty in the U.S. after World War II are said to be continuing their work in secret,
experimenting with alien-human hybrids, possibly to be immune to biological
weapons. The name of the character in charge of the former Unit 731 doctors, Takeo
Ishimaru, and his alias, Shiro Zama, are based on Dr. Shiro Ishii and Camp Zama (a
U.S. Army base in Sagamihara, Japan).
Japanese director Minoru Matsui's 2001 documentary Japanese Devils was composed
largely of interviews with 14 members of Unit 731 who had been taken as prisoners
by China and later released.
Japanese author Shusaku Endo published the book The Sea and Poison (1958): Set
largely in a Fukuoka hospital, during World War II, this novel is concerned with lethal
vivisections carried out on downed American airmen. It is told from the first-person
point of view of one of the doctors and the third-person perspective of his colleagues
who cut open, experiment on, and kill the six crew members. This is based on a true
incident.
In The Zombie Survival Guide author Max Brooks depicted Unit 731 as experimenting
with the "Solanum virus" in an attempt to train zombies as soldiers.

Pacific War (World War II)

Japanese human experimentations

Changde chemical weapon attack
Japanese war crimes
Kaimingye germ weapon attack
Second Sino-Japanese War

Nazi Germany

Nazi human experimentation

Josef Mengele

In Asia

North Korean human experimentation

References
1. ^ http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-10/17/content_273165.htm Book on
Japans germ warfare crimes published.
2. ^ Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors, Westviewpress, 1996, p.138
3. ^ AII POW-MIA Unit 731 "BE OFFENEDED that the survivors of this nightmare, the
Chinese people, American POWs, Russian and other nationalities, have received no
reparations for their suffering, nor an apology or answers."
4. ^ a b http://english.people.com.cn/200508/03/eng20050803_200004.html - Archives
give up secrets of Japan's Unit 731. "The files include full descriptions of 318 cases,
including at least 25 victims from the former Soviet Union, Mongolia and Korea."
5. ^ Daniel Barenblatt, A Plague upon Humanity, 2004, p.xii, 173.
6. ^ http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/japan/bw.htm Biological Weapons
Program.
15

7. ^ http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/cbw/bw.htm - Biological Weapons.

8. ^ Hal Gold, Unit 731 Testimony, 2003, p. 109
9. ^ Harris, Sheldon H. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and
the American Cover-Up, Routledge, 1994. ISBN 0-415-09105-5 ISBN 0-415-93214-9.
Page 26 for the Zhong Ma Prison Camp's creation, page 33 for the Pingfang site's
creation.
10. ^ Daniel Barenblat, A plague upon humanity, 2004, p.37.
11. ^ Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors, 1996, p.136
12. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Christopher Hudson (2 March 2007). "Doctors of Depravity".
Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?
in_article_id=439776&in_page_id=1770.
13. ^ Doctors of Depravity | Mail Online
14. ^ a b Richard Lloyd Parry (February 25, 2007). "Dissect them alive: order not to be
disobeyed". Times Online.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article1438491.ece.
15. ^ Interview with former Unit 731 member Nobuo Kamada
16. ^ "Unmasking Horror" Nicholas D. Kristof (March 17, 1995) New York Times. A
special report.; Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity
17. ^ Unlocking a deadly secret Photos of vivisection
18. ^ Japan Admits Dissecting WW-II POWs James Bauer. "Japanese Unit 731 Biological
Warfare Unit" Viewed January 16, 2007
19. ^ Vivisectionist recalls his day of reckoning, http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgibin/nn20071024w1.html
20. ^ Video adapted from "Biological Warfare & Terrorism: The Military and Public
Health Response", Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved October 21,
2007
21. ^ Barenblatt, Daniel. A Plague Upon Humanity: the Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's
Germ Warfare Operation, HarperCollins, 2004. ISBN 0-06-018625-9
22. ^ Biological Weapons Program-Japan Federation of American Scientists
23. ^ Review of the studies on Germ Warfare Tien-wei Wu A Preliminary Review of
Studies of Japanese Biological Warfare and Unit 731 in the United States
24. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/correspondent/1796044.stm - Unit 731:
Japan's biological force.
25. ^ AII POW-MIA Unit 731
26. ^ Ken Alibek and S. Handelman. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest
Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World - Told from Inside by the Man Who
Ran it. 1999. Delta (2000) ISBN 0-385-33496-6.
27. ^ "An Ethical Blank Cheque: British and US mythology about the second world war
ignores our own crimes and legitimizes Anglo-American war making". The Guardian,
May 10, 2005, by Richard Drayton.

Further reading

Barenblatt, Daniel. A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ
Warfare Operation, HarperCollins, 2004. ISBN 0-06-018625-9.
Barnaby, Wendy. The Plague Makers: The Secret World of Biological Warfare, Frog Ltd,
1999. ISBN 1-883319-85-4, ISBN 0-7567-5698-7, ISBN 0-8264-1258-0, ISBN 0-8264-1415-X.
Endicott, Stephen and Hagerman, Edward. The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets
from the Early Cold War and Korea, Indiana University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-253-33472-1.
Gold, Hal. Unit 731 Testimony, Charles E Tuttle Co., 1996. ISBN 4-900737-39-9.

16

Handelman, Stephen and Alibek, Ken. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest
Covert Biological Weapons Program in the WorldTold from Inside by the Man Who Ran It,
Random House, 1999. ISBN 0-375-50231-9, ISBN 0-385-33496-6.
Harris, Robert and Paxman, Jeremy. A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of
Chemical and Biological Warfare, Random House, 2002. ISBN 0-8129-6653-8.
Harris, Sheldon H. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 193245 and the
American Cover-Up, Routledge, 1994. ISBN 0-415-09105-5, ISBN 0-415-93214-9.
Moreno, Jonathan D. Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans, Routledge, 2001.
ISBN 0-415-92835-4.
Williams, Peter. Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II, Free Press,
1989. ISBN 0-02-935301-7.

17