Photo - 1936 -- Unit 731, a biological-warfare unit disguised as a water-purification unit, is formed. Japanese General Ishii directs the construction of more than 150 buildings over six square kilometers - at Pingfan, outside the city of Harbin.
BOOK REVIEWS
Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare,1932-1945, and the American Cover-up
By Sheldon H. Harris
Routledge, 2002
385 pages, $57 (pb)
By Phil Shannon
28 August 2002
In the last days of World War II, as the Japanese retreated from the Soviet army's advance into Japanese-occupied China, great care was taken by the Japanese army to destroy certain of their bases in dozens of Chinese cities. Red Army soldiers, arriving at these sites, discovered mass graves, many of the bodies still warm. The Japanese retreat was hasty but highly methodical. There was something they wanted to keep secret.
US and Soviet military investigators soon began piecing together the ugly story of Japan's biological warfare (BW) research in China, including experiments on humans. Sheldon Harris has meticulously documented the gruesome story in Factories of Death.
The primarily Chinese victims, but also Korean and Japanese civilians and Allied soldiers, were infected with pathogenic bacteria including bubonic plague, anthrax, cholera, typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis and dozens of other diseases to determine the most deadly killers. Some victims had vivisection performed on them. Those that did not die from the infections were no longer “viable experimental material” and were killed, their bodies burned in crematoria.
Field trials of delivery mechanisms (bombs, aerial spraying, poisoning of water and animals) were conducted against victims tied to stakes, and against whole Chinese villages and cities. Epidemics raged. In Nanjing, during the two-month slaughter and rape-fest of 1937-8, Chinese POWs were given dumplings laced with typhus and released to spread the disease. Children were given chocolate infected with anthrax. In border skirmishes with Soviet troops, pathogens were spread to thousands of Red Army soldiers.
Around 30,000 to 50,000 people are estimated to have been killed from the experiments alone in the BW bases, while victims of the open-air field trials reached six-figures. The human suffering was incalculable.
The standard defence of Japanese politicians and military comma-nders, then and now, was that these atrocities were the result of the “rogue” Kwantung army, the “loose cannon” Japanese military force in “Manchuria” (the three north-eastern provinces of China) which was occupied from 1931 to 1945. This force supposedly operated beyond the control of civilian and military authorities in Tokyo. This is a lie.
The ultra-right, fervently nationalist political and military forces which increasingly dominated Japan from the early 1930s had a program of military expansion of which biological warfare, made militarily practicable by human experimentation, was an accepted strategy.
Army doctor Major Ishii Shiro, a professor of immunology at Japan's top military medical school, the Tokyo Army Medical College, had conducted BW experiments on Japanese civilians in Tokyo and was given the opportunity to experiment on a much larger scale in occupied China.
He headed the infamous Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army located in the region known as Ping Fan. This massive BW factory and laboratory had ready access to thousands of prisoners — Chinese resistance fighters, Communist guerrillas, common criminals, POWs and Chinese civilians (people with an intellectual disability, vagrants, opium addicts and random people swept from the streets when “experimental stocks” were running low).
Unit 731 at any one time had 5000 personnel, including some 500 scientists (mostly microbiologists) from Japan's most prestigious universities. The war ministry in Tokyo lavishly funded the unit and support came from the highest levels of the military establishment, the scientific community, the Japanese Diet (parliament) and the royal family. Tens of thousands directly participated in Unit 731, including Prince Takeda (Emperor Hirohito's cousin and Kwantung army official who later headed the Japan Olympic Committee for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games).
Any diligent investigation by the US occupying forces after the war would have uncovered Japan's BW program and the war criminals responsible for it. Surviving victims, disaffected subordinates, dissident scientists, the conscience-stricken and the merely opportunistic could all have dobbed in their principals. The Japanese left, particularly the Japanese Communist Party, which strongly opposed (and infiltrated) Japan's BW network, had highly accurate knowledge of the atrocities.
Information from all these sources flooded into the US agencies investigating the Japanese leadership's war crimes. Yet by the time the war crimes trials concluded in 1948, not one of those responsible for the BW atrocities had been indicted, let alone convicted.
Although the chief war crimes prosecutor had compiled a detailed picture of the BW program and of those responsible (tracing the line of authority all the way to Tokyo), the plug was pulled by Washington as a deal was hatched to offer immunity from prosecution to the BW war criminals in return for providing the US with the results of their work.
Most “highly valued” were the human experiments “showing the direct effects of biological warfare agents on man”. This was the view of the US State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), a high-level, powerful body of the departments of state and war, and the US Navy, which determined occupation policy in Japan.
Prosecution for BW crimes, the SWNCC argued, would “stop the flow of information”. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed, including commander-in-chief President Harry Truman, who in March 1947 ordered an end to BW war crimes investigations.
The “utmost secrecy” was also ordered about the decision to trade immunity for information. A cover-up would “guard against embarrassment” of the US political and military authorities letting war criminals go unpunished so that the US could reap the benefits of their atrocities. Knowingly accepting the proceeds of crime is a crime itself, and the US had to be spared this awkwardness.
Washington's own BW research program had begun in 1943 with secret government funding of US$60 million, and by 1945 the US army had operational plans for 1 million anthrax bombs. Public revulsion at biological experiments on humans, however, had restrained the Dr Strangeloves so the Japanese BW research was a godsend.
The cover-up in Japan and the US has continued ever since. The master war criminal, Ishii, lived in quiet retirement on a handsome government retirement package. Other BW war criminals went on to illustrious careers with the Japanese ministry of health and welfare and the universities, their past un-investigated, ignored or covertly valued.
Every director bar one of the Japanese National Institute for Health, a government-sponsored research institute, has been a war criminal who served in a BW unit and experimented on humans. Half the scientific staff of the NIH had been veterans of Unit 731. For three decades after the war, they continued work on unfinished Unit 731 projects, and performed other biological experiments on unwitting prisoners, babies, psychiatric patients and soldiers of the Japanese “self-defence” army. In the 1980s, hospitalised children were given untested vaccines by NIH researchers, thousands dying or becoming disabled as a result.
The government-employed BW war criminals worked hand-in-hand with their war crime colleagues in the private pharmaceutical and blood-treatment companies, the primary concern of this network of war criminals being company profitability. Unit 731 has vanished from the school textbooks approved by the Japanese ministry of education.
As well as importing German Nazi scientists and intelligence officers after the war, Washington continued on its BW path, enriched by the windfall Japanese data and occasionally working in collaboration with its Japanese compilers. The US used biological warfare during the Korean War. From 1948 to 1968, a secret BW testing program was launched on misled or uninformed US citizens (a pale shadow of Unit 731 atrocities but a shadow cast by the same moral framework).
In both Japan and the US, the biological warfare atrocities, the deal with the war criminals and its cover-up, the post-war BW programs and human experiments, and the pharmaceutical company scandals were justified by the “national interest”, military “defence” and corporate profits.
The joint regard for Unit 731 held by both Japanese and US military and political elites show that when it comes to human rights, the concerns of those who hammer away about the “national interest” amount to nothing but immense suffering and death for humanity.
From Green Left Weekly, August 28, 2002.
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A Plague upon Humanity - The Hidden History of Japan's Biological Warfare Program
by Daniel Barenblatt
Chapter Excerpt-Chapter One
A Doctor's Vision
Few have the imagination for reality.
-- Goethe
It began in Kyoto in 1927. Dr. Shiro Ishii had his decisive revelation while going about his customary routine, thumbing through a stack of scientific research journals, making his usual effort to keep abreast of the latest research literature. At the age of thirty-five, the physician had just received his Ph.D. in microbiology from Kyoto Imperial University, one of the world's top institutions in that field and a school comparable in distinction to an American Ivy League college. Ishii was a rather eccentric young man, but he was even then highly respected among his Japanese peers and professors, with a reputation for brilliance and innovation that caused many of them to overlook his extracurricular activities and tastes.
Browsing through a medical periodical, Ishii came across an article that electrified him. He had discovered a report on the Geneva Convention of 1925, to which Japan had been a signatory. The article, written by a War Ministry delegate to the conference, First Lieutenant Harada, explored why Japan had signed the convention, a treaty organized by the League of Nations that banned the use of chemical weapons. As of 1925, some 1.3 million men in Europe and North America still suffered severe health problems resulting from their exposure to poisonous gas in the battles of World War I. Few in the league wanted to see this calamity repeated, and to the convention was added one more prohibition: It was also forbidden to make weapons from the germs responsible for infectious disease epidemics and pandemics such as bubonic plague, or the Black Death, as it was called, which wiped out 25 million Europeans in a five-year period during the fourteenth century.
Ishii read the text of the Geneva Convention over and over again, with both fascination and a sense of validation, for this was the direction in which he had been heading for some time. Titled the "Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare," the compact states that "the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world ... [T]he High Contracting Parties ... accept this prohibition, agree to extend this prohibition to the use of bacteriological methods of warfare and agree to be bound as between themselves according to the terms of this declaration."
The treaty was signed in Geneva on June 17, 1925, by 128 nations -- nearly every country on the planet. The prospect of germ warfare obviously created universal feelings of terror and revulsion among the civilized nations of the world. But Shiro Ishii took a different lesson from the Geneva Convention. If the prospect of germ warfare created such dread, he reasoned, Japan must do everything in its power to create the most virulent germ weapons, as well as effective methods for destroying wartime enemies with lethal diseases.
For years Ishii had spoken to colleagues and military officials of the strategic military potential of disease, and now the framers of the Geneva Convention had inadvertently done the Japanese physician a great service. Their fear of germ warfare catalyzed him to new levels of action. He would visit offices of Japan's top military officers, trying once more to persuade them that a program to conduct biological and germ warfare was the key to victory for Imperial Japan in any future wars.
By 1927 the nation had already conquered and occupied Korea and large portions of China, and powerful men in the ruling circles of Japanese society hungered for further expansion. Ishii now saw the way to make real his dream of state-of-the-art laboratories that could produce billions of deadly germs upon a general's request. The bacteriological weapons so reviled by the dignitaries who had traveled to Geneva in 1925 would become Japan's secret weapon. Ishii would be their mastermind.
At nearby Kyoto Army Hospital, to which Ishii had been attached as an active duty officer soon after attaining his doctorate, he proselytized about the military's need to make biological weapons. He took a train to Tokyo to see his old army buddies posted at the Tokyo Army First Hospital, where he had been on staff as a military surgeon five years earlier. There he managed to charm his way into the offices of high-ranking officials. He also got in to see top commanders and tacticians in Japan's War Ministry.
Ishii pleaded with them to begin researching biological weapons, citing the Harada article. He urged them to make tactical plans for the deployment of germ weapons. He also reminded them that most of the nations that had used chemical gas weapons in World War I also had ratified the Hague Convention of 1899, which banned the use of poison gas. One had to expect, he argued, that in the event of war, other countries would again develop banned weapons regardless of whatever international treaties to which they had sworn agreement.
The generals, colonels, and military scientists listened politely to Ishii, and not for the first time. The young doctor's face was well known around staff headquarters. "He always emphasized the role of bacteriological warfare in our tactical planning," wrote General Saburo Endo in his diary. But Ishii's ideas fell on deaf ears at the War Ministry. The government at the time, under Prime Minister Giichi Tanaka, had stressed a more limited role for the military and a less aggressive foreign policy. The Japanese army and navy commanders went along for the most part with the Tanaka directives, and those heading up Japan's military were unimpressed with the theoretical concepts of biological warfare. They preferred to abide by Japan's moral obligations as outlined broadly in the 1925 Geneva Convention, which Japan had signed, although not ratified.
Japan had ratified the 1899 Hague Convention, which banned chemical weapons ...
The foregoing is excerpted from A Plague upon Humanity by Daniel Barenblatt. All rights reserved. ISBN: 9780060933876; ISBN-10: 0060933879; Imprint: Harper Paperbacks; Publication Date: 09/02/2005; Format: Trade PB; Trimsize: 5 5/16 x 8; Pages: 304; $26.95
TV REVIEWNightmare in Manchuria - History channel
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This is the shocking history of video Unit 731 - Nightmare in Manchuria which documents japanese developement of biological warfare in World war 2. To reach their goal of world domination, the Imperial Government of Japan decided that they would have to build a huge arsenal of bioÂchemical weapons. Their takeover of the Chinese province of Manchuria was the first step, and in a top secret research facility called Unit 731, Japanese doctor Shiro Ishii and his staff conducted weapons research that claimed the lives of untold thousands perhaps even hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians. These atrocities were not exposed and no one was ever punished because the documents recording the grim findings were secretly sold to the United States in exchange for amnesty. These crimes against humanity are finally revealed, condemning two governments for their complicity in keeping this story silent for so long, and the repercussions may be felt for a long time. 50 min. A must see for everyone. History channel
More info at:
http://www.ihffilm.com/r660.html
http://www.nesa.org.uk/html/unit731.htm
Other documentaries on the same topic:
http://indypeer.org/show_file_page.php?file_id=301 (subtitles at: http://indypeer.org/show_file_page.php?file_id=471)
ed2k://|file|Unit.731.-.Nightmare.in.Manch...410BB3F05314A|/
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