Japan's Infamous Unit 731: First-hand Accounts of Japan's Wartime Human Experimentation Program (Tuttle Classics)

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In 1997, international lawyer Kōnen 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. All levels of the Japanese court system found the suit baseless. No findings of fact were made about the existence of human experimentation, but the courts' ruling was that reparations are determined by international treaties, not national courts. [ citation needed] a b c d e f g h i j Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged With Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons. Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1950. 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. a b David C. Rapoport. "Terrorism and Weapons of the Apocalypse". In James M. Ludes, Henry Sokolski (eds.), Twenty-First Century Weapons Proliferation: Are We Ready? Routledge, 2001. pp. 19, 29 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.

Felton, Mark. The Devil's Doctors: Japanese Human Experiments on Allied Prisoners of War, Chapter 10 Williams, Peter and Wallace, David. Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II, The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan, Inc., New York. 1989. ISBN 0029353017. X, X (1950). Materials On The Trial Of Former Servicemen Of The Japanese Army Charged With Manufacturing And Employing Bacteriological Weapons. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. p.366.

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McCurry, Justin (2018-04-17). "Japan publishes list of members of Unit 731 imperial army branch". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2018-04-17 . Retrieved 2018-04-17. In October 2003, a member of Japan's House of Representatives filed an inquiry. 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. [133] In April2018, the National Archives of Japan released the names of 3,607members of Unit731, in response to a request by Professor Katsuo Nishiyama of the Shiga University of Medical Science. [134] [135] Abroad

The Unit731 complex covered six square kilometers (2.3sqmi) and consisted of more than 150buildings. The design of the facilities made them hard to destroy by bombing. The complex contained various factories. It had around 4,500containers to be used to raise fleas, six cauldrons to produce various chemicals, and around 1,800containers to produce biological agents. Approximately 30 kilograms (66lb) of bubonic plague bacteria could be produced in a few days.The best moments are when Yang and co-author, Yue-Him Tam, a professor of history at Macalester College in Minnesota, reveal the stories of ordinary people who suffered. In 1934, some 30 prisoners staged a breakout of the unit. They carry an interview with a villager who still remembered he and his brother desperately trying to smash the fetters as the Japanese patrols drew closer; some were killed others, escaped to join the resistance. The Truth of Unit 731: Elite medical students and human experiments on YouTube, a documentary by NHK (2017) More details about Unit 731 are still being unearthed. A confession from a unit commander, written to U.S. interrogators at a base in Maryland shortly after the war, was released in August 2021 by a Chinese provincial agency. Chinese and Russian news outlets heralded the release, which highlighted America's part in using the information gathered by Unit 731, hiding it and protecting its sources from further prosecution. On 28 August 2002, Tokyo District Court ruled that Japan had committed biological warfare in China and consequently had slaughtered many residents. [9] [10] Formations Building of the Unit731 bioweapon facility in Harbin a b Emanuel, Ezekiel; Grady, Christine; Crouch, Robert; Lie, Reidar; Miller, Franklin (2011). The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics. US: Oxford University Press.

Moreover, the area became the perfect place to develop and test Ishii’s new biological and chemical weapons, a place where he would be free to conduct any kind of experiment he deemed beneficial. Unit731 had branches in Linkou (Branch162), Mudanjiang, Hailin (Branch643), Sunwu (Branch673), Toan, and Hailar (Branch543). [3] :60,84,124,310 Tokyo Vanderbrook, Alan Jay (2013). Imperial Japan's Human Experiments Before And During World War Two (MA thesis). University of Central Florida. Archived from the original on 2018-01-17 . Retrieved 2017-10-27.a b c d e f Kristof, Nicholas D. (1995-03-17). "Unmasking Horror – A special report. Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2019-07-14 . Retrieved 2019-07-14. a b Kristof, Nicholas D. (17 March 1995). "Unmasking Horror – A special report. Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity". The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 20, 2018 . Retrieved April 10, 2017. a b c d e f g Fuller, Richard (1992). Shōkan: Hirohito's Samurai. Arms and Armour. ISBN 978-1854091512. Unit 731 was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes committed by the Japanese armed forces. It routinely conducted tests on people who were dehumanized and internally referred to as "logs." Experiments included disease injections, controlled dehydration, biological weapons testing, hypobaric pressure chamber testing, vivisection, organ harvesting, amputation, and standard weapons testing. Victims included not only kidnapped men, women (including pregnant women) and children but also babies born from the systemic rape perpetrated by the staff inside the compound. The victims also came from different nationalities, with the majority being Chinese and a significant minority being Russian. Additionally, Unit 731 produced biological weapons that were used in areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces, which included Chinese cities and towns, water sources, and fields. Estimates of those killed by Unit 731 and its related programs range up to half a million people, and none of the inmates survived. In the final moments of the Second World War, all prisoners were killed to conceal evidence.

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 1932, Surgeon General Shirō Ishii, chief medical officer of the Imperial Japanese Army and protégé of Army Minister Sadao Araki, was placed in command of the Army Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory ( AEPRL). Ishii organized a secret research group, the "Tōgō Unit," for chemical and biological experimentation in Manchuria. Ishii had proposed the creation of a Japanese biological and chemical research unit in 1930, after a two-year study trip abroad, on the grounds that Western powers were developing their own programs. Gow, James; Dijxhoorn, Ernst; Kerr, Rachel; Verdirame, Guglielmo (2019). Routledge Handbook of War, Law and Technology. Routledge. ISBN 978-1351619974. Archived from the original on 2021-04-14 . Retrieved 2020-11-22.

Later, the Japanese took especially virulent forms of the plague and other pathogens that were developed at Unit 731, put them in canisters and dropped them on nearby towns to see if their weapons would work. They did. The New Eternity" (2018), from the Silent Planet album When the End Began refers to Unit731's human experimentation and other crimes against humanity. Japanese discussions of Unit 731's activity began in the 1950s, after the end of the American occupation of Japan. In 1952, human experiments carried out in Nagoya City Pediatric Hospital, which resulted in one death, were publicly tied to former members of Unit 731. [119] Later in that decade, journalists suspected that the murders attributed by the government to Sadamichi Hirasawa were actually carried out by members of Unit731. In 1958, Japanese author Shūsaku Endō published the book The Sea and Poison about human experimentation in Fukuoka, which is thought to have been based on a real incident.