fledse

Hi,
I wonder how many guys have ever heard about this 731 units of Japanese army. This unit is even overwhelming what North Korean leader Kim Jung Il is currently doing to his people, I believe.

Briefly, this unit was purposed for biological and chemical warfare, for which the Japanese developed lots of toxical weapon systems through experiments on living human bodies.

This is terrible to write, but if writing it up, they dissected human body without any anethesia. And these humans were mainly supplied from Chinese captives, Korean Independent activists, and even American captives from the Pacific Battles.

For instance, one of the reports said, "they (the human subjects) were located in -20 celcius (about -4 fahrenite), and then they were lined up in one row, and a soldier shoot a bullet toward them. Because of the low temperature, the bullet penetrated more than 3 bodies (living human)."

There are lots of stories on this unit, but I am sad that lots of Americans know Sushi and Toyota, but they fail to recognize these stuffs, too.

Indeed, the government of U.S. does not want this unit to be publicized and known to its citizens, because later U.S. gave the officials in this 731 unit an acquital and as a return for the acquital, U.S. government was received lots of experiment reports that could not be done within U.S.

In other words, because these Japanese units experimented on human bodies, the information and observations the Japanese made were also invaluable and precious for U.S. too.

And, if American public know it, this will cause lots of ethical problems.
But, I would like to inspire you to reserach for this unit and then, if you need, like to give some insights.

This is also reason why Koreans and Chinese do not favorably view current Japan because even in Japanese educational history book, this unit is not being dealt in detail while Japanese themselves fail to recognize if this kind of inhumane unit was ever existed.

Then, Japanese blame on Koreans and Chinese who are more likely to criticize and satirize Japanese.

Gary

Hi fledge, I do recall reading about unit 731 some years back but could not remember many details so dug around and came across Japan's Germ Warfare: the U.S. Cover-Up of a War Crime by John W. Powell. He explains the nature of the unit and gives estimates of the deaths, the existence of such a unit is despicable but not unsurprising. What I was surprised about was the fate of the unit after the war,

‘What has not been known until now is that among the human guinea pigs were an unknown number of American soldiers, captured during the early part of the war and confined in prisoner-of-war camps in Manchuria not far from the experimental laboratories. Until recently we also lacked proof that the U.S. Government had long known of these war crimes but that it had suppressed the evidence because it desired to secure exclusive possession of Japanese technology. Retribution for the torture and murder of captured American soldiers was foresworn in the interests of "national security."’

Having disbanded the unit after the war and the biological warfare (BW) personnel dispersing. Ishii Shiro, the founder of Unit 731 and the leading figure in Japan's BW program, along with his associates were given immunity from war crime charges in return for information and data on the experiments carried out by unit 731 and other units that did similar work.

.They reported that Ishii and his colleagues were cooperating fully, had prepared and were preparing voluminous reports and had agreed to supply photographs of "selected examples of 8,000 slides of tissues from autopsies of humans and animals subjected to BW experiments." Human experiments, they pointed out, were better than animal experiments. They also stated that the USSR was believed to be in possession of "only a small portion of this technical information" and that since "any 'war crimes' trial would completely reveal such data to all nations, it is felt that such publicity must be avoided in the interests of defense and national security of the U.S." They emphasized that the knowledge gained by the Japanese from their experiments "will be of great value to the U.S. BW research program" and added: "The value to U.S. of Japanese BW data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from war crimes prosecution."

Gary

For his troubles in investigating the Japanese biological was crimes John Powell and his wife was prosecuted by the U. S. government for treason and sedition. Powell's trial, which ended in a mistrial, took place in 1959 at the federal courthouse in San Francisco. The treason charges against Powell were formally dismissed in July, 1959, and two years later, in 1961, US Attorney General Robert Kennedy finally dropped the sedition charges.

However, with the documents he had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Powell was able to provide additional evidence supporting his earlier reports in the China Monthly Review. The second article, "Japan's Biological Weapons, 1930-1945," was published in the October, 1981 edition of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It wasn't until 1989 that a detailed account of the Japanese biological warfare appeared, when British journalists Peter Williams and David Wallace published their book, 'Unit 731: Japan's Secret of Secrets' (London: Hodder and Stoughton. Published in New York the same year as 'Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II). Even today, 50 years after the Japanese death camps, United States intelligence still refuses to make public certain information, However, documentation has established that in the United States did have a biological warfare weapons program at the time.
Powell's articles in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists eventually led to the broadcast of segments on the CBS investigative news show 60 Minutes and ABC's 20/20. Powell's reporting had brought widespread public attention to the use of germ warfare, which helped pressure the United States Congress to hold hearings from prisoners of war in 1982 and 1986.
.wikipedia.John W._Powell Sedition_trial

fledse

Thanks for sharing more information on this unit Gary^__^.
I did not know Powell's trial and have a very brief idea of what happned in U.S. about this unit.
Well, Chinese historians are more active and rigorous to investigate and publicize this unit to the world, based on testimony from those who survived on this camp. And they have a museum in China in Manchuria to let it be known to the world.

And still Japanese government holds official documents regarding to this unit and important officials until 2025.

See? That is what I would fundamentally wanna argue; German government, the one of the three axis governments during WW2, is willing to let any people in the world know what Nazi was doing, why Nazi was wrong, and how Nazi could oppress and committe all of these murders, but what about Japan?

Japan is advertising Sushi, Toyota, and cartoon, but they are absolutely unwilling to provide any information on its war criminal activities.

As a result, almost every American knows hollocaust and Nazi's oppression on the Jewish while almost every Americans fail to know this unit and Japanese war crime during WW2.

In this situation, how can it be expected that Japan and other neighboring natinos such as China, Korea, and Phillipine are becoming more friendly relationship? That is absolutely hard to be expected at all.

This is one of the reasons why I really love history, but my major is science field because, in history, politicall and economcial relationship can distort historical facts while it can not science facts (how can somebody argue 1+1=0 not 2 even if he or she is Jesus or the most powerful man in the world?).

Voskhod

Some members of Unit 731 were in fact tried and punished by the Soviet Union at the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials. They spent a decade in the Gulags. Serve them right, but they shouldn't have been freed.

Japanese war crimes are known, and Japanese government has admitted and apologised for them. The main issues here I think are that 1. some people think they're not being "sincere" enough and 2. they're not publicised.

I think this is partly as a result of policy from the American occupation era. In Germany, there was an intense program of "de-Nazification". Nothing comparable happened in Japan, and many politicians from the WWII era later became prominent after 1952.

This says more about the American educational system than Japanese responsibility (or lack there of) for war crimes.

Gary

Some members of Unit 731 were in fact tried and punished by the Soviet Union at the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials. They spent a decade in the Gulags. Serve them right, but they shouldn't have been freed. Voskhad

This is true but the U. S. covered up the activities of Unit 731 and the others, giving immunity to those who perpetuated these abominable experiment. How many did the U. S. authorities allow to spend the rest of their lives in freedom.

I think this is partly as a result of policy from the American occupation era. In Germany, there was an intense program of "de-Nazification". Nothing comparable happened in Japan, and many politicians from the WWII era later became prominent after 1952.

It is this sense of injustice that fledge alludes to, there was for East Asia no ‘closure’ as there was in Europe, leading to of resentment by those the Japanese military abused.

This says more about the American educational system than Japanese responsibility (or lack there of) for war crimes

Since starting to research this subject I have been surprised on the availability of publications on the subject. I would not blame the American education system exclusively, I suspect that it is endemic in the Western education system out side of those who study modern East Asian history.

Lucius

See Ian Buruma's The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and in Japan(1994)

Gary

Thanks but at the moment trying to wade though;

Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Cover-Up. Sheldon H. Harris - Routledge. 1995

Sino-Japanese Relations: Facing the Past, Looking to the Future?. Caroline Rose - Routledge 2005

plus several articles,
Got my interest piqued here