FourSimon

The notorious unit called 731 was set up in northeast of China in Harbin city
during World War II. They invented chemical and bacteriological weapons
by experimenting on human bodies.The torture that the Japanese inflicted
upon the native population almost surpasses the limits of human comprehension.
Here are only a few examples:they grabbed many innocent people, such as POWs
, women, Soviet civilians and even children. They put them in rooms containing
toxic air. In order to test the endurance of the human body, they put these
victims into large freezer compartment or large oven and let them freeze
to death or to die from heat and dehydration.They wanted to know whether
animal blood could replace human blood,injecting a horse’s blood into a
a live human body .They would cut a victim’s esophagus so that food could
not enter victim's stomach.They bound victims and threw in bacteriological
bombs so that victims would broke out all kinds of disease such as typhoid,
cholera, plague,anthrax and so on.They bound innocent people to beds,peeled
off the skin and extracted the organs whiles they were still alive,...etc.
These are just a few small example of the atrocities that occurred.The 731
leader was Ishi shiro.I feel deeply regret that the American government
invited him secretly to become an American professor of bacteriology.
Justice cannot always be upheld.While Hitler killed himself in May of 1945
,Japanese emperor,Hirohito,remained alive until 1989.
I have read some books such as A Plague upon Humanity, Factory of Death: Japanese biological warfare, 1932-1945, and the American cover-up.In the eastern theatre, Japan and America conspired with each other: If the Japanese government agreed to hand over the data on human experiments forced upon prisoners of war, local citizens, Mongolians, and the citizens of the Soviet Union, their new “ally” would give Unit 731 officers immunity from war crime charges. This was similar to the operation in Europe to bring Nazi scientists to America. By the way, the Japanese army extorted much gold in China and Southeast Asia. If Japan and America could share the wealth with each other, their new “Ally” would give many Japanese officers immunity from war crime trials.

Alex III

There was much more than unit 731 as well. There was the notorious Nami Unit in Kwangtung that did human experiments on water borne illnesses and was also the rat farm for producing the bubonic plague that was then used in other facilities.

There was the Kono Unit in Singapore that did testing of the plague and malaria mainly on POW's.

And Unit 731 had satellite units all over Manchukuo.

Most recent estimates by the International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare are that nearly 600,000 people were subjected to human testing by Unit 731 alone, not including the other units, with about half of them dying and many others succumbing in subsequent years.

One of the most disturbing parts of these facilities is that it was largely unknown for decades, and most of the prominent scientists involved in the program went on to become leaders in the scientific community in Japan in both government and universities well into the 1970's, and few people had actually known what they had done during the war until several decades later.

El Kaiser

Wow, i have heard about unit 731 before but i didn't know it was so large. How big was the infra structure?

Alex III

They took over the facilities of 9 large universities in China, mostly in Manchukuo, and as for the facilities that the Japanese actually built, we are unsure as they destroyed all of them when they retreated. They also released thousands of plague infected animals to help with the cover up which then went on to kill 30,000-40,000 more Chinese civilians in the following two years.

Only about ten years ago the estimates of people killed by unit 371 and the other similar units were at around 3,000, but new research and testimonies by Japanese scientists that took part in the operation led to further evidence that have increased this number to about 100 times that estimate. Examples such as that very plague in 1945-1947 caused by the animals, poisened water supplies that killed tens of thousands of Manchurians, a few hundred American POW's that were found in China that were killed by frostbite, and a bout of typhoid that killed 5,000 Japanese soldiers (accidentaly) in a base up river from the headquaters were never originally believed to have been linked to the unit 731, but first hand testimonials and new evidence has proved that those events (and many more) were in fact a direct result from unit 731.

Actually it's quite interesting, back in the 90's a Japanese scientist released some new studies regarding the effects of frostbite and gangrene and quoted some experiments that took place in 1945. After it raised a few eyebrows in Japan, it turned out that those very experiments that he quoted were done on American POW's...

FourSimon

Are there any Japanese in this historum?? What are your attitudes?

Deny? "They are all false. they are made up by Chinese government."

Apology? "We feel so sorry for our ancetry's violence."

Don't forget why your country become so rich. Before Japanese occupied Taiwan, or before the first sino-Japanese war, Japan was a poor country, so poor, and their expenditure was used in creating weapons for invading several country, especially China. Japanese extorted much gold in Taiwan, Northeast China, Korea, and when they invaded China and Southast Asia. Don't you want to return the gold that you extorted from many coutries? A person who commit homicide, robbery, and rape will be sentenced to death. How about a country? Don't Japanese feel so guilty?? I have many questions.

Philogogus

Much of what the Western world knows of the effects of cold on human beings, rapid decompression and the effects of directed explosions on human beings is directly linked to both the concentration camp doctors of Germany and Unit 731.

With Unit 731, one of the little tidbits of history that many people do not know is that none of them were prosecuted. In exchange for immunity, they gave the Americans/British the files and research they were doing on biological warfare and the other assundry tests they were doing. Some of these tests were performed on POWs from... you guessed it... Britain and America. To clarify, a few were prosecuted by the Soviets.

And the OP was absolutely right, the officers and men of Unit 731 were to be found later in the Japanese... and American... medical establishments. If I remember correctly, one of Japans major medical corporations was founded by one of the commanders of Unit 731 Dr. Kitana something.

In addition, a number of the doctors traveled to the United States with their families and worked on... you guessed it... biological weapons for the US military.

Alex III

Actually the Japanese government is the one leading the charge on researching deeper into these units, and they seem to be making all of their findings public. They don't seem to be hiding much anymore.

JohnnyH

Maybe there are 'good reasons' why we are not taught at school of the sickening activities that went on in the Japanese-run 'Unit 731' in WWII?

It was a covert network of 150 buildings (6km sq) in Manchuria where Japanese 'doctors' -sanctioned by their Govt- systematically perfomed horrific, warped 'experiments' upon asian civilians and allied PoW's, that rivalled only the abhorrent 'Rape of Nanking' in 1937 for atrocities and horror.

Shiro Ishii (employed by the US Govt during the Korean War), chief medical officer of the Japanese Army, was placed in command, and from 1941 on all these units were known collectively and furtively as the "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army"

Test subjects were gathered from the local, occupied population and sometimes referred to euphemistically as "logs" -a term that originated as a joke by 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.

The test subjects were selected to give a wide cross section of the population, and included common criminals, captured bandits and anti-Japanese fighters, political prisoners, allied servicemen, and also people rounded up by the secret police for alleged "suspicious activities" and included infants, the elderly, and pregnant women.

Amongst their unbelievably evil experiments were;-

* Vivisections were performed on prisoners- without anesthesia- 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 -and often left in blinding agony whilst the operating staff took meal breaks- because it was felt that the decomposition process would affect the results.
* The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children, and infants.
* Vivisections were also performed on pregnant women, sometimes impregnated by doctors, and the foetus removed.
* Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss, and those limbs that were removed were sometimes re-attached to the opposite sides of the body. Some prisoner's limbs were frozen and amputated, while others had limbs frozen then thawed to study the effects of the resultant untreated gangrene and rotting.
* Some victim's had their entire stomachs surgically removed and the osophegous reattached to the intestines, and often parts of the brain, lungs and heart were removed from some prisoners.


Other tests included tying their victims up and exposing them to attacks by hand-grenades, flamethrowers and various germ and chemical weapon tests.

At the end of the war, US General MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing the USA with their human-testing research on biological and chemical warfare, which we allies supposedly abhor?

Voskhod

Japan was highly successful in modernizing and industrializing its country in the face of Western threat. It helps that, before Commodore Perry, it was an already (relatively) rich country (albeit with little external trade) with a high literacy rate, good institutions, among other things. Once Japan became rich and powerful enough to be considered a Great Power, then it started to expand outwards. The primary motivation for this, like for all imperialist powers of the time, was greed. Japan was greedy for land, resources, markets, and prestige (because all the cool countries were invading countries and murdering people overseas).

Taiwan was a provincial backwater of China before it was handed to Japan (the Qing could do little as the Beiyang Fleet was at the bottom of the sea). Given the proximity to the home islands and a less rebellious population (than, say, Korea), Japan poured massive investment into the infrastructure and industrial development of the island. Not that all this was done out of some kind of humanitarian purposes - the wealth of Taiwan was primarily used for the benefit of Japan, not Taiwan. However, following the Second World War Taiwan was the most well-developed area of China.