Limbs removed were sometimes reattached to the opposite side of victims' bodies. Unit 731 (731), based in the Pingfang district of Harbin and led by the infamous Japanese microbiologist Shiro Ishii, was a covert biological warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and World War II. The program received generous support from the Japanese government until the end of the war in 1945. All of these units comprised Ishii's network, which, at its height in 1939, oversaw over 10,000 personnel. Takashi Tsuchiya. [126], In 2018, Japan disclosed the names of 3,607 members of Unit 731. Some of Unit731's satellite (branch) facilities are still in use by various Chinese industrial companies. However, conducting experiments without being bounded by ethical laws was appealing to most Japanese scientists. The effectiveness of various weapons was of obvious interest to the Japanese Army. [citation needed], In August2002, the Tokyo district court ruled for the first time that Japan had engaged in biological warfare. The 2001 documentary Japanese Devils largely consists of interviews with fourteen Unit731 staff members taken prisoner by China and later released. [5] These operations killed tens of thousands with bubonic plague epidemics. Professional people, too, like to play. The testimony of a unit member that served as a guard graphically demonstrated this reality: One of the former researchers I located told me that one day he had a human experiment scheduled, but there was still time to kill. Unit 731 was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes committed by the Japanese armed forces. "Terrorism and Weapons of the Apocalypse". Researchers performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body. [34][35]:xii,173. 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. To ensure effective transmission of the disease, syphilitic male victims were ordered to rape both female and male fellow captives, who would then be monitored to observe the onset of the disease. In unit 731, human targets were used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in various positions. A large area of scratches on his chest were bleeding. [56] Ice was then chipped away, with the affected area being subjected to various treatments, such as being doused in water, exposed to the heat of fire, etc. When the plague bacillus had been bred to what was felt to be a sufficiently lethal caliber, the last generation of victims to be infected were exposed to huge numbers of fleas, Y. pestis preferred vector of contagion. Richard Stockton is a freelance science and technology writer from Sacramento, California. The term Unit731 can refer to the Harbin complex itself, or it can refer to the organization and its branches, sub-Units and their branches. Finally, when a prisoners body was all used up, they would typically be shot or killed by lethal injection, though some may have been buried alive. The deteriorating physical states of these victims were documented by staff at a periodic interval. [89] Once deemed healthy and fit for experimentation, prisoners lost their names and were given a three-digit number, which they retained until their death. These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells, as well as other areas, with anthrax- and plague-carrier fleas, typhoid, cholera, or other deadly pathogens. Xinhua via Getty ImagesUnit 731 personnel conduct a bacteriological trial upon a test subject in Nongan County of northeast Chinas Jilin Province. "Medicine itself must become a weapon," said Nakagawa Yonezo, Professor Emeritus at Osaka University. Unit members orchestrated forced sex acts between infected and noninfected prisoners to transmit the disease, as the testimony of a prison guard on the subject of devising a method for transmission of syphilis between patients shows: Infection of venereal disease by injection was abandoned, and the researchers started forcing the prisoners into sexual acts with each other. After being infected with various diseases, exposed to chemical weapons, or suffering crush injuries, bullet wounds, and shrapnel injuries, the pregnant subjects were opened up and the effects on the fetuses studied. [82] Author Seiichi Morimura estimates that almost 70 percent of the victims who died in the Pingfang camp were Chinese (both military and civilian),[83] while close to 30 percent of the victims were Russian. RT @EzbyThor: Japan's notorious Unit 731 personnel not only avoided punishment, they were even encouraged to continue their abominable experiments on mentally ill patients in Japan. At first, these patients were volunteers from the ranks of the army, but as the experiments reached the limits of what could be non-invasively observed, and as the supply of volunteers dried up, the unit turned to the study of Chinese POWs and civilian captives. 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. One element of the unit, called Maruta, took this research a little further than the usual bounds of medical ethics by observing injuries and the course of disease on living patients. There was space between the outer walls of the cells and the outer walls of the prison, enabling the guards to walk behind the cells. [123] Since then, much more in depth testimony has been given in Japan. It routinely conducted tests on people who were dehumanized and internally referred to as "logs". [132], In October2003, a member of Japan's House of Representatives filed an inquiry. Once at the inner-prison, technicians would take samples of the prisoners' blood and stool, test their kidney function, and collect other physical data. [1] The Americans co-opted the researchers' bioweapons information and experience for use in their own biological warfare program, much like what had been done with Nazi German researchers in Operation Paperclip. [50][51] In addition to chemical agents, the properties of many different toxins were also investigated by the Unit. [56] Wano guessed that the man was Russian because there were many Russians living in the area at that time.[56]. A few years later, as the war was nearing its end, Japan likewise planned to bomb America with plague-ridden fleas, but never got the chance. The author reveals distressing evidence of Unit 731 experiments involving US prisoners and the use of British as control groups in Northern China, Hainau Island, New Guinea and in Japan. MacArthur struck a deal with Japanese informants:[108] he secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit731, including their leader, in exchange for providing America, but not the other wartime allies, with their research on biological warfare and data from human experimentation. [18] Medical doctors and professors from Japan were attracted to join Unit731 both by the rare opportunity to conduct human experimentation and the Army's strong financial backing. Weeping redness of the skin of the upper part of the body. In a number of separate experiments it was then determined how these parameters depend on the time of day a victim's body part was immersed in freezing water, the surrounding temperature and humidity during immersion, how the victim had been treated before the immersion ("after keeping awake for a night", "after hunger for 24 hours", "after hunger for 48 hours", "immediately after heavy meal", "immediately after hot meal", "immediately after muscular exercise", "immediately after cold bath", "immediately after hot bath"), what type of food the victim had been fed over the five days preceding the immersions with regard to dietary nutrient intake ("high protein (of animal nature)", "high protein (of vegetable nature)", "low protein intake", and "standard diet"), and salt intake (45g NaCl per day, 15g NaCl per day, no salt). Two Russian male prisoners were in a cell with handcuffs on, one of them lay flat on the floor pretending to be sick. "It was said that a small number of these poor men, women, and children who became marutas were also mummified alive in total dehydration experiments. Venereal disease has been the bane of organized militaries since ancient Egypt, and so it stands to reason that the Japanese military would take an interest in the symptoms and treatment of syphilis. Guards would hold him while another guard would smash the victim's head open with an ax. Unit 731 was a biological warfare research division of the Imperial Japanese Army, which was founded in 1936. Looks with hollow eyes. Sometimes he did this by dousing the limb with hot water, sometimes by holding it close to an open fire, and other times by leaving the subject untreated overnight to see how long it took for the persons own blood to thaw it out. Less discussed than the Holocaust forced on Jewish people during World War II, Unit 731 is Japan's covert biological and chemical research division that primarily operated in China between 1932 and 1945. [35]:xii,173 The American historian Sheldon H. Harris states that over 200,000 died. June 1942. Unit731 also performed transfusion experiments with different blood types. In this way, Unit 731 was performing the service of human experimentation for the entire Japanese medical community, in an on-going feedback loop. As explained in an internal War Department memorandum, dated June 23, 1947: "Since it is believed that the USSR possesses only a small . The occupying US government undertook the cover-up of Japanese war crimes after the end of World War II, granting political immunity to military personnel who had engaged in human experimentation and other crimes against humanity, predominantly in mainland China. At death, the corpses would only weigh 1/5 normal bodyweight.". Other articles where Unit 731 is discussed: World War II: The horror of war in pictures: Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army carried out horrific medical experiments on thousands of prisoners of war and civilians; men and women were subjected to chemical and biological agents and vivisected to survey the results. The average life expectancy of a prisoner once they had entered the Unit was two months. So he and another unit member took the keys to the cells and opened one that housed a Chinese woman. [91] Prisoners were repeatedly reused for experiments as long as they were healthy enough. Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and their esophagus reattached to the intestines. There are unit members who were known to be interned at the Fushun War Criminals Management Centre and Taiyuan War Criminals Management Centre after the war, who then went on to be repatriated to Japan and founded the Association of Returnees from China and testified about Unit 731 and the crimes perpetrated there. ", "Japan publishes list of members of Unit 731 imperial army branch", "Unit 731: One of the Most Terrifying Secrets of the 20th Century", Occupation censored Unit 731 ex-members' mail: secret paper, "The United States and the Japanese Mengele: Payoffs and Amnesty for Unit 731", Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran it, "Unit 731: Japan discloses details of notorious chemical warfare division", "Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism, and Historical Memory: Intra- and Inter-national Conflicts", "Examining the Japanese History Textbook Controversies", , "Names of 3,607 members of Imperial Japanese Army's notorious Unit 731 released by national archives", "Hit manga My Hero Academia removed in China over war crimes reference", "My Hero Academia Manga Updated With Villain's New Name", "The English Fhrer by Rory Clements Historia Magazine", Orrori e misteri dell'Unit 731: la 'fabbrica' dei batteri killer, "Unit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army's Biological Warfare Program", The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), History of Japan's biological weapons program, History of United States' biological weapons program, "US paid for Japanese human germ warfare data", The Unknown Victims of Japanese Unit 731 in WWII (19321945) and Known Experiments, Select Documents on Japanese WarCrimes and Japanese Biological Warfare, 19342006, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Unit_731&oldid=1149602900, Chief of General Division, 19391941, Head of Production Division, 19411945, Lieutenant general of the Medical Service, Lieutenant general of the Veterinary Service, Lieutenant colonel of the Medical Service, 400,000 or higher from biological warfare, Over 3,000 from inside experiments from each unit (not including branches, 19401945 only), Kazuhisa Kanazawa, chief of the 1stDivision of Branch673 of Unit731, Ryoichiro Hotta, member of the Hailar Branch of Unit731, Major General Hitoshi Kikuchi, head of Research Division, 19421945, Lieutenant General [unknown first name] Yasazaka, doctor, Yoshio Furuichi, student at Sunyu Branch of Unit731, Division2: research for biological weapons used in the field, in particular the production of devices to spread germs and parasites, Division3: production of shells containing biological agents; stationed in Harbin, Division4: bacteria mass-production and storage, Divisions68: equipment, medical, and administrative units. Corporal Kikuchi Norimitsu testified that he was told by another unit member that a prisoner "had shown violence and had struck the experimenter with a door handle" and then "jumped out of the cell and ran down the corridor, seized the keys and opened the iron doors and some of the cells. Bayonets, swords, and knives were also studied in this way, though the victims were usually bound for these tests. Witnesses to the raid recall a fine reddish dust settling on surfaces all over town, followed by a rash of painful flea bites that afflicted nearly everyone. Most or all Units had branch offices, which were also often referred to as "Units". Koizumi had joined a secret poison gas research committee in 1915, during World War I, when he and other Imperial Japanese Army officers were impressed by the successful German use of chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres, in which the Allies suffered 5,000 deaths and 15,000 wounded as a result of the chemical attack. But then finally he stopped. While he was there, he watched footage of human experiments and executions from Unit731. Official silence during the American occupation of Japan, Post-occupation Japanese media coverage and debate, Significance in postwar research on bio-warfare and medicine, Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II (Pacific Theater). Then, have a look at four of the most evil science experiments ever performed and find out whether or not any of the highly disturbing Nazi research actually contributed anything to medical science. One of the unit members raped her; the other member took the keys and opened another cell. [1] Japan's occupation of Manchuria began in 1931 after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Unit731 also tested chemical weapons on prisoners in field conditions. The author Seiichi Morimura published The Devil's Gluttony[ja] () in 1981, followed by The Devil's Gluttony: A Sequel in 1983. Unit 731 - Japans Secret Human Experiments Disturban History 236K subscribers Subscribe 22K 702K views 1 year ago Formed in response to western powers developing their own chemical and. Weakness of all four extremeties. [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. Millions of inhumane experiments occurred in this research center. Unit 731 (Japanese: 731, Hepburn: Nana-san-ichi Butai), short for Manshu Detachment 731 and also known as the Kamo Detachment: 198 and the Ishii Unit, was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in lethal human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing . All this progress was, of course, built on the limitless suffering of human captives, who were held as test subjects and walking disease incubators until Unit 731 was shut down at the end of the war. In addition to the accusations of propaganda, the US also asserted that the trials were to only serve as a distraction from the Soviet treatment of several hundred thousand Japanese prisoners of war; meanwhile, the USSR asserted that the US had given the Japanese diplomatic leniency in exchange for information regarding their human experimentation. Abundant mucous nose secretions. Unit 731 was split into eight divisions. According to American historian Sheldon H. Harris: The Togo Unit employed gruesome tactics to secure specimens of select body organs. Xinhua via Getty ImagesThe frostbitten hands of a Chinese person who was taken outside in winter by Unit 731 personnel for an experiment on how best to treat frostbite. In addition, gas chambers were set up at unit facilities and test subjects exposed to nerve gas and blister agents. 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