Some of the most
gruesome atrocities of World War II - medical experiments on Chinese,
Russian and American prisoners - were committed in China by Japan's
infamous Unit 731.
Fifty Years later, the Japanese continue to deny or minimize this part of
their wartime record, refused demands for a clear apology. The cover-up
was assisted by the United States in the postwar years. Rather than allow
Unit 731 research on biological warfare to fall into Soviet hands,
America shielded some of the war's worst criminals in exchange for their
knowledge. Today, victims of the experiments are at last seeking
compensation in the courts.
Unit 731's sprawling headquarters were at Pingfan - completed with
airport, railway stations and dungeons - on the outskirts of Harbin.
Retreating Japanese troops burned down most of Pingfan in an attempt to
destroy evidence, but even today, a local factory still fires up in incinerator
where victims of medical experiments - at least 3,000 men, women and
children - were disposed of. A dank cellar eerily suggests the thousand
of white rats once bred there as carrier of bubonic plague and whose
release at the war's end killed thousands of local Chinese in an
epidemic.
On a sunny day in June this year, on the steps of cellar, Han Xiao,
Chinas leading expert on Unit 731, confirmed what the Department of
Veterans Affairs has long denied: that American POWs in Mukden (Shenyang)
were injected in 1943 with various bacteria to test their immunity. Most
survived, but many died.
Breaking Silence. A member of Unit 731, Nobuo Kamaden, speaking on the
record for the first time, told U.S. News that his main job at Pingfan
was to breed plague bacteria. "We would inject the most powerful
bacteria into rats. On a 500-gram rat, we would attach 3,000 fleas. When
the rats were released, the fleas would transmit the disease."
Infected rats and fleas were also loaded into special porcelain bombs designed
to keep the rats alive as they descended on a parachute from an airplane.
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But it was the
human experiments, more than horrible weaponry, that distinguished
Pingfan. Once, in an operation aimed at extracting plague-infected
organs, which Kamada still finds it difficult to talk about, Kamada took
a scalpel with no anastethic, to a Chinese prisoner, or "log,"
as the Japanese euphemistically called their victims. "I inserted
the scalpel directly from the log's neck and opened the chest," he
told an Japanese interviewer, at the time anonymously. "At first
there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent."
Sometimes the logs had to be prepared: "Unless you work with a
healthy body, you can't get results. So if we had a spy who was unhealthy
. . . we would feed him good food and make him exercise. It was the
height of cruelty."
Kamada's long silence about Unit 731 was shared almost universally by
other former members. "Everyone was still alive. And the doctors
were making contributions to medical studies. I thought it was best to
stay silent for the sake of the nation," he says.
Indeed, Japanese leading medical schools had assigned doctors to Unit
731. They returned as pillars of the postwar medical establishment, as
deans of medical schools and head of pharmaceutical companies. Lt. Gen.
Masaji Kitano, who served as commander of Unit 731 near the end of the
war, went on to the director of Green Cross Corp., a leading maker of
blood products founded by another Unit 731 veteran. Today, a bizarre
stone memorial that Kitano erected in honor of his experimental rats
still stand in a disused rat cellar in China. It was more courtesy than
he showed the victims of his experiments, who were euphemistically
referred to as "monkeys" in published scientific papers. The
Shenyang medical school still has hundreds of slides of human brain cross
sections, some of which were used in papers published by Sendai
University with open references to the use of "fresh human
brains."
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Prof. Keiichi
Tsuneishi, a Japanese historian of science, pieced together much of the Unit
731 story from scientific papers published by doctors, many of whom later
agreed to speak to him. "They have no sense of remorse at all,"
he says. Instead, the doctors complained of wasting the best years of
their lives on medical research that could not be continued after the
war.
These attitudes have contributed to a collective amnesia in Japan toward
war atrocities. Still, the truth keeps seeping out. One example: Japanese
right-wingers typically deny the Nanjing massacre of 1937-38, in which marauding
troops slaughtered some 200,000 Chinese. A secret report from the defunct
Japanese South Manchuria Railroad Co. recently came to light detailing
some results of the massacre.
Professor Tsuneishi says that the death of Emperor Hirohito 1989 has made
it easier for veterans to speak openly. Even so, reverence for the
emperor's brother, Prince Mikasa, learned of the human experiments when
visiting Pingfan in 1943, and it is almost inconceivable that the
emperor, who signed the order founding Unit 731, was unaware of the true
nature of the work.
Indeed, recent historical research suggests that the emperor had a
considerable greater hand in directly managing the conduct of the war and
delaying the peace than had been thought. When Mac Arthur spared Hirohito
from prosecuting in the interests of stability, he inadvertently blocked
Japanese efforts to know and face their own past.
by Steven Butler in Tokyo
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