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Unit 731: Japan's Secret Horrifying Human Experiments

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Unit 731 didn’t prevent epidemics—it spread them.

Japan has gone down in popular memory as the original victim of weapons of mass destruction, after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

But it was  China  that was the real first victim of WMDs in World War II—and the perpetrator was Japan itself. Tokyo’s biological weapons killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese. And their murders still matter today.

But Imperial Japan had no such fear because backward China had no WMDs and no other means of massive retaliation. Moreover, Tokyo viewed the Chinese as a racially inferior enemy—one that foolishly resisted a massive Japanese army that tried for nearly a decade to subdue China.

Bio-warfare seemed one way out of China’s unseemly quagmire.

Unit 731 , Japan’s biological warfare program, was formed in 1932 under the leadership of the notorious Gen. Shiro Ishii, chief medical officer of the Japanese army. Based in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Unit 731 operated under the cover name “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.”

But Unit 731 didn’t prevent epidemics—it spread them. Nazi medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners, performed by monsters such as Josef Mengele, have been thoroughly documented.

Less well known are the experiments that Japan performed on adult male Chinese prisoners of war and political prisoners, as well as women and children. The captives were injected with diseases such as cholera and gonorrhea, or chained to stakes while aircraft dropped plague bombs.

There was also the vivisection. “Human experimentation gave researchers their first chance to actually examine the organs of a living person at will to see the progress of a disease,” according to Hal Gold’s book  Unit 731 Testimony .

“Vivisection was a new experience for the doctors of Japan,” Gold writes. “One former unit member explained that ‘the results of the effects of infection cannot be obtained accurately once the person dies because putrefactive bacteria set in. Putrefactive bacteria are stronger than plague germs. So, for obtaining accurate results, it is important whether the subject is alive or not.’”

As atrocities go, or as much as sane human beings can rank them, this doesn’t sound any worse than Nazi experiments. But unlike the Nazis, Imperial Japan actually weaponized its biological horrors.

Cholera was dumped into wells used by the Chinese populace. Fleas were carefully collected, infected with plague and then dropped in aerial bombs over  Chinese cities and villages .

“The air team and those who knew how to handle bacteria would get into a plane together and spread germs over a village or other areas of population concentration,” said a Unit 731 member cited in Gold's book. “After that, the area would be examined for the effectiveness of the attack.”

“With plague, fleas were used as a carrier and transported in a ceramic bomb,” the unit member added. “At first, glass bombs were tried, but they did not work well. Rats weigh about 600 grams. They were infected with plague, then they were infested with 3,000 to 6,000 fleas each and loaded into the ceramic bomb. When the bomb is dropped and breaks, the fleas scatter.”

Half a million or more  Chinese died in these attacks.

It would be satisfying to say that the perpetrators of Unit 731 were punished for their crimes. But there’s no happy ending here. In 1945, Ishii and the other members of Unit 731 made a deal with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the U.S. government: they would turn over their research to the Americans—not the Soviets—in return for immunity from prosecution.

Even compared to the sordid dealings that allowed Nazi scientists and spies to trade their expertise for immunity from war crimes trials, this was repugnant.

Some might dismiss Japan’s bio-war against China as history from a past century. But that history still resonates. Memories of Japanese atrocities still linger in Asia. And as China and Japan appear on the brink of  conflict  over disputed islands in the East China Sea, it’s worth remembering that this time, it’s China and not Japan that has weapons of mass destruction.

Should Chinese ever contemplate the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, you can be sure the ghosts of Unit 731 will be at their side.

Image : Wikimedia Commons.

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Japan’s Hellish Unit 731

In conquered Manchuria, ghastly experiments were fiendishly conducted on human guinea pigs.

This article appears in: Fall 2018

By David D. Barrett

The final months of World War II saw the liberation of hundreds of ghastly concentration camps and the awful reality of Nazi racism. For more than seven decades those atrocities, including the use of human beings for medical experiments, have been common knowledge. Far less known is the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Chinese by a Japanese organization known as Unit 731.

Established for the purpose of developing biological and chemical weapons, Unit 731 exceeded by a year the duration of the Third Reich. While biological and chemical weapons were not new to warfare, Japanese testing on human subjects was unparalleled even by the Nazis.

What makes this descent into barbarity all the more stunning was the Japanese contribution to medical science just three decades earlier. A U.S. Army doctor named Lewis Livingston Seaman observed colleagues who were attending to the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).

Dr. Seaman came away from his experience profoundly impressed with his medical brethren, stating, “The history of warfare for centuries has proven that in prolonged campaigns the first, or actual enemy, kills 20 percent of the total mortality in the conflict, whilst the second, or silent enemy (disease), kills 80 percent.

“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.

“It is against this enemy that Japan, with triumphant exaltation, may cry Banzai. For it is against this enemy that she has attained her most signal victories….”

Twenty years later, Japan signed the Geneva Convention, which prohibited biological and chemical warfare. But where other men reasoned with justification that these kinds of weapons should be banned by civilized nations, another man, a specialist in bacteria and related fields, Dr. (Colonel) Shiro Ishii, saw the prohibition as an opportunity.

He reasoned that if something were bad enough to be outlawed, then it must certainly be effective, and he began a sustained effort to establish a military arm within the Japanese Army whose aim would be the development of weapons based on biology. Ishii was highly intelligent but arrogant, merciless, and immoral.

He thought of himself beyond reproach and as a visionary. He was driven to break new scientific ground and to help Japan defeat its foes. In his quest to contribute to that effort, Ishii in time exhorted his team of physicians to violate the physicians’ ethical code: “A doctor’s God-given mission is to challenge all varieties of disease-causing micro-organisms; to block all roads of intrusion into the human body; to annihilate all foreign matter resident in our bodies; and to devise the most expeditious treatment possible….

“However, the research we are now about to embark is the complete opposite of these principles, and may cause us some anguish as doctors. We pursue this research for the double medical thrill; as a scientist … probing to discover the truth in natural science; and as a military person, to build a powerful military weapon against the enemy.”

To convince the senior levels of the Imperial Army to back his efforts, Ishii built his case around financial considerations, completely skirting either Japan’s obligation to the world community as a signatory of the aforementioned 1925 Geneva Convention or the morality of using such weapons. Ishii argued that compared with the costs of building, manning, and maintaining huge conventional forces, bacteria and gas were a far less expensive alternative.

By 1930, nationalism burned hotter than ever in Japan and created a climate receptive to Ishii’s ideas of developing biological weapons. In September 1931, Japanese forces instigated the “Mukden Incident.” The pitched battle between Japanese and Chinese forces was actually no more than a Japanese ruse used to justify a complete takeover of Manchuria.

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.

The following year, under the cover of the euphemistically named Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory, Ishii set up shop in the Army’s hospital in Tokyo. The location was only temporary because, to accomplish his objectives, he would need access to far greater resources; Japanese ascendancy in Manchuria provided its medical community unprecedented opportunities for research (much as the Germans used concentration camps and their prisoners for their own medical and pseudo-scientific research).

Ishii’s goal of turning bacteria and gas into weapons for the Imperial Japanese Army required comprehensive study, and he believed animals could not supply usable data. Japan’s control over Manchuria delivered research materials in the form of people who were plucked from the streets and locked into black vans known as voronki (ravens), to be carried off to the waiting prison cells of Unit 731.

Japan’s Kempeitai, the military police arm of the IJA from 1881 to 1945, was tasked with these kidnappings. The Kempeitai was less a conventional military police body than a secret police force akin to the Gestapo. Headed in Manchuria by Hideki Tojo, from 1935 to 1937, the Kempeitai’s cruelty was notorious in occupied territories. (See WWII Quarterly, Fall 2011). After the war, the U.S. Army estimated it numbered 36,000 regular members.

Anxious to take operations to the next level, in 1932 Dr. Ishii chose the city of Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang Province in southwest Manchuria, as the site of Unit 731’s first biological and chemical weapons facility. The original buildout covered a 500-square-meter area and was designated a restricted military zone. A tract of land to the south of the sector was appropriated and made into an airport. It and a nearby rail line were also used to move victims to Unit 731 and transport results and specimens back to Japan’s medical community.

Japan’s medical institutions enabled the work of Unit 731 by supplying Dr. Ishii with top Japanese scientists and physicians who would be labeled Hikokumin (traitors) if they refused to take part. Most medical professionals saw their work as noble service to the Emperor; the fact that they were killing non-Japanese meant nothing to them.

Unit 731 received state-of-the-art equipment and a nearly unlimited supply of funds from the Japanese government. Even for reluctant researchers Ishii’s factories were luxurious. The annual budget for Unit 731 was ten million yen (about nine billion yen in the modern currency, or about $86 million). Salaries were very generous, and the food was exceptional.

Precipitated by an escape attempt by 40 prisoners, all of whom were captured and killed, the Harbin operation was closed and moved to the Harbin suburb of Ping Fang in 1936. This complex was a sprawling walled city of more than 70 buildings that dwarfed its predecessor in Harbin. The perimeter at Ping Fang incorporated more than six square kilometers and rivaled Auschwitz-Birkenau in size. Tucked away inside the administration building was a prison that housed 500 men, women, and children selected for vivisection.

As immense as Ping Fang was, Unit 731 also had affiliated locations in Nanking (Unit 1644), Beijing (Unit 1855), and Changchun (Unit 100). Altogether there were 26 known killing laboratories, experimental detachments, and battalions of the Army spread across occupied lands in Asia. The total number of personnel involved reached some 20,000. All units and facilities were coordinated by the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory under the control of Colonel Ishii.

The research was made available not just to the Army hospital in Manchuria, but to doctors and educators throughout Japan. In this way, Unit 731 was performing the service of human experimentation for the entire Japanese medical community, in an on-going feedback loop. “Medicine itself must become a weapon,” said Nakagawa Yonezo, Professor Emeritus at Osaka University.

The gruesome professionalism of Unit 731 included a touch of sardonic humor. The construction of the Ping Fang installation prompted locals to ask what it was. The answer was a “lumber mill.” Regarding this reply, one of the researchers joked privately, “and the people are the logs.”

From then on, the Japanese term for log, Maruta, was used to speak of the prisoners whose last days were spent being infected with lethal pathogens, torn apart, frozen, or gassed by Japanese researchers. The expression indicates a degree of racism far beyond disdain; it is evidence of a belief that torturing the Chinese was of no more consequence than squashing a bug.

As noted earlier, the primary objective of Ishii and Unit 731 was the creation of biological and chemical weapons. To facilitate that end, wholesale human experimentation was utilized, including the vivisection of thousands of people. The justification for performing all these surgeries came from the expectation that human tests would create better weapons.

Doctors in Unit 731 examined the first stages of disease on organs. A former member of Unit 731 described the process: “As soon as symptoms were observed, the prisoners were taken from their cells and into the dissection room, he was stripped and placed on a table, screaming, trying to fight back. He was strapped down, still screaming frightfully. One of the doctors stuffed a towel into his mouth, then with one quick slice of the scalpel he was opened up.” Witnesses reported that, without anesthesia, the victims let out horrible screams when the first cut was made and that the cries stopped soon thereafter.

A doctor at Ping Fang testified to a time when he was working on a pregnant female victim who awoke from anesthesia while being vivisected. The woman said, “It’s all right to kill me, but please spare my child’s life.” It is likely that more than one mother voiced, as a last wish on the vivisection table, the wish to let her child live. None ever did. The researchers wanted their data.

As ghastly as these procedures were, vivisections were not limited to weapons development, but fell into four categories: (1) intentional infection of diseases, (2) training newly employed army surgeons, (3) trials of nonstandardized treatments, and (4) discovering the limits of human tolerance to pain and stress.

Under the auspices of weapons development and intentional infection of diseases, prisoners were injected with various biological agents including plague, typhus, cholera, anthrax, and syphilis.

To test the effectiveness of dispersion methods for military purposes, victims were staked to crosses with their vital organs and heads protected. Various types of bombs and agents were then dropped or sprayed from specially modified planes to test the survivability of the agents and their ability to infect the subjects. Community water and food sources were also contaminated. To determine the results, mobile vivisection units were set up in the field near the infected communities.

The Imperial Japanese Army also allowed its physicians to perform vivisections on living subjects to train them in the treatment of battle wounds—procedures that are too gruesome to describe in detail.

Tests that could have real medical value were also conducted, such as finding the best method to deal with frostbite. But even here Japanese doctors chose to perform the experiments in the most merciless ways possible.

Conventional weapons tests were also carried out. Victims were tied to stakes and used to determine the operational range of flamethrowers, grenades, and various kinds of shells and bombs.

But this was hardly the extent of the tests to which the prisoners were subjected. Sheldon Harris, author of Factories of Death, stated, “They just killed people with no inherent purpose other than to see how they reacted to being killed.” People were locked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, or they were put into centrifuges and spun to death.

Other experiments involved hanging prisoners upside down to discover how long it took for them to choke to death or injecting air into their arteries to test for the onset of embolisms. Another test consisted of taking blood samples, at least 500 cm³ (slightly more than a pint) at two- to three-day intervals. Some victims became debilitated; still, the blood drainage continued.

When the human guinea pigs could no longer serve as lab material, they were abused in various manners: injected with poison, killed for their vital organs (brains, lungs, or liver), subjected to violent surgeries (e.g., amputation and reattachment of the limbs to the opposite sides of the body, resection of the stomach to attach the esophagus to the intestines). Electrical shocks were administered until the person slowly roasted to death.

Some experiments had no medical purpose whatsoever except the administering of indescribable pain, such as injecting horse urine into prisoners’ kidneys. The doctors of Unit 731, like the Nazi doctors at Dachau and Buchenwald, indulged any perversion they could imagine.

In 1938 and 1939, the Soviet and Japanese Armies clashed in two encounters near the border of Mongolia and Manchuria. The 1939 summer battle, known as the Nomonhan Incident and the Battle of Kalhin Gol by the Soviets, resulted in the overwhelming defeat of the Japanese Kwantung Army by Stalin’s Red Army.

The clash saw the first field operation of Japan’s biological warfare unit; it occurred in a desert region where water was scarce. To disable their Russian foes, the Japanese dumped large quantities of intestinal typhoid bacteria into the river.

Fortunately for the Russians, this type of typhoid germ became ineffective almost immediately after hitting the water. The contamination was probably initiated more for the publicity than anything else, as Ishii likely knew it would not work.

In 1940, Japanese planes dropped wheat, corn, rags, and cotton infested with bubonic plague on the unarmed village of Ningbo, China. More than 100 people died within a few days of the attack.

Two years later, the Japanese conducted a second attack in the same area. Japanese researchers took over a house on top of a hill about a kilometer away from the infected zone to use as a vivisection laboratory. As a result of the attacks, the Ningbo region remained sealed off until the 1960s.

During the siege of Bataan in the Philippines in March 1942, the Japanese planned to release 200 pounds of plague-carrying fleas—about 150 million insects—in each of 10 separate attacks. However, by the time the assault was ready the battle had already ended.

In June-July 1944, during the Battle of Saipan, plague-infested fleas were again to be used against U.S. forces. Fortuitously for the Americans, by this stage in the war it had become almost impossible for the Japanese to get any reinforcements and or matériel to its island bastions, and the Japanese submarine carrying the fleas was sunk en route.

For the Battle of Iwo Jima, February-March 1945, another biological attack was to be carried out against the invading Americans. Two gliders loaded with pathogens were to be towed over the battlefield and released. The gliders never reached their destination.

One of the least known Japanese efforts to attack Canada and the continental United States occurred in late 1944 and the spring of 1945. Records uncovered in Japan after the war indicated that about 9,000 balloon bombs, known as fugo, and carrying incendiary bombs, were launched into the jet stream during this period. More than 200 ultimately reached the United States. Six people were killed in Oregon when a bomb detonated on discovery. Before Japan surrendered, Ishii and Army leaders proposed using balloon bombs filled with cattle plague and anthrax.

As part of Japan’s defense of Okinawa in the spring of 1945, Unit 731 had developed plans to meet the American invaders with plague bacteria. The attacks were never carried out because once again fleas carrying the plague could not be delivered to the island. The native Okinawan population only learned of this plan in 1994.

Operation PX, aka Cherry Blossoms at Night, were the codenames for the Japanese plan for a biological attack on cities in southern California. The plan was completed March 26, 1945, and scheduled for September 22, 1945, but was abandoned due to the strong opposition of Army Chief of Staff General Yoshijiro Umezu, who was also a member of Prime Minister Suzuki’s war cabinet.

The plan involved the use of five I-400 submarine aircraft carriers, each carrying three Aichi M6A Seiran floatplanes launched against San Diego, Los Angeles, and/or San Francisco. The aircraft were to spread bubonic plague, cholera, typhus, and dengue fever over the city, while the submarine crews infected themselves and ran ashore in a vast suicide mission.

Even after surrender, the Japanese considered a final use of biological weapons. Ishii wanted to stage suicide germ attacks against occupying U.S. troops in Japan. This planned attack never took place, once again due to opposition from General Umezu and Vice Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, General Torashiro Kawabe, who claimed that he did not want Ishii to die in a suicide attack.

Almost as soon at World War II ended, a new Cold War began between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this atmosphere, Lt. Col. Murray Sanders of the United States Army recommended to General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry Truman in the fall of 1945 that Ishii and his subordinates be given immunity from prosecution as war criminals in return for Unit 731’s research.

MacArthur and Truman approved the deal, and Japan’s biological and chemical weapons program remained largely a secret until the 1990s.

From start to finish, the highest levels of the Japanese government and military were involved in Unit 731. Hideki Tojo, head of the Kempeitai in Manchuria from 1935 to 1937, became Japan’s longest serving prime minister in World War II, from October 18, 1941, to July 22, 1944. Tojo approved the attack on Pearl Harbor and was tried as a Class A war criminal and hanged in 1948.

General Yoshijiro Umezu, who served as the Army’s chief of staff, was a member of the elite war cabinet that held the reins of power in Japan from April 1945 until it surrendered to Allied forces on September 2, 1945. According to Lt. Gen. Kajitsuka Ryuji of the Japanese Medical Service and former Chief of the Medical Administration for the massive Kwantung Army (located in Manchuria), Ishii was given permission to begin the Ping Fang experiment in 1936 by “command of the Emperor.”

At some point in 1939-1940, Hirohito issued still another decree recognizing Ishii’s unit for its service. Moreover, the Emperor’s younger brother toured Unit 731’s facilities during its time of operation.

Unit 731 was extremely well funded, with state-of-the-art facilities, generously staffed with the cream of Japan’s medical community, and routinely communicated with the medical establishment back in Japan—which even provided suggestions for experiments and regularly received human samples.

The vast majority of Ishii’s staff walked away from their wartime service scot free. Information turned over to the United States proved worthless to the American biological weapons program, as the vivisection of human beings did not yield better scientific data.

Immune from prosecution as war criminals, many of Unit 731’s doctors went on to prominent careers in universities, hospitals, and industry, rising to positions that included governor of Tokyo, president of the Japanese Medical Association, and head of the Japanese Olympic Committee. The ringleader, Dr. Shiro Ishii, quietly returned to private practice and died in 1959 of throat cancer at the age of 67.

The Soviet Union was the only government to bring anyone associated with Unit 731 to trial. In late December 1949, in Khabarovsk, Russia, 12 former physicians, officers, and staff were accused of manufacturing biological and chemical weapons. While there was some coverage in the American press, the United States government, keen on protecting its secret deal, labeled the proceedings just another Soviet show trial.

It would take nearly 50 years before the infamy of Unit 731 came to light in the United States. Unlike the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, in which high-ranking German and Japanese officials were hanged or sentenced to life in prison, the Khabarovsk trials saw no sentence exceed 25 years—with some as short as two. All of the defendants were quietly freed and slipped back to Japan by 1956.

In 1998, more than 100 Chinese plaintiffs filed suit in Japan in an effort to get the Japanese government to acknowledge the crimes of Unit 731 and to obtain reparations for the victims and their families. Mere months before the trial began, the Japanese Education Ministry approved a textbook glossing over the Imperial Japanese Army’s culpability.

The Tokyo District Court’s ruling, coming on August 28, 2002, accepted that Unit 731 had waged germ warfare in China and caused harm to residents but dismissed the Chinese plaintiffs’ claim for compensation. Nevertheless, it was the first time a Japanese court admitted that the Imperial Army had used biological weapons during its war with China from 1932-1945.

Judge Iwata said in handing down the ruling, “The evidence shows that Japanese troops, including those from Unit 731, used bacteriological weapons under the order of the Imperial Japanese Army’s headquarters and that many local residents died.” Noteworthy in the judge’s declaration was his understatement that “many local residents died.”

The judge’s comment was, however, consistent with much of the narrative written about Unit 731 after the war, which generally characterizes the group’s activities as “experimental,” a seeming reference to the vivisections conducted by the Japanese doctors.

Most accounts reckon the loss of life caused by vivisection to be around 3,000 to 10,000 individuals. These figures neglect the field tests of pathogens conducted against Chinese civilians and the subsequent losses of life from bubonic plague after the war.

Such minimization constitutes a miscarriage of justice for the hundreds of thousands who were murdered as a result of these attacks, and potentially the tens of thousands more Americans who could have died if the Japanese plans had been carried out on numerous Pacific battlefields, or if they had been successful in their attempts to deliver biological agents to the U.S. mainland in the latter stages of the war.

As it stands, Sheldon Harris’s Factories of Death (1994) estimates the loss of life at 200,000, with Daniel Barenblatt’s A Plague Upon Humanity (2008) putting it as high as 580,000.

At what point is Unit 731 indicted for mass murder? While some Japanese scholars have been rigorous in documenting Japan’s war crimes, their own government has been unwilling to acknowledge the atrocities it perpetrated against China.

Unit 731’s legacy is one of a useless, fanciful, extravagant, and sadistic indulgence that accomplished nothing politically or militarily for Japan, and, in terms of its research, nothing for the United States.

One can only hope that the perpetrators, who escaped prosecution as war criminals, achieved something positive in their postwar careers because the victims are still crying out for justice.

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Inside Unit 731, Japan's Gruesome WWII Human Experiment Program

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Key Takeaways

• Unit 731, a Japanese Imperial Army program, conducted deadly medical experiments and biological weapons testing on Chinese civilians during WWII.
• Thousands of prisoners were killed in cruel experiments, and perhaps hundreds of thousands more died from biological weapons testing.
• The true extent of Unit 731's actions was shielded from public knowledge for years, with the U.S. granting immunity to top officials in exchange for research.

For years after World War II , in most of what was considered the "civilized" world, the truth behind Japanese Imperial Army Unit 731 was quietly swept away. Facts were suppressed. Memories questioned. Reports denied.

Even today, the true extent of Unit 731's wartime actions — horrendous, deadly medical experiments and lethal biological weapons testing on unsuspecting Chinese civilians — is known largely only to historians and scholars.

But the facts are out there for those who seek them. And for those who seek to use them for their own personal reasons.

"I think that it has become a piece of this tortured dialogue over the war between Japan and China. The Chinese have seized upon this quite a bit. And the Japanese right, the nationalist right, their basic view is that, 'Oh, the Chinese. This is all political.' ... And there is a certain truth to that," says Daniel Sneider , a lecturer in international policy at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies . "There is a 'uses of the past' question here. Perhaps you could say it's cynical in that everybody does it."

The truth is that Japan's Unit 731 committed some of the most heinous war crimes ever. Thousands of prisoners were killed in cruel human experiments at Unit 731, which was based near the northeastern China city of Harbin, north of the Korean peninsula and on a border with Russia. Perhaps hundreds of thousands more — maybe as many as a half-million — were killed when the Japanese tested their biological weapons on Chinese civilians.

The exact number of dead is not known. It may never be known.

"It's very difficult to calculate," says Yue-Him Tam , a history professor at Minnesota's Macalester College and co-author of a book entitled, " Unit 731: Laboratory of the Devil, Auschwitz of the East (Japanese Biological Warfare in China 1933-1945) ." Tam, born and raised in China, has taught a class at Macalester on war crimes and memory in contemporary East Asia for more than 20 years. "If you include those victims who suffered from the other activities — not necessarily just used as human guinea pigs — the bombs in China ... it's very difficult to calculate."

The Start of Unit 731

America's shameful part, dealing with unit 731 today.

Unit 731 — its official name was the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army — was formed before World War II began (at least for the U.S., which didn't officially enter the war until December 1941). It came about sometime in the mid-1930s when Japan and China went to war , a conflict that eventually morphed into World War II's war in the Pacific theater.

The Unit's charge was clear from the beginning: testing, producing and storing biological weapons. Such activities were outlawed by at least two international treaties at the time, though the Japanese did not ratify the 1925 Geneva protocol . It didn't matter.

From the start, Unit 731, under General Shirō Ishii , was merciless.

Among the thousands of experiments conducted on prisoners: vivisections without anesthesia; injections of venereal diseases to examine their spread; amputations to study blood loss; removal of other body parts and organs; starvation; and deliberate exposure to freezing temperatures to examine the effects of frostbite . From a 1995 article in The New York Times , relating a story from a medical assistant in Unit 731:

Reportedly, not one of the thousands of prisoners that were experimented on — most of whom were Chinese, though many were Russian or Korean — survived.

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.

Thousands of these still-dangerous bombs remain in the Chinese countryside today, Tam says. Some people still suffer from the Japanese "dirty" bombs.

At one time, the Japanese hatched a plan to infect fleas with a plague manufactured at Unit 731 and drop flea-filled bombs, launched from planes stored aboard submarines, on San Diego in a mission code-named Operations Cherry Blossoms at Night . The war ended before the plan could be executed.

After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan and effectively ended the war in 1945, Japanese leaders ordered the destruction of Unit 731, which included more than 150 buildings and two airports. As the victorious Allied forces approached, many hundreds of remaining prisoners were killed. The thousands of people who worked in the place and conducted experiments on healthy, living humans scattered, many never to face justice.

The top doctors and soldiers at Unit 731 kept careful records of their experiments, and used them to leverage their way to freedom after the war. When the Allies swept into China, they agreed to grant Ishii and many of his associates immunity from prosecution for war crimes . The reasons: The U.S. wanted Unit 731's research for its own use , and it wanted to keep that information out of the hands of others, including the Russians. Thus, for years, the true nature of what went on in Unit 731 was shielded from public knowledge.

Some of the truth came out in the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial , held in that Russian city in December 1949. Twelve members of Unit 731 and associated units were tried. All were found guilty and imprisoned. Despite that trial, though, much of what went on in Harbin was immediately classified by the U.S. government and remained clouded in secrecy.

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.

"The United States is not the outsider to this. Previously, I think the tendency was for the people in the United States to think, 'This is a problem between Japan and its neighbors.' But not only were we of course the major combatant in the war, we shaped the postwar settlement, including decisions like the one concerning Unit 731," Sneider says. "We made the big decisions about what was a war crime and what wasn't ... We're the creator of the postwar order, and therefore we have responsibility and involvement in dealing with the issues that were left, unfortunately, unresolved."

Research on 731 continues to be conducted all over the world. As recently as 2018, the Japanese government provided a list of more than 3,600 members of Unit 731 to a Japanese scholar. Yet even with more information, with politicians and the governments of various countries opening their records, the facts remain largely in the shadows and in some dispute.

In China, with the resurgent government now not as dependent on Japan as it was in the years following World War II, the Chinese are demanding more answers, eager to hold old rival Japan responsible.

For their part, most Japanese are not nearly as willing to engage in discussions about what is considered by many Japanese as a shameful period in that country's history. Some say the surge in Chinese interest in Unit 731 is nothing more than political in nature.

The U.S. is dealing with its own internal demons about its history with Unit 731.

These varying viewpoints, and others in the region and throughout the world, complicate matters. From 2006 to 2016, Sneider and others at Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center conducted a project, " Divided Memories and Reconciliation ," aimed at examining the historical memory of the wartime period in Asia. These histories, viewed differently, go directly to ideas about national identity and nationalism. They are tricky histories to examine, uncovering differences that often stay unresolved.

"Sometimes the truth is pretty elusive," says Sneider. "To some degree, the goal is not necessarily always to establish 'the fact.' That's a good goal, but it may not be possible. The goal, if you're seeking reconciliation, the goal may be to understand the different perceptions of the other.

"In Japan, wartime memory is highly contested within Japan. They've been battling over these issues since 1945. Sometimes it's important just for Koreans and Chinese and Americans to understand what's going on within Japan. That path is contrived; to try to get to reconciliation by agreeing on what happened."

People may not agree on how many people were killed by the criminals in Unit 731, who did it, how it was done, or why it occurred. They can, and should, look critically upon America's decisions after the war, too.

But this much is indisputable: What happened in Unit 731 was an abomination.

In August 2015, The Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by Japanese Army Unit 731 opened in an area just south of Harbin, a city of more than 5 million people. Tam is among the millions who have visited the site.

"The room where they experimented with poisonous gas, there are still walls standing there, and the walls are really thick, almost like 1-meter [3.2-feet] thick, to prevent leaking of something. When I saw these things, I was really shedding tears as to how people can do that," Tam says. "It was very moving.

"I am a historian. The most important thing that matters to me is the facts. I want to find out the facts. And that was a fact, Unit 731. The crimes they committed and produced are facts."

Japanese war criminals were tried at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East , otherwise known as the Tokyo War Crimes trial. Testimony from Ishii , gathered in Maryland after his postwar arrest, was used in the trial, too. But Ishii, the architect behind the Unit 731 atrocities, was never charged. He died in Tokyo in 1959, a free man.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did unit 731's activities impact international laws on human experimentation, what were the long-term health effects on survivors of unit 731's experiments.

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• World War 2

The main site of Japan’s experiments into biological warfare was the prisoner of war camp known as Unit 731 located in Pingfan, Manchuria, where Chinese inmates were subjected to gruesome experiments aimed at testing the limits of the human body and the effectiveness of biological and chemical agents.

These experiments were replicated elsewhere on Allied POWs in the puppet state of Manchukuo created by the Japanese and nominally ruled by Pu Yi, the last emperor of China.

Shiro Ishii, a Japanese Doctor Mengele

Born on 25th June 1892, Shiro Ishii was a brilliant medical student at the Imperial University in Kyoto who then went on to become a surgeon in the Imperial Guard. Further studies cemented Ishii’s status as one of the country’s pre-eminent specialists in the field of bacterial research and he is credited with inventing a revolutionary filtration system which could remove all traces of bacteria from stagnant water.

From 1933, Ishii switched his attention away from the prevention of infections and began to concentrate his research on how dangerous bacterium could be best employed in warfare.

Unit 731, the Center of Japan’s Wartime Experiments on Humans

In 1933, Shiro Ishii moved his team of researchers to Manchuria in China and assumed leadership of a center of experimentation into biological warfare which would later come to be known as Unit No. 731, and eventually be responsible for the deaths of around 3,000 inmates.

The human guinea pigs of Unit 731 were mostly captured Chinese soldiers or locals thought hostile to the occupation. However, at the nearby camps of Hogoin and Moukden similar experiments were repeated on captured Russian and other Allied soldiers respectively. The results were then transmitted back to Ishii’s personnel for verification.

Inmates of the camps were subjected to a terrifying array of experiments. Bombs containing gangrene or various bacterium were set-off in close proximity to prisoners, not with the intention of causing death by explosion, but in order to study the effectiveness of airborne infection.

Among many other atrocities, subjects were exposed to extremes of temperature, decompression, bombarded by x-rays, starved, deprived of sleep, boiled alive, killed in giant centrifuges, or even subjected to vivisection whilst still alive.

The Aims of Unit 731 and Shiro Ishii’s Research

The horrific experiments carried out within the walls of Unit 731 were not just a case of cruelty for cruelty’s sake. The aim of Shiro Ishii’s research was the development of an effective chemical and biological weapons program that could turn the tide of the war in Japan’s favor.

Shiro Ishii was particularly interested in the plague and a significant amount of Unit 731’s resources were expended on breeding rats to sustain plague-carrying fleas.

Several outbreaks of plague in China during the early 1940s can be directly attributed to Ishii’s experiments on the local populace. When running at full capacity, Unit 731 was theoretically capable of producing three hundred kilos of plague germs per month and enough bacteria of various sorts to kill the entire population of the world several times over.

The End of Unit 731 and the War Crimes Tribunals

In August 1945, as the Soviet army swept into Manchuria, Shiro Ishii evacuated around 2,000 members of Unit 731 back to Japan; everyone was under strict instructions to separate and not to talk to anyone of what had happened at the camp.

The retreating Japanese army destroyed nearly all traces of Unit 731 and other similar camps, although some documents still fell into Soviet hands and were used to set up their own programs after the war. At Unit 731 alone, the Japanese army killed all of the prisoners and machine-gunned six hundred local workers.

Once Japan had formally surrendered, Shiro Ishii and others deemed responsible for carrying out atrocities in the pursuit of biological warfare were regularly interrogated by the Americans, who refused all Soviet requests to hand them over.

Shiro Ishii never faced a war crimes tribunal, and the subject of biological warfare was never raised during any of the trials of suspected Japanese war criminals. General MacArthur himself officially denied the existence of any Japanese experiments on American soldiers.

The reason for this is simple: a deal had been struck whereby Ishii told the Americans everything he knew about biological and chemical warfare in return for immunity from prosecution.

Shiro Ishii died of throat cancer in 1959 but the last years of his life are the subject of some dispute: it is claimed that he continued his research into biological warfare in America, but his daughter denies this and asserts that he spent the post-war period in Japan.

National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

• World War II History

By Avani Sihra

In the 1930s-‘40s, the Japanese Empire committed atrocities across Asia, such as the Rape of Nanking. German crimes such as human medical testing committed in concentration camps tend to receive more attention than Japan’s crimes against humanity, as more research has been done and more historians have spent time looking back and studying these horrific acts. However, the Japanese too played a part in human medical testing in a secret project called Unit 731.

Begun in 1937, Unit 731, located in Harbin, China, was created with legitimate intentions by the Japanese government. Started as an agency to promote public health, Unit 731 was meant to conduct research that would benefit Japanese soldiers, such as learning more about the ways in which the human body can withstand hunger and thirst and fight diseases. Early experiments were conducted on volunteers who had signed consent waivers, giving personnel permission. However, as the war intensified, they changed their methods.

Although the 1925 Geneva Accords had banned the use of biological or chemical weapons in warfare, the Japanese nevertheless wanted to prepare for these types of warfare. As these types of experiments were naturally ones that most people would not volunteer to take part in, the Japanese decided to use prisoners of war as their test subjects. Unit 731’s victims who were primarily Chinese and Russians, along with some Mongolians and Koreans.

The leader of the unit was Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii. Along with the other scientists he recruited, they experimented by infecting test subjects with different types of diseases to see how their bodies would respond to pathogens. As the Japanese destroyed most of the Unit’s records at the end of the war, little is known about the scientists who worked there.

Using the test subjects, the scientists injected different germs to see how they would react to one another in the human body, in an attempt to create new diseases. Referring to their victims as Maturas , or “wooden logs,” Japanese scientists would perform different types of procedures, such as vivisection, on live victims. Rats infected with the bubonic plague were released onto victims, with the intention of infecting the subjects so that they could be studied. Unit 731 was a place of torture that was, in the minds of many Unit 731 workers, a necessity in order to win the war .

Scientists in Unit 731 also experimented on their test subjects through pregnancy and rape. Male prisoners infected with syphilis would be told to rape female prisoners as well as male prisoners in order to see how syphilis spreads in the body. Women were involuntarily impregnated and then experiments were done on them to see how it affected the mother as well as the fetus. Sometimes the mother would be vivisected in order to see how the fetus was developing. 

Once it was clear that the Japanese were going to lose the war, unit workers destroyed much of the evidence of the experiments. Upon the formal surrender of the Japanese in August 1945, Unit 731 was officially terminated. The Japanese government did not admit to the wrongdoing committed by Unit 731 until very recently. The government did not acknowledge the atrocity until 1988, and even then, they did not apologize for what had happened. The project was highly secretive and much of the evidence had been destroyed; in addition, government officials who were aware of what happened in Unit 731 did not make their knowledge known to the public. Because of this lack of acknowledgment, the Chinese government took it upon themselves to spread awareness of the atrocities. In 1982, they established a museum in the same place where Unit 731 operated during the war.

Unlike some of the Nazi doctors who conducted experiments on prisoners and concentration camp inmates, none of those involved with the experiments at Unit 731 were ever punished for their crimes. Instead, after war’s end, many re-entered society and went on to have very successful careers in their fields. American forces , chiefly General Douglas MacArthur, decided not to put workers of Unit 731 on trial. MacArthur granted those involved immunity in exchange for the information they had gathered while doing their experiments. He believed that pursuing trials against these people would get in the way of the Americans receiving the medical information that had been documented from these experiments. Because of this decision, justice was never served.

Frank, Richard B. Downfall. Penguin Books, 1994.

Kristof, Nicholas D. “Unmasking Horror -- A special report; Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity.” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world/unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html . Accessed 3 May 2018.

Stockton, Richard. “Inside Unit 731, World War II Japan’s Sickening Human Experiments Program.” All That’s Interesting, http://allthatsinteresting.com/unit-731 . Accessed 3 May 2018.

Unit 731. Unit 731: Japan’s Biological Warfare Project, https://unit731.org/ . Accessed 3 May 2018.

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Scholar unearths new details of Unit 731 from national archives

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

August 12, 2023 at 08:00 JST

An exceptionally rare document listing the names and ranks of members of the Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious wartime Unit 731 has turned up in Tokyo.

It is the first time for such a record to surface that details both the organization’s personnel and organizational structure.

The document was discovered among materials kept at the National Archives of Japan by Seiya Matsuno, a researcher of Japanese modern and contemporary history at Meiji Gakuin University’s International Peace Research Institute.

Officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, Unit 731 operated in a suburb of the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin.

Unit 731 was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes committed by the Japanese army. It conducted biological experiments on  Chinese and Russian prisoners and developed bacterial weapons. 

The covert unit’s facilities in what was then called Manchuria were destroyed immediately before Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945. Relevant documents were ordered to be destroyed.

Only very limited records on the corps are known to exist, rendering it difficult to expose the true scope of the horrors perpetrated by Unit 731.

The document was found in a report on the reorganization of the Kwantung Army in August 1940.

It states that Unit 731’s name was changed from the Epidemic Prevention Department to the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department. Additional personnel were deployed to the unit as it expanded its scale of operations.

Appended to the report was the staff list of Unit 731.

Surgeon Col. Shiro Ishii, the first director of Unit 731, is described as its top official. The names, affiliations and ranks of 97 senior officers are referred to as well.

“A characteristic is that many medical experts sent from universities are counted among the executives as ‘technicians,’” said Matsuno. “What the unit was like around the time of its introduction has become clear for the first time.”

A similar personnel list dating from 1945 emerged some years ago at the National Archives.

The document was made publicly available in 2016, when Katsuo Nishiyama, professor emeritus of social medicine at Shiga University of Medical Science, petitioned for its disclosure.

It details the names and addresses of those who belonged to the unit shortly before the war ended.

But other details, such as its organizational composition, could only be deducted based on accounts of individuals and recollections during court trials and elsewhere.

“The latest discovery is important because until now each member’s affiliation and personnel replacement could not properly be determined,” said Nishiyama. “Now, we have been able to retrace what happened to some members by comparing the older staff list with the one that has just surfaced.”

Matsuno said his discovery could shed light on the postwar movements of top Unit 731 officials.

“Some formerly unknown technicians appear on the list,” Matsuno said. “The document may help figure out how they regained their standing in medical circles and the pharmaceutical industry after the war.”

Nishiyama noted that many medical experts earned degrees following the end of World War II based on their studies at Unit 731.

“We must look at why the medical world and university operators involved in the unit’s activities did not reflect on their misconduct even after the war ended,” he said.

The staff list of Unit 100, or the Kwantung Army Warhorse Disease Prevention Shop for biological warfare research, was also among the cache of recently discovered documents. Veterinary servicemen worked for the unit.

(This article was written by Ryota Goto and Senior Staff Writer Ryuichi Kitano.)

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Dangerous World

Understanding Existential Risks

Unit 731: Imperial Japan’s Biological and Chemical Warfare

Written by Romeo Jung.

Introduction

Unit 731 was a secret Biological and Chemical Warfare Unit that Imperial Japan had established during the World War II. Eager to win the war, the scientists involved committed a lot of inhumane crimes like vivisection to Chinese, Korean, Russian, and Mongolian prisoners of war, and used the data gained to harm many Chinese civilians. This essay details heavily on the biological research and its data from start to the end as well as their impacts and aftermath.

Unit 731 was established first in 1932 as a small group of five scientists interested in biological weapons, and was expanded around 1936 when Shiro Ishii was given full command of the unit. Given alternative names like “lumber yard” and “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army”, the name “Unit 731” was made formal in 1941.  The lab was based at the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory in Japanese Army Military Medical School in Tokyo. Their purpose was none of the given names, but biological and chemical warfare research.

The idea of Unit 731 first circulated around by a memo written in April 23, 1936, that speaks about the establishment of reinforcement military forces in Manchuria. The memo states that there would be a new “Kwantung Army Epidemic Prevention Department” and that it shall be expanded later on. 

The headquarters was set in three square kilometers of land in Pingfang district, Manchuria. Many of the lab’s buildings inside were hidden by a tall wall and high voltage wired fences. The lab had around 150 buildings, including incinerator, housing for prisoners, an animal house, and air field. The buildings were completely isolated from the outside world, with only a tunnel as the entrance.

Unit 731, along with two other units to be mentioned later, was created in opposition to the Geneva protocol of 1925 banning biological and chemical warfare. This protocol was signed at June 17, 1925 in Geneva. It became effective from February 8th, 1928, and got registered by League of Nations Treaty Series on September 7, 1929.

Within Unit 731, there were eight subunits designed to focus on different topics of warfare. The first division focused on biological weapons like bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, typhoid, and tuberculosis, with human subjects to work with. The second division  focused on effectively spreading the biological weapons covered in the first division. The third division was focused on a specific way of spreading biological agents by bomb, the fourth on bacteria mass production and storage. The fifth through eighth divisions  were mostly focused on the supplying the rest of the Unit, which included training workers, providing equipment, and overall administrative units.

Outside of Unit 731, Japan established two departments: Unit 100 and Unit 516. Unit 100 was first declared as the “Kwantung Army Military Horse Epidemic Prevention Workshop,” which focused on developing biological weapons aside from Unit 731. “Kwantung Army Technical Testing Department”, later called Unit 516, was also established for more research that focused on chemical weapons. 

People Involved

There were many involved with the research of Unit 731, most of them remaining anonymous to this day. Shiro Ishii was the Chief of Unit 731, with Masaji Kitano as second in command. Other scientists were most likely to be a Professor at an university or a chief of a medical research unit, like Dr. Hisato Yoshimura, who directed the frostbite experiments on subjects, and Dr. Hideo Futaki, who lead the tuberculosis research squad and some vivisections. Other personnels include Lieutenant Shunichi Suzuki, who, after the trials, went to work as the Governor of Tokyo, and Amitani Shogo, who remained at the lab afterwards and received the Asahi Prize for outstanding scientific performance.

Shiro Ishii served in the Imperial Japanese Army from 1921 to 1945, and in the meantime, he was a Japanese army medical officer, microbiologist, and the director of Unit 731. Before serving in the army, he had studied medicine at Kyoto Imperial University. He was first assigned as an army surgeon, then to the First Army Hospital and Army Medical School in Tokyo. His work soon impressed the superiors, which earned him postgraduate level medical education. Ishii was promoted to an army surgeon in 1925, and was advocating for a biological weapons research program.

After getting promoted to higher ranks, Ishii began his experiments in Zhongma Fortress for biological weapons. Then the government granted him permission to set up Unit 731 in his hopes of digging deeper into the topic. After World War II, he was arrested for a short time by the US occupation authorities for Unit 731, then received immunity from consequences in exchange for data. There are different accounts as to what he did after that, but some say that he traveled around to give talks about biological weapons and others say that he stayed in Japan to provide medical services for free.

What They Did

In Unit 731, the first division conducted many outrageous experiments which were violating human rights. They conducted   many experiments that tested the limitations of the human body. The prisoners, used as subjects, were of mixed ethnicity and gender, some pregnant, and some as young as three years old.  The prisoners, tied to stakes, would have to endure the biological agent bombs that carried plague infested fleas on them or rats with the diseases. Then they were subject to their body being cut open with a scalpel and examined while they were screaming for mercy on the table. 

An unnamed Unit 731 surgeon, in an interview with  New York Times, described his experience with the unit. His first vivisection, which he recalled that he “cut [the prisoner] open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony… …finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons…” (Kristof) There was no use of anesthetics during vivisections at all because they were afraid that it would have an effect on the results and data.

In another part of his article, Kristof interviews a former medical worker in Unit 731, Takeo Wano. Wano says that he had seen “six-foot-high glass jar in which a Western man was pickled in formaldehyde. The man had been cut into two pieces, vertically.” There were many other jars in the headquarters of Unit 731 containing other body parts from different people, labeled often as their ethnicity. An anonymous Unit 731 veteran says that most of the jars had been noted as Chinese, Korean, and Mongolian, although there were occasionally American, English, and French. Some body parts were even sent in from other places.

Other experiments included prisoners being locked inside a pressure chamber to test how much pressure the body can handle before their eyes started popping out, being exposed to poisonous gas and many more biological and chemical weapons, having limbs cut off for studying blood loss, having cut off limbs attached to different parts of the body, having horse urine injected into kidneys, and having lethal dosages of x-rays. Kristof noted that “The accounts are wrenching to read even after so much time has passed: a Russian mother and daughter left in a gas chamber, for example, as doctors peered through thick glass and timed their convulsions, watching as the woman sprawled over her child in a futile effort to save her from the gas.”

Hisato Yoshimura, apart from infection based experiments, led the frostbite experiments, which focused on the effects of frostbite on human limbs. He gave orders to freeze limbs of prisoners, often until they were black. The prisoners were let in only when an officer was sure that their limbs were frozen. The officers would test limbs by beating them with a stick, as they knew that frozen limbs sound like wooden boards upon hitting. 

After chilling prisoners’ limbs to near 0 degrees Celsius with ice water, Yoshimura continued to chop off parts of the limb, especially fingers, so that he may record how the frostbite was affecting human limbs. He and his team experimented on subjects as young as three years old, with a needle in their finger to keep it from clenching into a fist. 

Effects During War

The Japanese Military used the biological weapons developed by Unit 731 directly on Chinese civilian population. Agents in divisions other than the first division in Unit 731 would spread the diseases by train, road, and airplanes. Many Chinese civilians developed the worst infections on their limbs, and only a few were exposed to treatment since no local doctors or hospitals had seen the infections before.

Quzhou village, Ya Fan village, and Chong Shan village in the Zhejiang Province had suffered deeply from the Bubonic Plague, as well as Dysentery, Typhoid, Cholera, and many more. In an episode of BBC Correspondent,  Wu Shi-Gen, a victim of Unit 731’s biological weapons, tells his story of how the Bubonic Plague had affected his nine-year old brother. The rest of the family chose to lock his little brother away in another room to minimize the possibilities of infections while the little boy cried out from the room. Wu said he still remembers how he could not run in and help his brother when he cried out in pain.

Ya Fan village was affected with an unknown infection, commonly known to residents as “The Rotten Leg Disease.” A victim of this infection describes it as something that “started like an insect bite, then swelling and unbearable pain. Then his flesh started rotting away. Many died of it. Experts say it’s probably Glanders, another of Unit 731’s special recipes. Treatments were ineffectual and cost a fortune.” He stated that while his mother and he both had the disease on their legs, she refused the medicine so that he could have it instead of her. She passed away a few months later.

Aside from negative effects, Unit 731’s research was also used to heal Japanese soldiers with certain conditions. Studying about human conditions like frostbites and different diseases, the doctors could effectively pinpoint medical solutions for their sick soldiers. For instance, the frostbite experiment revealed that putting frozen limbs in water from 100 to 122 degrees Celsius is the best.

As soon as the World War II was over, the scientists at Unit 731’s headquarters started burning the building down, getting rid of all the evidence. When Shiro Ishii and many others were captured by China and sent over to the US for a trial, they had a deal with President MacArthur. He decided to let go of the Unit 731’s scientists free of charge for the war crimes in exchange for their medical research data.

In addition, Japanese government was fairly late to apologize to the rightful victims of Unit 731, while paying war tributes to the dead war criminals of Unit 731. They have been continuously visiting their shrines every year since 2013, offending neighboring countries and victims. Many news articles had been written about it, yet they do not seem to matter to the Japanese government.

Many Japanese scholars also deny the fact that there was ever a Unit 731 and state that the history involving the group is fabricated, although there are plenty of evidences. The Japanese history textbooks do not cover most of Japan’s horrific acts in World War II, leading them to believe that Japan was mostly a victim country rather than hostile like their opponents. By large, the Japanese public has a false sense of history due to the fact that their history textbooks are skewed. 

The former members of Unit 731 seem to have conflicting opinions about the publicity of the topic. Yoshio Shinozuka and some others had gone to give talks and share information about Unit 731, but others like Toshimi Mizobuchi intend to keep the promise to hide the information. A portion of Unit 731 members still hold their annual staff reunion parties hosted by Mizobuchi.

Unit 731 has been one of of the most cruel groups to do human experimentation, yet so few people that I’ve met know about what really happened. Although these inhumane experiments could be defended by saying that they were useful for modern medical science, they were definitely not worth the cost of many civilian lives as well as prisoners’ suffering.

Maruta — “Log” in Japanese. Prisoners were often called logs so that they could be experimented on without scientists feeling remorse.

Vivisection —  Much like dissection, but with an alive person.

Unit 731: Japan’s Biological Warfare Project. (2018). Retrieved March 14, 2018, from https://unit731.org/ Kristof, N. D. (1995, March 17). Unmasking Horror — A special report.; Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world/unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html?pagewanted=all L. (2013, February 11). Unit 731: Japan’s biological force. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LfMNX3TsT0 Working, R. (2001, June 5). The trial of Unit 731. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2001/06/05/commentary/world-commentary/the-trial-of-unit-731/#.WqoQ6z9zJhE McCurry, J. (2013, December 26). Japan’s Shinzo Abe angers neighbours and US by visiting war dead shrine. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/26/japan-shinzo-abe-tension-neighbours-shrine Beijing, S. A. (2014, October 17). China protests at Japanese PM’s latest WW2 shrine tribute. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/17/china-protests-japan-shinzo-abe-yasukuni-shrine Japanese PM Abe sends ritual offering to Yasukuni shrine for war dead. (2017, October 17). Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-yasukuni/japanese-pm-abe-sends-ritual-offering-to-yasukuni-shrine-for-war-dead-idUSKBN1CL355 Abe training jet photo sparks outrage in South Korean media. (2013, May 15). Retrieved March 24, 2018, from http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1238533/abe-training-jet-photo-sparks-outrage-south-korean-media Tsuneishi, K. (2005, November 24). Unit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army’s Biological Warfare Program. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://apjjf.org/-Tsuneishi-Keiichi/2194/article.html Pure Evil: Wartime Japanese Doctor Had No Regard for Human Suffering. (2016, June 15). Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.medicalbag.com/despicable-doctors/pure-evil-wartime-japanese-doctor-had-no-regard-for-human-suffering/article/472462/ Tsuchiya, T. (2007, December 16). Retrieved March 24, 2018, from http://www.lit.osaka-cu.ac.jp/user/tsuchiya/gyoseki/presentation/UNESCOkumamoto07.html Unit 731: One of the Most Terrifying Secrets of the 20th Century. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2018, from https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~kann20c/classweb/dw2/page1.html

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Unit 731 , short for Manshu Detachment 731 , was a unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in unethical and deadly human experimentation , including testing of biological and chemical weapons on human populations, during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II . Based in Japanese-occupied China , it was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes committed by the armed forces of Imperial Japan, including anthrax, cholera , and bubonic plague attacks on both military and civilian populations; vivisection of men, women, children, and infants (often without anesthesia); testing of grenades and flamethrowers on people; and subjecting victims to water deprivation, low pressure, low temperature (causing frostbite), chemical agents, amputation and limb reattachment, being buried alive, and other atrocities. Because Shirō Ishii was director of Unit 731, the division has also been referred to as the Ishii Unit.

• 2.1 Zhongma Fortress
• 2.2 Unit 731
• 2.3 Other units
• 3.1 Chemical agents and chemical weapons
• 3.2 Biological agents and biological weapons
• 3.3 Frostbite testing
• 3.4 Vivisection
• 3.5 Venereal diseases
• 3.6 Weapon testing
• 3.7 Other experiments
• 4 Victims, including numbers of victims
• 5 Known unit members
• 6 Divisions
• 7 Facilities
• 8.1 Destruction of evidence and arrest
• 8.2 American grant of immunity
• 8.3 Separate Soviet trials
• 8.4 Aftermath
• 10 References

The heinous acts of torture committed by Unit 731 mirrored the inhumane experimentation conducted on prisoners by Nazi Germany. However, the aftermath of the two atrocities were very different. Many of the perpetrators of the Nazi human experimentation were tried by the United States in the Doctors' Trial , and the response to the unveiling of the Nazi crimes included the pivotal development of the Nuremberg Code and subsequently other sets of ethical standards for research with human subjects. In the case of Unit 731, most of the key participants in Unit 731, including Shirō Ishii, escaped prosecution via an agreement with the United States to provide their research findings. In addition, most of the Unit 731 crimes escaped public attention for years. Some of those responsible for Unit 731 were captured by the Soviet Union and subject to trials by that nation.

Unit 731 was active in Japanese-occupied territory in Asia, notably Manchuria . The Empire of Japan first invaded Manchuria in 1931, and in 1932 established the puppet state of Manchukuo. The formation of Unit 731 began in 1932 with the establishment of a research group in Manchukuo for chemical and biological experimentation.

Japan occupied other areas in Asia during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War and established branch offices of Unit 731 in some of these areas as well. The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) was primarily waged between the Republic of China (1912–1949) and the Empire of Japan. The beginning of the war is conventionally dated to the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, when a dispute between Japanese and Chinese troops in Beijing escalated into a full-scale invasion. This full-scale war between the Chinese and the Empire of Japan is often regarded as the beginning of World War II in Asia: after the Japanese invasion of Malaya and attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Second Sino-Japanese War merged with other conflicts that are generally categorized under those conflicts of World War II. However, some scholars consider the European theatre of World War II and the Pacific War to be entirely separate, albeit concurrent, wars. Other scholars consider the start of the full-scale Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 to have been the beginning of World War II. Following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the Japanese scored major victories, capturing Beijing, Shanghai, and the Chinese capital of Nanjing in 1937. After failing to stop the Japanese in the Battle of Wuhan, the Chinese central government was relocated to Chongqing (Chungking) in the Chinese interior.

The formation of Unit 731 traces to 1932, when Surgeon General Shirō Ishii, chief medical officer of the Imperial Japanese Army, organized a secret research group, the "Tōgō Unit," for chemical and biological experimentation in Manchuria. In 1936, Emperor Hirohito authorized the expansion of this unit and its integration into the Kwantung Army as the Epidemic Prevention Department (Barenblatt 2005). In 1940, it became known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army (Tanaka 1996), or Unit 731 ( 731部隊 , Nana-san-ichi Butai ) , short for Manshu Detachment 731. It is also known as the Kamo Detachment (USSR 1950) and the Ishii Detachment or Ishii Unit (CIA 1947). Unit 731 was based in the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, but also had active branch offices throughout China and Southeast Asia. (Note that the Japanese word butai is variously translated with military terms such as "unit," "detachment," "regiment," or "company.")

Unit 731 was commanded until the end of World War II by General Ishii. The facility itself was built in 1935 as a replacement for the Zhongma Fortress, and Ishii and his team used it to expand their capabilities. The program received generous support from the Japanese government until the end of the war in 1945. Unit 731 and the other units of the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department operated biological weapon production, testing, deployment and storage facilities. They routinely conducted tests on human beings (who were internally referred to as "logs"). Additionally, the biological weapons were tested in the field on cities and towns in China. Estimates of those who were killed by Unit 731 and its related programs range up to half a million people.

The researchers in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data which they gathered during their human experimentation (Gold 1996). Other researchers that the Soviet forces managed to arrest first were tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949. The Americans did not try the researchers so that the information and experience gained in bio-weapons could be co-opted into their biological warfare program, much as they had done with Nazi researchers in Operation Paperclip (Harris 2002). Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the West as communist propaganda (Brody et al. 2014).

In 1932, Surgeon General Shirō Ishii ( 石井四郎 , Ishii Shirō ) , chief medical officer of the Imperial Japanese Army and protégé of Ministry of War of Japan 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.

One of Ishii's main supporters inside the army was Colonel Chikahiko Koizumi, who later became Japan's Health Minister (Minister of Health, Labor, and Welfare) from 1941 to 1945. 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 (Williams and Wallace 1989).

Zhongma Fortress

Unit Tōgō was implemented in the Zhongma Fortress, a prison/experimentation camp in Beiyinhe, a village 100 km (62 mi) south of Harbin on the South Manchuria Railway. Prisoners were generally well fed on the usual diet of rice or wheat , meat , fish, and occasionally even alcohol, with the intent of having prisoners in their normal state of health at the beginning of experiments. Over several days, prisoners were eventually drained of blood and deprived of nutrients and water. Their deteriorating health was recorded. Some were also vivisected. Others were deliberately infected with plague bacteria and other microbes.

In the autumn of 1934, a prison break, which jeopardized the facility's secrecy along with a later explosion (believed to be sabotage) in 1935 led Ishii to shut down Zhongma Fortress. He then received authorization to move to Pingfang, approximately 24 km (15 mi) south of Harbin, to set up a new, much larger facility (Harris 2002).

In 1936, Emperor Hirohito authorized by decree the expansion of this unit and its integration into the Kwantung Army as the Epidemic Prevention Department (Barenblat 2005). It was divided at that time into the "Ishii Unit" and "Wakamatsu Unit," with a base in Hsinking (Changchun; it was renamed Hsinking during the Japanese occupation, serving as the capital of Imperial Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo). From August 1940, the units were known collectively as the "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army (関東軍防疫給水部本部)" (Tanaka 1996) or "Unit 731" (満州第731部隊) for short.

Other units

In addition to the establishment of Unit 731, the decree also called for the establishment of an additional biological warfare development unit called the Kwantung Army Military Horse Epidemic Prevention Workshop (later referred to as Manchuria Unit 100) and a chemical warfare development unit called the Kwantung Army Technical Testing Department (later referred to as Manchuria Unit 516). After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, sister chemical and biological warfare units were founded in major Chinese cities and were referred to as Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Units. Detachments included Unit 1855 in Beijing, Unit 1644 in Nanjing, Unit 8604 in Guangzhou, and later Unit 9420 in Singapore. All of these units comprised Ishii's network and at its height in 1939 was composed of more than 10,000 personnel (Keiichi 2005). Medical doctors and professors from Japan were attracted to join Unit 731 by the rare opportunity to conduct human experimentation and strong financial support from the Army (NHK 2017).

Human experiments

Human experimentation was conducted using men, women, and children — including infants, the elderly, and pregnant women — both inside the facility and among surrounding populations. The subjects included common criminals, captured bandits, anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners, the homeless and mentally handicapped, and also people rounded up by the Kempeitai military police for alleged "suspicious activities." Ordinary citizens were also subjects to the tortures and death conducted by the researchers. The members of Unit 731 included approximately 300 researchers, including doctors and bacteriologists (Harris 2002). Many of the researchers had been desensitized to performing cruel experiments from experience in animal research (Cook and Cook 2000).

Test subjects were sometimes euphemistically referred to as "logs" ( 丸太 , maruta ) , used in such contexts as "How many logs fell?" This term may have originated by Unit 731 staff based on the fact that the official cover story for the facility was that it was a lumber mill. However, in an account by a man who worked as a junior uniformed civilian employee of the Imperial Japanese Army in Unit 731, the project was internally called "Holzklotz," which is a German word for log (Cook and Cook 2000). Researchers in Unit 731 published some of their results in peer-reviewed journals, writing as though the research had been conducted on non-human primates called "Manchurian monkeys," or "long-tailed monkeys" (Harris 2002).

Experiments conducted on subjects included those involving chemical agents and chemical weapons, biological agents and biological weapons, frostbite, vivisection, venereal diseases, and weapons testing, among others.

Chemical agents and chemical weapons

Unit 731 tested many different chemical agents on prisoners and had a building dedicated to gas experiments. Some of the agents tested were mustard gas, lewisite, cyanic acid gas, white phosphorus, adamsite, and phosgene gas (Gold and Totani 2019).

A former army major and technician gave the following testimony anonymously (at the time of the interview, this man was a professor emeritus at a national university) (Gold and Totani 2019):

In 1943, I attended a poison gas test held at the Unit 731 test facilities. A glass-walled chamber about three meters square and two meters high was used. Inside of it, a Chinese man was blindfolded, with his hands tied around a post behind him. The gas was adamsite (sneezing gas), and as the gas filled the chamber the man went into violent coughing convulsions and began to suffer excruciating pain. More than ten doctors and technicians were present. After I had watched for about ten minutes, I could not stand it any more, and left the area. I understand that other types of gases were also tested there.

Unit 731 also tested chemical weapons on prisoners in field conditions. A report authored by an unknown researcher in the Kamo Unit (Unit 731) describes a large human experiment of yperite gas (mustard gas) on September 7—10, 1940. Twenty subjects were divided into three groups and placed in combat emplacements, trenches, gazebos, and observatories. One group was clothed with Chinese underwear, no hat, and no mask, and was subjected to as much as 1,800 field gun rounds of yperite gas over 25 minutes. Another group was clothed in summer military uniform and shoes; three had masks, and another three had no mask. They also were exposed to as much as 1,800 rounds of yperite gas. A third group was clothed in summer military uniform, three with masks, and two without masks, and were exposed to as much as 4,800 rounds. Then their general symptoms and damage to skin, eye, respiratory organs, and digestive organs were observed at 4 hours, 24 hours, and 2, 3, and 5 days after the shots. Injecting the blister fluid from one subject into another subject and analyses of blood and soil were also performed. Five subjects were forced to drink a solution of yperite and lewisite gas in water, with or without decontamination. The report describes conditions of every subject precisely without mentioning what happened to them in the long run (Emanuel et al. 2011).

Biological agents and biological weapons

Unit 731 and its affiliated units were involved in testing of numerous biological agents on humans, including anthrax, typhoid , plague (infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis ), dysentery , tuberculosis , syphilis , tetanus, salmonella , tetrodotoxin (pufferfish or fugu venom), gas gangrene, meningitis, and yellow fever, including the deployment of epidemic-creating biowarfare weapons in assaults against the Chinese populace (both military and civilian) throughout World War II.

At least 12 large-scale field trials of biological weapons were performed, and at least 11 Chinese cities were attacked with biological agents. Plague-infected fleas , bred in the laboratories of Unit 731 and Unit 1644, were spread by low-flying airplanes upon Chinese cities, including coastal Ningbo and Changde, Hunan Province, in 1940 and 1941 (CIA 1947). This military aerial spraying killed tens of thousands of people with bubonic plague epidemics. An expedition to Nanking involved spreading typhoid and paratyphoid germs into the wells, marshes, and houses of the city, as well as infusing them into snacks to be distributed among the locals. Epidemics broke out shortly after, with the conclusion that paratyphoid fever was "the most effective" of the pathogens (Harris 2003; Barenblatt 2004). An attack on Changda in 1941 reportedly led to approximately 10,000 biological casualties and 1,700 deaths among ill-prepared Japanese troops, with most cases due to cholera (Christopher et al. 1997). In addition, poisoned food and candies were given to unsuspecting victims.

During the final months of World War II, Japan planned to use plague as a biological weapon against the United States in Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night. The plan was scheduled to launch on September 22, 1945, but Japan surrendered five weeks earlier (Baumslag 2005; Kristol 1995).

Due to pressure from numerous accounts of the bio-warfare attacks, Chiang Kai-shek sent a delegation of army and foreign medical personnel in November 1941 to document evidence and treat the afflicted. A report on the Japanese use of plague-infested fleas on Changde was made widely available the following year, but was not addressed by the Allied Powers until Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a public warning in 1943 condemning the attacks (Guillemin 2017).

Frostbite testing

Army Engineer Hisato Yoshimura conducted experiments by taking captives outside, dipping various appendages into water of varying temperatures, and allowing the limb to freeze (Tsuchiya 2007). Once frozen, Yoshimura would strike their affected limbs with a short stick, "emitting a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck" (Kristof 1995). The affected area was subjected to various treatments. For example, the best temperature for treating frostbite was found to be immersion in water slightly above 100 degrees but less than 122 degrees; this was found to be better than the traditional method of rubbing the affected limb (Kristof 1995).

Members of the Unit referred to Yoshimura as a “scientific devil” and a “cold blooded animal” (LaFleur et al. 2007). Naoji Uezono, a member of Unit 731, described in a 1980s interview a grisly scene where Yoshimura had “two naked men put in an area 40-50 degrees below zero and researchers filmed the whole process until [the subjects] died. The subjects suffered such agony they were digging their nails into each other’s flesh” (Emanuel et al. 2011). Yoshimura’s lack of remorse was evident in an article he wrote for the Journal Of Japanese Physiology in 1950 in which he admitted to using 20 children and a 3-day-old infant in experiments which exposed them to zero-degree-celsius ice and salt water (Yoshimura and Iida 1950). [Kristof (1995) reported about a three-day-old baby had a needle stuck into the middle finger to measure temperature; the needle prevented the hand from clenching into a fist and by keeping the finger straight it made the experiment easier.] Although this article drew criticism, Yoshimura denied any guilt when contacted by a reporter from the Japanese newpaper Mainichi Shinbun (Kei-ichi and Asano 1982).

Yoshimura developed a “resistance index of frostbite” based on the mean temperature 5 to 30 minutes after immersion in freezing water, the temperature of the first rise after immersion, and the time until the temperature first rises after immersion. 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 (45 g NaCl per day, 15 g NaCl per day, no salt) (Eckart 2006). This original data are seen in the above figure.

Vivisection

Thousands of men, women, children and infants interned at prisoner of war camps were subjected to vivisection (surgery on a living organism), often without anesthesia and usually ending with the death of the victim (Kristof 1995). Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss. Those limbs that were removed were sometimes re-attached to the opposite sides of the body. Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and the esophagus reattached to the intestines. Parts of organs, such as the brain, lungs, and liver, were removed from some prisoners (Parry 2007). Imperial Japanese Army surgeon Ken Yuasa suggests that the practice of vivisection on human subjects was widespread even outside Unit 731 (Kristof 1995), estimating that at least 1,000 Japanese personnel were involved in the practice in mainland China (Hongo 2007).

A former member of the Special Team (who insisted on anonymity) recalled in 1995 his first vivisection conducted at the Unit, involving a 30-year-old man tied to a bed naked, who was dissected without anesthetic (Kristol 1995):

He didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped.

Other sources suggest that it was the usual practice in the Unit for surgeons to stuff a rag (or medical gauze) into the mouth of prisoners before commencing vivisection, in order to stifle any screaming (Yang 2016).

Venereal diseases

To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea , then studied. In some cases, this was done via injection, disguised as vaccinations (Medical Bag 2014).

Unit members also orchestrated forced sex acts between infected and non-infected 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 (Gold and Tutani 2019):

Infection of venereal disease by injection was abandoned, and the researchers started forcing the prisoners into sexual acts with each other. Four or five unit members, dressed in white laboratory clothing completely covering the body with only eyes and mouth visible, rest covered, handled the tests. A male and female, one infected with syphilis, would be brought together in a cell and forced into sex with each other. It was made clear that anyone resisting would be shot.

After victims were infected, they were vivisected at different stages of infection, so that internal and external organs could be observed as the disease progressed.

Some children infected with syphilis grew up inside the walls of Unit 731. A Youth Corps member deployed to train at Unit 731 recalled viewing a batch of subjects that would undergo syphilis testing: "one was a Chinese woman holding an infant, one was a White Russian woman with a daughter of four or five years of age, and the last was a White Russian woman with a boy of about six or seven" (Gold and Tutani 2019). The children of these women were tested in ways similar to their parents, with specific emphasis on determining how longer infection periods affected the effectiveness of treatments.

Weapon testing

Unit 731 was involved in testing weapons on human subjects, including grenades, flamethrowers, explosives, and other weapons.

Human targets were used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in various positions. Flamethrowers were tested on people (Hickey et al. 2017). Victims were also tied to stakes and used as targets to test pathogen-releasing bombs, chemical weapons, shrapnel bombs with varying amounts of fragments, and explosive bombs as well as bayonets and knives.

To determine the best course of treatment for varying degrees of shrapnel wounds sustained on the field by Japanese soldiers, Chinese prisoners were exposed to direct bomb blasts. They were strapped, unprotected, to wooden planks that were staked into the ground at increasing distances around a bomb that was then detonated. It was surgery for most, autopsies for the rest. —Unit 731, Nightmare in Manchuria (Monchinski 2008; Neuman 2008)

Other experiments

In other tests, subjects were deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death; placed into low-pressure chambers until their eyes popped from the sockets; experimented upon to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival; hung upside down until death; crushed with heavy objects; electrocuted; dehydrated with hot fans; placed into centrifuges and spun until death; injected with animal blood; exposed to lethal doses of x-rays ; subjected to various chemical weapons inside gas chambers; injected with sea water; and burned or buried alive (Kristof 1995; Silvester 2006).

Massive amounts of blood were drained from some prisoners in order to study the effects of blood loss according to former Unit 731 vivisectionist Okawa Fukumatsu. In one case, at least half a liter of blood was drawn at two to three-day intervals (Gold and Totani 2019). Unit 731 also performed transfusion experiments with different blood types. Unit member Naeo Ikeda wrote (Eckart 2006):

In my experience, when A type blood 100 cc was transfused to an O type subject, whose pulse was 87 per minute and temperature was 35.4 degrees C, 30 minutes later the temperature rose to 38.6 degrees with slight trepidation. Sixty minutes later the pulse was 106 per minute and the temperature was 39.4 degrees. Two hours later the temperature was 37.7 degrees, and three hours later the subject recovered. When AB type blood 120 cc was transfused to an O type subject, an hour later the subject described malaise and psychroesthesia in both legs. When AB type blood 100 cc was transfused to a B type subject, there seemed to be no side effect.

Female prisoners were forced to become pregnant for use in experiments, with the stated reason the possibility of vertical transmission (from mother to child) of diseases, particularly syphilis. Fetal survival and damage to mother's reproductive organs were objects of interest. Though "a large number of babies were born in captivity," there have been no accounts of any survivors of Unit 731, children included. It is suspected that the children of female prisoners were killed after birth or aborted (Gold and Totani 2019).

While male prisoners were often used in single studies, so that the results of the experimentation on them would not be clouded by other variables, women were sometimes used in sex experiments and as the victims of sex crimes. The testimony of a unit member that served as a guard graphically demonstrated this reality (Gold and Totani 2019):

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. So he and another unit member took the keys to the cells and opened one that housed a Chinese woman. One of the unit members raped her; the other member took the keys and opened another cell. There was a Chinese woman in there who had been used in a frostbite experiment. She had several fingers missing and her bones were black, with gangrene set in. He was about to rape her anyway, then he saw that her sex organ was festering, with pus oozing to the surface. He gave up the idea, left and locked the door, then later went on to his experimental work.

Victims, including numbers of victims

The victims of Unit 731 included prisoners (criminals, anti-Japanese partisans, political dissidents, communist sympathizers, and those arrested for alleged suspicious activities), the homeless and mentally handicapped, and ordinary citizens. The victims included men, women, children, and infants. While the majority were Chinese, the victims also comprised Russians, Mongolians, Koreans, and other populations. There are reports that the victims also consisted of a small number of European, American, Indian, Australian and New Zealander prisoners of war (Wells 2009; Gold and Totani 2019; Harris 2002).

There have been widely varying estimates of the number of people killed due to activities of Unit 731. Sheldon Harris, an American historian, states that over 200,000 were killed in the germ warfare experiments (Harris 2002; Kristoff 1995). He also states that plague-infected animals released near the war's end killed at least 30,000 people in the Harbin area from 1946 through 1948 (Kristoff 1995). During a 2002 international symposium on crimes of bacteriological warfare held in Changde, China (site of a plague flea bombing), there was an estimate given of around 580,000 deaths caused by the germ warfare and human experiments (Barenblatt 2004). On the other hand, Keiichi Tsuneishi, a leading Japanese scholar of Unit 731, is skeptical of such high numbers (Kristoff 1995). At least 3,000 men, women, and children were subjected to experimentation conducted by Unit 731 at the camp based in Pingfang alone, which does not include victims from other medical experimentation sites, such as Unit 100 (Tsuchiya 2006). Note that in addition to Chinese casualties, 1,700 Japanese troops in Zhejiang during the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign were killed by their own biological weapons while attempting to unleash the biological agent (Rapoport 2014).

Known unit members

In April 2018, the National Archives of Japan disclosed a nearly complete list of 3,607 members of Unit 731 to Katsuo Nishiyama, a professor at Shiga University of Medical Science. Nishiyama reportedly intends to publish the list online to encourage further study into the unit (McCurry 2018).

Some of the previously disclosed members include:

• Lieutenant General Shirō Ishii
• Lieutenant Colonel Ryoichi Naito, founder of the pharmaceutical company Green Cross
• Professor, Major General Masaji Kitano, commander, 1942–1945 (Christopher et al. 1997; Fuller 1992).
• Kazuhisa Kanazawa, chief of the 1st Division of Branch 673 of Unit 731
• Ryoichiro Hotta, member of the Hailar Branch of Unit 731 (Fuller 1992).

There were also twelve members who were formally tried and sentenced in the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials, held in December 1949 in the Soviet Union.

Unit 731 was divided into eight divisions:

• Division 1: research on bubonic plague , cholera , anthrax, typhoid and tuberculosis using live human subjects; for this purpose, a prison was constructed to contain around three to four hundred people
• Division 2: research for biological weapons used in the field, in particular the production of devices to spread germs and parasites
• Division 3: production of shells containing biological agents; stationed in Harbin
• Division 4: bacteria mass-production and storage
• Division 5: training of personnel
• Divisions 6–8: equipment, medical and administrative units

Unit 731 had other units underneath it in the chain of command. Most or all units had branch offices, which were also often referred to as "Units." The term Unit 731 can refer to the Harbin complex itself or it can refer to the organization with its branches.

The Unit 731 complex covered 6 square kilometers (2.3 sq mi) and consisted of more than 150 buildings. The design of the facilities made them hard to destroy by bombing. The complex contained various factories. It had around 4,500 containers to be used to raise fleas , six cauldrons to produce various chemicals, and around 1,800 containers to produce biological agents. Approximately 30 kilograms (66 lb) of bubonic plague bacteria could be produced in a few days.

Unit 731 had branches in Linkou (Branch 162), Mudanjiang, Hailin (Branch 643), Sunwu (Branch 673), Toan and Hailar (Branch 543) (USSR 1950).

A medical school and research facility belonging to Unit 731 operated in the Shinjuku District of Tokyo during World War II. In 2006, Toyo Ishii — a nurse who worked at the school during the war — revealed that she had helped bury bodies and pieces of bodies on the school's grounds shortly after Japan's surrender in 1945. In response, in February 2011 the Ministry of Health began to excavate the site (AP 2011). While Tokyo courts acknowledged in 2002 that Unit 731 had been involved in biological warfare research, the Japanese government had made no official acknowledgment of the atrocities committed against test subjects, and rejected the Chinese government's requests for DNA samples to identify human remains (including skulls and bones) found near an army medical school (The Economist 2011).

Surrender and immunity

Operations and experiments continued until the end of the war. Ishii had wanted to use biological weapons in the Pacific War since May 1944, but his attempts were rejected.

Destruction of evidence and arrest

With the coming of the Red Army in August 1945, the unit had to abandon their work in haste. Ministries in Tokyo ordered the destruction of all incriminating materials, including those in Pingfang. Potential witnesses were killed — the 300 remaining prisoners were either gassed or fed poison and then were cremated; the 600 Chinese and Manchurian laborers were shot. Ishii swore every member of the group to silence and they were told to disappear (Altheide).

Skeleton crews of Ishii's Japanese troops blew up the compound in the final days of the war to destroy evidence of their activities, but many were sturdy enough to remain somewhat intact.

Ishii and various leaders of Unit 731 was arrested by United States authorities during the Occupation of Japan at the end of World War II. They were supposed to be thoroughly interrogated by Soviet authorities (BBC 1984). Instead, Ishii and his team managed to negotiate and receive immunity from prosecution in 1946 from Japanese war-crimes prosecution before the Tokyo tribunal in exchange for their full disclosure (Brody et al. 2014; Kaye 2017).

The Soviet Union did arrest and prosecute twelve top military leaders and scientists from Unit 731 and affiliated units in the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials.

American grant of immunity

Among the individuals in Japan after its 1945 surrender was Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders, who arrived in Yokohama via the American ship Sturgess in September 1945. Sanders was a highly regarded microbiologist and a member of America's Military Center for Biological Weapons. Sanders' duty was to investigate Japanese biological warfare activity. At the time of his arrival in Japan he had no knowledge of what Unit 731 was. Until Sanders finally threatened the Japanese with bringing the Soviets into the picture, little information about biological warfare was being shared with the Americans. The Japanese wanted to avoid prosecution under the Soviet legal system, so the next morning after he made his threat, Sanders received a manuscript describing Japan's involvement in biological warfare. Sanders took this information to General Douglas MacArthur, who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers responsible for rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupations. MacArthur struck a deal with Japanese informants: He secretly granted immunity from prosecution to the physicians of Unit 731, including their leader, Ishii, in exchange for providing America, but not the other wartime allies, with their research on biological warfare and data from human experimentation (Gold 2004).

Although the Soviet authorities wished the prosecutions to take place, the United States objected after the reports of the investigating US microbiologists. Among these was Edwin Hill, the Chief of Fort Detrick, whose report stated that the information was "absolutely invaluable;" it "could never have been obtained in the United States because of scruples attached to experiments on humans" and "the information was obtained fairly cheaply" (BBC 1984). On May 6, 1947, Douglas MacArthur wrote to Washington, D.C. , that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence" (Gold 2004). The reason for the Americans granting immunity was that they believed that the research data was valuable and did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons (McNaught 2002).

The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal heard only one reference to Japanese experiments with "poisonous serums" on Chinese civilians. This took place in August 1946 and was instigated by David Sutton, assistant to the Chinese prosecutor. The Japanese defense counsel argued that the claim was vague and uncorroborated, and it was dismissed by the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence. The subject was not pursued further by Sutton, who was probably unaware of Unit 731's activities. His reference to it at the trial is believed to have been accidental.

Separate Soviet trials

Although publicly silent on the issue at the Tokyo Trials, the Soviet Union pursued the case and prosecuted twelve top military leaders and scientists from Unit 731, and its affiliated biological-war prisons Unit 1644 in Nanjing and Unit 100 in Changchun, in the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials. Included among those prosecuted for war crimes, including germ warfare, was General Otozō Yamada, the commander-in-chief of the million-man Kwantung Army occupying Manchuria.

The trial of those captured Japanese perpetrators was held in December 1949 in Khabarovsk, Russia, located in southeast Russia, near the border with China. A lengthy partial transcript of the trial proceedings was published in different languages the following year by a Moscow foreign languages press, including an English-language edition (USSR 1950). The lead prosecuting attorney at the Khabarovsk trial was Lev Smirnov, who had been one of the top Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials . The Japanese doctors and army commanders who had perpetrated the Unit 731 experiments received sentences from the Khabarovsk court ranging from two to 25 years in a Siberian gulag (labor camp). The United States refused to acknowledge the trials, branding them communist propaganda (Tsuchiya 2011). The sentences doled out to the Japanese perpetrators were unusually lenient by Soviet standards, and all but one of the defendants returned to Japan by the 1950s (with the remaining prisoner committing suicide inside his cell). In addition to the accusations of propaganda, the US also asserted that the trials were only to 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. The accusations of both the US and the USSR were true, and it is believed that the Japanese had also given information to the Soviets regarding their biological experimentation for judicial leniency (Vanderbrook 2013). This was evidenced by the Soviet Union building a biological weapons facility in Sverdlovsk using documentation captured from Unit 731 in Manchuria (Alibek and Handelman 2000).

There was consensus among US researchers in the postwar period that the human experimentation data gained was of little value to the development of American biological weapons and medicine.

Japanese history textbooks usually contain references to Unit 731, but do not go into detail about allegations (Selden and Nozaki 2009; Masalski 2001). Saburō Ienaga's New History of Japan included a detailed description, based on officers' testimony. The Ministry for Education attempted to remove this passage from his textbook before it was taught in public schools, on the basis that the testimony was insufficient. The Supreme Court of Japan ruled in 1997 that the testimony was indeed sufficient and that requiring it to be removed was an illegal violation of freedom of speech (Asahi Shimbun 1997).

In August 2002, the Tokyo district court ruled for the first time that Japan had engaged in biological warfare. Presiding judge Koji Iwata ruled that Unit 731, on the orders of the Imperial Japanese Army headquarters, used bacteriological weapons on Chinese civilians between 1940 and 1942, spreading diseases including plague and typhoid in the cities of Quzhou, Ningbo, and Changde. However, he rejected the victims' claims for compensation on the grounds that they had already been settled by international peace treaties (Watts 2002).

In October 2003, a member of the House of Representatives of Japan filed an inquiry. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi responded that the Japanese government did not then possess any records related to Unit 731, but the government recognized the gravity of the matter and would publicize any records that were located in the future. In April 2018, the National Archives of Japan released the names of 3,607 members of Unit 731, in response to a request by Professor Katsuo Nishiyama of the Shiga University of Medical Science (Japan Times 2018; McCurry 2018).

After WWII, the U.S. Office of Special Investigations created a watchlist of suspected Axis collaborators and persecutors who were banned from entering the United States. While they have added over 60,000 names to the watchlist, they have only been able to identify under 100 Japanese participants. In a 1998 correspondence letter between the DOJ and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Eli Rosenbaum, director of OSI, stated that this was due to two factors. (1) While most documents captured by the US in Europe were microfilmed before being returned to their respective governments, the Department of Defense decided to not microfilm its vast collection of documents before returning them to the Japanese government. (2) The Japanese government has also failed to grant the OSI meaningful access to these and related records after the war, while European countries, on the other hand, have been largely cooperative (US Dept. of Justice 1998).

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References ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

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A mysterious pile of bones could hold evidence of Japanese war crimes, activists say

FILE - A pink tape is marked on the ground on Feb. 21, 2011, at the site of a former medical school in Tokyo as Japan has started to excavate the site of the former school linked to Unit 731, a germ and biological warfare outfit during the war. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara, File)

FILE - A power shovel is used on Feb. 21, 2011 to dig the site of a former medical school in Tokyo linked to Unit 731, a germ and biological warfare outfit during the war. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara, File)

Members of a citizens group investigating the bones dug up from a wartime Imperial Army medical school site, hold the excavation anniversary on July 20, 2024, in Tokyo. Hideo Shimizu, seen on screen, who was sent to Unit 731 in April 1945 at age 14 as lab technician, joined the meeting online from his home in Nagano. (Kyodo News via AP)

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TOKYO (AP) — Depending on who you ask, the bones that have been sitting in a Tokyo repository for decades could be either leftovers from early 20th century anatomy classes, or the unburied and unidentified victims of one of the country’s most notorious war crimes.

A group of activists, historians and other experts who want the government to investigate links to wartime human germ warfare experiments met over the weekend to mark the 35th anniversary of their discovery and renew a call for an independent panel to examine the evidence.

Japan’s government has long avoided discussing wartime atrocities, including the sexual abuse of Asian women known as “comfort women” and Korean forced laborers at Japanese mines and factories, often on grounds of lack of documentary proof. Japan has apologized for its aggression in Asia, but since the 2010s it has been repeatedly criticized in South Korea and China for backpedalling.

Around a dozen skulls, many with cuts, and parts of other skeletons were unearthed on July 22, 1989, during construction of a Health Ministry research institute at the site of the wartime Army Medical School. The school’s close ties to a germ and biological warfare unit led many to suspect that they could be the remains of a dark history that the Japanese government has never officially acknowledged.

Headquartered in then-Japanese-controlled northeast China, Unit 731 and several related units injected prisoners of war with typhus, cholera and other diseases, according to historians and former unit members. They also say the unit performed unnecessary amputations and organ removals on living people to practice surgery and froze prisoners to death in endurance tests. Japan’s government has acknowledged only that Unit 731 existed.

Top Unit 731 officials were not tried in postwar tribunals as the U.S. sought to get ahold of chemical warfare data, historians say, although lower-ranked officials were tried by Soviet tribunals. Some of the unit’s leaders became medical professors and pharmaceutical executives after the war.

A previous Health Ministry investigation said the bones couldn’t be linked to the unit, and concluded that the remains were most likely from bodies used in medical education or brought back from war zones for analysis, in a 2001 report based on questioning 290 people associated with the school.

It acknowledged that some interviewees drew connections to Unit 731. One said he saw a head in a barrel shipped from Manchuria, northern China, where the unit was based. Two others noted hearing about specimens from the unit being stored in a school building, but had not actually seen them. Others denied the link, saying the specimens could include those from the prewar era.

A 1992 anthropological analysis found that the bones came from at least 62 and possibly more than 100 different bodies, mostly adults from parts of Asia outside Japan. The holes and cuts found on some skulls were made after death, it said, but did not find evidence linking the bones to Unit 731.

But activists say that the government could do more to uncover the truth, including publishing full accounts of its interviews and conducting DNA testing.

Kazuyuki Kawamura, a former Shinjuku district assembly member who has devoted most of his career to resolving the bone mystery, recently obtained 400 pages of research materials from the 2001 report using freedom of information requests, and says it shows that the government “tactfully excluded” key information from witness accounts.

The newly published material doesn’t contain a smoking gun, but it includes vivid descriptions — the man who described seeing a head in a barrel also described helping to handle it and then running off to vomit — and comments from several witnesses who suggested that more forensic investigation might show a link to Unit 731.

“Our goal is to identify the bones and send them back to their families,” said Kawamura. The bones are virtually the only proof of what happened, he says. “We just want to find the truth.”

Health Ministry official Atsushi Akiyama said that witness accounts had already been analyzed and factored into the 2001 report, and the government’s position remains unchanged. A key missing link is a documentary evidence, such as a label on a specimen container or official records, he said.

Documents, especially those involving Japan’s wartime atrocities , were carefully destroyed in the war’s closing days and finding new evidence for a proof would be difficult.

Akiyama added that a lack of information about the bones would make DNA analysis difficult.

Hideo Shimizu, who was sent to Unit 731 in April 1945 at age 14 as lab technician and joined the meeting online from his home in Nagano, said he remembers seeing heads and body parts in formalin jars stored in a specimen room in the unit’s main building. One that struck him most was a dissected belly with a fetus inside. He was told they were “maruta” — logs — a term used for prisoners chosen for experiments.

Days before Japan’s Aug. 15, 1945 surrender, Shimizu was ordered to collect bones of prisoners’ bodies burned in a pit. He was then given a pistol and a packet of cyanide to kill himself if he was caught on his journey back to Japan.

He was ordered never to tell anyone about his Unit 731 experience, never contact his colleagues, and never seek a government or medical job.

Shimizu said he cannot tell if any specimen he saw at the 731 could be among the Shinjuku bones by looking at their photos, but that what he saw in Harbin should never be repeated. When he sees his great-grandchildren, he said, they remind him of that fetus he saw and the lives lost.

“I want younger people to understand the tragedy of war,” he said.

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The True Story Behind Japan’s WWII Human Experiment Division

The 20th Century is full of examples of man’s inhumanity to man. The horrors of the first World War early in the century set the stage for what was to become one of the darkest periods in human history. And no event serves as a more terrible reminder of how evil people can be than the atrocities that followed in the second World War.

The crimes of Nazi Germany in occupied territories and the industrial slaughter of the Holocaust resulted in the deaths of millions of people. But the second World War was truly a global conflict and evil was found everywhere it was fought.

Though they often get less popular attention than those of the Germans, the Japanese military’s crimes were certainly horrific. The occupation of Nanking by the Japanese Army led to a maelstrom of violence that lead to tens or possibly even hundreds of thousands of deaths among the residents of the city.

Like the Germans, the Japanese often treated the citizens in occupied territories with almost casual cruelty. Also like the Germans, the Japanese even exploited these people for horrific human experimentation . They even had a specialized unit they created to conduct these experiments: Unit 731.

The story of Unit 731 really began before the Second World War with the person who would eventually lead the unit’s activities, Shiro Ishii . Ishii was a medical officer in the Japanese military who specialized in studying infectious diseases. This kind of research was a popular subject for Japanese Army researchers like Ishii, who realized the importance of keeping troops healthy in the field. But Ishii also realized that infectious diseases could be turned against an enemy’s troops and began to advocate that the military look into developing biological weapons.

In 1930, Ishii petitioned the government for funding to form a research team that would study the effects of pandemic diseases. The government agreed and Ishii began work at the “Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory,” where he claimed publicly to be working on ways to protect Japanese troops from diseases. This was actually true in one sense. Much of Ishii’s work was dedicated to researching effective ways to treat and prevent infectious diseases. However, Ishii’s actual intentions were always far darker. He wanted to learn which diseases would be the best candidate for weaponization.

With the permission of his direct superiors in the military, Ishii began to look for ways to turn his knowledge of preventing diseases towards finding ways to spread them. Ishii began testing various diseases on animals to see which spread quickly and killed efficiently in the hopes of finding the perfect biological weapon . However, Ishii felt that what he really needed to achieve his goal were human subjects. Because his research unit operated in Tokyo, ethical concerns and fears of containing the diseases he was testing prevented him from acquiring these subjects. However, events would soon provide him with the opportunity he needed.

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In 1931, a Japanese military officer placed dynamite near the tracks of a Japanese-owned railway line in the region of Manchuria in North-East China. The resulting explosion did little actual damage, but officers in the Japanese Army seized the opportunity and blamed Chinese saboteurs for the attack that they themselves had engineered. Using the event as a pretext, they launched an invasion, quickly taking control of the region from the Chinese. The Chinese government, which didn’t want a war with Japan, offered little resistance and Japan set up a puppet government under the last Qing Emperor of China, Puyi .

Shiro Ishii recognized the opportunity to collect subjects from the civilian population of Manchuria and moved to Zhongma Fortress near the city of Harbin in Manchuria. There, Ishii organized a secret research group called the “Togo Unit” and began his research in earnest. During the occupation, the Japanese Army and secret police frequently arrested Chinese civilians and resistance fighters, as well as common criminals. Many of these prisoners ended up in Zhongma fortress, where they fell under the control of Ishii and the Togo Unit.

Ishii began to test the effects of various diseases on his human subjects. Under the guise of giving them vaccines, prisoners were injected with different bacteria or viruses to see how long it took for them to become infected. After the infection set in, the prisoners were monitored to see how the disease developed compared to other prisoners. In many cases, prisoners were then cut open while still alive to study the effects of the disease on their internal organs. Those who didn’t die from these tests were executed.

In 1934, a prisoner at Zhongma managed to overpower a guard and take his keys. He then freed forty of his fellow prisoners and scaled the walls of the fortress. Many of the prisoners attempting to escape were shot or recaptured, but a few managed to get away and spread the word of what was going on inside the prison. This escape and loss of secrecy lead Ishii and his superiors to close down their research at Zhongma and move to a new facility. There, the unit acquired the name by which it is most well-known: Unit 731. And there, they continued their horrific experiments.

Unit 731 was able to continue getting its supply of fresh subjects through the Japanese secret police, the Kempeitai. The Kempeitai arrested Chinese civilians on trumped-up charges of “suspicious activities” at the behest of Unit 731, which gave them instructions on whom to arrest. Ishii wanted to make sure that his subjects reflected the general population, so pregnant women, children, and the elderly were all arrested on these sorts of charges and brought to Ishii’s facility for tests on the effects of different diseases. And because Ishii wanted to test the effects of disease on different races of people, the large Russian community in Harbin was frequently targeted by the Kempeitei. In Ishii’s eyes, everyone was a potential subject for his twisted experiments.

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Ishii’s goal was always to find an effective biological weapon, so he investigated some of the most virulent diseases in human history. Many of his tests focused on the bubonic plague , which killed millions during the Middle Ages. He wanted to find ways to spread the plague quickly, which meant testing the best way to infect large numbers of people with the disease. Ishii ordered plague-infected fleas to be dropped from airplanes onto cities in China, leading to minor epidemics that killed thousands. In addition to fleas, Unit 731 dropped clothing or food infected with cholera and anthrax, leading to more epidemics and thousands of deaths.

But Unit 731 didn’t limit its research to just weaponizing disease, they also tested the effects of different injuries to the human body. Prisoners were often subjected to freezing temperatures to study the effects of frostbite, as guards beat them to determine how much feeling was left in their frozen limbs. The injuries were then left untreated to study the effects of gangrene, as the prisoner’s fingers or limbs began to rot and fall off. Other prisoners were subjected to experiments testing the effects of grenades from different ranges, and even flamethrowers. Obviously, few survived these types of tests.

Unit 731 was also very interested in venereal diseases, like syphilis or gonorrhea. Often, prisoners were infected with these diseases to test the effects and treatments. But these prisoners were also forced under threat of death to have sex with uninfected prisoners so that researchers could study how the diseases were transmitted from one person to another. They also wanted to study whether or not pregnant women could transmit a venereal disease to their fetus; thus women were sometimes forcibly impregnated for these tests.

Prisoners were also subjected to stranger experiments that reflect the callous disregard for human life shown by Unit 731. It was as though they simply wanted to satisfy their morbid curiosity. Prisoners were strapped into centrifuges that spun them at high speeds until they died. Others were injected with animal blood or seawater, simply to see how their body might respond. Still, others were bombarded with X-rays to study the effects of radiation. Some were simply buried alive or burnt to death. And others were denied food or water to see how long it took them to die.

Ultimately, Ishii’s experiments accomplished little. The Japanese never managed to develop a biological weapon that could turn the tide of the war. And Ishii’s attempts to pressure the Japanese military to use biological weapons in the Pacific were rebuffed several times. The only serious attack ever planned was to target the city of San Diego. However, this last desperate plan was aborted due to Japan’s surrender in 1945. After the surrender, Ishii was granted immunity by the American occupation forces in exchange for handing over his research. Ishii never stood trial for his crimes and lived out the rest of his days in Japan before dying of throat cancer years later. The fact that Ishii and other members of Unit 731 escaped prosecution truly rank among the worst failures of justice in history.

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December 10

1936–1945: Unit 731 — the Asian Auschwitz

Japanese Medical Atrocities

1936–1945: Unit 731 — the Asian Auschwitz — was a massive biological warfare research program of the Japanese Imperial Army under the command of Lt. General Dr. Ishii Shiro in Pin Fang, Manchuria outside the city of Harbin. Its true purpose was masked as the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory. Unit 731 was housed within 150 buildings with a staff of 3,000. It included an aerodrome, railway line, barracks, dungeons, laboratories, operating rooms, crematoria, cinema, bar and Shinto temple. Its barbarous inhumane experiments rivalled the infamous Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, though the numbers of prisoners were smaller, it operated for a much longer period. From 1936 to 1942 between 3,000 and 12,000 men, women and children were subjected to unspeakable diabolical experiments, vivisected while still alive, before they were slaughtered in Unit 731. (C. Hudson, Doctors of Depravity , 2007; Nightmare in Manchuria, 2012; Unit 731 )

Shiro Ishii’s extensive deadly human experiments were under the protection of the Kanto Army High Command, the Kampeitei (secret Japanese police), and local police collaborators. His first laboratories were in the city of Harbin, later in Beiyinhe, and still later in an extraordinary facility in Harbin’s suburb known as Ping Fang.  Construction began in 1936, and was completed in 1939. Originally named Togo, later changed to Ishii Unit, finally it was named Unit 731; it was the world’s largest premier biological and chemical warfare research center.

“Each year hundreds of prisoners were fodder for fiendish experiments.  They were exposed to every known disease.  These ranged from anthrax to yellow fever.  Some were used for hyperthermia experiments.  Others were forced to endure gangrene experiments; and still others were forced to engage in sexual intercourse with individuals known to be infected with venereal diseases. They were then monitored as the disease took its toll on the victims.” “The victims were captured communist partisans, ordinary criminals, political dissidents, those who were mentally handicapped but physically fit, and, when candidates among these groups were scarce, the secret police would pick up the poor, the homeless, off the streets in cities throughout occupied China and Manchuria.  The police would be given orders to send prisoners to Harbin/Ping Fan by “Special Delivery.” “Everyone engaged in this sordid business understood that “Special Delivery” was the code words for new human experimental prey.  Prisoners to be tested were of various nationalities.  The overwhelming majority were Han Chinese.  However, Koreans, Soviet prisoners of varying ethnic backgrounds, and, occasionally, Europeans and Americans were used.” “Victims were frequently vivisected while still living.  They were not given an anesthesia since Ishii and his colleagues wanted to be certain that their tests were not influenced by an outside source.  Those individuals whose experiments required a course of study usually lasted about six weeks.  Then, of no longer any value to the researchers, they were “sacrificed”, the euphemism used instead of “killed.”  The bodies, men, women, and children, would then be dissected by pathologists, and, eventually, deposited in either large burial pits or burned in the three crematoria housed at Ping Fan.” (Sheldon Harris. Japanese Medical Atrocities in WWII: Unit 731 Was Not An Isolated Aberration .” A paper read at the International Citizens Forum on War Crimes & Redress, Tokyo, Dec. 11, 1999)

Unit 731 was divided into eight divisions: Division 1: Research on bubonic plague , cholera , anthrax , typhoid and tuberculosis using live human subjects in a prison was constructed to contain around 300 to 400 people. Division 2: Research for biological weapons used in the field, in particular the production of devices to spread germs and parasites. Shiro Ishii, the mastermind behind Japan’s biological warfare — “Factories of Death” — was a brash and flamboyantly corrupt man who considered himself a visionary” beyond scruples. He was brilliant, charming, intimidating, stone-hearted, driven to break new scientific ground and to help Japan defeat its foes. Ishii exhorted his team of physicians to violate the physicians’ ethical code:

“A doctor’s God-given mission is to challenge all varieties of disease-causing micro-organisms; to block all roads of intrusion into the human body; to annihilate all foreign matter resident in our bodies; and to devise the most expeditious treatment possible. . . However, the research we are now about to embark is the complete opposite of these principles, and may cause us some anguish as doctors.” “We pursue this research,” he explained, “for the double medical thrill; as a scientist . . . probing to discover the truth in natural science; and as a military person, to build a powerful military weapon against the enemy.” (Patrick Fong. Impunity Of Japan’s Secret Biological Warfare Unit , 2000.)

Unspeakably cruel and ghoulish experiments were conducted by Japanese physicians who had been recruited from Japan’s leading academic medical institutions. Like their Nazi counterparts, Japan’s physicians perverted the essence of medicine. Doctors in the biological war program turned life – biology – against life.

They referred to the prisoners as Maruta (“logs” whose killing was comparable to cutting down a tree). Army surgeons conducted many vivisections “for training purposes” — in truth, to desensitize them. The victims were mostly Chinese — men, women, and children, including pregnant women and infants. Soviet, Australian and several American prisoners of war were also subjected to experiments designed to infect the victims with fatal diseases including: plague, cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid, tetanus, anthrax, typhus, hemorrhagic fever, and dysentery. See, list “medically usable specimens” (i.e., pathogens) compiled in a U.S. occupation report . The victims were then vivisected — many while still alive. Live vivisection was a Japanese “specialty.”

The experiments conducted at Unit 731 and its satellites can be classified into the following broad categories: Vivisections for training new Army surgeons: These were performed at army hospitals in China using many Chinese prisoners. The doctors were trained to perform appendectomies and tracheotomies; prisoners were shot, then doctors removed the bullets from their bodies; they amputated their arms and legs and sewed up the skin around the wounds, and finally killed the prisoners. This surgical training program was to teach newly minted army surgeons how to treat wounded soldiers at the front lines. However, unlike normal medical training which teaches surgical skills while avoiding causing harm to patients, the training of these army doctors encourages causing needless harm and death. So, it has been suggested that training under Unit 731 supervision, was not required at all, but rather its main purpose was to desensitize the surgeons, rather than to perfect their surgical skills. (Takashi Tsuchiya.  Why Japanese doctors performed human experiments in China 1933-1945 ,  Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics, 2000)

Intentional infecting with viruses and pathogens followed by vivisection either after death or vivisected to death. Doctors purposefully infected victims with diseases ;  victims would then be strapped down to an operating table and subjected to live autopsy without anesthesia. Some screamed in a non-human way when they realized their fate. Unit 731 “doctors” would cut them open to observe the progress of the germs incubating within them or to harvest organs that had enough germs to weaponize or spread on nearby villagers. They would amputate limbs to study blood loss and the effects of rotting and gangrene (some limbs were later attached to the other side of the body), parts of the stomach, liver, brains and lungs were often removed to observe the effects. The reason for live vivisection was to study the effect of the pathogens on live human organs and to avoid decomposition.

Germ warfare , male and female prisoners were injected with venereal diseases in the disguise of inoculations (or sometimes infected via rape) to determine the viability of germ warfare, victims were infested with fleas in order to communicate the disease to an organism which could be later dropped onto a populace. During one anthrax operation, the doctors noted the progress of the pathogen organ by organ. The victim’s suffering was unspeakable, with “his organs swelling, bleeding and disintegrating.” Fleas were also tainted with cholera, anthrax, and the bubonic plague, as well as, other plagues. This was the origin of the “flea bomb” which infected large geographic areas and polluted land and water. They were dropped in the guise of clothing and supplies which resulted in the estimated death of another 400,000–580,000 Chinese civilians. (Read more: China History Forum , 2005.)

Weapons testing,  grenades, mortars and other explosive devices were detonated near living targets to determine the effects with regards to different distances and angles, so they could determine how long victims could survive with their sustained injuries; experiments to determine the ability of the human body to survive in the face of various pathogens and in conditions such as extreme cold; Chinese prisoners were exposed to mustard gas in a simulated battle situation; others were tied to stakes tests to determine the lethality of biological, and chemical weapons and other explosive material.

Physical endurance experiments,  to determine the physical tolerance level of human beings. The experiments were designed to answer questions such as: how much air could be injected intravenously; how much poison gas could be inhaled; how much bleeding caused death; how many days prisoners could survive without food or water; how high electric current human beings could bear; air pressurized, oxygen deprivation experiments — same as those conducted in Nazi concentration camps; frostbite experiments where prisoners would lose entire limbs and suffer gangrene; forced sex between prisoners (most often one that was infected with a STD while the other was healthy). In other experiments victims were hung upside down to observe how long it took for one to die due to choking and the length of time until the onset of embolism occurred after inserting air into ones blood stream. Read more: Unit 731

Nonstardized treatment tests and Sadistic what if? Experiments . Numerous experimental vaccines were tested on prisoners with no animal trials; Victims were hung upside down to observe how long it took for one to die due to choking; the length of time until the onset of embolism occurred after inserting air into ones blood stream; what would happen if horse serum got injected into the body of a human?

“Other experiments were conducted so the doctors could learn more about how humans live and die. These included studies of dehydration, starvation, frostbite, air pressure – some inmates had their eyes blown out – transfusions of animal blood to humans and others. Even children and babies were destroyed this way. Other ghoulish experiments included cutting off a prisoner’s hands and sewing them back on to the opposite arms to gauge what happened.” ( China History Forum , 2005)

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Japan's Biological Warfare Project

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Most of us heard about the horrible experiments on humans of the Nazis done by doctor Mengele. But the Nazis weren’t alone in conducting cruel experiments on humans.

One of the lesser known atrocities of the 20th century was committed by the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731. Some of the details of this unit’s activities are still uncovered.

This webpage was set up to collect and organize the information known to date about Unit 731 and present it to anyone interested.

For 40 years, the horrific activities of “Unit 731” remained one the most closely guarded secrets of World War II. It was not until 1984 that Japan acknowledged what it had long denied – vile experiments on humans conducted by the unit in preparation for germ warfare.

Deliberately infected with plague, anthrax, cholera and other pathogens, an estimated 3,000 of enemy soldiers and civilians were used as guinea pigs. Some of the more horrific experiments included vivisection without anesthesia and pressure chambers to see how much a human could take before his eyes popped out.

Unit 731 was set up in 1938 in Japanese-occupied China with the aim of developing biological weapons. It also operated a secret research and experimental school in Shinjuku, central Tokyo. Its head was Lieutenant Shiro Ishii.

The unit was supported by Japanese universities and medical schools which supplied doctors and research staff. The picture now emerging about its activities is horrifying.

According to reports never officially admitted by the Japanese authorities, the unit used thousands of Chinese and other Asian civilians and wartime prisoners as human guinea pigs to breed and develop killer diseases.

Many of the prisoners, who were murdered in the name of research, were used in hideous vivisection and other medical experiments, including barbaric trials to determine the effect of frostbite on the human body.

To ease the conscience of those involved, the prisoners were referred to not as people or patients but as “Maruta”, or wooden logs. Before Japan’s surrender, the site of the experiments was completely destroyed, so that no evidence is left.

Then, the remaining 400 prisoners were shot and employees of the unit had to swear secrecy. The mice kept in the laboratory were then released, which could have cost the lives of 30,000 people, since the mice were infected with the bubonic plague, and they spread the disease.

Few of those involved with Unit 731 have admitted their guilt.

Some caught in China at the end of the war were arrested and detained, but only a handful of them were prosecuted for war crimes.

In Japan, not one was brought to justice. In a secret deal, the post-war American administration gave them immunity for prosecution in return for details of their experiments.

Some of the worst criminals, including Hisato Yoshimura, who was in charge of the frostbite experiments, went on to occupy key medical and other posts in public and private sectors.

The Twisted Story Of Shiro Ishii, The Josef Mengele Of World War 2 Japan

Shiro ishii ran unit 731 and performed cruel experiments on prisoners until he was apprehended by the u.s. government — and granted full immunity..

A few years after World War I, the Geneva Protocol prohibited the use of chemical and biological weapons during wartime in 1925. But that didn’t stop a Japanese army medical officer named Shiro Ishii.

A graduate of Kyoto Imperial University and a member of the Army Medical Corps, Ishii was reading about the recent bans when he got an idea: If biological weapons were so dangerous that they were off-limits, then they had to be the best kind.

Wikimedia Commons Shiro Ishii is often compared to the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, but he arguably had even more power over his human experiments — and did far more monstrous scientific research.

From that point on, Ishii dedicated his life to the deadliest kinds of science. His germ warfare and inhumane experiments aimed to place the Empire of Japan on a pedestal above the world. This is the story of General Shiro Ishii, Japan’s answer to Josef Mengele and the evil “genius” behind Unit 731.

Shiro Ishii: A Dangerous Youth

Born in 1892 in Japan, Shiro Ishii was the fourth son of a wealthy landowner and sake maker. Rumored to have a photographic memory, Ishii excelled in school to the point that he was labeled a potential genius.

Ishii’s daughter Harumi would later muse that her father’s intelligence might have led him to be a successful politician if he had chosen to go down that path. But Ishii chose to join the military at an early age, showing boundless love for Japan and its emperor all along the way.

Wikimedia Commons From an early age, Shiro Ishii was believed to be a genius.

An atypical recruit, Ishii did well in the military. Standing six feet tall — well above the height of the average Japanese man — he boasted a commanding appearance early on. He was known for his spotlessly clean uniforms, his meticulously groomed facial hair, and his deep, powerful voice.

During his service, Ishii discovered his real passion — science. Specifically interested in military medicine, he worked tirelessly toward the goal of becoming a doctor in the Imperial Japanese Army.

In 1916, Ishii was admitted to the Medical Department of Kyoto Imperial University. In addition to learning both the best medical practices of the time and proper laboratory procedures, he also developed some strange habits.

He was known for keeping bacteria in petri dishes as “pets.” And he also had a reputation for sabotaging other students. Ishii would work in the lab at night after the other students had already cleaned up — and use their equipment. He would purposely leave the equipment dirty so the professors would discipline other students, which led them to resent Ishii.

But while the students knew what Ishii had done, he was apparently never punished for his actions. And if the professors somehow knew what he was doing, it almost seemed as if they were rewarding him for it.

It’s perhaps a sign of his growing ego that shortly after reading about biological weapons in 1927, he decided that he would become the best in the world at making them.

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Shiro Ishii’s Immodest Proposal

Wikimedia Commons Special Naval landing forces of the Imperial Japanese Navy prepare to advance during the Battle of Shanghai in August 1937 — with gas masks firmly in place.

Shortly after reading the initial journal article that inspired him, Shiro Ishii began to push for a military arm in Japan that focused on biological weapons. He even directly pleaded with top commanders.

To truly grasp the scale of his confidence, consider this: Not only was he a lower-ranking officer suggesting military strategy, but he was also proposing the direct violation of relatively new international laws of war.

At the crux of Ishii’s argument was the fact that Japan had signed the Geneva agreements, but had not ratified them. Since Japan’s stance on the Geneva agreements was technically still in limbo, there was perhaps some wiggle room that would allow for them to develop bioweapons.

But whether Ishii’s commanders lacked his vision or nebulous grasp of ethics, they were skeptical of his proposal at first. Never one to take no for an answer, Ishii asked for — and ultimately received — permission to take a two-year research tour of the world to see what other countries were doing in terms of biological warfare in 1928.

Whether this signaled legitimate interest on the part of the Japanese military or simply an effort to keep Ishii happy is unclear. But either way, after his visits to various facilities across Europe and the United States, Ishii returned to Japan with his findings and a revised plan.

A Receptive Audience

Wikimedia Commons The Japanese soldiers bombed Chongqing, China from 1938 to 1943.

Despite the Geneva Protocol, other countries were still researching biological warfare. But, out of either ethical concerns or fear of discovery, no one had yet made it a priority.

So in the years preceding World War II, Japanese troops began to seriously consider investing their resources in this controversial weaponry — with the goal that their battle techniques would surpass all other countries on Earth.

By the time Ishii returned to Japan in 1930, a few things had changed. Not only was his country on track to wage war against China, nationalism as a whole in Japan burned a little brighter. The old country slogan of “a wealthy country, a strong army” was echoing louder than it had in decades.

Ishii’s reputation had also grown. He was appointed professor of immunology at the Tokyo Army Medical School and given the rank of major. He also found a powerful supporter in Colonel Chikahiko Koizumi, who was then a scientist at the Tokyo Army Medical College.

Wikimedia Commons Japanese army surgeon Chikahiko Koizumi. After World War II, he came under suspicion for being a war criminal, but he committed suicide before he could be properly investigated.

A veteran of World War I, Koizumi oversaw research into chemical warfare beginning in 1918. But around this time, he almost died in a lab accident after being exposed to a chlorine gas cloud without a gas mask. After his full recovery, he continued his research — but his superiors placed a low priority on his work at the time.

So it’s no surprise that Koizumi saw himself reflected in Shiro Ishii. At the very least, Koizumi saw someone similar enough to him who shared his vision for Japan. As Koizumi’s star continued to rise — first to Dean of the Tokyo Army Medical College, then to Army Surgeon General, then to Japan’s Minister of Health — he made sure that Ishii moved up along with him.

For Ishii’s part, he certainly enjoyed the praise and promotions, but nothing seems to have been more important to him than his own self-aggrandizement.

Ishii’s public work consisted of researching microbiology, pathology, and vaccine research. But as all those in the know understood, this was only a small part of his actual mission.

Unlike his student years, Ishii was rather popular as a professor. The same personal charisma and magnetism that had won over his teachers and commanders also worked on his students. Ishii often spent his nights out drinking and visiting geisha houses. But even while inebriated, Ishii was more likely to go back to his studies than to go to bed.

This behavior is telling on two counts: It shows the kind of obsessive man Ishii was, and it explains how he was able to persuade others to help him with his deranged experiments after he began working in China.

A Secret, Sinister Facility

Xinhua via Getty Images Unit 731 personnel conduct a bacteriological trial upon a test subject in Nongan County of northeast China’s Jilin Province. November 1940.

Following the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the establishment of the puppet client state Manchukuo shortly thereafter, Japan utilized the region’s resources to fuel its industrialization efforts.

Like the attitudes of Americans during the “Manifest Destiny” period of expansion, many Japanese soldiers saw the people living in the area as obstacles. But to Shiro Ishii, these residents were all potential test subjects.

According to Ishii’s theories, his biological research would require different types of facilities . For instance, he established a biological weapons facility in Harbin, China, but quickly realized that he wouldn’t be able to freely conduct involuntary human research in that city.

So he simply began to put together another secret facility that was about 100 kilometers south of Harbin. The 300-home village of Beiyinhe was razed to the ground to make way for the site, and local Chinese laborers were drafted to construct the buildings.

Here, Shiro Ishii developed some of his barbaric techniques, foreshadowing what would come in the notorious Unit 731.

Wikimedia Commons Unit 731’s Harbin facility was built on Manchurian land conquered by Japan.

The sparse records from the Beiyinhe facility offer a sketch of Ishii’s work there. With up to 1,000 prisoners crammed into the facility, the test subjects were a mixed group of underground anti-Japanese workers, guerrilla bands who harassed the Japanese, and innocent people who unfortunately got caught in a roundup of “suspicious persons.”

A common early experiment was drawing blood from prisoners every three to five days until they were too weak to go on, and then killing them with poison when they were no longer considered valuable to research. Most of these subjects were killed within a month after their arrival, but the number of total victims in the facility remains unknown.

In 1934, a prisoner rebellion broke out as the soldiers celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival. Taking advantage of the guards’ drunkenness and the relatively lax security, some 16 prisoners were able to successfully escape. This is the main reason why we know what we do about that facility.

Despite the extreme risk to the security and secrecy of the operation, it’s possible that experiments continued at that site as late as 1936, before it was officially shut down in 1937.

Ishii, for his part, did not seem to mind the closure. He was already getting started with another facility — which was far more sinister.

The Josef Mengele Of Japan

Xinhua via Getty Images Unit 731 researchers conduct bacteriological experiments on captive child subjects in Nongan County of northeast China’s Jilin Province. November 1940.

Shiro Ishii is often compared to Josef Mengele, the German doctor known as the “Angel of Death,” who conducted sinister experiments in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was a complex that killed its prisoners as part of its design. While many victims were executed in gas chambers, others were reserved for Mengele and his twisted medical experiments.

As an SS officer and member of the Nazi elite, Mengele had the authority to determine the fitness of prisoners, recruit imprisoned medical professionals as assistants, and force inmates into becoming his test subjects.

But unlike Ishii, Mengele was more limited in his power over the camp and in the effectiveness of his research. Auschwitz had been built to produce rubber and oil, and Mengele used the environment to conduct pseudoscience. His work fell under the guise of genetics , but it was often little more than pointless and cruel acts of sadism.

In many ways, Ishii had more control over his human subjects. His research was also more scientific — and monstrous. Just about all the horrors that occurred in the facilities had been thought up by Ishii — with the intention of turning human beings into data.

Expanding and building upon his earlier efforts, Ishii designed Unit 731 to be a self-sufficient facility, with a prison for his human subjects, an arsenal for making germ bombs, an airfield with its own air force, and a crematorium to dispose of human remains.

In another part of the facility were the dormitories for Japanese residents, which included a bar, library, athletic fields, and even a brothel.

But nothing at the complex could compare to Ishii’s house in Harbin, where he lived with his wife and children. A mansion left over from the period of Russian control over Manchuria, it was a grand structure that was remembered fondly by Ishii’s daughter Harumi. She even likened it to the home in the classic film Gone With The Wind .

Shiro Ishii And The Experiments At Unit 731

Xinhua via Getty Images The frostbitten hands of a Chinese person who was taken outside in winter by Unit 731 personnel for an experiment on how to best treat frostbite. Date unspecified.

If you know the name Unit 731, then you probably have some idea of the horrors that unfolded at Ishii’s facility — believed to be set up around 1935 in Pingfang. Despite decades of cover-up, stories of the cruel experiments that took place there have spread like wildfire in the age of the internet.

However, for all the discussion of freezing limbs, vivisections, and high-pressure chambers, the horror that tends be ignored is Ishii’s inhumane reasoning behind these tests.

As an army doctor, one of Ishii’s primary goals was the development of battlefield treatment techniques that he could use on Japanese troops — after learning just how much the human body could handle. For example, in the bleeding experiments, he learned how much blood the average person could lose without dying.

But at Unit 731, these experiments kicked into high gear. Some experiments involved simulating real-world conditions.

For example, some prisoners were placed in pressure chambers until their eyes popped out so that they could demonstrate how much pressure the human body could withstand. And some prisoners were injected with seawater to see if it could work as a replacement for a saline solution.

The most horrifying example touted around the internet – the frostbite experiment — was actually pioneered by Yoshimura Hisato, a physiologist assigned to Unit 731. But even this test had a practical battlefield application.

Unit 731 researchers were able to prove that the best treatment for frostbite was not rubbing the limb — the traditional method up until that point — but instead immersion in water a bit warmer than 100 degrees Fahrenheit (but never hotter than 122 degrees Fahrenheit). But the way they came to this conclusion was horrific.

Unit 731 researchers would lead prisoners outside in freezing weather and leave them with exposed arms that were periodically drenched with water — until a guard decided that frostbite had set in.

Testimony from a Japanese officer revealed that this was determined after the “frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck.”

When the limb was struck , this sound would apparently let the researchers know that it was sufficiently frozen. The frostbite-affected limb was then amputated and taken to the lab for study. More often than not, the researchers would then move on to the prisoners’ other limbs.

When prisoners were reduced to heads and torsos, they were then handed over for plague and pathogen experiments. Brutal as it was, this process bore fruit for Japanese researchers. They developed an effective frostbite treatment several years ahead of other researchers.

As with Mengele, Ishii and the other Unit 731 doctors wanted a wide sample of subjects to study. According to official accounts, the youngest victim of a temperature-changing experiment was a three-month-old baby .

The Brutality Of Weapons Testing

Xinhua via Getty Images A Unit 731 doctor operates on a patient that is part of a bacteriological experiment. Date unspecified.

Weapons testing at Unit 731 took several distinct forms. As with medical research, there were “defensive” tests of new equipment, such as gas masks.

Researchers would force their prisoners to test out the effectiveness of certain gas masks in order to find the best kind among the pack. Although unconfirmed, it is believed that similar testing led to an early version of the bio-hazard protection suit.

In terms of offensive weapons tests, these tended to fall under two different categories. The first was the deliberate infection of prisoners to study disease effects and to select suitable candidates for weaponization.

In order to better understand the impacts of each disease, researchers did not provide prisoners with treatment and instead dissected or vivisected them so that they could study the impact of the diseases on the internal organs. Sometimes, they were still alive while they were being cut open.

In a 1995 interview, one anonymous former medical assistant in a Japanese Army unit in China revealed what it was like to cut open a 30-year-old man and dissect him alive — without any anesthetic.

“The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn’t struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down,” he said. “But when I picked up the scalpel, that’s when he began screaming.”

He continued, “I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”

The second type of offensive weapons testing involved the actual field testing of various systems that dispersed diseases. These were used against prisoners within the camp — and against civilians outside of it.

Ishii was diverse in his exploration of disease dispersal methods. Inside the camp, prisoners infected with syphilis would be forced to have sex with other prisoners who weren’t infected. This would help Ishii observe the onset of the disease. Outside the camp, Ishii gave other prisoners dumplings that were injected with typhoid and then released them so they could spread the disease.

He also passed out chocolates filled with anthrax bacteria to local children. Since many of these people were starving, they often didn’t question why they were receiving this food and unfortunately assumed it was just an act of kindness.

Sometimes, Ishii’s men would use air raids to drop innocuous items like wheat and rice balls and strips of colored paper above nearby cities. It was later discovered that these items were infected with deadly diseases.

But as horrific as these attacks were , it was Ishii’s bombs that truly placed him at the top of all other biological weapons researchers.

A “Gift” To Mankind

Xinhua via Getty Images Japanese personnel in protective suits carry a stretcher through Yiwu, China during Unit 731’s germ warfare tests. June 1942.

Ishii’s plague bombs carried an unusual payload. Instead of the usual metal containers, they would use containers made of ceramic or clay so that they would be less explosive. That way, they would be able to properly release plague-infected fleas on countless people.

Unable to improve off of the traditional means of spreading the “Black Death,” Ishii decided to skip the rat middleman. When his bombs exploded, the surviving fleas would quickly escape, seeking out hosts to feed on and spread the disease.

And that’s exactly what happened in China during World War II. Japan dropped these bombs on both combatants and innocent civilians in multiple towns and villages.

But Ishii’s master plan, “Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night,” intended to use these weapons against the United States .

If this plan would’ve succeeded, about 20 of the 500 new troops who arrived in Harbin would’ve been taken toward southern California in a submarine. They would’ve then manned an onboard plane and flown it to San Diego. And plague bombs would’ve then been dropped there in September 1945.

Thousands of disease-riddled fleas would’ve been deployed, as the troops took their own lives by crashing somewhere onto American soil.

However, America’s atomic bombings happened before this plan came to fruition. And the war ended before the operation was even fully mapped out. But ironically enough, it was America’s interest in Ishii’s research that ultimately saved his life.

In August 1945, shortly after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the order came to destroy all evidence of the activities at Unit 731. Shiro Ishii sent his family ahead by railroad, remaining behind until his infamous facilities were destroyed.

The exact number of people killed by Unit 731 and its related programs remains unknown, but estimates usually range from about 200,000 to 300,000 (including the biological warfare operations). As for deaths due to human experimentation, that estimate typically ranges around 3,000. By the end of the war, any remaining prisoners were speedily killed off.

Although Ishii was also ordered to destroy all documentation, he carried some of his lab notes out of the facility with him before going into hiding in Tokyo. Then, the American occupation authorities paid him a visit.

Throughout the war, vague reports from China about unusual outbreaks and “plague bombs” had not been taken very seriously until the Soviets took Manchuria from the Japanese. By that point, the Soviets knew enough to have a vested interest in finding and securing General Ishii to “interview” him about his infamous research.

For better or for worse, the Americans got to him first. According to Ishii’s daughter Harumi, the American officers used her as a transcriber as they interrogated her father about his work.

At first, he played coy, pretending not to know what they were talking about. But after he secured immunity, protection from the Soviets, and 250,000 yen as payment, he began to talk.

All told, he’d revealed 80 percent of his data to the United States by the time of his death. Apparently, he took the other 20 percent to his grave.

A Deal With The Devil

Wikimedia Commons Unit 731 bombs on display at a museum on the site of where the Harbin bioweapon facility used to be.

In order to protect Ishii and maintain a monopoly on his research, the United States kept its word. The crimes of Unit 731 and other similar organizations were suppressed, and at one point they were even labeled “Soviet Propaganda” by American authorities.

And yet, a “top secret” cable from Tokyo to Washington in 1947 revealed: “Experiments on humans were … described by three Japanese and confirmed tacitly by Ishii. Ishii states that if guaranteed immunity from ‘war crimes’ in documentary form for himself, superiors, and subordinates, he can describe program in detail.”

To put it plainly, American authorities were eager to learn the results of experiments that they weren’t willing to perform themselves. That’s why they granted him immunity.

Although some of the research from Ishii was valuable, American authorities didn’t learn nearly as much as they thought they would. And yet they kept their end of the bargain. Shiro Ishii lived out the rest of his days in peace until he died of throat cancer at the age of 67.

Years after the agreement, North Korea made a startling allegation that the United States had dropped plague bombs on them during the Korean War.

And so a group of scientists from France, Italy, Sweden, the Soviet Union, and Brazil — led by a British embryologist — toured the affected areas to collect samples and issue a verdict in the 1950s.

Wikimedia Commons A page from the International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in China and Korea. Allegations that America used biological warfare during the Korean War remain controversial to this day.

Their conclusion was that germ warfare had indeed been used as North Korea claimed. Officially, this is also “Soviet Propaganda,” according to the United States. Or is it?

With a clear answer still missing, we are left with uncomfortable questions. Consider the following: In 1951, a now-declassified document showed that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff issued orders to begin “large scale field tests… to determine the effectiveness of specific BW [bacteriological warfare] agents under operational conditions.” And in 1954, Operation “Big Itch” dropped flea bombs at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.

With that in mind, what is more likely? Are these actions coincidental to the Chinese and Soviets using part of the truth that they knew in an attempt to embarrass the Americans? Or, did someone secretly give the order to bring Shiro Ishii and his men out of retirement?

In any case, one thing is clear. Shiro Ishii never faced justice and died a free man in 1959 — all thanks to the United States deal with the Devil.

After reading about Shiro Ishii, the unhinged mind behind Unit 731, learn the full story of Operation “Cherry Blossoms at Night.” For a glimpse of what the operation may have looked like, check out the mysterious “Battle of Los Angeles” that may have been started by a Japanese balloon bomb.

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35 Rare Images of the Infamous Japanese Experiment Unit 731 in China

Table of Contents

• 1 Japanese Experiment Unit 731: Rare Historical Images
• 2 What was the Unit 731
• 3.1.1 China Underground

Japanese Experiment Unit 731: Rare Historical Images

Unit 731 (731部隊), 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.

Featured image: A photograph released from Jilin Provincial Archives, which, according to Xinhua Press, “shows personnel of ‘Manchukuo’ attend a ‘plague prevention’ action which indeed is a bacteriological test directed by Japan’s ‘Unit 731’ in November 1940 at Nong’an County, northeast China’s Jilin Province.”

What was the Unit 731

At least 12,000 men, women, and children were killed during the experimentation conducted by Unit 731 at the camp based in Pingfang alone .

Related articles:   Names of members of infamous Unit 731 released by the National Archives of Japan , Rare images of the infamous Japanese experiment unit 731 in China – Second Part – Graphic content – Men Behind the Sun by Mou Tun-Fei (The film is a graphic depiction of the war atrocities committed by the Japanese at Unit 731 )

Prisoners of war were subjected to a range of brutal experiments without anesthesia, including vivisection. Researchers infected detainees with various diseases before performing invasive surgeries to remove organs. This was done to study the effects of diseases on the human body, with the operations carried out on living subjects to avoid the impacts of decomposition on the results.

In a series of inhumane tests, humans were also used as live targets to assess the effectiveness of grenades, flamethrowers, and germ-releasing bombs, as well as chemical and explosive weapons. These prisoners were positioned at different distances and orientations to gauge the lethality of these weapons.

Shiro Ishii, a prominent figure in these experiments, oversaw the injection of prisoners with disease inoculations under the guise of vaccinations. This allowed scientists to observe the progression of diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea, which were deliberately transmitted to both male and female prisoners without treatment, to study their effects.

Additionally, to further research into germ warfare, prisoners were infested with fleas to produce large quantities of disease-carrying fleas. Techniques of warfare included dropping bombs filled with plague fleas, infected clothing, and other contaminated materials on various targets. The dissemination of cholera, anthrax, and plague through these means is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of approximately 400,000 Chinese civilians. Tularemia was another disease tested on Chinese civilians in these horrific experiments.

Unit 731 images

Related article: Japanese officer performing seppuku during World War II

Source : Wikipedia , incredibleimages4u.blogspot.com , picturechina.com.cn , enviromental graffiti , http://xubaojun.blog.163.com

Topic: causes of unit 731, what did they do at Unit 731

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22 thoughts on “35 Rare Images of the Infamous Japanese Experiment Unit 731 in China”

We are a creation with the capacity to do great good and immense evil.

Today, Obama honors ww2 Japan…

That’s not wrong, in the end Japan suffered many casualties among the civilians…What we all should complain is the fact that americans didn’t punished many war criminals, like Shirō Ishii, the mastermind (or one of them) of the Unit 731. He died in 1959, and he didn’t pay for his crimes because americans wanted the data of the experiments! Of course the japanese government was guilty too, because they didn’t prosecute any of them. So OBama didn’t honor those war criminals, he honored the civil victims in Japan.

Did you know a lot of our modern medicine came from the findings of these experiments?

Maybe, but war criminals shoud pay for their crimes, if not with their lives, at least in some other ways.

What advances in modern medicine were advanced by these butchers? That I’d like to hear!!

It’s a long story. When you come in to an ER with extreme frostbite and they know exactly to treat you. They know exactly what frostbite does to the skin, tissues, etc. How it progresses and at what stage. Because of this information they could come up treatments. Where did they find out about the severe effects of frostbite? UNIT 731. Sad…but true. And this is just one example.

A lot of their experiments were to duplicate severe battle feild injuries. i.e. loss of limbs. Did you notice how much battle feild triage improved from WWII to the Korean War. Just 6 years seperate these two wars and yet medical surgical knowledge leaped for the MASH units. Where do you think this info came from?

What’re you talking about? Our modern medicine came from the findings of German experiments, not the Japanese.

The experiments were not done to save people in the future they were done to kill people in the most effective way. no noble goal just to make mass murder easy. The good came from doctors and scientists, who studied the craven acts

War Crimes are committed on both sides during War.

these are beyond “war crimes”… it is pure evil!

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I don’t know! do you? Do you have prove? they are researching to KILL, not to SAVE!!! Did you see the picture of all the naked kids? Any medicine worth that? Without humanity, what is left in life!!!

I’m sorry, but there’s absolutely no excuse, no justification that could justify what happened in Unit 731 and Unit 100. The cruelty and atrocity are beyond human understanding. I repeat THERE IS NO JUSTIFICATION WHATSOEVER for what took place in Harbin, China.

IT IS EVIL–SHEAR AND PURE EVIL. Shame to the Japanese who still try to cover it up or white wash their evil past !!!

im glad japan lost the war

It saddens me to hear this truth about the attrocities that were done in Unit 731. This is no different than in Germany. This is and was EVIL. I personally don’t care about the medical GAINS that have been achieved. Unfortunately EVERY EVIL has their way of justifying WHY they do what they do. Only GOD can forgive them. We must REMEMBER the reason WHY. Hitler; super race, Japanese; ??,. These days our younger generation only wants to whitewash the past. We are to learn from their past mistakes so they are NOT repeated.

everything about this point in time is a horror story. The really sad part of it all is China is literally doing things on this level in the name of organ transplants on demand as we speak today in 2020.

Are you people nuts, these VICTIMS are individuals with the exact same feelings of pain and terror and shock as you or I would experience, they probably had families and homes once, there is categorically no reason or excuse to put any human being through this kind of torture, I am utterly appalled and extremely upset by this atrocity and I believe that every one should be also, and as for medical knowledge we have found answers and treatments in ways that don’t destroy the profound right of every human to live and to live without being tortured

And by the way Crystal there is no such thing as supernatural beings, grow up

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10 Atrocious Experiments Conducted By Unit 731

The events of World War II may show humanity at its lowest point. Clashing political ideologies and the ensuing worldwide combat produced a nearly unprecedented level of bloodshed and destruction.

Although the Holocaust showed the extreme nature of the war and the horrifying extent to which a nation could be driven, Japan’s Unit 731 facilities, an Auschwitz equivalent, held their own horrors in human experimentation. These are just some of the experiments that were performed during the unit’s existence from 1936 to 1945.

10 Dismemberment

Like experiments at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, Unit 731 doctors and researchers studied the potential survival of soldiers on the battlefield. But instead of using Japanese soldiers for these experiments, Unit 731 used Allied POWs as well as Chinese and Russian civilians.

One such war-influenced experiment was in various dismemberments , particularly limb amputations, to study the effects of blood loss. Other forms of dismemberment were purely experimental and not combat-related. For example, some amputated limbs were reattached to other sides of the body. Other times, limbs were frozen and amputated until only the victim’s head and torso remained.

Often, this was done without anesthetic for fear of negatively affecting the experiments. Test subjects were degradingly called marutas (“logs”), a reference to the phrase, “How many logs fell?”

9 Nanjing Atrocities

Unit 731 was one of the two most infamous, large-scale war crimes committed by Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The second war crime was the Nanjing Massacre.

Besides the atrocities committed, the correlation between the two war crimes was that many POWs and civilians captured during the campaign were used in the Unit 731 experiments. By and large, the anti-Chinese sentiment was still in place between the two events. As soon as Japanese soldiers entered China’s capital in December 1937, the city was host to mass murder and rape.

After the orders to eliminate all captives eventually arrived, no one was spared . The atrocities included beatings, drownings, decapitations, mass theft, forced incestuous rape, live burials, addictive drug distribution, and numerous unrecorded crimes.

There was even a contest between two Japanese officers to see who would kill 100 people with a sword first. Unlike many of the participants in Unit 731, however, these officers were tried and executed.

8 Vivisection

One of the most common and brutal experiments performed was vivisection. This was done on live subjects without anesthesia as it was believed that the symptoms of decay after death would skew results.

One purpose of these vivisections was to practice surgery. In fact, multiple different surgeries were often performed on a subject. Once the victim was of no more use, he was killed and dissected before being burned or placed in a large burial pit.

Other times, vivisections were performed to see the internal effects of diseases. Vivisections were also part of crude experiments, like the removal of the stomach and the attachment of the esophagus to the intestines. Images of and testimonies about these surgeries are available online. But view them with discretion as they are extremely graphic.

7 Lethal Injections

Initially, many of Unit 731’s disease experiments were performed as preventative measures. The Japanese had found that 89 percent of battlefield deaths from the First Sino-Japanese War were from diseases. But these experiments into preventative medicines and vaccines evolved into offensive use as the war progressed.

Unit 731 was split into eight divisions. The first focused on experimenting with bacteriological diseases, including the bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, typhoid, and tuberculosis. These bacteria were injected into subjects regularly, and the resulting infections were studied. The outcomes became increasingly deadly because many people lived in communal cells.

The Japanese also studied the effects of injecting humans with animal blood, air bubbles that caused embolisms, and seawater. These seawater injections were similar to the seawater ingestion experiments at Auschwitz .

6 Venereal Diseases

Children were not exempt from the unit’s atrocities as vertical transmission from mother to fetus was studied. This included diseases like syphilis . The researchers studied how syphilis would affect the resulting baby’s health and how it would harm the mother’s reproductive system. Although we don’t know the number of children born in captivity, it is known that none had survived when the unit dissolved in 1945.

While diseases like tuberculosis and smallpox could be injected, syphilis and gonorrhea required a different method of infection. This was done using a male and a female, one of whom was infected. The couple was forced to have sexual intercourse under threat of being shot. The infected bodies were later vivisected to see the internal results.

5 Frostbite

One of the more horrifying series of experiments revolved around extreme temperatures. While extreme heat was also used on test subjects, extreme cold was used more often as it was suited to certain facility climates in Japan.

After the test subjects were taken outside in the cold, water was intermittently poured on their arms until frostbite set into the affected areas. Other times, limbs were frozen and subsequently thawed to study gangrene.

One might wonder how the researchers could tell that the arms were frostbitten. According to one officer’s testimony, frostbite had occurred if the “frozen arms, when struck with a short stick , emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when struck.”

However, these experiments did yield scientific findings. The unit determined that rubbing a frostbitten area was not the most effective treatment. Instead, it was better to treat frostbite by immersing the affected area in water warmer than 37.8 degrees Celsius (100 °F) but cooler than 50 degrees Celsius (122 °F). A scene depicting this experiment is featured in the 1988 film Men Behind the Sun with some artistic license.

4 Sexual Assault

The rape and sexual assault of women occurred with tragic frequency in Unit 731. Like the mass rapes and sex slavery exhibited during the Nanjing Massacre (aka “The Rape of Nanjing”), sex crimes committed by Japanese soldiers and researchers were rampant. Although these unlawful acts were committed for pleasure, they were sometimes justified by the researchers as experiments about venereal diseases.

However, one guard’s account of a researcher shows the disturbing and casual nature of these crimes . According to the guard, the researcher “told me that one day he had a human experiment scheduled, but there was still time to kill. So he and another member took the keys to the cells and opened one that housed a Chinese woman. One of the unit members raped her.”

3 Special Chamber Experiments

Although Unit 731 did plenty of testing in the field, the 6-square-kilometer (2.3 mi 2 ) facility was host to numerous buildings for specific experiments. Many of these buildings were used to raise fleas and culture pathogens, but some were specially built for testing.

A centrifuge was built to examine how much force it would take to cause death. High-pressure chambers pushed victims’ eyes out of their heads. Forced abortions and sterilizations were conducted, and subjects were treated to lethal doses of X-rays.

In an experiment to observe the innate bond between mother and offspring, a Russian mother and her child were monitored in a glass chamber while poisonous gas was pumped in . The mother covered her child in an attempt to save her, but both ultimately succumbed.

2 Weapons Testing

In Unit 731, human subjects were also used in weapons testing at many facilities. The victims were typically taken to an experimental field like Anda and tied to wooden posts for testing. Then the victims had plague-spreading bombs dropped on them en masse, were used for target practice, had grenades lobbed at them, or were burned with flamethrowers.

This was very similar to the Imperial Japanese Army’s protocol to use captured Chinese soldiers for bayonet practice. Nevertheless, it’s an example of the unnecessary cruelty exhibited at the Unit 731 facilities.

1 Biological Warfare

World War I brought technological advances in warfare, particularly biological warfare. Inspired by the success produced by these bioweapons (particularly the chlorine gas used during the Second Battle of Ypres), General Shiro Ishii, the director of Unit 731, experimented extensively in this area.

In addition to dropping bombs filled with diseases like anthrax, cholera, typhoid, and bubonic plague on prisoners, Ishii designed a special porcelain-shelled bomb that allowed infected fleas to disperse and infect a wider area. Again, subjects were often tied to stakes and bombed. Scientists in protective suits examined the bodies afterward.

Other times—such as on October 4 and 29, 1940—low-flying airplanes sprayed plague bacteria in the Chechiang province in China, killing 21 and 99 people, respectively. However, estimates for the total number of Chinese killed in this manner vary from 200,000–580,000 people.

The Japanese regarded the Chinese as inferior. As a result, the Chinese were considered viable test subjects for these attacks. We can only speculate as to what the unit would have done on a larger scale with these biological weapons.

Thatcher Boyd is a writer, actor, film lover, and drinker of a LOT of black coffee. You can reach him here to collaborate, communicate, or just shoot the breeze.

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Reimagining China in Tokyo

As a teacher in his early twenties, Zhang felt the premonition of a crisis. The new millennium had dawned, and Zhang (who asked that I use only his last name, for fear of government retaliation) was living in a middling city in central China drilling vocabulary to high-school students. One day, surrounded by fellow-teachers near retirement age, he peered into his future and recoiled. “That kind of life, predictable from beginning to end, terrified me,” Zhang told me. And so, in 2001, Zhang quit his job to become a beipiao , a slang term for migrant “drifters” seeking prospects and purpose in Beijing.

Zhang arrived in the capital during a beguiling stretch of dynamism. After the crackdowns in Tiananmen Square, in 1989, the Communist Party had shifted its focus to economic growth, dismantling old structures and seeding—in the media cliché of the time—the “germs of a civil society.” Journalists published daring reports on official corruption. Lawyers championed the rights of workers. Bookstores and universities became hot spots of public discussion. The year Zhang arrived in Beijing, China joined the World Trade Organization in what state media called a “historical necessity.” And, eight decades after famed visits by John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, China fêted the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, best known for his idea of the “public sphere,” where private individuals discuss matters of common interest.

Zhang basked in Beijing’s emerging space for self-exploration. He found a job as an editor at a small publishing outlet and frequented bookstores. He wrote book reviews, attended concerts, and sat in on lectures at Peking University, China’s summit of higher learning. In the early two-thousands, universities were open to the public, and classrooms were frequented by what the media called youxuesheng (“wayfaring students”). Zhang fondly recalled biking through the vortex of street venders at the university’s south gate and paging through lecture posters on the campus bulletins. “Back then, we used to go to Peking University for everything,” Zhang told me. “We ate there, showered there, and played basketball there.”

But the public square began to shrink in China—at first slowly, in the years leading up to Xi Jinping’s rise to power, in 2012, and then precipitously thereafter. Party journals began to cast civil society as a “trap” set by Western agitators. Hundreds of human-rights lawyers, investigative journalists, and feminist activists were detained, imprisoned, or placed under surveillance. Chinese universities bore the markers of Xi’s obsession with “total security.” Gates were barricaded and featured facial-recognition scanners; outsiders were no longer permitted to freely enter campuses. When Zhang visited Peking University around 2017, he had to wait in an hour-long queue for visitors’ identification.

Zhang, who had risen to become an executive at a large Chinese publisher—“the front lines of ideology,” as he put it—grew well-versed in the workings of censorship. In 2018, the Party issued a sweeping assessment plan. Each publisher would be evaluated on a “social benefit” score, which emphasizes political and moral propriety. Companies were docked points for publishing content that went “against the Party and government directives,” which resulted in budget cuts that affected employees’ salaries. Zhang was darkly amused by the new system, in which patriotism and profit were so explicitly married. “Everyone was still groping about in it,” he recalled. “Like, ‘Hey, if I published an article in the People’s Daily , would it add a point?’ ”

Zhang’s mental health declined, and he began to imagine a life overseas. He had long thought highly of Japan: during one trip, Zhang’s wife had feared she’d lost their three-year-old child on the subway, only to find her rescued by an elderly Japanese woman. What if he started his own publishing company in Tokyo? A few years ago, his team passed on a memoir he had championed from a writer from China’s industrial northeast, claiming that the depiction of economic hardship in the region was “too bleak.” Zhang’s spirits sank. “There was not a single part of that book that was overtly critical,” Zhang told me. Before long, he applied for a business-management visa in Japan, which is a popular path for Chinese citizens who hope to eventually gain permanent residency there. In September, 2021, the Zhangs officially moved to Tokyo.

For reasons ranging from political repression to pandemic lockdowns and a relentless work culture, a growing number of Chinese have become practitioners of runxue —“run philosophy,” or emigration. In each of the past two years, more than three hundred thousand Chinese have left the country, according to data from the United Nations—more than double the number in 2012. They include China’s wealthiest, who have snapped up luxury villas in Singapore and contributed to record-high real-estate prices in Tokyo, as well as those who have embarked on the perilous trek to the United States via the Darién Gap, on the border between Colombia and Panama. Among this exodus, many are like Zhang: skilled, educated members of the middle class who once enjoyed the public life available in China’s cities.

A generation ago, the West was the prime destination for China’s élites. Now a lot of them prefer Japan. More than two thousand Chinese reportedly entered Japan in 2022 on the business-management visa, a fifty-per-cent increase from 2019. Among the first to come were China’s tech entrepreneurs. Even their icon, Jack Ma, reportedly made an extended visit to Tokyo after a high-profile fallout with Chinese regulators in late 2020. A steady influx of middle-class professionals and cultural creators has come since. A Chinese writer, whom I’ll call Lu, arrived this past September on a work visa sponsored by a friend. It took him three months, much quicker than what he had estimated for the U.S. While some American politicians are spurning Chinese immigrants, Japan has created visa pathways for skilled workers and recent graduates of top universities. “Only the top-shelf professionals go to North America now,” Lu told me. “For petty intellectuals like me, we go to Tokyo.”

It took Zhang a while to join public life in his adopted city. “For people like us, who grew up on the mainland, freedom is a drug,” he told me. “Once we get here, even if we don’t do anything and just live off our savings, that is enough.” Then, last year, he began to see mentions in messaging groups of familiar names: scholars, journalists, and writers who had recently moved to or visited Japan. Last June, a Chinese historian he had long admired was giving a lecture at the University of Tokyo. “I just had to go,” Zhang told me. He entered the university campus through the gates, unbothered by meddling security guards. Then he went into the room, and saw a scene straight from his memories: there was the professor at the lectern and a rapt crowd of Chinese. “It was just—oh man—it was so emotional,” Zhang told me. His cherished life in Beijing was gone. Somehow, it had reappeared in Tokyo.

Roughly sixty million Chinese and their descendants live abroad today, according to the Chinese government’s estimates, a population roughly equal to that of France. I count myself among them. My parents were college students in Beijing in the nineteen-eighties, and were swept up in the democratic ferment that stirred from Eastern Europe to the streets of Seoul. When the military opened fire at Tiananmen Square protesters , they chose to leave China, forsaking their political idealism for the ordinary desire to make money and pursue happiness in the now. With the help of a relative, they immigrated to Tokyo, where they obtained Ph.D.s in chemistry and physics. They later moved to the U.S. So many of their college classmates left China in the decade after Tiananmen that class reunions take place in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I grew up in Tokyo, in the nineties; my parents bonded with fellow Chinese graduate students, but there were few other meeting points. Most seemed focussed on making ends meet or studying for a degree so they no longer had to. Just in the past year, however, a topology of Chinese bookstores, literary salons, and lecture spaces has arrived in Tokyo. I visited Tokyo in March, and within hours I was pulled into an online group chat of roughly two hundred and seventy Chinese émigrés. Every day, it seemed, the group was sharing a new seminar, a book club, or lecture to attend. The most striking difference between the new émigrés and my parents was not wealth or even their modern messaging tools; it was their appetite for congregation. “This year was definitely an inflection point,” one Chinese staff member at a bookstore named One Way Street told me. “We used to just meet up for drinks one-on-one.”

One Way Street, named after the essay collection by Walter Benjamin, sits on a secluded lane in Ginza, an upscale district of Tokyo. It is a modest space, with a white exterior and books arrayed so inaccessibly high they blur the line between merchandise and décor. A wooden spiral staircase leads to a seating area where, according to the beleaguered staff, the store has held more than a hundred events and lectures since it opened last August. When I visited, an animated Japanese banker was gesticulating to a Chinese audience about the intricacies of Japan’s finance system. Whenever he cracked a joke, spectators chuckled before the interpreter could get off a translation. Everyone, it seemed, was either bilingual or bluffing.

The Ginza store is the brainchild of Xu Zhiyuan, an intellectual turned entrepreneur who famously co-founded a bookstore chain in China. The first store opened in 2005, in a courtyard of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace; One Way now has locations in other provinces, and has expanded into podcasting, video programming, and coffee. The Ginza store seemed to have spun out of Xu’s own romantic yearnings rather than hard-nosed business logic. When China implemented travel restrictions in early 2020, Xu was stranded in Japan. For years, he had been researching and writing a multivolume biography on one of the great visionaries of modern China, Liang Qichao. There was some irony: In 1898, Liang had fled to Tokyo after a failed attempt to overhaul China’s imperial system made him a wanted man. Liang’s political writings reached something of a creative acme in exile, where he was energized by Japanese intellectuals and their bountiful translations of Western texts. Xu wanted to rekindle that earlier mingling of minds. His latest volume on Liang, “The Exile,” was published in the same month the Ginza bookstore opened.

A couple of miles north of One Way Street is Juwairen, Chinese for l’étranger , after the novella by Albert Camus. The spirited owner, Zhao Guojun, was once a cultural impresario in Beijing, known in the legal community for helping host forums and seminars on current affairs or, as he put it, “all the sensitive topics of the day.” This year, the Taiwan-based bookstore Feidi is planning on opening a branch in the city, too. According to the stores’ various owners, these establishments are motivated by a desire to make more Chinese public spaces, something that has become a rarity on the mainland. Books merely create the scene. “They’re like the UI or UX of a Web site,” Annie Zhang, the owner of Feidi, told me. In the past couple of years, Zhang said, she has heard from Chinese immigrants in New York, Amsterdam, and Berlin, asking her to chat. “They all want to start their own,” she told me.

Lu, the writer, now runs a YouTube account about Chinese history and current affairs. He estimates that he is one of several hundred cultural creators who have recently moved to Tokyo and are doing similar activities. This is fuelling a new ecosystem of overseas Chinese media free from the Party’s censors. Some are launching magazines and publishers; others are hosting podcasts and music concerts. In March, a banned Chinese rock singer named Li Zhi, known for his ballads critical of the government—including “The Square,” about the 1989 Tiananmen crackdowns—announced a few concerts in Japan. It was his first tour in five years, after his performances were cancelled and his music disappeared from streaming sites in 2019, on the thirtieth anniversary of the massacre. Tickets sold out in weeks, and a video from his Osaka concert showed a sea of fans shouting along to his every word.

The publisher Zhang, for his part, co-founded a new company, which released one of its first books last winter: “Between Staying and Leaving,” about the dilemma of intellectuals after the Chinese Communists’ victory in 1949. So far, he has printed a thousand copies, a fraction of the volume he dealt with on commercial titles back in China, but he felt it was worth it. “I have my own spiritual needs,” he told me. The author, a mainland scholar, had published a censored version of the book in China, in 2005. Zhang cited a quote from him that appears on the back cover: “Once again, Chinese intellectuals are confronted with the dilemma of staying or leaving. It is most regrettable that this book remains relevant to this day. I had always hoped my words would fade swiftly into obscurity. Alas!”

A few hours after I attended my first lecture in Tokyo, I received a message from the group chat. It was from a human-rights lawyer named Li Jinxing: “Dear friends, I am planning to crowdfund a Tokyo Chinese-language library in the near future. Anyone interested is welcome to participate.”

Back in China, Li was a prominent criminal-defense lawyer, and he played an active role in civil society, organizing events on judicial reform, market liberalization, and social inequality, among other topics. “A lawyer is a social activist,” Li told me. “It’s not just about interpreting the law, it’s about how well you can marshal society’s resources to rescue your client.”

In the summer of 2015, the Party rounded up hundreds of human-rights lawyers and activists. Li’s office was raided, and his law license was later revoked. “When your comrades get taken away, you know your days are numbered,” he told me. As the pressure tactics mounted, Li grew disillusioned with his work. “I felt like being a lawyer in China was useless,” he told me. “So I decided to change identities.” In September, 2022, Li moved to Tokyo, where he began organizing events for Chinese émigrés in a beige-tiled building not far from a university campus. When I was in town, he had organized a book club contrasting Chinese and Japanese paths to modernity and a lecture by a mainland scholar about an early-twentieth-century Chinese revolutionary who had spent time in Tokyo.

On a radiantly sunny afternoon, I went to the lecture, part of a series titled “Rebuilding China in Tokyo.” When I entered the building, Li and his wife were setting out folding chairs. The room was stark and sterile, but, along the white walls, Li had hung portraits of lawyers, journalists, and activists who were still detained by the Party. Soon, Chinese people of all ages filed into Li’s office, including Zhang, who had published the works of the scholar delivering the talk.

Li switched on a projector, beaming an image of a wiry man in a tasselled, shoulder-padded jacket onto a screen. The scholar (who asked to remain anonymous, fearing government retribution) introduced the man as Cai E, one of Liang Qichao’s disciples. In 1899, at just sixteen years of age, Cai moved to Tokyo. He later trained in a Japanese military academy and delved into political organizing. He returned to China in 1904 and rose through the ranks of the military in the south. In 1911, Cai participated in the revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty and established the Republic of China. “Tokyo nurtured Cai,” the scholar remarked, referring both to his skills as a military leader and his anti-imperialism. “It was in Japan,” he said, “that the seeds to rebuild China germinated.”

Critics of Xi have long likened him to a Chinese emperor. Where, then, were the Cai Es of this era? “This world is simple if you think about it,” the scholar concluded. “You just need to get some young people, aged seventeen or eighteen, and nurture them into Cai Es, and you’ll have it all. But whose family will let you nurture their kid into Cai E? Families today want their kids to become Jack Ma.” The quip elicited chuckles from the audience.

Beyond pedagogical preferences, many émigrés say that China’s repression of dissent abroad is why a Liang or a Cai E has yet to surface. During the “white paper” protests in 2022, members of the Chinese diaspora from Paris to Sydney and Tokyo staged rallies in solidarity. Some of them later told journalists that their families in China had been contacted by police. In February, an influential Twitter personality called Teacher Li , who came to prominence posting videos of the protests from Italy, shared screenshots from followers in China who claimed that they had been questioned by the police. Even in the new public spaces in Tokyo, some émigrés were still leery of discussing China. When I asked Xu, the entrepreneur, why a figure like Liang Qichao hadn’t emerged today, he put it bluntly: “This state is too strong.”

One week later, in central Tokyo, more than a hundred Chinese packed into a conference hall at Meiji University, which derives its name from the period of upheaval that transformed feudal Japan into a modern state. The university had invited a group of Chinese liberals, who opined on what role Japan might play this time in China’s political evolution. One of the speakers was Wu Guoguang, an exile of the Tiananmen generation and a senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. In his lecture, Wu presented a theory that might explain why many Chinese seem to support the Communist Party, despite its fumbles in economic recovery and pandemic management: “Chinese people can’t imagine an alternative.” He explained that a lot of people bought into the propaganda that “the dissolution of the Party rule would mean the dissolution of the country.”

Then he turned to the émigrés. “I can only imagine that, by living in this political system, you’ve obtained things that you couldn’t obtain in China,” he said. “Consider this: if you can have them in Japan, why can’t you have them in China?” The émigrés, he said, would be the ones to imagine a more desirable alternative. “How do we achieve it? That’s a question for another day,” Wu added. “First you must envision it.”

The physical act of emigration is often smooth, but the spiritual one can be far more vexing. In the eighties and nineties, integrationists like my parents moved to the U.S., joined corporations as scientists, and largely avoided joining Chinese communities. To them, peace and prosperity were the future, and Beijing was firmly in the past. Several older émigrés I met in Japan shared a similar outlook, and bristled at the thought of rebuilding China in Tokyo. “They don’t understand Japanese society,” one Chinese journalist, who emigrated in the late eighties, said, of the new arrivals. “They need to learn the language and culture first.” Others had held themselves apart from their new home, feeling that they had something to preserve. “When we left China, everyone still imagined they would return,” Wang Dan, an exiled Tiananmen student leader who has lived in the U.S. for decades, told me.

Many of the new émigrés seem to defy such categories. Though many aspire to reimagine China abroad, they don’t only perceive themselves as being in exile: theirs is a China that is synergistic with foreign cultures. “There isn’t just preserving your native land or assimilating to the foreign one. Most of us are in between,” Annie Zhang, the owner of Feidi, told me. The émigrés I spoke to often used a common word to describe their experience: jilei , or “accumulation.” They had accumulated the traumas and transgressions of state power. They had accumulated wealth and entrepreneurial skills. And they had accumulated a global consciousness through China’s decades of engagement with the world. “We’re the successors of China’s forty years of reform and opening up,” Li, the human-rights lawyer, told me. “We’ve inherited not only wealth but a wealth of understanding—of markets, legal systems, democracy, and judicial fairness.” Li was building a Chinese community in Tokyo, and he was also taking a Japanese-language class. The émigrés, it seemed, were still figuring out their relationships to both their new country and their motherland.

Before I left Japan, I took a train down to Kyoto to visit a man I’ll call Wang, who had owned an independent bookstore in China. “Seventy-five per cent of China’s most famous writers” gave talks there, he told me proudly. But, from 2020 to 2022, local officials shut down Wang’s store eight times, a function of China’s strict “zero- COVID ” policies. “That feeling of being constantly thwarted was so excruciating.” he said. In the spring of 2022, he paused his operations and boarded a one-way flight to Japan. He has been taking a break from bookselling since.

I arrived in Kyoto on a crisp evening and took a taxi to Wang’s, where he’d invited me and another guest from Tokyo for a hot-pot dinner. As we zipped down a lane along the Kamo River, the waterway that bisects Kyoto, the city’s famed ryokans , or inns, cast a warm glow on the water. When I entered Wang’s dining room, I recognized a familiar face: Zhang, the publisher.

Over dinner, Zhang recounted a recent visit to Taiwan, where he had seen demonstrations near the Presidential building. Elections were coming up in January, and protesters with the Taiwan People’s Party, a new alternative to the Democratic Progressive Party, were hollering “Step down, D.P.P.!” The phrase “step down,” in Chinese, xiajia , struck Zhang as oddly meek. “Democracies observe the rules of the game,” Zhang told us. “The worst thing people say is ‘step down.’ But, after you step down, you can step back up!”

Wang passed around bottles of sesame sauce, chili oil, and other condiments for each of us to make our own dipping sauce. As he plunged some pork ribs into the boiling broth, I asked Zhang and Wang to share some of their first impressions of Japan. For Zhang, who moved in the fall of 2021, it was Japan’s approach to COVID . “I wasn’t used to it,” he told me. “I thought, Why wasn’t there anyone minding us?” He was referring to the lockdown and mass-testing regime that had become ubiquitous in China: “No one was asking us to do PCR tests.”

Wang spoke about his life in the shrine-dotted city he had adopted as his new home. On most days, he explained, he maintained a relaxed schedule, entertaining Chinese guests who passed through Kyoto and cycling along the Kamo River. During those bike rides, Wang said, he had felt called, as though by Kyoto itself, to become a kinder person. His eyes welled up. “In China, I never knew what the next day might bring to me,” he said. “In Japan, I know exactly what the next day won’t bring to me.”

As midnight approached, Zhang pressed Wang on why he hadn’t hosted events or started a bookstore in Kyoto. Wang waffled. “The events you’re talking about, I can easily do them, it’s just a matter of if I want to or not,” he said.

Zhang looked at me as though he were a detective who had spotted a new lead. “This is the reason I came to Kyoto—to spur him into action!” he said. “I know his situation all too well, biking along the Kamo and the like. He’s lying flat! He doesn’t want to work anymore.”

“I’m just waiting for the right circumstances,” Wang retorted. Zhang relented, and the two moved on to other topics, updating each other on the lives of mutual friends and sharing their impressions of Taiwan’s publishing scene.

The next morning, Zhang and I ate breakfast at Wang’s dining table and packed our bags to head back to Tokyo. Before we left, Wang invited us to take a tour of his office. He led us to a door outside his house that I had thought belonged to a neighbor. Wang, it turned out, owned both of the attached houses. We stepped through the door into what, at first, looked like an ordinary living room, with a TV and a table cluttered with books and snacks.

But then I noticed bookshelves, which spanned the walls and stretched into the hallways, and held a wonderland of literary paraphernalia: old periodicals, specialty items, and an impressive collection of signed books in Chinese, Japanese, and English. Some had been shipped over from his old bookstore, Wang explained; others were sourced from secondhand shops in Japan.

Zhang’s eyes brightened. “I shouldn’t have said anything last night,” he said. “You’ve been planning something all along.”

“As I said, it’s not a matter of if,” Wang replied, smiling. “It’s only a matter of when.” ♦

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Japan tackles invasive fire ants in first colony found this year, in China shipment

• Aggressive fire ants rear their heads in Japan for the first time this year, underlining nation’s constant battle to keep invasive alien species at bay
• The first fire ants discovered in Japan were at ports in 2017, with the insects apparently entering via shipments from mainland China, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia

“There is no question that this is becoming a bigger problem every year,” said Dr Koichi Goka, head of the Invasive Species Research Team at the National Institute of Environmental Studies.

“The first fire ants were found in a cargo in 2017 and since then, virtually every month another colony is discovered at a port somewhere in Japan,” he said.

To date, there have been 110 cases reported to the authorities, he said, “but we have been fortunate to find them and quickly eradicate these colonies”.

A queen fire ant can produce as many as 1,600 eggs a day and the insects, which have a reputation for being aggressive, can grow up to 6mm long. Authorities in other countries have confirmed that their bite can cause anaphylactic shock and, in extreme cases, have been reported to have caused death in very young or elderly people.

There have been no reports of colonies beyond the immediate environs of ports, Goka said, but officials and port staff have been instructed to remain alert.

Scientists at the institute have developed a new insecticide to spray inside containers that is now available at every port in Japan. They have also created a bait that contains pesticide.

The ants could cause a great deal of damage if a breeding colony entered a city environment.

“Most of Japan is too cold in the winter months for these ants, so we expect that they would try to nest in urban areas, taking advantage of the ‘heat islands’ created by homes and other buildings,” Goka said.

“They could thrive in that sort of environment, causing damage to structures and injuring people.”

Insect cuisine gains popularity in Japan, echoing pre-WWII past

And if the larger and more aggressive insects entered the subtropical areas of southern Japan, such as Okinawa Prefecture, it is likely that they would quickly annihilate local ant species, Goka says.

“The entire ecosystem would undoubtedly suffer, and we are seeing that happening in parts of southern China where they are spreading today,” he said. “In some places, it looks like they cannot be stopped.”

Fire ants are just one of the threats to Japan’s native flora and fauna.

The National Institute of Environmental Studies’ website lists over 1,000 invasive species of plants and animals. Many have evaded quarantine controls and have since adapted to life in Japan, but some were imported as pets and then either escaped or were released by their owners.

In 2020, Goka’s agency confirmed that a species of cicada first found in central Japan in 2011 had arrived as eggs in broomstick shipments from China.

An example of an imported species that has adapted to its new habitat is the American raccoon, according to Goka.

“In the 1970s, there was a very popular television cartoon about a raccoon called Rascal and suddenly every family wanted a pet raccoon,” he said.

“The cartoon raccoon was very cute and hundreds were imported, but people quickly learned that they can be very aggressive, and they grow big very quickly.”

Unable to care for their pets, many people chose to simply release them, and their offspring are now a frequent sight in the suburbs of Japanese cities.

Similarly, black bass that were imported by an entrepreneur as a potential new food source did not appeal to the Japanese palate and were either released or escaped from fish farms. Large and aggressive, they have laid waste to the native species of fish that inhabited Lake Biwa, in central Japan, and other large bodies of fresh water across the country.

Snapping turtles – which can bite off a person’s finger – have similarly been dumped in suburban park ponds, along with American crayfish and bullfrogs. Countless civet cats, imported in the 1850s to be farmed for its fur, escaped and have since thrived in the wild and are blamed for damage to farmers’ crops.

Japan passed the Invasive Alien Species Act in June 2004 to stem the flood of foreign flora and fauna, but Kevin Short, a naturalist and former professor of cultural anthropology at Tokyo University of Information Sciences, says adaptive plants and animals will always get through.

“It is an unavoidable consequence of greater global trade and more containers coming into Japan from other parts of the world,” he said. “The best thing the authorities can do is to try to contain invasive species in areas close to ports until they can deal with them.

“Yes, they pose a threat to Japan’s biodiversity and ecosystems, but I do not think that is the greatest threat,” he added. “Ecosystems are resilient, and they are able to adapt to change, but if there are large numbers of fire ants or poisonous spiders, like redbacks that have been reported here already, then that poses a danger to people.”

Goka agrees that the challenges are huge.

“My fear is that if it is impossible to eradicate all invasive species, then Japan’s natural flora and fauna will ultimately be destroyed,” he said. “Inevitably, the same thing will happen across Asia and the rest of the world. Countries need to work with each other to limit the spread of these species and protect our domestic ecosystems.”

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