Unit 731

Unit 731
The Unit 731 complex
Location	Pingfang
Coordinates	45.6°N 126.633333°E / 45.6; 126.633333
Date	1935–1945
Attack type	Human experimentation. Biological/chemical warfare.
Weapons	Diseases Chemicals Explosives
Deaths	Around 10,000-40,000 from inside experiments and 200,000-600,000 from field experiments.
Perpetrators	General Shirō Ishii Lt. General Masaji Kitano Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army

Unit 731 (731部隊, Nana-san-ichi butai, Chinese: 731部队) was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel.

It was officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army (関東軍防疫給水部本部, Kantōgun Bōeki Kyūsuibu Honbu). Originally set up under the Kempeitai military police of the Empire of Japan, Unit 731 was taken over and commanded until the end of the war by General Shiro Ishii, an officer in the Kwantung Army.

Description

Shiro Ishii, commander of Unit 731

Unit 731 was based at the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China).

More than 10,000 people—from which around 600 every year were provided by the Kempeitai—were subjects of the experimentation conducted by Unit 731.

More than 95% of the victims who died in the camp based in Pingfang were Chinese and Korean, including both civilian and military. The remaining 5% were South East Asians and Pacific Islanders, at the time colonies of the Empire of Japan, and a small number of the prisoners of war from the Allies of World War II.

According to the 2002 International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare, the number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments is around 580,000. According to other sources, the use of biological weapons researched in Unit 731's bioweapons and chemical weapons programs resulted in possibly as many as 200,000 deaths of military personnel and civilians in China.

Many of the scientists involved in Unit 731 went on to prominent careers in post-war politics, academia, business, and medicine. Some were arrested by Soviet forces and tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials; others surrendered to the American Forces.

On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington 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." The deal was concluded in 1948.

Formation

In 1932, General Shirō Ishii (石井四郎 Ishii Shirō), chief medical officer of the Japanese Army and protégé of Army Minister Sadao Araki was placed in command of the Army Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory. Ishii organized a secret research group, the "Tōgō Unit", for the conduct of various chemical and biological investigations in Manchuria.

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 Manchurian Railway. A jailbreak in autumn 1934 and later explosion (believed to be an attack) in 1935 led Ishii to shut down Zhongma Fortress. He received the authorization to move to Pingfang, approximately 24 km (15 mi) south of Harbin, to set up a new and much larger facility.

In 1936, Hirohito authorized, by imperial decree, the expansion of this unit and its integration into the Kwantung Army as the Epidemic Prevention Department. It was divided at the same time into the "Ishii Unit" and "Wakamatsu Unit" with a base in Hsinking. From August 1940, all these 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)" or "Unit 731" (満州第731部隊) for short.

Activities

A special project code-named Maruta used human beings for experiments. Test subjects were gathered from the surrounding population and were sometimes referred to euphemistically as "logs" (丸太, maruta). This term originated as a joke on the part of the staff because the official cover story for the facility given to the local authorities was that it was a lumber mill. In an account by a man who worked as a "junior uniformed civilian employee" of the Japanese Army in Unit 731, the term Maruta came from German, meaning medical experiment, used in such contexts as, "How many logs fell?"

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

Vivisection

Prisoners of war were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia. Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Scientists performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body. These were conducted while the patients were alive because it was feared that the decomposition process would affect the results. The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children, and infants.

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' limbs were frozen and amputated, while others had limbs frozen then thawed to study the effects of the resultant untreated gangrene and rotting.

Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and the esophagus reattached to the intestines. Parts of the brain, lungs, liver, etc. were removed from some prisoners.

In 2007, Doctor Ken Yuasa testified to the Japan Times that, "I was afraid during my first vivisection, but the second time around, it was much easier. By the third time, I was willing to do it." He believes at least 1,000 people, including surgeons, were involved in vivisections over mainland China.

Weapons testing

Human targets were used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in different positions. Flame throwers were tested on humans. Humans were tied to stakes and used as targets to test germ-releasing bombs, chemical weapons, and explosive bombs.

Germ warfare attacks

Prisoners were injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea, then studied. Prisoners were infested with fleas in order to acquire large quantities of disease-carrying fleas for the purposes of studying the viability of germ warfare.

Plague fleas, infected clothing, and infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets. The resulting cholera, anthrax, and plague were estimated to have killed around 400,000 Chinese civilians. Tularemia was tested on Chinese civilians.

Unit 731 and its affiliated units (Unit 1644, Unit 100 et cetera) were involved in research, development, and experimental deployment of epidemic-creating biowarfare weapons in assaults against the Chinese populace (both civilian and military) throughout World War II. Plague-infested fleas, bred in the laboratories of Unit 731 and Unit 1644, were spread by low-flying airplanes upon Chinese cities, coastal Ningbo in 1940, and Changde, Hunan Province, in 1941. This military aerial spraying killed thousands of people with bubonic plague epidemics.

Other experiments

Prisoners were subjected to other torturous experiments such as being hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death, having air injected into their arteries to determine the time until the onset of embolism, and having horse urine injected into their kidneys.

In other tests, subjects were deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death; placed into high-pressure chambers until death; experimented upon to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival; 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 to determine if it could be a substitute for saline; and/or burned or buried alive.

Biological warfare

Japanese scientists performed tests on prisoners with plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, and other diseases. This research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the flea bomb used to spread the bubonic plague. Some of these bombs were designed with ceramic (porcelain) shells, an idea proposed by Ishii in 1938.

These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells, and other areas with anthrax, plague-carrier fleas, typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and other deadly pathogens. During biological bomb experiments, scientists dressed in protective suits would examine the dying victims. Infected food supplies and clothing were dropped by airplane into areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces. In addition, poisoned food and candies were given out to unsuspecting victims and children, and the results examined.

Known Unit members

• Lieutenant General Shirō Ishii
• Lieutenant Colonel Ryoichi Naito, founder of the pharmaceutical company Green Cross
• Dr. Masaji Kitano
• Yoshio Shinozuka
• Yasuji Kaneko

Divisions

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: Production of other miscellaneous agents.
• Division 5: Training of personnel.
• Divisions 6–8: Equipment, medical and administrative units.

Facilities

One of the buildings is open to visitors

The Unit 731 complex covered six square kilometers 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 kg of bubonic plague bacteria could be produced in several days.

Some of Unit 731's satellite facilities are in use by various Chinese industrial concerns. A portion has been preserved and is open to visitors as a War Crimes Museum.

Tons of biological weapons (and some chemicals) were stored in various places in northeastern China throughout the war. The Japanese attempted to destroy evidence of the facilities after disbanding. Twenty-nine people were hospitalized in August 2003 after a construction crew in Heilongjiang inadvertently dug up chemical shells that had been buried deep in the soil more than 50 years before.

Anda testing site

This site was an open air testing area about 120 km (75 mi) from the Pingfang facility.

Hsinking (Changchun) HQ

Headquarters of "Wakamatsu Unit" (Unit 100), under command of veterinarian Yujiro Wakamatsu. This facility dedicated itself to both the study of animal vaccines to protect Japanese resources, and, especially, veterinary biological-warfare. Diseases were tested for use against the Soviet and Chinese horses and other livestock. In addition to these tests, Unit 100 ran a bacteria factory to produce the pathogens needed by other units. Biological sabotage testing was also handled at this facility: everything from poisons to chemical crop destruction.

Peking (Beijing) HQ

This HQ served as the headquarters of Unit 1855. It was also an experimental branch unit based at Jinan in Shandong province. Pandemic diseases were extensively studied at this facility.

Nanking HQ

This section was the headquarters of the "Tama Unit" (Unit Ei 1644) and conducted extensive joint projects and operations with Unit 731.

Kwangtung (Canton) HQ

The headquarters of the "Nami Unit" (Unit 8604). This installation conducted human experimentation in food and water deprivation as well as water-borne typhus. In addition, this facility served as the main rat-farm for the medical units to provide them with bubonic plague vectors for experiments.

Syonan (Singapore) HQ

Formed in 1942, by Ryoichi Naito, Unit 9420 had approximately 1,000 personnel based at the Raffles Medical University. The unit was commanded by Major General Kitagawa Masataka and supported by the Japanese Southern Army Headquarters.

There were two main sub units: the "Kono Unit", which specialized in malaria, and "Umeoka Unit", which dealt with the plague. In addition to disease experiments, this facility served as one of the main rat catching and processing centers.

Hiroshima HQ

A top secret factory in Ōkunoshima produced chemical weapons for the Japanese military and medical units. Starting with mustard gas production in 1928, the factory moved on to such poisons as Lewisite, and Cyanogen. During the 1930s, as the war in China grew worse, the island the factory sat on was removed from most maps to strengthen secrecy and security.

Manchuria HQ (Unit 200)

This unit was associated directly with Unit 731, and worked mainly in plague research.

Manchuria HQ (Unit 571)

This section, with unknown headquarters, was another unit that worked directly and extensively with Unit 731.

Shinjuku

A medical school and research facility belonging to Unit 731 operated in Shinjuku, 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.

China has requested DNA samples from any human remains discovered at the site. The Japanese government—which has never officially acknowledged the existence of Unit 731—has rejected the request.

Special Mobile Teams

Special units led by Shirō Ishii's elder brother and only staffed with members from Ishii's home town operated separately from the regular medical organizations as roving researchers and trouble shooters.

Special Operations units

Units with special and unknown assignments in Manchuria and the Asian mainland. It has been suggested that nuclear weapons research was conducted in Manchuria toward the end of the war by this branch.

Disbanding and the end of World War II

Information sign at the site today.

Operations and experiments continued until the end of the war. Ishii had wanted to use biological weapons in the Pacific conflict since May 1944, but his attempts were repeatedly foiled by poor planning and Allied intervention.

With the Russian invasion of Manchukuo and Mengjiang in August 1945, the unit had to abandon their work in haste. The members and their families fled to Japan.

Ishii ordered every member of the group "to take the secret to the grave", threatening to find them if they failed, and prohibiting any of them from going into public work back in Japan. Potassium cyanide vials were issued for use in the event that the remaining personnel were captured.

Skeleton crews of Ishii's Japanese troops blew the compound up in the final days of the war to destroy evidence of their activities, but most were so well constructed that they survived somewhat intact.

After Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, Douglas MacArthur became the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupation. MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing America, but not the other wartime allies, with their research on biological warfare. American occupation authorities monitored the activities of former unit members, including reading and censoring their mail. The U.S. believed that the research data was valuable. The U.S. did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons.

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 counselor 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 likely aware of Unit 731's activities. His reference to it at the trial is believed to have been accidental.

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.

Although most victims of Unit 731 were Chinese, other victims were American POWs, British, Russian, Korean and other nationalities. The trial of those captured Japanese perpetrators was held in Khabarovsk in December 1949.

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: Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950). (French language: Documents relatifs au procès des anciens Militaires de l'Armée Japonaise accusés d'avoir préparé et employé l'Arme Bactériologique / Japanese language: 細菌戦用兵器ノ準備及ビ使用ノ廉デ起訴サレタ元日本軍軍人ノ事件ニ関スル公判書類 / Chinese language: 前日本陸軍軍人因準備和使用細菌武器被控案審判材料)

This book remains an invaluable resource for historians on the organization and activities of the Japanese biological warfare "death factory" lab-prisons. The lead prosecuting attorney at the Khabarovsk trial was Lev Smirnov, who had been one of the top Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials.

After World War II, the Soviet Union built a biological weapons facility in Sverdlovsk using documentation captured from Unit 731 in Manchuria.

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 labor camp.

After World War II

Official silence under Occupation

As above, under the American occupation the members of Unit 731 and other experimental units were allowed to go free. One graduate of Unit 1644, Masami Kitaoka, continued to do experiments on unwilling Japanese subjects in 1947 to 1956 while working for the National Institute of Health Sciences. He infected prisoners with rickettsia and mental health patients with typhus.

Post-Occupation Japanese media coverage and debate

Japanese discussions of Unit 731's activity began in the 1950s, after the end of the American occupation of Japan. In 1952, human experiments carried out in Nagoya City Pediatric Hospital, which resulted in 1 death, were publicly tied to former members of Unit 731. Later in that decade, journalists suspected that the murders attributed by the government to Sadamichi Hirasawa were actually carried out by members of Unit 731. In 1958, Japanese author Shusaku Endo published the book The Sea and Poison about human experimentation, which is thought to have been based on a real incident.

The author Morimura Seiichi published the book The Devil's Gluttony (悪魔の飽食) in 1981, followed by The Devil's Gluttony: A Sequel in 1983. This purported to reveal the "true" operations of Unit 731, but actually confused them with that of Unit 100, and falsely used unrelated photos attributing them to Unit 731, which raised questions about its reliability.

Also in 1981 appeared the first direct testimony of human vivisection in China, by Ken Yuasa. Since then many more in-depth testimonies have appeared in Japanese. The 2001 documentary Japanese Devils was composed largely of interviews with 14 members of Unit 731 who had been taken as prisoners by China and later released. All those interviewed, including Yuasa, had once been sentenced to death in China for war crimes, but had been released after extensive "re-education" treatment, which places public doubt on their testimonies.

Official government response in Japan

See also: List of war apology statements issued by Japan

Since the end of the American Occupation, these Japanese government has repeatedly apologized for its prewar behavior in general, but specific apologies and indemnities are determined on the basis of bilateral determination that crimes occurred, which requires a high standard of evidence. For example, compensation was paid to South Korea for comfort women-related crimes in the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea. Unit 731 presents a special problem, since unlike Nazi human experimentation which is extremely well documented, the activities of Unit 731 are known only from the testimonies of former unit members, and testimony cannot be employed to determine indemnity in this way.

In accordance with this principle, Japanese history textbooks do not usually carry descriptions of Unit 731; however, Saburo Ienaga's New History of Japan included a long 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.

In 1997, the international lawyer Kōnen Tsuchiya filed a class action suit against the Japanese government demanding reparations for the actions of Unit 731, using evidence filed by Rikkyo University professor Makoto Ueda. All court levels found that the suit was baseless. No findings of fact were made about the existence of human experimentation, but the decision of the court was that reparations are determined by international treaties and not by local court cases.

In October 2003, the Prime Minister of Japan responded to an inquiry from a member of the House of Representatives of Japan stating that, while the current Japanese government does not possess any records related to Unit 731, they recognize the gravity of the matter and will publicize any records that are located in the future.

Abroad

The Chinese film Men Behind the Sun, directed by Tun Fei Mou in 1988, is a graphic film about the atrocities committed by Unit 731, as is the Russian film Philosophy of a Knife, directed by Andrey Iskanov and released in 2008.

James T. Hong produced a 2007 documentary about Unit 731 told from the Chinese and Japanese sides called 731: Two Versions of Hell.

American thrash metal band Slayer's 2009 album World Painted Blood contains a song entitled "Unit 731" describing the events and atrocities that occurred at Unit 731.

The X-Files episode "731" was a reference to Unit 731, in which former members secretly continue their experiments on humans under control of a covert U.S. government agency.

See also

• War crime
• Poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services

Pacific War (World War II)

• Japanese human experimentations
• Changde chemical weapon attack
• Japanese war crimes
• Kaimingye germ weapon attack
• Second Sino-Japanese War

Other human experimentation

• Nazi human experimentation
• Josef Mengele
• North Korean human experimentation
• Tuskegee syphilis experiment
• Unethical human experimentation in the United States
• Harold Blauer (victim)
• Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments

Further reading

• Barenblatt, Daniel. A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation, HarperCollins, 2004. ISBN 0-06-018625-9.
• Barnaby, Wendy. The Plague Makers: The Secret World of Biological Warfare, Frog Ltd, 1999. ISBN 1-883319-85-4, ISBN 0-7567-5698-7, ISBN 0-8264-1258-0, ISBN 0-8264-1415-X.
• Cook, Haruko Taya; Cook, Theodore F., Japan at war : an oral history, New York: New Press: Distributed by Norton, 1992. ISBN 1-56584-014-3. Cf. Part 2, Chapter 6 on Unit 731 and Tamura Yoshio.
• Endicott, Stephen and Hagerman, Edward. The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea, Indiana University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-253-33472-1.
• Gold, Hal. Unit 731 Testimony, Charles E Tuttle Co., 1996. ISBN 4-900737-39-9.
• Grunden, Walter E., Secret Weapons & World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science, University Press of Kansas, 2005. ISBN 0-7006-1383-8.
• Handelman, Stephen and Alibek, Ken. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World—Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It, Random House, 1999. ISBN 0-375-50231-9, ISBN 0-385-33496-6.
• Harris, Robert and Paxman, Jeremy. A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare, Random House, 2002. ISBN 0-8129-6653-8.
• Harris, Sheldon H. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932–45 and the American Cover-Up, Routledge, 1994. ISBN 0-415-09105-5, ISBN 0-415-93214-9.
• Lupis, Marco. Orrori e misteri dell'Unità 731: la "fabbrica" dei batteri killer, La Repubblica, 14 aprile 2003, on line too.
• Mangold, Tom; Goldberg, Jeff, Plague wars: a true story of biological warfare, Macmillan, 2000. Cf. Chapter 3, Unit 731.
• Moreno, Jonathan D. Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans, Routledge, 2001. ISBN 0-415-92835-4.
• Williams, Peter. Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II, Free Press, 1989. ISBN 0-02-935301-7.

External links

• The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG)—The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
• History of Japan's biological weapons program—The Federation of American Scientists (FAS).
• History of United States' biological weapons program—The Federation of American Scientists (FAS).
• Dan Barenblatt's A Plague Upon Humanity: The Continuing Story—an internet gathering place for news and emerging information about Japan's human experiment and biological warfare program of the 1930s and 1940s, commonly known in shorthand as "Unit 731".
• UNIT 731: Japanese Experimentation Camp (1937-1945)—information site.
• Unit 731, Nightmare in Manchuria, a World Justice documentary, [1]
• The forgotten victims of biological warfare—online slideshow from the Sunshine Project.
• Unit 731: Auschwitz of the East—AII POW-MIA images.
• Army Doctor—a firsthand account by Yuasa Ken.
• Theodicy - through the Case of "Unit 731" by Eun Park (2003).
• Why the past still separates China and Japan by Robert Marquand (2001), Christian Science Monitor.
• China recalls germ warfare experiments — Agencies (2005), China Daily.
• Ex-Japanese Soldier Deemed War Criminal by Michael Zielenziger (1998), Houston Chronicle.
• US paid for Japanese human germ warfare data, Australian Broadcasting Corporation News Online.
• Japan's sins of the past by Justin McCurry (2004), The Guardian.
• The Asian Auschwitz of Unit 731 by Shane Green (2002), The Age.
• Doctors of Depravity by Christopher Hudson (2007), Daily Mail.
• War Crimes: Never Forget—review of the book Unit 731 by Peter Williams and David Wallace