When I first saw this, it reminded me of the movie 9. But this wasn’t the cute and helpless creature out to save the world. I was at the Unit 731 Museum in Harbin, the location of an Imperial Japanese military compound used for the research and development of chemical and biological weapons. At least 3,000 prisoners were used as human guinea pigs, called “logs,” for various experiments. There were the ones where people were exposed to the plague or anthrax, then cut open without anesthesia to see how the disease affected internal organs. There were the ones where people were put in pressure chambers to see how long it takes for their eyes to pop out. There were the ones where people were poisoned in a gas chamber, to see how long it takes them to die. There were the ones where people were left outside to freeze their limbs, so the doctors can figure out a better way to treat frostbite on Japanese soldiers.
This is a quote from a New York Times interview with a medical assistant who worked at the compound, speaking of his first vivisection experience:
“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,” recalled the 72-year-old farmer, then a medical assistant in a Japanese Army unit in China in World War II. “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. 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.”
As with German scientists, doctors from Unit 731 were never prosecuted for war crimes. Instead, they were granted immunity in exchange for their data. The head of the unit, General Shiro Ishii, died peacefully from throat cancer in 1959.
I hope he suffered.
Near the end of the war, Japan made a last desperate attempt to attack the US by sending bombs attached to balloons. Although over 200 balloons arrived, only one exploded, killing a pregnant woman and five children in a small Montana town. There’s a wonderful Radiolab episode about it. I wonder, had those balloons carried the chemical and biological weapons that Unit 731 developed, would the American government have been so kind to the doctors who created them.
As a Chinese person who studied Japanese, lived in Japan, and loves Japanese culture, even I find the Japanese government’s refusal to acknowledge certain aspects of the war to be genuinely disturbing. It’s not about retribution or reparation, it’s simply about acknowledging that something terribly wrong had been done, which is the first step to making sure that it never happens again. The lack of acknowledgement seems to indicate that it’s ok to do such things in a war, because the objective was to win. The end of the New York Times article illustrates my fear through the words of one man:
By conventional standards, few people were more cruel than the farmer who as a Unit 731 medic carved up a Chinese prisoner without anesthetic, and who also acknowledged that he had helped poison rivers and wells. Yet his main intention in agreeing to an interview seemed to be to explain that Unit 731 was not really so brutal after all.
Asked why he had not anesthetized the prisoner before dissecting him, the farmer explained: “Vivisection should be done under normal circumstances. If we’d used anesthesia, that might have affected the body organs and blood vessels that we were examining. So we couldn’t have used anesthetic.”
When the topic of children came up, the farmer offered another justification: “Of course there were experiments on children. But probably their fathers were spies.”
“There’s a possibility this could happen again,” the old man said, smiling genially. “Because in a war, you have to win.”
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