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