Unit 731

Body disposal at Unit 731

Unit 731 was a covert biological 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. Officially known by the Imperial Japanese Army as the Kempeitai Political Department and Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory, it was initially set up as a political and ideological section of the Kempeitai military police of pre-Pacific War Japan. It was meant to counter the ideological or political influence of enemies, and to reinforce the ideology of military units.

The unit was disguised as a water purification unit and was based in the Pingfang district of the northeast Chinese city of Harbin, part of the puppet state of Manchukuo. It worked through Japanese political propaganda and as an ideological representative of the Imperial Japanese Army's Kodoha (Imperial way faction, or war party). In the first phase, this section worked against communist propaganda, but extended its responsibilities in other directions, at home and overseas.

It became a rough equivalent to the German Nazi SS propaganda departments. It promoted the belief in Japanese racial superiority, racialist theories, counterespionage, intelligence, political sabotage and infiltration of enemy lines. It also liaised with the Manchukuo military police, the Manchu intelligence service, regular Manchu police, Manchu Residents committees, local Nationalist Manchu Parties, and the Japanese Secret Service detachment in Manchukuo. Its section in Manchukuo used some agents from White Russian, Chinese, Manchu, Mongol and other foreign backgrounds for special services, or covert actions at home and abroad.

As many as ten thousand people, both civilian and military, of Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, and Russian origin were subjects of the experimentation conducted by Unit 731. Some American and European Allied prisoners of war also died at the hands of Unit 731. In addition, the use of biological weapons researched in Unit 731's bioweapons program resulted in tens of thousands of deaths in China – possibly as many as 200,000 casualties by some estimates.

Unit 731 was one of many units used by the Japanese to research biological warfare; other units included Unit 516 (Qiqihar), Unit 543 (Hailar), Unit 773 (Songo unit), Unit 100 (Changchun), Unit 1644 (Nanjing), Unit 1855 (Beijing), Unit 8604 (Guangzhou), Unit 200 (Manchuria) and Unit 9420 (Singapore).

Many of the scientists involved in Unit 731 went on to prominent careers in politics, academia, business, and medicine. Some were arrested by Soviet forces and tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials; others, who surrendered to the Americans, were granted amnesty in exchange for access to the data collected by them.

Because of their brutality, Unit 731's actions have now been declared by the United Nations to be war crimes.

Formation

In 1932, General Shiro Ishii was placed in command of the Army Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory. He and his men built the Zhong Ma Prison Camp (whose main building was known locally as the Zhongma Fortress), a prison/experimentation camp in Beiyinhe, a village 100 kilometers south of Harbin. Manchu railway lines were set up for transport of materials and equipment. Ishii organized the secret research group "Togo Unit" for the conduct of chemical and biological investigations. In 1935, a jailbreak, and later, an explosion (believed to be an attack) forced Ishii to shut down Zhongma Fortress. He later moved to Pingfang, approximately 24 kilometers south of Harbin, to set up a new and much larger facility.

This unit later was integrated into the Kwantung Army as the Epidemic Prevention Department, but was divided at the same time into the "Ishii Unit" and "Wakamatsu Unit" with a base in Hsinking. From 1941 on all these units were known collectively as the "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army", or "Unit 731" for short. They had support from the Imperial Young Corps, Japanese university research, and the Kempeitai. Some sources even link them with the Mitsui zaibatsu monopoly on poppy farming in Manchukuo (for production of heroin).

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" (maruta, 丸太). This term originated as a "joke" on the part of the staff due to the fact that the official cover story for the facility given to the local authorities was that it was a lumber mill. The test subjects included infants, the elderly, and pregnant women. Many experiments and dissections were performed on the living without the use of anesthetics because it was believed that it might affect the results, or that it was unnecessary because the subjects were tied down.

Vivisection

• Prisoners of war were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia
• Vivisections were performed on prisoners infected 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 felt that the decomposition process would affect the results. The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children and infants.
• Vivisections were also performed on pregnant women, sometimes impregnated by doctors, and the fetus removed.
• 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.

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 via rape, 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.
• Tularemia tested on Chinese civilians Source: CDC.gov
• Unit 731 and its affiliated units (Unit 1644, Unit 100 etc.) went beyond the "testing" phase of biological weapons, and actively committed epidemic-creating germ warfare assaults against the Chinese people (both civilians and soldiers) throughout World War II. Plague-infested fleas, bred in the lab facilities of Unit 731 and Unit 1644, were spread by low-flying airplanes over Chinese populated locations, such as the coastal city of Ningbo in 1940, and the city of Changde, Hunan province in 1941. This military aerial spraying resulted in human epidemics of bubonic plague that killed thousands of Chinese civilians.

Other experiments

• Some prisoners were hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death.
• Some prisoners had air injected into their arteries to determine the time until the onset of embolism.
• Some prisoners had horse urine injected into their kidneys.
• Some prisoners were deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death.
• Some prisoners were placed into high pressure chambers until death.
• Some prisoners were exposed to extreme temperatures and developed frostbite to determine how long humans could survive with such an affliction, and to determine the effects of rotting and gangrene on human flesh.
• Some experiments were performed to determine the relationship between temperature, burns and human survival.
• Some prisoners were placed into centrifuges and spun until death.
• Animal blood was injected into some prisoners and the effects of this studied.
• Some prisoners had lethal doses of x-ray radiation administered.
• Gas chambers tested various chemical weapons on some prisoners.
• Sea water was injected into some prisoners to determine if it could be substituted for saline.

Biological warfare

Japanese scientists performed tests on prisoners centering around the 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 Shiro Ishii in 1938.

These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells and other areas with anthrax, plague-carrying fleas, typhoid, dysentery, cholera and other deadly pathogens.

In addition to this, infected food supplies and clothing were dropped by planes into areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces.

Unit members

• Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii
• Lieutenant Colonel Ryoichi Naito
• Dr. Masaji Kitano
• Yoshio Shinozuka

Divisions

Unit 731 was divided into eight divisions:

• Division 1: Research on bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, typhoid, 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.
• Division 6-8: Equipment, medical, and administrative units.

Facilities

One of the buildings is open to tourists

The Unit 731 complex covered six square kilometers and consisted of more than 150 buildings. The facilities were very well designed, making it hard to destroy them. Some of Unit 731's satellite facilities still remain and are open to tourists. The complex contained various factories. It had around 4,500 containers to be used to raise fleas, six giant 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.

Tons of these 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. This failed because evidence has occasionally harmed civilians even recently.

In August 2003, 29 people were hospitalized after a construction crew in Heilongjiang inadvertently dug up chemical shells that had been buried deep in the soil more than fifty years ago.

Anta testing site

This was an open air testing area about 120 km from the Pingfang facility.

Hsinking (Changchung) HQ

Headquarters of "Wakamatsu Unit" (Unit 100), under command of veterinarian Wakamatsu Yujiro. 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 (Peiping) HQ

This was the headquarters of Unit 1855. It was also an experimental branch unit based at Chinan, Hopei. Plague and other diseases were extensively studied at this facility.

Nanking HQ

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

Kwantung (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 Naito Ryoichi, Unit 9420 had approximately 1000 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. Evidence points towards this facility supplying a medical sub-unit operating in Thailand, with diseases for unknown operations and or experiments.

Hiroshima HQ

A top secret factory in Hiroshima, it 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 Yperite, 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.

Special Mobile Teams

Special units led by Ishii Shiro's elder brother and only staffed with members from Ishii's home town. They 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 research was conducted in Manchuria towards 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. Shiro 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 across Manchuria and China to return to Japan.

Ishii ordered every member of the group "to take the secret to the grave," threatening to find them if they failed, and ordering none of them to go 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 as a testimony to what had happened there.

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.

At the end of the war he secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing America with their research on biological warfare. The United States believed that the research data was valuable because the allies had never publicly conducted or condoned such experiments on humans due to moral and political revulsion. The U.S. also did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons, not to mention the military benefits of such research.

The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal has heard only one reference to Japanese experiments with "poisonous serums" on Chinese civilians. This took place in August 1946 and was actioned by David Sutton, assistant to the Chinese prosecutor.

Japanese defense counselor Michael Levin 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 germ warfare criminals was General Otozoo Yamada, the commander-in-chief of the million man Japanese army occupying Manchuria.

Many Soviet POWs held by Axis Japan, and Russian civilians, including women and children were killed in chemical and biological warfare experiments by Unit 731, along with Chinese, Koreans, Mongolians, and other nationalities. The trial of those captured Japanese perpetrators was held in the city of Khabarovsk, in the Russian Far East near the border with northeast China, in December of 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). This book remains an invaluable resource for historians on the organization and activities of the Japanese biological warfare "death factory" lab-prisons. Interestingly enough, none of the foreign language editions of this book had any data on their number published - only the Russian language edition says about 50,000 copies were published. The lead prosecuting attorney at the Khabarovsk trial was Lev Smirnov, who had been one of the top Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials, against the Nazi doctors who had committed human experimentation atrocities at such death camps as Auschwitz and Dachau.

The Japanese doctors and army commanders who had perpetrated the Unit 731 atrocities and germ warfare experiments received sentences ranging from 2 to 25 years in a labor camp from the Khabarovsk court.

Many former members of Unit 731 became part of the Japanese medical establishment. Dr Masaji Kitano led Japan's largest pharmaceutical company, the Green Cross. Others headed U.S.-backed medical schools or worked for the Japanese health ministry. Shiro Ishii in particular went on to supervise biological research at the University of Maryland.

Cultural depictions and representations

• Japanese 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, which were the first Japanese language publications to reveal the dark history of Unit 731 in Japan.
• The Chinese movie Men Behind the Sun is a film about the atrocities committed by Unit 731.
• Two episodes of the television show The X-Files weave Unit 731 into the series' complex alien abduction/government conspiracy mythology. In the episodes "Nisei" and "731", Japanese scientists who were given amnesty in the U.S. after World War II are said to be continuing their work in secret, experimenting with creating an alien-human hybrid, possibly as a weapon to be immune to biological weapons. The name of the doctor in charge of the secret Japanese group of former Unit 731 doctors, Takeo Ishimaru, and his alias, Shiro Zama, is an amalgamation of the name of the real head of Unit 731, Dr. Shiro Ishii. Camp Zama is the name of a U.S. Army base in Sagamihara, Japan.
• The British comics writer Warren Ellis wrote a John Constantine story ("Setting Sun," Hellblazer #142, DC Comics) about a fictional version of one of the doctors who performed the experiments and his guilt-ridden desire to have done to him what he did to others.
• Japanese director Minoru Matsui's 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.
• Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson recorded a solo song entitled "The Breeding House", which was about Unit 731.
• Alfred Coppel's paperback The Burning Mountain, which depicts the Allied invasion of Japan had the Fat Man nuclear design not worked, depicts a P-61 Black Widow night fighter strafing a Japanese convoy carrying cyanogen after the convoy's leader risks turning on the convoy's headlights to reach before dawn a place to safely camoflague for the day. The cyanogen decimates a Japanese village and some of the gas is detected by the CW detector on board a Fletcher-class destroyer offshore, but disregarded as a false alarm.

See also

Pacific War (World War II)

• Japanese human experimentation on the Chinese
• Changde chemical weapon attack
• Japanese war crimes
• Manila Massacre
• Nanking Massacre
• Kaimingye germ weapon attack
• Second Sino-Japanese War
• Sook Ching Massacre

Nazi Germany

• Nazi human experimentation
• Josef Mengele

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
• Gold, Hal. Unit 731 Testimony, Charles E Tuttle Co., 1996. ISBN 4-900737-39-9
• Williams, Peter. Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II, Free Press, 1989. ISBN 0-02-935301-7
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Moreno, Jonathan D. Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans, Routledge, 2001. ISBN 0-415-92835-4

External links

Resources

• 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 '40s, commonly known in shorthand as "Unit 731".
• UNIT 731: Japanese Experimentation Camp (1937-1945) — information site.

Images

• The forgotten victims of biological warfare — online slideshow from the Sunshine Project.
• Unit 731: Auschwitz of the East — AII POW-MIA images.

Accounts

• Army Doctor — a firsthand account by Yuasa Ken.

Articles

• 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.
• Unit 731: a half century of denial — by Steven Butler.
• Doctors of Depravity - by Christopher Hudson (2007), the Daily Mail.