Death Factories :Unit 731

The Officers Club, Khabarovsk. December 1949. Twelve members of the Japanese Kwantung Army were on trial - the only time in history when war criminals would be on trial for creating biological weapons. “Each time I think about it, I pray that I forget the beastly things we did. But it's impossible to forget.”, says Okawa Fukumatsu, one of the twelve, drowning in remorse and guilt.

Unit 731 or Manshu Detachment 731, was a covert biological and chemical warfare research experiment based in Manchuria of China. Built on the ashes of 300 shelters in the local village of Pingfang and the nearby city Harbin, Unit 731 bore witness to Chinese and Russian ‘test subjects’-men, women, children, infants, the elderly, pregnant women-none were spared. The facility was self-sufficient and inaccessible.

Unit 731 was a unique organization in human history—a group of enthusiasts stopping at nothing short of creating the most dangerous biological weapon ever. Japan had a long-standing interest in biological and chemical warfare by then. Emperor Hirohito, who had a degree in marine biology, believed that such weapons would help Japan conquer the world. By the 1930s, an exceptional status of being Japanese had already trickled into society, if not mainstream debate topics. Journalist Shoji Kondo states, “This idea of the nation’s exceptional status inspired the army during the war [Second World War]. But the very same idea drove the world to Nazism.”

The commanding officer and director of the project was Colonel Shiro Ishii, the prodigal man who was not just a military commander but was also a renowned biologist and a pilot. “Each crew was assigned a task to create a pathogen, and in the [process] of creating one pathogen, we would kill three or four people at a time”, Okawa recounts, “ I dissected people infected with plague, shigella, parasites, etc. I’d harvest tissue samples from the heart, liver, kidney, and the spleen to study the stage of infection and how it has affected the organs.” Some other victims had their stomachs surgically removed and esophagus reattached to their intestines. There were further experiments done that amounted to full-on torture. There was an entirely separate building for gas experiments where many agents like mustard gas, white phosphorus, adamsite, lewisite, cyanic acid gas, and phosgene gas were all used. Army Engineer Hisato Yoshimura was feared for his frostbite testing. He’d take the subjects outside and dip any appendage in varying low temperatures. Once that limb was frozen solid, he would beat it with a stick. Ice would be chipped away, and the area would undergo various treatments like being doused by cold or hot water. Test subjects were hung upside down till death, crushed by heavy weights, electrocuted, injected with seawater and animal blood, exposed to lethal doses of X-rays, and subjected to much darker ‘creative’ ways of dying. It is hard to estimate the number of deaths involved in Unit 731 and its associated facilities at Unit 1644 and Unit 100. Some give estimates of 3,000-5,000 while other sources put the number at a gripping 10,000.

How did this mass massacre in the name of science come to an end? The experiments were ‘not useless’, nay, ‘profitable’ in fact, because now the army was equipped with bombs full of lethal bacteria to be dropped on the Soviet cities. And then the atom bomb in Hiroshima happened. And Nagasaki after. Ishii was in a hurry. The Unit prepared to run away. Surviving prisoners were killed in large numbers. Personnel and valuables were moved out. And anything that could be left behind burned.

On August 19, 1945, Soviet troops entered Harbin. BY then, Unit 731 was already bombed out. But traces of their crimes remained, and the Soviets put the pieces together, with the 12 central people involved in the project being tried later on. It was only after proclaimed Japanese author Seiichi Morimura analyzed everything Unit 731 had done that the general Japanese public came to know about these atrocities. Members of the unit, including its directors, had been acting like nothing had ever happened. They became practicing physicians or scientists at medical universities. The book dug up these hard truths and revealed them to the general public. Now one can hear the choral suite ‘Repentance’, composed by Shinichiro Ikeby, sung by a special choir in Japan. Based on Morimura’s novel, “The Devil’s Gluttony”, it's a lasting reminder that science must be used for only good and not as a means to hurt.