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Real Horror: Japanese Human Experimentation During the Second Sino-Japanese War

Far worse than any Halloween horror story are the true horrors of war. One of the worst atrocities ever to be committed occurred in Manchuria during the Japanese invasion and occupation.  A unit of the Japanese Army, ironically named the ‘Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department’, was formed in 1935 to conduct chemical and biological research.  The unit was designated Unit 731 and was based first at Zhongma Fortress and later at a larger facility at Pingfang.   The program was located in newly occupied Manchuria as it provided an inexhaustible source of test subjects with thousands of civilians, prisoners and Chinese and Allied prisoners of war being subjected to inhuman tests.  

The project was created and led by Shirō Ishii, a Japanese Army medical officer who specialised in microbiology.  His unit would go on to carry out hundreds of horrific vivisections (medical dissections of living subjects) on men, women and children. [See below the ‘read more’ for photographs taken of these horrific vivisections.]  These unanesthetized surgeries including amputations and vivisections were performed on people from all age groups from the elderly to children and pregnant women.  

General Shirō Ishii, commander of Unit 731

Unit 731’s mandate was to develop biological and chemical weapons, test conventional weapons on living test subjects and to develop ways of treating infection, disease and frostbite.   They did this by infecting healthy test subjects (often prisoners or abducted Chinese civilians) with diseased such as cholera, syphilis and plague.  They also carried out examinations into the effects and possible treatments of conventional weapons by exploding shrapnel shells among restrained test victims arranged at various distances.

The unit was made up of professional medical and scientific staff who willingly took part in experimentation.  Many of whom relished the opportunity to experiment without restrictions.  Many conducted experiments to find the limits of human tolerance by exposing subjects to extreme temperatures, starving them of food, oxygen and water, passing electrical current through them and by subjecting them to different poisonous gasses to see how long it took them to die.   These horrendous experiments contravened every medical and moral convention.  Almost every kind of horrific experiment imaginable was carried out by the heinous staff of Unit 731. 

The staff dehumanised their victims, terming them ‘Maruta’ - or logs. This played on the lie perpetuated to the local populace by the Japanese that the Pingfang complex was simply a lumber mill.  Up to 3,000 ‘Maruta’ subjected to tests died and were subsequently cremated.

From the experiments carried out by Unit 731 new delivery systems were devised such as spraying fleas and liquids from planes and later the design of ceramic bombs which could carry plague infected fleas, typhoid, cholera and other germs to be dropped from planes.  

Ceramic biological bomb

Unit 731 began breeding virulent strains of plague and growing Anthrax cultures during the 1940s and Ishii oversaw the breeding of fleas en masse which would be used to spread plague.  The Japanese put these new biological weapons to use against the Chinese populace dropping plague-infected fleas over eastern and north-central China.  Cholera and typhoid cultures were placed in wells and water sources leading to the deaths of an estimated 200,000 people from bubonic plague, cholera and typhoid. 

Burned out Unit 731 facility

With the war coming to an end Japanese troops destroyed Unit 731’s headquarters at Pingfang in attempt to hide what had happened there. However, General Shirō Ishii and other members of his staff were arrested and interrogated by the Allies.  They should have been charged with war crimes and tried at the Tokyo Tribunal however, Ishii was granted immunity by the US and as a result were never charged or tried.  In return Ishii allegedly handed over the meticulous research data and results from the experiments that had been collected by Unit 731.So great was the US’ scientific communities desire for human experimentation data that Ishii and his colleagues went unpunished.

Unit 731’s experimentation led directly to the deaths of approximately 3,000 people through experiments and vivisections.  While it is estimated tens of thousands more died as a result of field experiments.   It is one of the worst systematic abuses of science in history.  

Sources:

Getting Away With Murder, J. Tittle (Source)

Code Name: Maruta – The Horrors of Unit 731 (Source)

Japanese Biological Weapons Program (Source)

Photographs relating the Unit 731 (Warning: some extremely graphic)

More horrific photographs can be seen here (warning: extremely graphic)

Unit 731 - Nightmare in Manchuria (History Channel Documentary)

Below the break are some horrific photographs of the human vivisections carried out by Unit 731.  (Warning: extremely graphic.)

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