Posted on 02/22/2011 1:04:24 PM PST by lbryce
Toyo Ishii, a former military nurse, broke her 60-year silence about Unit 731 in 2006. Photograph: Itsuo Inouye/AP
uthorities in Japan have begun excavating the former site of a medical school that may contain the remains of victims of the country's wartime biological warfare programme.
The school has links to Unit 731, a branch of the imperial Japanese army that conducted lethal experiments on prisoners as part of efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.
The Japanese government has previously acknowledged the unit's existence but refused to discuss its activities, despite testimony from former members and growing documentary evidence. In 2002 a Japanese court said Tokyo was under no obligation to compensate victims.
The government agreed to launch a ¥100m (£741,000) investigation after Toyo Ishii, a former nurse, said she had helped bury body parts on the site as the US occupation forces moved into Tokyo at the end of the second world war. Officials said so far there was no evidence the site had been used for experiments.
"We are not certain if the survey will find anything," Kazuhiko Kawauchi, a health ministry official, told Associated Press. "If anything is dug up, it may not be related to Unit 731."
Experts believe that if the excavation yields physical evidence that Japan conducted experiments on live humans, the government would face pressure to discuss the country's wartime conduct. "If bones or organs with traces of live medical experiments are found, the government would have to admit a wartime medical crime," said Yasushi Torii, head of a group that has been investigating the case for decades. "This is a start, although we will probably need more evidence to prove Unit 731's involvement."
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
I recall reading an article on the front page of the New York Times in the late 1990's, an interview with a member of Unit 731, living in Tokyo describing in ghoulish detail the circumstances of an autopsy performed on a live Chinese national, conscious throughout without any anesthesia or substance to ameliorate any pain, in order to keep the results of the autopsy 100% reliable, uncontaminated by what otherwise may have had a different outcome.
I remember the horror of his words, in reference to a particular medical case, procedure, recalling the circumstances with fondness, amusement, "That fellow howled like a mad man throughout".
Unlike in Europe there were no criminal charges or Nuremberg-type tribunals because the US in the newly hostile environment in post-war relations with the USSR was very anxious to learn the secrets of advanced bacteriological, biological warfare from the Japanese in exchange for immunity.
Any US POW’s to be found among the bones?
Granted the Japanese had plenty of Chinese to experiment on.
I’ve read and seen a fair amount about WWII. The Japs made the Krauts look like pansies.
Holy crap!!! Was she one of the ‘experiments’ that lived?
Sorry for my previous post. It was wrong and very insensitive.
All this stuff is unfortunately true. There were only a very few cases, but in some cases the subjects were Americans —one downed flier who was captured had his liver eaten, though that is hardly scientific. That sounds fictional, right?
Mostly their work focused on use of plague-bearing fleas outside Harbin, and a few other Chinese cities. I remember one unusual case in which a number of tied Chinese nationals broke free prior to exposure to poisonous gas for a new JIA artillery shell —they rebelled and there was a very intense and worky fight to put them down.
Remember that Sasakawa guy from 25 years ago, the super rich Japanese guy lobbying hard to get the Nobel Prize? He was buddies in post-war jail with a bunch of these guys.
Here is the super dirty secret: the outbreak of the Korean War saved them, cuz the US believed the threat of germ warfare there to be real, and these thugs all had great knowledge of the measures and counter-measures.
Go to the top floor of the Ship Museum near Shinagawa, in south Tokyo, and you’ll see photos of him with a very large number of world leaders, including Jimmy Carter Ghandi. I mean all the walls of the whole building have the aim of showing you How Important This Guy Is —it’s ham-handed and over-the-top.
Sasakawa also talked openly of bedding over 2 or 5 thousand whores (didn’t see anything wrong with it). He was in super tight with the Yakuza, ultra-right wing and huge conglomerates in Japan.
He was polite, but he was everything that leftists scream about (usually with no truth at all).
Unit 731, Yakuza, and Sasakawa are like peas in a pod.
I have read that a number of Japanese war criminals became millionaires when Japan rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s.
I have Japanese and Chinese friends. You never call a Chinese a Japanese, or a Japanese a Chinese.... You’ll get your butt kicked. They hate eachother.
What the Japs did was take healthy Americans, Chinese (men and women) and injected them with various diseases and viruses and then let them freeze or starve to see what it took for them to die.
I call the Japs because it is derogatory and they need to be viewed in that way because they were just plane cruel.
There were other GI’s that mysteriously disappeared after being captured and shipped to Japan that are thought to be part of this experiment. They did not show up in the prisons specifically set aside for War Prisoners.
Tojo was not the only high ranking Japanese hanged after the war. Although the number is small, it included: Generals Sugiyama, Doihara, Yamashita [who didn’t deserve it], Homma, and the general who oversaw the Rape of Nanking. At a secondary level, an Admiral who burned U.S prisoners alive was also hanged, as were some lesser officers.
The problem was Hirohito got a pass, as did the commanding general of Unit 731 [the latter from ‘Dugout Doug’ himself], and the Japanese, unlike the Germans were never forced to confront, or acknowledge their guilt in starting the war, nor the war crimes they committed during the war.
Insofar as a comparison between the Japs and Germans vis a viz POWs, some 3% of Allied POWs [excluding USSR POWs]died in German hands. The percentage of Allied POWs who died in Japanese hands approximated 40%.
Unit 731 is but one of the many, many examples of Japanese conduct of World War II which make any apology for the US ending the war using nuclear weapons absurd.
Try talking to an older Korean in Japanese.
She does look a little too happy about the whole affair.
“What the Japs did was take healthy Americans, Chinese (men and women) and injected them with various diseases and viruses and then let them freeze or starve to see what it took for them to die”
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They did more than that. They took a couple of downed B-29 crews and dissected them organ by organ while still alive.
Always make sure you can bury it again.
HF
Nothing will be found... move along... nothing to see here...
Mama San died in her sleep last night. She had Alzheimers.
...and books:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjfGxiE2UzI
HF
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