Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II

Product Information

Human targets were used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in various positions. Flamethrowers were tested on people. [49] Victims were also tied to stakes and used as targets to test pathogen-releasing bombs, chemical weapons, shrapnel bombs with varying amounts of fragments, and explosive bombs as well as bayonets and knives. Setting Sun" story from Hellblazer #142 by DC Comics, written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Javier Pulido, features a fictitious character who used to be a doctor in Unit731 during the war and conducted experiments on humans. Japanese Medical Atrocities in World War II". www.vcn.bc.ca. Archived from the original on 2019-06-18 . Retrieved 2019-05-10. Unit 731 ( Japanese: ７３１部隊, Hepburn: Nana-san-ichi Butai ), [note 1] short for Manshu Detachment731 and also known as the Kamo Detachment [3] :198 and the Ishii Unit, [5] was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in lethal human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It killed an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people. It was based in the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China) and had active branch offices throughout China and Southeast Asia. Pure Evil: Wartime Japanese Doctor Had No Regard for Human Suffering". Medical Bag. 2014-05-28. Archived from the original on 2017-03-29 . Retrieved 2017-03-28.

There was also the vivisection. “Human experimentation gave researchers their first chance to actually examine the organs of a living person at will to see the progress of a disease,” according to Hal Gold’s book Unit 731 Testimony. Cholera was dumped into wells used by the Chinese populace. Fleas were carefully collected, infected with plague and then dropped in aerial bombs over Chinese cities and villages. Su, Zhaohui; McDonnell, Dean; Cheshmehzangi, Ali; Abbas, Jaffar; Li, Xiaoshan; Cai, Yuyang (2021). "The promise and perils of Unit 731 data to advance COVID-19 research". BMJ Global Health. 6 (5): e004772. doi: 10.1136/bmjgh-2020-004772. PMC 8141376. PMID 34016575.Vanderbrook, Alan (2013). "Imperial Japan's Human Experiments Before And During World War Two". Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019– via STARS. The Japanese government has also failed to grant the OSI meaningful access to these and related records after the war, while European countries, on the other hand, have been largely cooperative, [136] the cumulative effect of which is that information pertaining to identifying these individuals is, in effect, impossible to recover.

There are unit members who were known to be interned at the Fushun War Criminals Management Centre and Taiyuan War Criminals Management Centre after the war, who then went on to be repatriated to Japan and founded the Association of Returnees from China and testified about Unit 731 and the crimes perpetrated there.Twenty years later, Japan signed the Geneva Convention, which prohibited biological and chemical warfare. But where other men reasoned with justification that these kinds of weapons should be banned by civilized nations, another man, a specialist in bacteria and related fields, Dr. (Colonel) Shiro Ishii, saw the prohibition as an opportunity. Forest Sea [ pl] ( Polish: Leśne morze) (1960), a novel by a Polish writer and educator Igor Newerly, was the first book published outside Asia which refers to atrocities committed in the unit. While Unit731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials, those captured by the United States were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered during their human experiments. [6] The United States helped cover up the human experimentations and handed stipends to the perpetrators. [1] The Americans co-opted the researchers' bioweapons information and experience for use in their own biological warfare program, much like what had been done with Nazi German researchers in Operation Paperclip. [7] [8] On 28 August 2002, Tokyo District Court ruled that Japan had committed biological warfare in China and consequently had slaughtered many residents. [9] [10] Formations Building of the Unit731 bioweapon facility in Harbin Crisis in the Ashes, by William W. Johnstone features the grandson of Dr. Ishi who has samples of the bubonic plague that he is trying to use to stop the liberal dictator of the US from using to conduct ethnic cleansing.