The Unspeakable Things That Happened In Unit 731

Many of the videos we produce at “A Day in History” cover topics many people don’t know much about. Some of these events have been largely forgotten or ignored over time. Sometimes this forgetting isn’t simply the product of time, but of politics and peculiar national and ethnic blind spots. Today’s video covers one of the latter topics.

Some of our more recent videos covering topics such as the Romanian part in the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, and our videos on the Holocaust itself have started with very explicit warnings about the videos as content. This episode of “A Day in History” is no different and perhaps warrants a more serious caution about what you are about to see. This video is the story of a relatively forgotten and horrible place in China where human beings were treated in many ways worse than lab animals by other human beings. Please use discretion when watching this video; it is only for adults or older teens watching with adults.

After watching our video on the Nanking event, some commenters decided without any proof that we were spreading Chinese Communist propaganda. First, none of what we reported is untrue—it all happened, so do your own research and find out. Second, the writer of that script and this one lived in Japan for a time and taught there, having nothing but admiration for Japan and the Japanese of today. Twenty-first-century Japan resembles 1940s Japan as much as today’s Germany resembles the Nazi era—that is, not at all. But the Japanese of the World War II era committed horrible crimes. Facts are facts. Horrible atrocities have occurred in almost every nation and culture in history. They occur most often when ordered and encouraged by the country’s leadership. Unfortunately, one of the things we have learned through history is that many people will become absolute brutes and monsters when they are encouraged to do so or know they will face no legal consequences for their actions, at least not from their government.

Japan has a unique history. From the early 17th century until the mid-19th century, the island nation was isolated from the world by order of the ruling Shoguns, the military leaders who ruled in the name of the emperor. Foreigners were only allowed on one small island near Nagasaki, and no Japanese at all were allowed to leave, ever. This all changed in 1853 to 1854, when American naval officer Matthew C. Perry forcibly opened Japan to international trade.

What the naval officers and marines in Perry’s fleet saw when they came ashore in Japan shocked them. Japan had been suspended in time since the early 1600s; its buildings, clothing, and especially weapons were 200 years behind America and the Western world. At the same time, China was becoming almost a vassal state of European countries. Sections of the country were under virtual foreign rule, and the Chinese had been forced to sign a series of what historians call the unequal treaties. Foreigners enjoyed favorable trade conditions which allowed them to profit greatly while many Chinese suffered. Additionally, in those parts of China known as concessions under European control or influence, European citizens, soldiers, and later Americans were subject to their own law, not that of China. This included crimes committed against the Chinese.

For all of these reasons and more, the Japanese were determined not to let that happen to their own country. Playing one nation against another and occasionally using the threat of violent uprisings against the Western powers who came to trade in Japan, while at the same time understanding the limits of their own power and compromising with the West when necessary, the Japanese set themselves two main goals: to modernize their country as quickly as possible and to prevent the Western countries from doing to Japan what they were doing in China.

After a period of civil strife, Emperor Meiji was given executive power over the nation and the Shoguns were no more. From 1871 until 1905, the Japanese went from a country living in the 1600s to a modern industrial nation with modern armed forces. To the surprise of everyone except the Japanese, Japan won two wars: in 1894 against China, and in 1904 to 1905 against the Russian Empire. The Russian defeat shocked the world, and Japan wanted to be seen as an equal by the modern Western powers.

Unfortunately, Japan and the West saw the world differently to a large degree. One of the ways in which they did so had to do with race and ethnicity. Long leading the world in military strength, technology, and economics, the West was reluctant to see the Japanese as equals. Much of this had to do with racial bias; some of it stemmed from the idea that the Japanese learned much from the Europeans. The Japanese had seen their nation rise from a primarily backward agricultural nation into a growing industrial power. They had defeated two much larger countries: China had long looked down on the Japanese as a tributary nation, and the Russians believed that their more modern army, navy, and soldiers would easily defeat the small Japanese force. They didn’t know that the Japanese armed forces were more modern than the Russians, their troops better trained, and their generals more skilled.

The Japanese were proud of their victory over Russia; it showed the world that Japan was equal to any Western nation. Unfortunately, many Japanese believed that they had been shortchanged by the Western powers in the talks that ended these wars. The trade rights and territorial concessions received after the defeat of the Russians discouraged many Japanese; they believed that they had won and deserved more for their victory.

In World War I, the Japanese sided with the Allies, keeping German naval forces bottled up in the Pacific and China. For their effort, which was relatively small, the Japanese gained control of the few German possessions in the Pacific, and even this was not enough for many Japanese. Two groups of people took the blame for Japan’s perceived lack of respect: the civilian government and the Western powers. Many Japanese believed the Europeans, especially, conspired to keep Japan down. To a large degree, this was true, as a powerful and close-by Japan could threaten British, Dutch, French, and American colonies and business interests in Asia.

The westernization of Japanese cities was added to the complaints of many Japanese, especially the conservative military. Western fashion, especially that for women, was taking over. Many women began to press for equal rights and more jobs outside the home. Baseball and jazz music were two of the more popular pastimes in Japan, and baseball still is.

Why are we telling you all this in a video about Japanese atrocities in World War II China? Because there is no making sense of what happened unless you know what caused them. By the early 1930s, Japan had become a military dictatorship. Through the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, Japan became a fascist country as dangerous to its citizens as it was to its neighbors. Promoted by the Japanese military government through the media, education, mass rallies, and its behavior were ideas of Japanese ethnic superiority, the importance of obedience and loyalty to the emperor to the point of death, and a new version of what conservative Japanese believed to be the guiding principles of the samurai. Among these principles were loyalty unto death just mentioned and a disdain for anything not Japanese. This Bushido code resembled the ways of the ancient samurai mostly in name only.

The people who bore the brunt of Japanese ethnocentrism were the Chinese. For centuries, the Chinese had demanded and received tribute from the Japanese in one form or another. As a result, Chinese culture dominated Japan, and though Japanese culture became unique over time, many of its religious ideas, writing, and cultural characteristics had Chinese roots. By the 20th century, most Japanese saw themselves much like a child who had grown up to be more powerful and advanced than their parents. Combined with the ideas we just mentioned, the Japanese in China behaved much like the Nazis did in occupied Europe: superior and without regard for human life that wasn’t Japanese.

In 1931, the Japanese conquered the Chinese territory of Manchuria. In 1937, they invaded China and soon overran most of the eastern part of the country, especially the coastal cities. The treatment of the Chinese who found themselves under Japanese occupation was abysmal to say the least, and one brutal atrocity followed another, the best known of which was the infamous Rape of Nanking in 1937. The Japanese exploited the Chinese under their control economically, and China also became one vast laboratory. Its people were subjected not only to modern warfare, but were subjects for the Japanese military to learn about chemical and biological weapons. The war itself cost China millions of people; in the military and among civilians, the estimates of Chinese losses from 1936 to 1945 range from 10 to 20 million people.

Doing his best to increase that total was a monster named Shiro Ishii. Ishii, like Mengele at Auschwitz, was a doctor. He was born in 1892 into an established middle-class family and became a doctor in 1921, joining the army as a surgeon. Ishii was fascinated by the process of infection, and after a trip to the battlefields of World War I Europe, became interested in the possibilities of chemical and biological weapons. After spending two years on World War I battlefields and talking with the doctors and officers who had fought on them, Ishii was recognized as an expert in the field of weapons of mass destruction.

In 1936, Ishii was ordered to form a new unit. The unit’s official name was the Number 731 Water Purification Unit, but it was referred to as Unit 731 then and now. Ishii was joined by a number of other doctors, including his second-in-command, Dr. Hisato Yoshimura. There were other doctors on the staff and a company or more of guards and assistants. Unit 731’s home was an old fortress and prison camp near the northern Chinese city of Harbin. Up to 1,000 people could be housed inside the fortress complex at any one time. From the time of its inception until the end of the war, Unit 731 killed anywhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people. Most of those victims were killed or allowed to die not by firing squad, hanging, or other common forms of executions. The vast majority were not gassed as the Nazis did to their victims in the death camps of Poland. No, most of the victims of Unit 731 died as a result of experiments developed by Ishii, Yoshimura, and others.

These experiments in death came in many forms. It’s estimated that thousands of Chinese in the surrounding areas were killed when Unit 731 released a variety of germs on the unsuspecting populace. These diseases included plague, typhus, and smallpox. Prisoners were injected with tuberculosis, cholera, gonorrhea, and syphilis, and were made to have dysentery. Flea bombs filled with plague-infested insects were released in towns and villages. Children were given food poisoned with a variety of deadly chemicals, and their bodies were then dissected and studied. Massive doses of tetanus vaccine, which caused people to go into uncontrollable muscle spasms that often led to death, were administered within the prison. Doctors and soldiers wore protective suits; at times, figures in otherworldly biosuits would roam over areas of the countryside strewn with dead and dying people, not to help, but to see how lethal, long-lasting, and effective their biological weapons were.

Experiments included exposure to incredible amounts of X-rays; the radioactive burns within and without the body were studied after the victims had died of this exposure. Many of the people who were dying of the diseases given to them by the members of Unit 731 were examined before their deaths. When we say examined, we mean that they were cut open in various ways and parts of their bodies removed with no anesthetic. Ishii and his staff wanted to witness the process of infection before serious internal and external infections set in, as they believed that decomposition would affect or skew their results.

Some experiments, while theoretically having some kind of purpose, seemed to be created simply from pure sadism. People were burned to death with flamethrowers. They were exposed to chemical warfare agents—meaning they had these agents thrown on their naked bodies or forced down their throats and other orifices. Female prisoners were raped, some of them by male prisoners, with the stated purpose to study the possibility of conception even while infected with deadly diseases including syphilis and gonorrhea. Many of the guards were also infected by raping prisoners, though they were officially forbidden to have sexual contact with them.

Like the Nazi doctors, Ishii and his men exposed people to freezing temperatures and low-pressure chambers. They also induced heart attacks, forced abortions on prisoners and women who lived nearby, and conducted surgeries that were right out of a nightmare: arms removed and legs sewn in their place, the removal of sexual organs, and more. The list is almost endless and includes many more instances of sadism, some of which we caution you are even more disturbing than what has already been described in this video.

When the war ended in September 1945, Ishii was in Japan. He was arrested by U.S. authorities, as were a number of his accomplices. As was the case with a number of wanted Nazi war criminals, Ishii was given immunity from prosecution. Again, he was given immunity from prosecution by the United States military government. Why? Because the U.S. believed that it was possible some of the data collected by Ishii during the war could be of use to America in any future conflict. Yes, you heard that right; Ishii died peacefully in 1959.

A number of Ishii’s officers and men were captured by the Soviets when they invaded northern China in the last days of the war. Amazingly, they received prison terms, not executions; despite some of them receiving sentences of twenty or more years, many were repatriated to Japan in the 1950s in a Soviet effort to improve relations with Japan. Members of Unit 731 openly held reunions in Japan after the war.

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