![]() Japan's biological weapons program was born in the 1930's, in part because Japanese officials were impressed that germ warfare had been banned by the Geneva Convention of 1925. The Origins Ban on Weapon Entices Military The accounts are wrenching to read even after so much time has passed: a Russian mother and daughter left in a gas chamber, for example, as doctors peered through thick glass and timed their convulsions, watching as the woman sprawled over her child in a futile effort to save her from the gas. ![]() Instead of putting the ringleaders on trial, it gave them stipends. Japanese and American documents show that the United States helped cover up the human experimentation. The research was kept secret after the end of the war in part because the United States Army granted immunity from war crimes prosecution to the doctors in exchange for their data. They proposed using balloon bombs to carry disease to America, and they had a plan in the summer of 1945 to use kamikaze pilots to dump plague-infected fleas on San Diego. No one knows how many died in the "field testing." It is becoming evident that the Japanese officers in charge of the program hoped to use their weapons against the United States. Scholars and former members of the unit say that at least 3,000 people - by some accounts several times as many - were killed in the medical experiments none survived. Half a century after the end of the war, a rush of books, documentaries and exhibitions are unlocking the past and helping arouse interest in Japan in the atrocities committed by some of Japan's most distinguished doctors. They could.Ī trickle of information about the program has turned into a stream and now a torrent. Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army conducted research by experimenting on humans and by "field testing" plague bombs by dropping them on Chinese cities to see whether they could start plague outbreaks. That research program was one of the great secrets of Japan during and after World War II: a vast project to develop weapons of biological warfare, including plague, anthrax, cholera and a dozen other pathogens. ![]() No anesthetic was used, he said, out of concern that it might have an effect on the results. After infecting him, the researchers decided to cut him open to see what the disease does to a man's inside. #Human japanese stuck fullThe Chinese prisoner had been deliberately infected with the plague as part of a research project - the full horror of which is only now emerging - to develop plague bombs for use in World War II. This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time."įinally the old man, who insisted on anonymity, explained the reason for the vivisection. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. "I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. ![]() "But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming. "The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down," recalled the 72-year-old farmer, then a medical assistant in a Japanese Army unit in China in World War II. He is a cheerful old farmer who jokes as he serves rice cakes made by his wife, and then he switches easily to explaining what it is like to cut open a 30-year-old man who is tied naked to a bed and dissect him alive, without anesthetic. ![]()
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