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

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Japanese Medical Atrocities in World War II". www.vcn.bc.ca. Archived from the original on 2019-06-18 . Retrieved 2019-05-10. As stated above, dehydration experiments were performed on the victims. The purpose of these tests was to determine the amount of water in an individual's body and to see how long one could survive with a very low to no water intake. It is known that victims were also starved before these tests began. The deteriorating physical states of these victims were documented by staff at a periodic interval. Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged With Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1950. p.427. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a Booker Prize-winning 2014 novel by Australian writer Richard Flanagan, refers extensively to the atrocities committed by a doctor who served in Unit731. Man, Medicine, and the State: The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century (2006) p. 187 Frostbite testing

Yoshimura, Hisato; Iida, Toshiyuki (1950). Studies on the Reactivity of Skin Vessels to Extreme Cold. Japan: Japanese Journal Of Physiology. Nakagawa Yonezo [ ja], professor emeritus at Osaka University, studied at Kyoto University during the war. While he was there, he watched footage of human experiments and executions from Unit731. He later testified about the playfulness of the experimenters: [25]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.

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. Established for the purpose of developing biological and chemical weapons, Unit 731 exceeded by a year the duration of the Third Reich. While biological and chemical weapons were not new to warfare, Japanese testing on human subjects was unparalleled even by the Nazis. 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.The following year, under the cover of the euphemistically named Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory, Ishii set up shop in the Army’s hospital in Tokyo. The location was only temporary because, to accomplish his objectives, he would need access to far greater resources; Japanese ascendancy in Manchuria provided its medical community unprecedented opportunities for research (much as the Germans used concentration camps and their prisoners for their own medical and pseudo-scientific research). Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950). (French language: Documents relatifs au procès des anciens Militaires de l'Armée Japonaise accusés d'avoir préparé et employé l'Arme Bactériologique / Japanese language: 細菌戦用兵器ノ準備及ビ使用ノ廉デ起訴サレタ元日本軍軍人ノ事件ニ関スル公判書類 / Chinese language: 前日本陸軍軍人因準備和使用細菌武器被控案審判材料) Prisoners were injected with diseases, disguised as vaccinations, [26] to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea, then studied. Prisoners were also repeatedly subjected to rape by guards. [27] Vivisection Grunden, Walter E., Secret Weapons & World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science, University Press of Kansas, 2005. ISBN 0700613838.

The New York Times interviewed a former member of Unit 731. Insisting on anonymity, the former Japanese medical assistant recounted his first experience in vivisecting a live human being, who had been deliberately infected with the plague, for the purpose of developing "plague bombs" for war. a b Morimura, Seiichi (1984). Zu Binghe translation of Ogre's Cave: terrible inside story of the bacteriological warfare unit from Japan's Kwantung Army. Beijing: Qunzhong Chubanshe. pp.108–109. The judge’s comment was, however, consistent with much of the narrative written about Unit 731 after the war, which generally characterizes the group’s activities as “experimental,” a seeming reference to the vivisections conducted by the Japanese doctors.Vanderbrook, Alan (2013). "Imperial Japan's Human Experiments Before And During World War Two". Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019– via STARS.