The final months of World War II saw the liberation of hundreds of ghastly concentration camps and the awful reality of Nazi racism. For more than seven decades those atrocities, including the use of human beings for medical experiments, have been common knowledge. Far less known is the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Chinese by a Japanese organization known as Unit 731.
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.
What makes this descent into barbarity all the more stunning was the Japanese contribution to medical science just three decades earlier. A U.S. Army doctor named Lewis Livingston Seaman observed colleagues who were attending to the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).
Dr. Seaman came away from his experience profoundly impressed with his medical brethren, stating, “The history of warfare for centuries has proven that in prolonged campaigns the first, or actual enemy, kills 20 percent of the total mortality in the conflict, whilst the second, or silent enemy (disease), kills 80 percent.
“I unhesitatingly assert that the greatest conquest of Japan has been in the humanities of war, in the stopping of the needless sacrifice of life through preventable disease. Japan is the first country in the world to recognize that the greatest enemy in war is not the opposing army, but a foe more treacherous and dangerous—preventable disease, as found lurking in every camp—whose fatalities in every great war of history have numbered from four to twenty times as many as those of mines, bullets, and shells.
“It is against this enemy that Japan, with triumphant exaltation, may cry Banzai. For it is against this enemy that she has attained her most signal victories….”
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.
He reasoned that if something were bad enough to be outlawed, then it must certainly be effective, and he began a sustained effort to establish a military arm within the Japanese Army whose aim would be the development of weapons based on biology. Ishii was highly intelligent but arrogant, merciless, and immoral.
He thought of himself beyond reproach and as a visionary. He was driven to break new scientific ground and to help Japan defeat its foes. In his quest to contribute to that effort, Ishii in time exhorted his team of physicians to violate the physicians’ ethical code: “A doctor’s God-given mission is to challenge all varieties of disease-causing micro-organisms; to block all roads of intrusion into the human body; to annihilate all foreign matter resident in our bodies; and to devise the most expeditious treatment possible….
“However, the research we are now about to embark is the complete opposite of these principles, and may cause us some anguish as doctors. We pursue this research for the double medical thrill; as a scientist … probing to discover the truth in natural science; and as a military person, to build a powerful military weapon against the enemy.”
To convince the senior levels of the Imperial Army to back his efforts, Ishii built his case around financial considerations, completely skirting either Japan’s obligation to the world community as a signatory of the aforementioned 1925 Geneva Convention or the morality of using such weapons. Ishii argued that compared with the costs of building, manning, and maintaining huge conventional forces, bacteria and gas were a far less expensive alternative.
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