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The shameful and harrowing story of Unit 731 · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: Should Know. And this is definitely the chipperest I'm going
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: to sound for this episode right now.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and another joke free edition.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Possibly, we're definitely hitting that.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Should we see oa?
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, there's there, Yeah for sure. Please go ahead.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Okay, all right, I did laugh. There are unspeakable atrocities
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: that we will discuss of the horrors of well I
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: was about to say the horrors of war, but it
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: really are just the horrors of human experimentation during war.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: And so children should not listen to this, and people
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: that are really haunted by that kind of thing should
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: not listen to this.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean we can. It's not like there's spoilers
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: or anything. We're going to talk about human vivisection, abuse
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: of like children, women, the elderly, like it's it's as
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: bad as humans can possibly do to other humans what
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: we're going to talk about today. So if that's not
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: your bag, we will definitely not blame you for skipping
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: this one.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: That's right, But we do need to thank a listener
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: sitting this one in. This came from you know, I
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: don't even know if I'm going to say her last name.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: Her name is Amy, and you know who you are,
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: and you know, I'm glad you sitting this my way
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: because this is something I knew nothing about and I
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: think people, you know, part of the fabric of the
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: show is is teaching people some of the unspeakable things
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: that have happened that you would not learn in school.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: And so Amy sitting us in. So thank you, Amy,
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: and we'll just forward any complaints to you.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, Amy.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: I had heard of Unit seven thirty one before several times. Nothing.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: I had no idea the detail that I know now
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: about them, But you know, I was walking on like
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: we'll never talk about that. So thanks again, Amy. But
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: I guess let's just start at the beginning. Let's give
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: a little background, because what we're talking about here is
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: a detachment and I think an Imperial Army unit from
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: Japan that started up in the nineteen thirties and it
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: committed medical atrocities war crimes that actually rival easily rival
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: Joseph Mengel's hideous medical War crimes at Auschwitz Death Camp,
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: like the stuff that the Japanese essentially did during World
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: War Two to Chinese and Russian and to a lesser
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: extent Mongolian civilians and then sometimes prisoners of war, including
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: American It's just it's unspeakable and we're going to try
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: to speak it as best we can, but it doesn't
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: make sense without a little bit of context. If you
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: have a little bit context, in my opinion, of where
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: this evolved from, it doesn't doesn't excuse it doesn't explain it.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: It just makes slightly more sense than the Japanese just
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: suddenly did this horrible thing and now everything's back to normal.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And just to add an additional comment to the
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: sort of comparison to Nazi atrocities, certainly not in scale
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: that was happening in Germany and Poland and elsewhere, but
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: as far as just the how reprehensible some of this
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: stuff is.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying, No, No, this is a
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: separate thing for sure, and there's no comparison it. This happened.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: This happened. It's just the reason I'm comparing the two
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: is because most people walk around understanding that the Nazis
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: did these horrible atrocities, and what I'm trying to get
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: across is that the Japanese did too during World War II. Yeah,
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: it's just for really specific reasons that the average person
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: isn't walking around knowing about that, which we'll talk about
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: later too.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, all right, So you promised talk of backstory,
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: and we'll get into that here, because the backstory is
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: is starting sort of in the late eighteen hundreds. The
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: government of Japan was it sort of went through a
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: movement where it was looking to build itself up into
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: a superpower, like you know, just like Europe was, just
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: like the United States was, And a lot of this
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: was tied up in just sort of modernizing the country,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: whether it was the military or how they functioned economically,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: and sort of this ultranationalist movement grew up around all this.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so you just said the key word here ultranationalist,
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: which is I mean nationalism is fervent to begin with.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: Ultranationalism reaches a fanatical level, and that's kind of this
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: journey that began to infect Japanese society starting in the
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: twenties or thirties. And the reason why is because Japan
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: took a number of like kind of punches and was
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: kind of down both economically and as far as like
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: cultural honor goes like. Japan helped the US and UK
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: win World War One, but were left out of the
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: table when the spoils of war were divided up. That
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: was a big black eye and the national pride. The
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: Great Depression hit Japan disproportionately hard compared to some of
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: the other countries outside of the US. There was just
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: a lot of stuff that it was clear that the
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: leaders of Japanese society weren't equipped to handle. And the
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: worse it made Japan look to the Japanese, the more
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: the national pride felt it needed to be defended. And
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: that's where that nationalism and then eventually ultra nationalism came from.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: And the reason that we're talking about this today is
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: because it became a really thick component of the Japanese military.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: Nationalist fanaticism.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it can become a very and usually
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: does become a very dangerous thing.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: Yes, everywhere anywhere in all of.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: History, Yeah, for sure. In the nineteen thirties, there was
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: a part of China and northeastern China kind of near
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Korea in Russia and Mongolia called Manchuria, where Japan had
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: a lot of people that were living there, had settled there.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: They had a lot of influence on that area. The
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: Chinese government did not like this, of course, they were
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: in the middle of a civil war with the Nationalists,
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: which was the ruling party at the time. The Nationalist
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: government with Shang Kai Shek and then Malo Zedong's Communists
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: were trying to take control, but they had a common
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: enemy in Japan, and Japan was sort of encroaching on
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: this area in northeastern China in the thirties.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the ulter nationalism, I said, was so thick
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: in the Japanese military it actually created almost like an
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: additional branch, especially for the Kwantung Army that had basically
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: invaded Manchuria. They weren't following orders from the Japanese Imperial
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: Army heads, the leaders of the actual military. They were
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: kind of working on their own to expand the empire
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: and they were successful, so they were getting away with it.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: They were also getting away with it because they would
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: assassinate you or they would stage a coup attempt, like
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: you did not mess with these people, even though they
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: weren't the leaders the leaders were afraid of like these
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: middling officers who were actually these ulternational fanatics. So the
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: upshot of all that is that Japan ended up controlling
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: Manchuria in the nineteen thirties and set up a puppet
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: government there, and it was like a big first step
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: toward expanding the empire. And one other part of the backstory,
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: and then I'll be quiet about the backstory, is that
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: part of that ulternationalism was a certain amount of genetic
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: and cultural pride in Japan and the Japanese. And there's
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: nothing wrong with having pride in your culture, but the
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: problem is very often, especially in the context of nationalism
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: or ultra nationalism, means everybody else is inferior. And so
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: that kind of gave this ultra nationalist detachment of the
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: military carte blanc to mistreat anybody who wasn't Japanese, which
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: included the Russians, Koreans, Mongolians, and Chinese. That all kind
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: of met in Manchuria, which was at the border of
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: all of these countries, which is where the Japanese had
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: taken over and set up this puppet government.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, anytime you throw the word genetic in there,
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: you're probably traveling down a bad road. Yeah, you know,
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: and Japan definitely saw themselves, or at least a faction
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: of Japan. I'm not going to say like everyone in
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: the country, but this ultra nationalistic wing thought they were
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: the superior Asian human being on planet Earth at the time.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the ones who didn't think the same way
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: were too scared to speak up. They were killed, Like
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: they killed the Prime minister, Chuck, the military just killed
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: the Prime minister, assassinated because it wasn't going along with
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: their aims. Okay, so I lied. That was the end
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: of the backstory.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: All right. So the puppet government was there in nineteen
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: thirty two in Manchuria. The Chinese, like I said, did
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: not love this. So they had a common enemy and
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: got together to fight, and there was a pretty much
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: a full scale war started which started in nineteen thirty
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: seven that a lot of people are like, you know,
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: you could really point to this as the very beginnings
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: of what would be World War two if you want
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: to get technical, and so this is just sort of
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: what's going on. When Unit seven thirty one is formed
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty six under the command of General shiro
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: A Shie. I watched this. It was pretty good documentary. Actually,
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: it's like an hour long on YouTube. I can't remember
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: what it was called, but if you're looking for Unit
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: seven thirty one docs on YouTube, it's the one that's
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: like an hour long on the nose and super professionally done.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: It's called There's Something Wrong with Aunt Shiro?
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Was that it?
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: No? No, I was referencing another horrible documentary called There's
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: Something Wrong with Aunt Diane. Not horrible, horrific.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: Oh, I think I've heard of that one.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: Actually, it's It's tough.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll talk offline. Okay, I'm not sure I'm thinking
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: of the right one.
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: This is definitely the episode to bring it up, and
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: I'll tell you that.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So she E was a doctor in the Japanese army,
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: was a part of that ultra nationalist wing before the war.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: He was interested in biological weapons and what that might
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: offer the army, and supposedly as early as nineteen thirty
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: was starting to do some human experimentation. I think, you know,
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: as a doctor, though not as a general, correct.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: As both I believe he was. He'd been a general
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: for a while, or at least a high ranking military official.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: For a while when he started. Okay, so the reason
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: that we talked so much about Manchuria a second ago
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: is because doctor General Ishi realized very quickly that even
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: in ultranationalists Japan, people weren't super cool with unwilling human experimentation.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: So he's kind of successively moved his operation further and
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: further away from the prying eyes of everyday Japanese people
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: and ultimately ended up in Manchuria because it was so
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: it was so lawless as far as like ethics and
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: morals regarding civilian treatment and war crimes goes. It was
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: the kind of place where you could set up a
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: medical experimentation machine using unwilling participants. It was that kind
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: of place. And it also had a steady supply of
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: inferior human beings. I just made scare quotes for those
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: of you who can't see me, who were the Koreans
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: and the Russians and the Chinese and the Mongolians who
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: lived in the area and were just unfortunate to have
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: lived in this area that Japan now controlled.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, So in nineteen thirty TWOHI became the head
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: of the and this is a new operation, but it
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: was called the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory. This was at
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: the Japanese Military Medical School in Tokyo, and Unit seven
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: thirty one was known officially we call it Unit seven
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: thirty one now for short, but it was the Kwan
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: Kwantung Armies Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department or Manchu
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: Detachment seven thirty one. But like I said, we call
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: it Unit seven thirty one now. And this was the
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: main base of operations. It was a there were like
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: eight village basically where they kicked all the villagers out
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: and said this is ours now they built I mean,
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: it was like a prison camp basically. You know, it
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: was surrounded by barbed wire, there were guard towers. No
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: one was coming in or getting out of there without
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: explicit permission. But some of the people invited in were
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: doctors and nurses and engineers and pathologists and people that
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: specialize in bacterial cultures and stuff like that. So they
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: were just sort of staffing up with you know, legitimate
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: and medical personnel because they were they were set to
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: and as you'll see, it was sort of like, hey,
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: let's figure out anything we ever wanted to know about
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: the human body and how it responds to anything you
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: could throw at it, from bullets to knives to anthrax.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: Right, And so they actually started out with a fairly
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: legitimate mandate, which was figure out how to essentially treat
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: things like communicable diseases or things that soldiers, Japanese soldiers
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: might find useful, like, you know, if there were fighting
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: in the Pacific theater, figure out how to treat malaria
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: or something like that. But under the guidance of General Ashi,
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: it became they moved from willing, initially willing Japanese soldiers
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: who signed consent waiver saying you can test on me,
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: to unwilling, unfortunate civilians. And there's a lot, as we'll see,
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of debate and discussion about what happened when,
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: who is involved, And if we were doing this podcast
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: twenty years ago, we would be completely lost by this
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: point totally. So much has come out that we essentially
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: know exactly what happened. And one of the things that
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: has really been established over the years is that awareness
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: of Unit seven thirty one and the unwilling medical experimentation
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: war crimes that was carrying out went all the way
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: to the top. The Emperor was involved the Emperor's family
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: was involved, Prime Minister Tojo was involved. Everybody knew about this.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: It was incredibly well funded and it was a huge
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: prong of the Japanese military. It was just also kept
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: incredibly secret too.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And when we say unwilling subjects because
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: of where it was located, like we said near Korea
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: and Russia and Mongolia. Sometimes that were Russians and Koreans
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: and Mongolians, but most of them were Chinese citizens. Some
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: of them were criminals, some of them were just communists
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: that were arrested basically and rounded up, and they were
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: brought in like you said, sort of initially like hey,
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: let's see what Let's see what happens when you don't
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: eat for a while if our soldiers are out there
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: and kate get their hands on food and water, Like
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: how long can humans go without food and water? Or
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: what is this? What does milaria do? Like you were saying,
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: like diseases they might encounter, But it really morphed pretty
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: quickly into hey, and this might be a good time
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: to break but hey, I think we can develop biological weapons,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: so let's see how they react to the human body.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's when it really took a terrible left turn.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, so we'll be right back. And it
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: gets worse than act too, We'll be right.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: Back, okay, Chuck. So when we were last talking, the
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: Unit seven thirty one had started to veer off into
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: developing biological weapons, and they did so apparently because in
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: nineteen twenty five, under the Geneva Convention, a bunch of
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: countries outlawed biological weapons, and apparently that caught the attention
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: of the Japanese, who were like, wow, if it's worth outlawing,
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: those things must really work at killing, so let's try those, right.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: It pequed their interest enough that they started a program,
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: and so they developed a really extensive pathological development section
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: where they apparently could develop a trillion microorganisms every few days. Like,
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: they just grew so many communicable diseases that I saw
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: in some field tests they would have one hundred and
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: fifty kilograms of it, Like that's how much they could produce.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: And they were doing things like producing malaria, cholera, typhus,
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: the plague. They were growing this stuff. Yeah, and then
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: they were testing it on those unfortunate, unwilling test subjects
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: to see what happened. And that's where the essentially the
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: medical torture, the war crimes really began.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you want to see what happened to
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: someone that was infected with typhus or cholera, you don't
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: just ask a bunch of questions and check vitals and
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: see how Say how are you feeling, and we'll write
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: it down. You mentioned vivisection earlier, and that's what would happen.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: Vis Section is, you know, the dissection of a live thing.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: So whether it's a frog in biology class or in
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: this case, a human being, it is a live human
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: being in these cases being cut open and studied from
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: the inside out, and a lot of times without anesthesia.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: I think they did use anesthesia for some stuff here
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: and there, at least a documentary said they did, But
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: a lot of times they didn't even use anesthesia when
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: they would amputate someone's limb or take someone's kidney out
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: to study it.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: So on vivisection. Nicholas Christoff, the New York Times reporter,
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: went to Japan in nineteen ninety five as some of
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: this stuff was really coming out and talked to some
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: people who are actually in Unit seven thirty one, and
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: he actually interviewed a man who was a doctor at
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: Unit seven thirty one who had performed one of these
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: unanesthetized vivisections, and he quoted the guy in the article.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: If you want to hear it, it's it's just insane
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: that people have ever done this to other people. So
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: what the guy said was that the the and I'm
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: paraphrasing this first part, that when they brought the prisoner in,
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: he knew that it was over for him, that his
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: life was about to be executed, but he didn't know how,
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: so he wasn't he wasn't fighting along the way. He
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: came in essentially willingly. But when they put him down
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: on the examination table and a scalpel was produced, he
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: started screaming, and he said that this is this guy,
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: this doctor who performed this said quote. I cut him
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: open from chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly,
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: and his face was all twisted in agony. He made
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: this unimaginable sound. He was screaming so horribly, but then
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: he finally stopped. This is all in a day's work
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: me because it was my first time that that happened.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: A guy did that to another guy. He killed him
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: by performing surgery on him without anesthesia and opening his
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: his abdomen and removing the organs.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: Yea, and this happened a lot at unit seven thirty one.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: And we'll say that that part and like the next
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: probably five to seven minutes an we're gonna kind of
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: go through some of the worst of it. Yeah, so
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: feel fear to skip ahead, and then you know, we'll
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: talk about kind of ramifications and all that stuff.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: But yeah, just listen for the sound of one of
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: us wretching while the other one's talking. You know, we're
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: still in that five to seven minute part.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So I mentioned amputations and stuff like that.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: Organ removal. Boy, this one is tough. They had men
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: that were infected with different venereal diseases like syphilis, that
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: were forced to rape women there to see how syphilis spreads.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: There were women who were raped and impregnated that had
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: you know, where the men had communical diseases like you know,
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: make her pregnant so we can see the effects on
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: developing fetuses. Sometimes babies were born. Those babies were experimented
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: on elderly people. You know that they wanted to get
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: a range of not just what would this do to
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: a Japanese soldier, but what would these weapons do to
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: a range of humans, like from literal babies to elderly people.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: So that's what they did. You want to take over.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: Sure, So some of the things in addition to studying
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: what communicable diseases the effects that had on the body.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: And that's actually the reason why they would give later
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: on why they didn't use anesthesia. Sometimes they were concerned
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: that the anesthesia would affect the effects and that they
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: wouldn't have like an actual picture of what was really
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: going on in the body, So they just didn't anesthetize.
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: But they studied other things too, like what happens when
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: we crush your limb? What happens if you are only
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: allowed to drink seawater for several days? Like just imagine
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: like completely losing all of your morals and ethics being
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: a doctor and saying like what can I pursue here?
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: What just crazy experiments can I come up with and
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: then actually carrying them out? And that's essentially what happened
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: at ping Von.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, what if you had a blood transfusion of cow's blood?
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: Like what would that do to a human being or
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: a blood type that didn't match your own? What would
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: that do to somebody? There was one guy, he was
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: a physiologist name Yoshimura Hissato that focused on frostbite. So
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: they would, you know, purposely give people frostbite to see
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: what happened to their body and their limbs. They did
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: publish some of this stuff, I believe. The second in command,
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: his name was Masagi Kitano, said that, yeah, we published
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: some of this stuff, but when we published it during
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: the war, we said that we were using you know,
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: research monkeys and stuff like that, and certainly keeping all,
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: you know, anything about humans a secret.
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's not like they didn't realize that what
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: they were doing was considered unethical and immoral.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they knew it.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: That's also they kept the whole thing secret too, and
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: yet they did it anyway. That frostbite work is very
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: frequently cited as you know, evidence that actual scientific findings
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: came out of this, because apparently before the way that
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: they thought to revive a frostbit and limb was to
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: rub it back into health, and they found that actually
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: makes it worse. That you want to dunk it in
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: water that's between one hundred and one hundred and twenty
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: two degrees farentheight, And so people are like, see, that's
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: a scientific finding. It's weird. It's almost as if they're
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: trying to excuse it in some way, shape or form
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: or say that it was in any way justified. And
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: from what I can tell, that's the only one that
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: anyone's actually able to point to as a scientific experiment
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: that produced actual scientific findings that we weren't aware of before.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. So not only were they like saying,
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: you know, what kind of bomb can we make out
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: of poison gas or a plague culture or you know,
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: something that as like infected fleas, like animal fleas as
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: a payload that have the plague dropped on a town.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: But I mentioned earlier just you know, regular weapons, guns
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: and knives and stuff like, let's just tie people up
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: at a stake and shoot them with different things from
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: different distances to see like how far the bullets travel,
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: what kind of wounds they would produce, you know, flame throwers, knives, swords,
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: anything they could think of to just log sort of
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: what the human body could take and what kind of
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: effect it would have.
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that area where you're talking about was a second
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: kind of satellite site at a town called Hoda. It's
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: about ninety miles away from Harbin, which is where the
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: ping Fon complex was, right, and everything we're talking about
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: to this point has was carried out at ping Fon
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: and this one huge, sixty five square acre complex of
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: just horror, every single day horror. And imagine hundreds of
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: other people working with them, and all of them are
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: walking around of doing the same thing, hearing the same screams,
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: like carrying out the same atrocities. Yeah, and it's just
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: like the guy said, like it was just all in
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: a day's work. That's just what we were doing. Like
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: imagine that, like try. I can't even conceive of putting
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: myself in a place like that and just going along
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: with it, because you know that there were people who
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: were there who were worried about not going along with
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: it because they knew they would be next on the
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: slab if they spoke up or spoke out against it.
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: I just can't imagine it. When when my brain tries
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: to put me in that that place at that time,
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: it's just like stop, I don't want to go there.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, did you see the zone of interests yet, No,
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: you should check that out.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: What is it a movie? Is it a play?
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a movie from last year, won the
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: Oscar for Foreign Film and was nominated for Best Picture overall.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: Jonathan later, it's basically a movie true story obviously about
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: the guy who led who was sort of the head
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: of the concentration camp. I think it was Auschwitz and
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: not docu. But you know, it doesn't go in the
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: camp at all. The whole movie is just told from
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: the perspective of the fact that he had his house
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: next door on the other side of the wall, where
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: he had his wife and kids in garden, and they
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: just they live this normal life and it's a very
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: The way that Glazer did it was very, very effective
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: and different than I've seen in any other war movie
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: to get across this sort of horrors without seeing any
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: of them happen.
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, that's really interesting. I've heard about that. Yeah,
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: I haven't heard anything more than what you just said.
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: So I'll check it out though, because I trust your recommendations.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, it's a great film and very effective,
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: And you know, the reason I brought it up is
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: because that's sort of the same idea because I did
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: a little research after about this guy and he was like,
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: you know, I felt like I was, you know, I
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: had to do this stuff or else I would be,
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: you know, shot for not following orders. And that's always
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: sort of the line that you hear.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: Sure, no, for sure, especially further down the pecking order.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: The thing is is there were very very clearly people
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: who were there who were totally into this and were
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: totally fine with it all in a day's work. Yeah,
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: it's just what they did. Yeah, But I guarantee there
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: were people who were there just crumbling inside every day.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: I don't know, maybe there weren't. Maybe you couldn't possibly
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: keep quiet in a place like that, who knows. But
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: there were hundreds of people, like you said, from all
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: different fields and professions that were coming together to work
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: to experiment on unwilling humans at ping Fon. And that
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: was just ping Fon because what we said earlier was
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: that their ultimate goal was to create biological weapons. Yeah,
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: and you can sit there and come up with a
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: trillion microorganisms every few days, all like, all year long,
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: and it doesn't amount to anything if you can't infect
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: your enemy with them. If you wanted to carry a
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: biological warfare program, I should say. And so one of
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: the other things that they experimented on was how to deliver,
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: like you said, payloads of plague infected fleas or cholera
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: into local wells, and they did it sometimes successfully. And
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: I think the number for the people who died just
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: at Pingfon was three thousand. That's the number that's generally cited.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: And they had one hundred percent mortality rate among prisoners.
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: There no one survived Pingfon. Not a single person survived
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: ping Fon. If you went in there as a prisoner,
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: you died just at ping Fon. That was three thousand.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: When it goes to the actual experiments that they carried
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: out trying to deliver biological weapons in Manchuria, it expands,
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: by some estimates into the hundreds of thousands of deaths.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, And we should point out too when you
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: say that there were no survivors of ping Fan when
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: they closed down, and you know, we're skipping towards the end,
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: but when they did shut it down, whoever was still living,
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: they just murdered straight up to cover up any sign
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: of evidence, and then just dynamited the place beyond recognition.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and then they destroyed all the records and then
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: all of the people there took a last order from
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: General Ishi that was never talk about this and never
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: implicate anyone that's ever worked here. They basically took a
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: vow of silence about it.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So you mentioned, you know, using actual biological weapons
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: that was mainly against Chinese civilians, and this is some
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: of the stuff that you know, they had sort of
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: considered when they dropped like cotton or wheat or rice
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: infested with disease carrying fleas on different Chinese cities, and
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: they testified in court later on civilians did about like
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: what happened to their community communities, these illnesses that spread
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: through there. It's just it's hard to fathom that this
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: was going on and largely gotten away with, you know.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, there were a couple more that I found, Chuck,
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: that I were just reprehensible. They would infect dogs with cholera,
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: I believe, and release them into villages and collar outbreaks
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: would start. They gave local children chocolate lace with salmonella.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: The one thing that was super effective they found was
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: mixing wheat grain with plague infested fleas or infected fleas
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: and dropping it from airplanes and then the villagers would
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: feed the grain to their chickens and plague outbreak would
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: start and again. Like over time, at least tens of
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: thousands of people in Manchuria died from these plague and
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: collar outbreaks. Colera is no oh joke. Apparently there was
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: a researcher who was a pathologist at Unit seven thirty
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: one who boasted that they produced enough calera to kill
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: every single person in the world. And they didn't succeed
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: in that, thankfully, but they definitely killed a significant number
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: of people in Manchuria with things like cholera and the
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: plague from just trying to figure out how to get
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: that to those people. Fortunately, that was something they really
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: failed at. They never really figured it out.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, mainly we've been talking about like people
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: that they arrested and you know, practice on or when
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: it was like you know, actual biological weapons, it was
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: on civilians, but they also did this on prisoners of
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: war in different places outside of Unit seven thirty one,
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: specifically Singapore and the Philippines. You mentioned US prisoners of
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: war early on. There was one documented case, at least
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: one documented case in May of nineteen forty five when
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: there was a down US plane where they captured eight
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: airmen and in May of nineteen forty five, they were
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: basically medically tortured. There was one medical student later on
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: that said, you know what was going on was just
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: torture at this point, there was no scientific value happening.
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that wasn't even Unit seven thirty one. That's
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: how badly like this whole German infected Japanese military. Essentially,
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: the military is like, hey, we got these POWs. We
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: want to we want to do a number on them.
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: So basically just operate on them until they're dead. And
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: that's what it would be dressed up as is like
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: practice surgeries. Like I want to learn how to remove
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: an arm, so that's what they would practice on. Or
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: I want to learn how to remove an appendix, so
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: I'm going to practice that, and like eventually the patient
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: would just die because they didn't have enough organs left
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: to sustain themselves, or they lost so much blood that
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: they died, but they died from surgery. That was how
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: they died.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: Well, and if they happened to live through this, they
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: would strangle them till they died.
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I heard one other thing it's kind of unrelated
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: to this, but it's just stuck out to me, and
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: it's kind of haunted me actually, that there was a
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: group of POWs, American POWs that were being held in Japan,
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: and hours after the surrender had taken place and where
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: it had spread that Japan surrendered. Rather than release these POWs,
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: this group of Japanese soldiers took them to this hillside
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: and decapitated them, killed them, just completely wasted their lives
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: for nothing after a surrender. Somehow, it's bad enough to
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: do that in the context of war, but within hours
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: of surrendering, it makes it exponentially worse. It's way worse
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: than even if that happened five years later, Like they
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: just held them for five years and then killed them
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: somehow within hours of surrendering. It just makes it worse
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: to me. And I can't really get that one out
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: of my head, so I wanted to make sure it
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: was in everybody else's head, I guess.
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: I guess you want to think that after something as
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: horrific of a war has ended, then everyone just wants
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: to go home and have it be over, you know,
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: and that you know clearly isn't always the case.
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: Well, I remember also just kind of tied into it.
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: The Nazis did that too, Like the truest believers would
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: just walk around executing people who, like at the end
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: of the war, like they knew, like Hitler was dead
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: and the war was over, but they were executing people
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: who were like trying to go home or running away
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: or whatever. Just a complete waste of life. Yeah, yeah,
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: I don't really have anything else to add to that.
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: Maybe we'll edit that part out, but it just has
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: stuck with me.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, we'll take our last break, and we're
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: going to come back and finish up with the investigations
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: and kind of what happened afterward, and prepared to be
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: unsatisfied right after this. All right, we are back. We promised,
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: talked of investigation and you know kind of what happened afterward,
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: it you know, became pretty clear that the war was ending.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: So general is she e like you said earlier, said,
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: you know, no one can ever speak of this. Beginning
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: on August ninth, they started destroying everything, started blowing that
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: place up, killed everyone else who was there, which, as
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: we'll see is you know, one reason they got away
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: with some of these atrocities is because there were no
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: surviving people to testify. So the US started investigating this
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: at a place called Camp Dietrich in Maryland. It was
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: an army base, a pretty new one, and when they
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: started questioning, they kind of realized what was going on.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: And Japan said, you know, the Cold War is sort
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: of taking hold now, and you know, we're really afraid
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: that some of this stuff might get into the hands
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: of the Soviets. So America made a decision to rather
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: than pursue prosecution, was like, hey, let's work with them,
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: just to get as much much data and information as
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: we can from them that is useful to us, and
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: that in itself is a pretty horrific thing.
• 36:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we actually paid them. We paid them, We paid
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: the unit seven thirty one scientists like, general, is she
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: money to work with us? And it's weird. There's like
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: a lot of papers. I read one from the Cambridge
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics in twenty fourteen that compared like
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: the two prongs that were taken like two different, two
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: different approaches, one toward the Nazis and their medical atrocities,
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: one toward the Japanese and their medical atrocities. And there
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: was one guy in particular named John W. Thompson, who
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: was Canadian who really led the charge to prosecute the
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: Nazi doctors who carried out these horrible experimentations as war criminals.
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: There wasn't a guy like that dealing with the Japanese
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: in the tribunal for war crimes in the Far East,
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: and so the US military and intelligence was able to
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: keep a lid on the whole thing. The Russians were
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: talking about it because their people had been killed, the
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: Chinese were certainly talking about it because their people had
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: been killed, And people as high up as Douglas MacArthur
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: were publicly saying this is communist propaganda, This isn't true,
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: knowing full well it was true, because he was collaborating
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: and the people under him were collaborating with the very
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: people who had performed these atrocities in order to get
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: their medical data. We paid them for it, and we
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: gave them immunity. Some of them apparently even visited Fort
• 37:53
  Speaker 2: Dietrich to help with America's own biological warfare program that
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: we essentially lifted from the Japanese after World War Two.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: That's what happened, yeah, I mean, that is that's blood
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: on the hands of the United States because what they're
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: basically saying, they're basically you know, they wouldn't outright say that,
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: but they're justifying these experiments by saying that the data
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: was useful.
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah, they said that Americans couldn't possibly ever get
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: data like this because we have scruples, but apparently the
• 38:24
  Speaker 2: Japanese don't, so we'll just take their data because they
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: don't have scruples. But that means that by proxy, you
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: don't have scruples if you're willing to use this, And
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: that's what happened with the Nazi stuff like that guy
• 38:35
  Speaker 2: John W. Thompson wanted to make an example out of
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: those Nazi doctors, like attention all scientists everywhere in the world.
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: Even the cover of World War two can't save you
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: like you like you were going to be hung if
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: we ever catch any of you doing something like this, hanged.
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: I guess that that message wasn't given to the Japanese doctors,
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: and in fact, because a lid was kept so tightly
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: on what had happened and was just relegated to rumors
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: as far as America and Japan was concerned, they were
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: allowed to re enter Japanese society and actually become fairly
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: prominent and celebrated in their fields in a lot of cases.
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, there were some tribunals from over the course
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: of a couple of years from forty six to forty eight.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: Other countries were involved, including China and the Soviet Union,
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: but they did not talk about Unit seven thirty one.
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: There was a separate tribunal in Yokohama in nineteen forty
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: eight that convicted twenty three military figures, some medical personnel
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: that were in the Kyushu University torture, and these were
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: specifically of uspows only, and they got death or life sentences,
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: but those sentences were dropped or commuted, I guess because
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: the US was trying to build a friend in Japan
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: at that point and an ally at the start of
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: the Korean War, and then the Soviet you know, eventually
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: in nineteen forty nine said you know, we have to
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: expose some of this. So they put and this is
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: by themselves, they put twelve members of Unit seven thirty
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: one on trial and you know, accusing them of everything
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: that they did, and this is where a lot of
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: like information was brought out. They were sentenced between two
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: to twenty five years in prison, and the US, because
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: we were now in a Cold war with Russia, said
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: that this is propaganda.
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So this trial where essentially all of the information,
• 40:33
  Speaker 2: the fact factual information we had for decades about what
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: Unit seven thirty one did came out of this trial.
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: But it was just in the USSR. And it wasn't
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: until nineteen eighty two that a journalist named John W.
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: Powell got his hands on it and published an article
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: on what Unit seven thirty one had done during the
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: war and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists journal And it
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: was through those court transcripts, so they came back to
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: haunt them thirty years later, and that's when it really
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: became started to become knowledge among historians, the military, the
• 41:09
  Speaker 2: government in the West, in the United States, and among
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: allies that the Japanese had actually done these things that
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: they'd long been accused of by the Soviets and Chinese,
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: and here was evidence of it by the testimony by
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: the very people who were there, who'd been captured by
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: the Soviets.
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, most of this stuff has come out
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: at an alarmingly slow rate, and over the course of decades,
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: I believe in nineteen eighty two, there was a museum
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: in China at that ping Fan site obviously that China established,
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: But it took all the way until nineteen eighty eight,
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: you know, forty plus years after the war ended, that
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: the Japanese government finally admitted that it even happened. But
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: they still wouldn't release any information, like most of the
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: stuff that we know. Like you said, if we had
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: done this episode, you know, at the beginning of our run,
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: and we probably wouldn't have known what we know now
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: because a lot of it came out in the nineties,
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: the early two thousands. Well I guess by that time
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: we were around. Yeah, but that's neither here nor there.
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: The point is, it took a long time for this
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: stuff to come out, and you know, we can't go
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: over everyone. You did mention that, you know, many of
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: them went on to have just great lives and careers,
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: but we should highlight a few of these. The second
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: in command that I mentioned earlier, Masaji Kaitano. He co
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: founded a green Cross, a very large Japanese pharmaceutical company,
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: with two other colleagues from Unit seven thirty one. So
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: they did well, they.
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: Did, and green Cross went on to infect eighteen hundred
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: people with hemophilia with HIV because they were selling them
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: unsterilized blood clotting agents in the nineties.
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was what about is she?
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: She became one of the most celebrated doctors in all
• 42:57
  Speaker 2: of Japan. He supposedly, according to one British historian named
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: Richard Drayton, went to Fort Dietrich to advise the US
• 43:06
  Speaker 2: on the bioweapons program. There. He died in nineteen fifty
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: nine at age sixty seven, never having even been publicly
• 43:16
  Speaker 2: accused of what he had done in Japanese society. He
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: was just a celebrated doctor by that point when he died.
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the guy hasato that the guy who led those
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: frostbited experiments. He became president of the Kyoto Prefectural University
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: of Medicine.
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: This one gets me though, This last one. You gotta
• 43:39
  Speaker 2: say that one.
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the communicable disease researcher Amatani Shogo, he won the
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: Asahi Prize for outstanding contributions to the field of communicable
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: disease research. And part of that was some of the
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: stuff that he got from Unit seven thirty one.
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I looked all over like, hey, how did
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: he disguise that or how did the Asahi Prize people
• 44:03
  Speaker 2: miss that? I didn't see anything like that. Apparently his
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: research came directly from medical experiments on unwilling participants got
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: him the Asahi Prize. Yeah, that's insane, man.
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: So there's no clear evidence that the United States gained
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: much of anything from the deal it made with the
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: Unit seven thirty one leaders for all of their research.
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: Other people say, no, actually it's not true at all.
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: And in fact, the Chinese accused the US of using
• 44:36
  Speaker 2: the same kind of germs for germ warfare in Korea,
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: and the US of course it's like, no, he didn't.
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: But Fort Dietrich is well known as being like a
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: biological research facility. They're like, it's not biological warfare. We're
• 44:49
  Speaker 2: just using gain of function research to see what happens
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: when we make this virus do this, you know, not
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: for biological warfare. It's very bizarre, but it exists. It's
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: definitely there, and it's a strange place. Apparently that's where
• 45:03
  Speaker 2: a lot of MK ultra experiments were carried out.
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, wouldn't that where the men stared at goats?
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: I think so? Yeah, I mean that was definitely about that,
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: but I don't remember if that was at said at
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: Fort Tetrick or not. I got a funny story about that.
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: I got to tell you sometimes.
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: Oh well, how about now we could use it.
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: No, I can't really tell you here on the podcast.
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: Ah, copy of that, all right?
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: And then just one more thing, Chuck, This has not
• 45:28
  Speaker 2: revelations that Unit seven thirty one carried out these experiences
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: has not exactly been like embraced in Japanese society, right.
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: Like, there's a real divide on whether to teach this
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: horrific but very true history of their own country because
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: of the obvious sort of effects that this could have
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: on children and how they feel about their country.
• 45:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I've seen that they're worried that they might make
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: Japanese children ashamed of their country. So you can't teach
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: them that kind of stuff. So that's it. That's the
• 46:02
  Speaker 2: last thing I've got. All Right, you got anything else?
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: I got nothing else. I'm glad that one's over.
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: Same here, Thanks a lot, Amy, Yeah, thanks Amy. If
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: you want to know more about you in seven point
• 46:12
  Speaker 2: thirty one, Okay, there's plenty of stuff you can read
• 46:15
  Speaker 2: on the internet. And since I said that it's time
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: for listener mail.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a little further explanation about backdraft from
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: our Arts and Investigation EP. Hey guys, it's a fan
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: of your work. I was excited to listen to the
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: episode on an Arson Investigation because I'm a firefighter and
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: I've learned about some of what you guys covered and
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: got some cool new information from you. I want to
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: let you know that you were so close on backdraft,
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: but just a little bit off. The way backdraft works
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: is when you have a working fire that does not
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: have access to fresh oxygen. At a certain point, the
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: fire will have consumed all of the oxygen in a
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: space and basically begin to smolder, so it will create
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: a turbulent smoke in a very high and very high temperatures,
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: but not actual flames. So the backdraft occurs when oxygen
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: is suddenly added to the situation, if I say, opening
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: a door or a window. The sudden addition of oxygen
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: to the superheated gases can create a pretty violent explosion,
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: and that explosion itself is the backdraft. I figured I've
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: learned so much from you guys, I thought it'd be
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: cool to share some info back Hope this receives you
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: well and that is from Lindsey.
• 47:24
  Speaker 2: Thanks Lindsay. That was very cool. Apparently the only way
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: to fight a backdraft is to love it too. I'll
• 47:29
  Speaker 2: let that part out, Linda.
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: That's right, you got to joke in there. Very nice.
• 47:33
  Speaker 2: If you want to get in touch with us like
• 47:35
  Speaker 2: Lindsay did and let us know something cool that we
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: didn't know, you can do it. Send it via email
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.