Latest / Who Did What Now With Katie Charlwood / 205. Unit 731 - Japan's Covert Human Experimentation Program

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205. Unit 731 - Japan's Covert Human Experimentation Program · Who Did What Now With Katie Charlwood

0:10
Speaker 1: Hello, delicious friends, and welcome to Who Did What Now?
0:15
Speaker 1: The history podcast that is not your history class with
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Speaker 1: me your host, Katie Charlewood, history harlote and reader of books.
0:24
Speaker 1: Now that today's intro, it's going to be a bit
0:27
Speaker 1: more gibberjammer. It is going to be quite a bit
0:28
Speaker 1: of gibber jabber in today's intro to the episode, because
0:32
Speaker 1: last week it was my son's birthday. He was twelve,
0:36
Speaker 1: and I organized a Kirol's party, and by party, I
0:39
Speaker 1: mean small gathering with his friends, which incidentally meant that
0:43
Speaker 1: I got to go see Spider Man brand new day
0:45
Speaker 1: and I had a great time. So I had a
0:49
Speaker 1: great time. The kids had a great time. I helped
0:52
Speaker 1: them win some plushies, and then they did their own
0:55
Speaker 1: thing at in this sort of like leisure complex. Now
0:57
Speaker 1: I did not win a plushy. I won three blushes.
1:00
Speaker 1: Each of them got one. I didn't get one. I'm
1:02
Speaker 1: not bitter. I didn't want those plushes anyway, So they,
1:08
Speaker 1: you know, went and did their own thing. I paid
1:10
Speaker 1: for the thing. They went and did it, and I
1:11
Speaker 1: just stayed in a wee bit all by myself with
1:13
Speaker 1: all of the jackets right. My diary and many many
1:19
Speaker 1: sheets of paper, and I sat compiling the lists of
1:26
Speaker 1: all the libraries, museums, cafes, opera houses, community spaces, bookstores, schools,
1:35
Speaker 1: and theaters that had reached out to me. Now, if
1:39
Speaker 1: you have not been following me on the socials, you
1:41
Speaker 1: might be like, what is going on? So I'm going
1:45
Speaker 1: on to next year in the United States. I'm also
1:48
Speaker 1: going to be in bits of like Canada as well,
1:52
Speaker 1: and I'm actually doing one show in London as well
1:56
Speaker 1: as far as I know, but that's in amongst a
2:00
Speaker 1: few other things. So but I'm doing a big, massive
2:04
Speaker 1: American churn, effectically North American to beg massive one, and
2:07
Speaker 1: I'm booking shows all over the country. And I thought, well,
2:10
Speaker 1: seeing as I'm in a lot of these places too,
2:12
Speaker 1: right because I'm already there, why don't I see if
2:16
Speaker 1: a couple libraries want me to come and do a
2:18
Speaker 1: few bets, because you know, I believe in your local library.
2:21
Speaker 1: I believe that we need to be invested in local library.
2:23
Speaker 1: And I was like, well, why don't I I am
2:27
Speaker 1: a reader of books, after all, why don't I go?
2:30
Speaker 1: And so I did that. I put a call out
2:34
Speaker 1: for a librarians. I mean, like, hey, you run stuff
2:37
Speaker 1: in your library, get me to do a duck in
2:40
Speaker 1: your library, because in my head, I was like, sure,
2:44
Speaker 1: if I'm renting from a theater, surely I can rent
2:47
Speaker 1: from library, right. But it turns out the way that
2:50
Speaker 1: the library system is is that you just kind of
2:53
Speaker 1: go and do it and they give you like an honorarium,
2:55
Speaker 1: which is great, and that's like one way of doing things.
2:59
Speaker 1: And then I've had like venues and conventions reach out
3:04
Speaker 1: to me, like I'm doing three conventions next year as
3:07
Speaker 1: far as I know, and obviously I've gonna wait for
3:09
Speaker 1: all the announcements to go out, but I guess I'm
3:11
Speaker 1: gonna have to go get new headshots, jeez, Louise. But
3:14
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be doing like a lot of stuff. I
3:17
Speaker 1: always so like the little vote for like your location
3:21
Speaker 1: thing on my website. I've had to pull it for
3:24
Speaker 1: like a small period of time because because I have
3:30
Speaker 1: been uh inundated. I got five hundred new responses in
3:36
Speaker 1: three days, so I had to pull it, you know,
3:39
Speaker 1: just so that I can get what's organized now sorted
3:44
Speaker 1: because I was just getting so many emails and information
3:46
Speaker 1: and everything coming in. So that being said, if you
3:50
Speaker 1: do have a venue and you want to host me
3:52
Speaker 1: or you have me to come do a talk or whatever,
3:57
Speaker 1: reach out to me, email me, email me, and sweet
4:02
Speaker 1: dear denizens of the United States of America, please, if
4:08
Speaker 1: you are contacting me from a university or a college
4:12
Speaker 1: or whatever, please put the name of said like UNI,
4:18
Speaker 1: college or whatever, and possibly roughly geographical location in there,
4:23
Speaker 1: because what happened is is I'm getting a lot of
4:28
Speaker 1: acronyms showing up. It's like BZ and C and I'm like,
4:31
Speaker 1: I don't know what that is. You need to name
4:34
Speaker 1: what that is in the email because I have to
4:38
Speaker 1: then try and find it again. And if you haven't
4:40
Speaker 1: given me the name and you don't have college or
4:43
Speaker 1: university in there, it's very hard for me to go
4:47
Speaker 1: through the hundreds of emails I have to try and
4:49
Speaker 1: track it again. Like even just be like whatever university
4:54
Speaker 1: Georgia or whatever university Vermont or whatever wherever you are,
4:59
Speaker 1: because like I love going to Vermont. Vermont is on
5:01
Speaker 1: the list. I'm all over next year. It just depends
5:05
Speaker 1: on which part of the year and I will be
5:07
Speaker 1: in Canada, and I'm possible very close, very close to
5:12
Speaker 1: having stuff happening in Hawaii and Alaska, which is wild
5:18
Speaker 1: to me because these are very exciting places and this
5:20
Speaker 1: very exciting stuff. But they're being said. Regarding the tour,
5:23
Speaker 1: I have figured out how to put a calendar on
5:25
Speaker 1: my website. I did that on Sunday. I'm very proud
5:29
Speaker 1: of myself. It was surprisingly easy. I don't know why
5:32
Speaker 1: I was so stressed about it, but you can see,
5:35
Speaker 1: like when something is announced, it's there. But also if
5:38
Speaker 1: you have signed up for the you know the list,
5:43
Speaker 1: then you'll be emailed when I'm going to be in
5:45
Speaker 1: your area. That being said, I have announced Ireland and
5:51
Speaker 1: UK dates for this year, so I have so far.
5:57
Speaker 1: Brighton is very close to being up. There's just I'm
6:00
Speaker 1: just waiting on still happening on the other side, but
6:04
Speaker 1: that is going to be this November. Dublin is out.
6:09
Speaker 1: I'm waiting on go way to get back to me.
6:11
Speaker 1: But Go always happening and Belfast in Northern Ireland like
6:15
Speaker 1: those are currently there. They're currently available. We can go,
6:20
Speaker 1: you can book your tickets to come see me in
6:21
Speaker 1: those places. But anyway, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Katie,
6:27
Speaker 1: please quit your jibber jabber in fact me, in fact,
6:33
Speaker 1: you are will But first we've got to get our
6:36
Speaker 1: source on. Our sources are Japan's wartime medical atrocities, Comparative
6:44
Speaker 1: Inquiries and Science, history and Ethics by Jing Bou Nine, Nannyingual,
6:49
Speaker 1: Mark Selden, and Arthur Kleiman. Japan's Biological Weapons nineteen thirty
6:55
Speaker 1: eight to nineteen forty five by Robert Comer, John W. Powell,
6:59
Speaker 1: and Bert V. A Rolling Dark Medicine, Rationalizing unethical medical
7:06
Speaker 1: research by William Lafleur, Gilnobon and Sosumo Shumazono. Japan's Infamous
7:16
Speaker 1: Unit seven thirty one, first hand accounts of Japan's wartime
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Speaker 1: human experimentation program by Hal Gold and Eumototani. Hidden Atrocities
7:28
Speaker 1: Japan germ warfare and American obstruction of justice at the
7:32
Speaker 1: Tokyo Trial by Jane Gayman. The Devil's Doctors Japanese human
7:38
Speaker 1: experiments on Allied prisoners of war by Mark Felton. And
7:43
Speaker 1: of course we also have our old favorites history dot
7:46
Speaker 1: com and biography dot com. So ioso incomfortably Gold, Then
7:54
Speaker 1: let's begin. I say, let's beget, but it will be
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Speaker 1: talking talking about Unit seven thirty one. The horrible acts
8:02
Speaker 1: they committed, and the use of germ warfare. I will
8:06
Speaker 1: also be talking about assault, abuse, and many other horrific,
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Speaker 1: vile and terrible things. So it should go without saying
8:14
Speaker 1: that this episode will contain scenes of a violent nature.
8:20
Speaker 1: Listener discretion as advised. There will be just to confirm
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Speaker 1: description of torture, sexual abuse, and many incredibly horrible things consecutively,
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Speaker 1: one after another in a row. If you get queasy
8:34
Speaker 1: easily or are of a sensitive disposition, I would suggest
8:38
Speaker 1: that you exit stage left and we will see you
8:41
Speaker 1: next time, because this episode is going to be an
8:44
Speaker 1: unpleasant one. Now, it is very weird to start anything with, well,
8:52
Speaker 1: you know how the Nazis were bad. Well this is,
8:56
Speaker 1: you know, somehow worse and even more efficient. But I
9:01
Speaker 1: am getting ahead of myself because history does not exist
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Speaker 1: in a vacuum, and I'm going to try and cliff
9:07
Speaker 1: notes this as much as possible, but we do need
9:10
Speaker 1: to slip into some context. See if we're a good
9:14
Speaker 1: chunk of history. Japan was doing its own thing, which
9:17
Speaker 1: makes it really interesting from a social and cultural perspective
9:21
Speaker 1: because it was able to grow with really any or
9:25
Speaker 1: no outside influence due to not only being isolated but insular. See,
9:31
Speaker 1: it had this incredibly long period of peace time, which
9:35
Speaker 1: is probably the longest period of peace by any regime
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Speaker 1: that we know about, or at least that I know about,
9:41
Speaker 1: and that listen, I'm not an ancient history girls, I
9:45
Speaker 1: don't know. Maybe so during the Ageo period or the
9:50
Speaker 1: Tokogoa Shogunate, a two hundred and fifty or so span
9:54
Speaker 1: between sixteen oh three and eighteen sixty eight, it was
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Speaker 1: a very long period of peace time, and the shogunate
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Speaker 1: had ensured this piece by enforcing the Sakoku policies. Now,
10:11
Speaker 1: these policies were very much collectivist, and it maintained a
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Speaker 1: collectivist society across the fourteen thousand islands of Japan. Yes,
10:22
Speaker 1: there is that many. So cooperation and collectivism were necessary
10:29
Speaker 1: for survival, and not doing your part led to massive shame. Now,
10:34
Speaker 1: I have had to explain the concept of shame quite
10:37
Speaker 1: a lot to people in the modern world because we
10:41
Speaker 1: don't have the same honor system. Like apart from the
10:44
Speaker 1: fact that nobody is really embarrassed anymore, It's like people
10:48
Speaker 1: are afraid to be cringy, which is weird because they're
10:52
Speaker 1: also not embarrassed by things. It's a very strange like place.
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Speaker 1: It's an outward perception as opposed to an inward feeling
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Speaker 1: of guilt. And because we don't have that same honor system,
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Speaker 1: your word, being your bond and being dishonored was to
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Speaker 1: not only bring shame upon yourself, but to your family
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Speaker 1: and or community. And that's that's not great. The thing is,
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Speaker 1: as well, is the honor also got you privileges. And
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Speaker 1: under the Tokogawa Shogunate, it's shogunate, isn't it. I keep
11:29
Speaker 1: going shogunate, like that's that's not how you pronounce that.
11:33
Speaker 1: That's not how you pronounce that at all. I'm trying,
11:36
Speaker 1: but whatever it is with my accent, it's like whenever
11:39
Speaker 1: I try and say shogunate, it comes out shogunate, Like
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Speaker 1: what is that? That's not great? But like the thing
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Speaker 1: about as well is honor also got you privileges. If
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Speaker 1: you were very honorable, you were well respected, and you
11:54
Speaker 1: also got treats, you know what I mean. And the
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Speaker 1: thing is as well, the way that this was designed
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Speaker 1: is that submission was an honor, as was loyalty, and
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Speaker 1: if you were dishonored, if you weren't submissive to the
12:10
Speaker 1: you know, the shogunate, you would lose your privileges too.
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Speaker 1: And over the course of this, with this being ingrained
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Speaker 1: in their culture, Japanese people were socialized and conditioned to
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Speaker 1: follow orders. So that's a really good base here for
12:29
Speaker 1: keeping the country collective in nature. Another was the introduction
12:34
Speaker 1: of a family registry and a clan based funeral system
12:38
Speaker 1: to divide land. And these all working together meant that
12:45
Speaker 1: migration and immigration became now impossible, like it was hard
12:51
Speaker 1: enough to leave your village, you know, let alone the
12:56
Speaker 1: country as well as this, but as a was phased
13:00
Speaker 1: out and replaced with Neo Shintoism, foreign trade was heavily restricted,
13:06
Speaker 1: not at our band contacts continued through controlled channels, right.
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Speaker 1: This happened with the Dutch and the Koreans and the Chinese,
13:16
Speaker 1: but out centers, you know, they were kept in eyeline,
13:20
Speaker 1: but always at arms distance. So there's two hundred and
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Speaker 1: fifty ish yels of peace which got disrupted in eighteen
13:31
Speaker 1: fifty three with the Black Ship incident, which is when
13:36
Speaker 1: a steam powered gunship sailed by US commodore Matthew Perry,
13:41
Speaker 1: like could he be any more aggressive? It billowed into
13:48
Speaker 1: Ado Bay and brought with him gunpower thanks to the
13:53
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution at a time when Japan was still fighting
13:58
Speaker 1: with swords. It was clear that Japan could no longer
14:03
Speaker 1: hide from the outside world, and it became clear to
14:07
Speaker 1: them how ill equipped they were to deal with an
14:09
Speaker 1: outside threat. And this initial meeting led to a series
14:13
Speaker 1: of trade deals and treaties which really screwed Japan over royally,
14:19
Speaker 1: and they really didn't have the leverage to contest it,
14:22
Speaker 1: or battle against it or anything. So with this the
14:28
Speaker 1: shogunate crumbled and within fifteen years the Maiji Restoration was
14:33
Speaker 1: in full swing. Centralized government was the thing now, all
14:38
Speaker 1: under the Japanese Emperor, and the country had a new
14:42
Speaker 1: goal to make itself more impressive and so powerful that
14:47
Speaker 1: no one would dare think to invade. It entered the
14:50
Speaker 1: international market, it dipped its toes into colonization, and it
14:54
Speaker 1: built its military with the same ethos of honor and
14:57
Speaker 1: loyalty that was rooted in Japanese culture, along with perpetrating
15:03
Speaker 1: the idea that Japan was superior country and that it's
15:07
Speaker 1: people were superior to others in the East. Now I
15:13
Speaker 1: have to apologize to everyone for my terrible pronunciations. Normally
15:18
Speaker 1: I'm better, but I am still recovering from dental surgery
15:23
Speaker 1: and I can't move my mouth the way that I
15:26
Speaker 1: want to move it. So if I sound differently as
15:28
Speaker 1: well to the way I normally sound, some people were like,
15:31
Speaker 1: you sound weird. Yeah, ye, a dental surgery and I
15:35
Speaker 1: can't move my tongue proberly, but there's a few bits
15:39
Speaker 1: still working on. So I am not deliberately mispronouncing Japanese names.
15:46
Speaker 1: I am genuinely trying, but I can't get my tongue
15:49
Speaker 1: around it. I realized. I was like, why can't I
15:52
Speaker 1: say this properly? And it's like, oh, it's because I
15:54
Speaker 1: can't move my tongue normally around my very tender mouth.
15:59
Speaker 1: So again, very sorry, doing my best. Please don't hate
16:03
Speaker 1: me people who speak Japanese. So, the thing about the
16:08
Speaker 1: Japanese military, like what made it so terrifying was this
16:11
Speaker 1: idea of honor and shame, and that surrendering was both
16:17
Speaker 1: dishonorable and shameful. This was a military trained and conditioned
16:25
Speaker 1: to fight to the death, never surrender. There was no
16:29
Speaker 1: such thing as cutting their losses and retreating absolutely not
16:32
Speaker 1: an option, even if the odds were stacked against them,
16:35
Speaker 1: and there was no way out. They'd say, fuck this
16:38
Speaker 1: for a game of soldiers, and they would fight to
16:41
Speaker 1: win or they would die trying, which is fucking terrifying.
16:47
Speaker 1: How do you beat someone who's willing to die for
16:50
Speaker 1: their cause. So over the next sixty ish years, Japan
16:58
Speaker 1: builds itself up and builds up its military, and by
17:01
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties it's warring and whatnot. There's fighting those
17:05
Speaker 1: treating so Wan and so forth. Then China gets away
17:10
Speaker 1: bit wobbling because there also civil war in nineteen twenty
17:12
Speaker 1: seven between nationalist and communist forces, and Japan's like, my,
17:17
Speaker 1: what an opportune moment to strike, And so between nineteen
17:21
Speaker 1: thirty one and nineteen thirty seven, Japan had skirmishes like
17:26
Speaker 1: all over China, Like I say, Oliver in northern China,
17:31
Speaker 1: so it's in Shanghai and so on and so forth.
17:36
Speaker 1: And then in late nineteen thirty three, Japan forced Chinese
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Speaker 1: communists into the Long March, decimating about what ninety percent
17:47
Speaker 1: of their forces. By nineteen to thirty seven, these skirmishes
17:52
Speaker 1: evolve into an all out war with the Marco Polo
17:56
Speaker 1: Bridge incident near Beijing, the Second Sino Japanese war is
18:03
Speaker 1: just comes out of this right now. This is really
18:07
Speaker 1: fascinating from a chronological perspective because the Second World War,
18:11
Speaker 1: the way that it's perceived, it's the time where basically
18:16
Speaker 1: the entire globe is a war. And we often came
18:21
Speaker 1: well claim that the war was started in September nineteen
18:25
Speaker 1: thirty nine when Hitler invaded Poland, but the Second Sino
18:29
Speaker 1: Japanese War was already underway. So it has been argued
18:33
Speaker 1: the Second World War started in nineteen thirty seven, not
18:36
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine, and that the claim the war started
18:40
Speaker 1: in thirty nine is eurocentric. It's a very European Western
18:46
Speaker 1: perception of when the war started. AnyWho, the Empire of
18:53
Speaker 1: Japan is going full throttle at the Republic of China.
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Speaker 1: It's invasion followed by man, massacre, by battle, invasion, massacre,
19:03
Speaker 1: battle invasion, it, etc. And they are setting up base
19:07
Speaker 1: camps all over the shop, and they are laying waste
19:10
Speaker 1: wherever they go. Like the death doll is so high
19:15
Speaker 1: they had to calculate the dead by the average size
19:20
Speaker 1: of a body and how wide and deep a mass
19:25
Speaker 1: grave was, and like they had to do mathematical equations
19:30
Speaker 1: to figure out how many people had been massacred, and
19:35
Speaker 1: they wouldn't just find one mask grave, they would find another,
19:38
Speaker 1: and another and another, and it's like it's hard to
19:45
Speaker 1: keep up with how much of the population that had
19:49
Speaker 1: been decimated, Like this is the largest Asian war of
19:52
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, and the death doll is so huge.
19:56
Speaker 1: It's estimated that anywhere between three and eleven million people
20:02
Speaker 1: were murdered as a result of war crimes by the
20:05
Speaker 1: Japanese right in nineteen thirty seven. There is the Nanjing massacre,
20:13
Speaker 1: which frankly is incredibly graphic. There are photos that exist.
20:20
Speaker 1: There are always people who ask me to cover it,
20:25
Speaker 1: because I've covered many horrific and vile topics, terrible moments
20:29
Speaker 1: from history that are the worst. Now, I, out of
20:36
Speaker 1: sheer curiosity, looked up the Nanjing massacre. I looked at
20:42
Speaker 1: the photos. I read the accounts, and I had trouble
20:48
Speaker 1: sleeping reading the after reading the details. And if I
20:55
Speaker 1: can ever bring myself to cover it like sidebar, if
20:59
Speaker 1: I could ever bring myself to really go through it
21:02
Speaker 1: and dig through it and then try and lay out
21:05
Speaker 1: into quote digestible chunks, I'm putting it behind a Paywalt
21:10
Speaker 1: it's getting locked up on Patreon or something because you
21:13
Speaker 1: cannot do it justice without telling the truth. And the
21:16
Speaker 1: truth is so reprehensible that I don't want to risk
21:19
Speaker 1: someone listening to it who shouldn't. It's not going to
21:22
Speaker 1: be but an accident. It's going to be an active
21:25
Speaker 1: choice that someone is going to intentionally take. I am
21:29
Speaker 1: not going to let this be stumbled upon. You know,
21:33
Speaker 1: it's so horrible and that's not even a strong enough
21:39
Speaker 1: word for it. And I don't feel like anybody should
21:43
Speaker 1: be presented with that information unless that is a purely
21:49
Speaker 1: definitive active choice. So back to back to this thirty seven,
21:57
Speaker 1: Japan attacks Nanjing in nineteen thirty eight, it attacks Wuhan,
22:03
Speaker 1: which was the capital. Right, You've got everyone retreating inward
22:09
Speaker 1: because Japan is taking over. So the Chinese government, like
22:12
Speaker 1: the de facto government, was in Wuhan, and so it
22:15
Speaker 1: had to move inward. As you know, Japanese forces took hold.
22:20
Speaker 1: So there were alliances and such between eastern and western nations,
22:25
Speaker 1: and the US was supplying China with aid, so Japan
22:29
Speaker 1: was not placed. And Japan was a country that always
22:34
Speaker 1: went on the offensive, and now this is something that
22:36
Speaker 1: was brought up back in the episode on the Beverly
22:39
Speaker 1: Hill spy Rotland from Rutland, and like Japan attacked first
22:48
Speaker 1: and attacked hard. And in nineteen forty one, Japan launched
22:56
Speaker 1: a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, thus declaring war on
23:01
Speaker 1: the United States. So here's the thing. This is a
23:05
Speaker 1: violation of the Geneva Conventions after World War One, which
23:10
Speaker 1: implemented rules of war, one of which being that you
23:15
Speaker 1: couldn't just surprise attack. You had to declare and announce
23:18
Speaker 1: war first, almost like it was good manners. So there
23:22
Speaker 1: were rules for war, and there's always been rules of engagement, right,
23:28
Speaker 1: and this Geneva Convention, there was a few of them.
23:31
Speaker 1: This is one of them. So the Geneva Convention most
23:34
Speaker 1: people know about is the one after the Second World War,
23:37
Speaker 1: but the one before the First World War involved this.
23:41
Speaker 1: And it also banned the use of chemical weapons. So
23:47
Speaker 1: Japan would eventually surrender after the US dropped nuclear bombs
23:51
Speaker 1: on cities Hiroshiamat and Nagazaki in nineteen forty five. And
23:57
Speaker 1: I would always suggest to anyone that they should read
23:59
Speaker 1: firsthand account of survivors the Heba Kosha because the number
24:04
Speaker 1: of deaths is so grandiose and so large that it's
24:08
Speaker 1: very difficult to comprehend, and that to understand what happens
24:13
Speaker 1: is you need to see the individual. Now, it's harming stuff,
24:16
Speaker 1: but it does give perspective. But yes, before Little Boy
24:22
Speaker 1: was dropped, before the surrender, before World War two, In fact,
24:26
Speaker 1: before the Second Sceno Japanese War, Japan had established the
24:35
Speaker 1: Manchu Detachment seven to thirty one, also known as the
24:39
Speaker 1: Ehe Unit because it ran under the helm of shiro Ishie.
24:45
Speaker 1: But if you have heard of it, you're probably not
24:48
Speaker 1: better as Unit seven to thirty one, the not so
24:51
Speaker 1: secret base of Japan's chemical warfare research. Now I say
24:57
Speaker 1: that it established Manchu Attachment seven thirty one, it lay
25:03
Speaker 1: the groundwork for it. Really, so shiro Ishi, the man
25:12
Speaker 1: who many would refer to as the Joseph Mengela of
25:14
Speaker 1: the East, which is a fair comparison except for the
25:18
Speaker 1: fact that while Ishi may have been a vel human,
25:22
Speaker 1: he was at least fairly competent. Shiri Ishi was born
25:28
Speaker 1: on the twenty fifth of June eighteen ninety two in Chioda,
25:34
Speaker 1: Moura which is now Shibayama, Japan, as the fourth son
25:39
Speaker 1: of Katsuya Ishii, a wealthy sake maker and landolder. He
25:44
Speaker 1: had a privileged upbringing. He also did well academically, socially
25:49
Speaker 1: less so because he was a bit of a dick.
25:51
Speaker 1: He also had a shitty attitude, being selfish, arrogant, brash,
25:57
Speaker 1: and thought that he was better than everyone else. Yes,
26:02
Speaker 1: he was intelligent, he was rich, and he was over
26:05
Speaker 1: six foot tall. You also apparently had a very deep voice.
26:09
Speaker 1: Now he literally and figuratively looked down on the people
26:16
Speaker 1: around him. In nineteen sixteen, he enrolled at the Faculty
26:20
Speaker 1: of Medicine at the Kyoto Imperial University. He was there
26:24
Speaker 1: for four years, being loved by teachers and despised by
26:27
Speaker 1: fellow students. Becalls well, he was a bit of a dick.
26:31
Speaker 1: Instead of friends, he would grow bacteria and petry dishes
26:34
Speaker 1: and keep them as pets. Now, I get it. Once
26:38
Speaker 1: at grows felt you've got to name it, understand. But
26:42
Speaker 1: one of the things he liked to do was he
26:44
Speaker 1: used to do experiments at night. So after everyone had
26:48
Speaker 1: taken the time during the day to clean all of
26:51
Speaker 1: the equipment very carefully and put it all away, he
26:54
Speaker 1: would show up do whatever he wanted to do. And
26:57
Speaker 1: then would leave the mess for his classmates to clean up.
27:03
Speaker 1: A month after graduating, he joined the Japanese Imperial Army,
27:07
Speaker 1: where again he impressed his superiors, but not his comrades.
27:13
Speaker 1: He was stationed at an army hospital in Tokyo after
27:16
Speaker 1: completing basic training, and he spent his evenings drinking and
27:20
Speaker 1: hoaring about. Still he was impressed in the higher ups,
27:24
Speaker 1: and he was recommended for a postgrad When he completes
27:27
Speaker 1: that with his pH d in bacteriology, he's promoted to
27:31
Speaker 1: Army Surgeon's second class. And now in nineteen twenty seven,
27:36
Speaker 1: he was advocating for Japanese bioweapons program. See the Geneva
27:43
Speaker 1: Protocol had banned the use of germ warfare post World
27:46
Speaker 1: War One, both biological and chemical weapons, so no anthrax,
27:52
Speaker 1: no glandals, no mustard gas and whatnot. And Ishi thought that,
27:57
Speaker 1: you know, they're banning it, so it has to be
28:01
Speaker 1: pretty impressive. So he goes on a two year or
28:06
Speaker 1: two of the West trying to suss out info on
28:08
Speaker 1: biological warfare, but show horror, people weren't exactly loose slipped
28:12
Speaker 1: with secret information about illegal biological weapons. Now he did
28:18
Speaker 1: manage to convince the US to give him a vial
28:19
Speaker 1: of yellow favor, but only so that he could make
28:22
Speaker 1: a cure for it, so we didn't quite return home
28:26
Speaker 1: empty handed. That's funny. Oh, can you give me this
28:30
Speaker 1: infectious disease and I'll just like make a cure for it.
28:33
Speaker 1: That's the only reason I want it, Like sure, Jan Sure.
28:39
Speaker 1: So when he returns he is promoted to Senior Army surgeon,
28:44
Speaker 1: third class, like a sogeant major. Really. So, Japan invades
28:51
Speaker 1: and occupies Manchuria in nineteen thirty one, and his first
28:55
Speaker 1: research was at the Genma prison camp in Manchuria, funded
29:01
Speaker 1: by the Japanese government, who basically blank checked a shee
29:05
Speaker 1: to conduct whatever experiment he wanted, and he did not
29:09
Speaker 1: lack for subjects because of the amount of prisoners of
29:13
Speaker 1: war that had been captured, so he had his pick.
29:19
Speaker 1: How did he get the Department of Military Affairs to
29:22
Speaker 1: approve this? Well, he stated that chemical and biological weapons
29:28
Speaker 1: must be both powerful and successful if they were banned,
29:33
Speaker 1: and that Japan wasn't exactly flush with natural metal deposits,
29:36
Speaker 1: so manufacturing typical weapons would be a bit of a
29:40
Speaker 1: sticky wicket. So it was a bit difficult, and the
29:43
Speaker 1: Geneva Protocol may have been signed by a Japanese envoy,
29:48
Speaker 1: but loophole hadn't actually been passed by the Japanese parliament,
29:53
Speaker 1: and so it really had no reason to follow that
29:56
Speaker 1: rule at the in Camp's first set of orders was
30:02
Speaker 1: to find a cure for diseases that were affecting Japanese troops.
30:07
Speaker 1: So he infected the prisoners with diseases to see how
30:10
Speaker 1: they progressed, right, and not only that, but how they spread,
30:16
Speaker 1: And so he started with gentle options like the plague.
30:28
Speaker 1: The black death wasn't the only disease that doctors and
30:31
Speaker 1: medical students were testing. They also studied things like anthrax.
30:39
Speaker 1: So when they tested people and their subjects died, because
30:42
Speaker 1: of course they did, the bodies were cut open and
30:46
Speaker 1: bund in special fullnesses. Japan could see that more war
30:50
Speaker 1: was on the horizon, and so they threw more money
30:53
Speaker 1: at Ishie, who was now the leader of the Quantung
30:57
Speaker 1: Army Epidemic Prevention and Water sop Fly Department. Say testing
31:03
Speaker 1: camps were cropping up all over Japanese occupied territories, and
31:08
Speaker 1: a she was given a nice new shiny lab in Pingfan,
31:13
Speaker 1: far away from well everything now coincidentally, this was built
31:19
Speaker 1: after a successful escape attempt by prisoners, I say escape attempt.
31:24
Speaker 1: It was a successful escape and by an explosion that
31:28
Speaker 1: many believe to be sabotaged. And so they spent two
31:33
Speaker 1: years building this facility and Unit seven thirty one was
31:39
Speaker 1: officially founded in nineteen thirty six, and it was expanded
31:43
Speaker 1: to include one hundred and fifty structures, three thousand members
31:48
Speaker 1: of staff, and was able to hold six hundred prisoners
31:51
Speaker 1: at a time. Now, this was a purpose built facility
31:56
Speaker 1: where prisoners of war were experimented on. Now, it wasn't
32:00
Speaker 1: just prisoners of war like, there were teams, right, they
32:06
Speaker 1: would go out and round up people, kidnap them off
32:09
Speaker 1: the street, men, women and children. And the vans that
32:13
Speaker 1: did it were known as ravens. So they would go
32:18
Speaker 1: they would steal people indiscriminately, just whoever was about. They
32:23
Speaker 1: just you know, anyone in Puppet States or you know,
32:28
Speaker 1: oh by Japan or or basically half a China, Korea,
32:32
Speaker 1: all those places. They would just take people and it
32:36
Speaker 1: would be taken to all of these different facilities. So
32:41
Speaker 1: in Unit seven thirty one, prisoners were referred to as
32:46
Speaker 1: marota or locks, and so like again, it took two
32:52
Speaker 1: years to build this place. And over the two years
32:55
Speaker 1: it took to build it, the joke was like in
32:57
Speaker 1: the surrounding area is that the army was building a
33:02
Speaker 1: timber mill. So yeah, people were felt to as logs,
33:09
Speaker 1: as in how many logs did you chop today? So
33:15
Speaker 1: in this facility there were seventy buildings that contained prison blocks,
33:20
Speaker 1: and they were designed to be dehumanizing. They were practically
33:24
Speaker 1: based on the cages that held rats for testing. Men
33:29
Speaker 1: and women were held separately, with children being held with
33:32
Speaker 1: the women, and all of the cells opened up into
33:36
Speaker 1: a central corridor and the doors had openings on them,
33:39
Speaker 1: like for prisoners to put their arms out to receive
33:41
Speaker 1: injections and have their blood drawn. Now, like these openings
33:46
Speaker 1: were on the ground, and the reason they were so
33:49
Speaker 1: low is they were like, well, if someone's really weak,
33:51
Speaker 1: if they've gotten illness or disease, we need them to
33:54
Speaker 1: still be able to put their arm out. So if
33:57
Speaker 1: they're weak and on the ground, they'll still be able
33:59
Speaker 1: to do it, because that's efficient. There were protocols surrounding
34:07
Speaker 1: Unit seven thirty one. The alspace was blocked and there
34:11
Speaker 1: was a train that ran past and as it did.
34:14
Speaker 1: The blinds had to be shut. Like it wasn't a secret.
34:20
Speaker 1: They weren't publicizing it, but they weren't exactly keeping it
34:23
Speaker 1: stumb either. Here's the thing about Japanese medicine, Like Japan
34:30
Speaker 1: was at the forefront of medicine. It had been refining
34:33
Speaker 1: surgical procedures. It was way ahead with bacteria and virus research,
34:38
Speaker 1: and its military's hospitals were the cleanest, like they were
34:41
Speaker 1: hed on germ theory. Like even in Unit seven thirty one,
34:47
Speaker 1: it was pristine. Nobody was loving in squalor, and nobody
34:50
Speaker 1: got sick accidentally, apart from maybe the odd person working there.
34:57
Speaker 1: Like if you accidentally got sprayed with disease when you
35:00
Speaker 1: were working in a space with diseases, well, shame on.
35:04
Speaker 1: You shouldn't have been done. That should have been more careful.
35:07
Speaker 1: But like no prisoner accidentally contracted in illness, Like everything
35:12
Speaker 1: that was done there was done under very careful clinical
35:15
Speaker 1: conditions and it was spotless. Right. So because it was
35:21
Speaker 1: so far ahead, right, it really could have been advancing
35:27
Speaker 1: instead of torturing. But when it came to the hour
35:32
Speaker 1: of war, it was ascertained that military strikes kill about
35:36
Speaker 1: twenty percent of the enemy and the other eighty percent
35:39
Speaker 1: is defeated by preventable diseases. So Japan took that info
35:45
Speaker 1: and they ran with it, shoveling more and more money
35:49
Speaker 1: into Ech's research. The medics who were involved in this
35:55
Speaker 1: saw this work as honorable and defend the empire, and
36:01
Speaker 1: to refuse, well, that was a failure. It would bring dishonor.
36:06
Speaker 1: And remember, submission brings privileges, and they were all treated
36:10
Speaker 1: very very well, unlike their test subjects. Now seven thirty
36:16
Speaker 1: one was the main part of the Ishie network. Now
36:21
Speaker 1: they were affilated locations in Beijing, Nanjing, chang Qing, and
36:25
Speaker 1: all in all they were what twenty six active laboratories
36:29
Speaker 1: running at the same time, over twenty thousand people employed,
36:34
Speaker 1: and all the info was being shared with doctors and
36:37
Speaker 1: the educators all across Japan. And bear in mind that
36:42
Speaker 1: human experimentation was not anything new. Japan had been conducting
36:46
Speaker 1: experiments on people at least as far back as when
36:49
Speaker 1: Eshie was still in medical school. They coded their words
36:53
Speaker 1: there too. Peoples would refer to monkeys, except they weren't
36:57
Speaker 1: talking about monkeys, they were talking about experiments performed on people.
37:06
Speaker 1: Shiroly She's main objective within the Imperial Japanese Army was
37:10
Speaker 1: to research biological warfare and how to implement and weaponize bacteria, pathogens,
37:17
Speaker 1: and viruses. The prisoners of war were mainly Chinese, Korean,
37:22
Speaker 1: or sometimes Soviets, and they were experimented on and they
37:27
Speaker 1: were vivisected without anesthesia or painkillers. Now I knew that
37:32
Speaker 1: we discussed this back I think when I was talking
37:35
Speaker 1: about experimentation in concentration camps. But vivisections are when a
37:42
Speaker 1: body is dissected, but when the person is still alive.
37:49
Speaker 1: So the purpose of Unit seven thirty one was to
37:52
Speaker 1: harm the enemy and protect Japan and members of the
37:55
Speaker 1: Japanese Imperial Army. One of the many experiments conducted on
38:02
Speaker 1: the prisoners was the effect of traditional weapons. Right, prisoners
38:09
Speaker 1: would be stabbed with a variety of blades, knives, swords, bayonets,
38:14
Speaker 1: even and they would do this to see like what
38:17
Speaker 1: the weapons did to their organs, Like what was the damage?
38:20
Speaker 1: Could the damage be repaired? Was it fatal? Like would
38:24
Speaker 1: cutting at this angle do this? If you use this
38:26
Speaker 1: force would do that? And it was very clinical in
38:31
Speaker 1: its research. They would also see the damage to the
38:34
Speaker 1: wounds over a period of time. They also shot them
38:39
Speaker 1: with varying weapons a range of ammunition and artillery from
38:44
Speaker 1: varying distances to see what would happen. They strapped prisoners
38:50
Speaker 1: to boards at small distances from each other at an
38:53
Speaker 1: explosives testing site, grenades to be thrown, bombs to be dowundated,
38:58
Speaker 1: and researchers would for example, what distance could a person
39:03
Speaker 1: survive at, how close, how far right. All of this
39:07
Speaker 1: was taken into account. High velocity injuries were studied, and
39:13
Speaker 1: one of the ways they did this was by binding
39:17
Speaker 1: prisoners and dropping heavy objects on them like they would
39:23
Speaker 1: crush people, just to see what this would do to
39:28
Speaker 1: a body. Gas chambers were set up for mustard gas,
39:35
Speaker 1: nerve gas, and to use bluster agents on the subjects.
39:42
Speaker 1: They also tested the effects of radiation poisoning resulting in
39:45
Speaker 1: sterilization and death. They tested frostbite and the effects of
39:54
Speaker 1: different temperatures on the body appendages, limbs, and they were
39:58
Speaker 1: dipped into waters of varying temperature, allowing parts to freeze.
40:03
Speaker 1: They would then research the damage caused and if it
40:06
Speaker 1: was reversible. So they would hit the appendage with a
40:11
Speaker 1: stick just to hear the sound of frozen limb made
40:15
Speaker 1: if it made a hollow sound like a dum it
40:19
Speaker 1: was frozen. They would chip the ice away. They would
40:23
Speaker 1: chip off skin to see the damage and then they see,
40:27
Speaker 1: you know, try to see if they could traverse it.
40:32
Speaker 1: Would burning it with a flamethrower help one? If we
40:35
Speaker 1: poured this chemical on it? What about boiling water? Would
40:39
Speaker 1: this medicine work? Where the nerves damaged or could they
40:44
Speaker 1: be repaired? Could the limbs function again after this type
40:48
Speaker 1: of damage. Another thing that was purpose built were large centrifuges. Now,
40:57
Speaker 1: a centrifuge is a machine that spins, and it's typically
41:01
Speaker 1: used in a lab to separate like the plasma and
41:04
Speaker 1: the magma from the blood. Like it separates it so
41:06
Speaker 1: they can do like testing on it. Now, they built
41:11
Speaker 1: human sized centrifuges to study the effects of G force
41:15
Speaker 1: on fallen paratroopers and pilots. So they put people inside
41:20
Speaker 1: them and spun them until they lost consciousness or died. Now,
41:24
Speaker 1: this happened typically around ten to fifteen g's except for
41:29
Speaker 1: the children they would die much sooner. Subjects would have
41:36
Speaker 1: limbs amputated and then surgically reattached to other parts of
41:39
Speaker 1: their body. They would switch parts around. They would cut
41:44
Speaker 1: off hands and flip them around and reattach them just
41:48
Speaker 1: to see, just to see limbs were damaged, just to
41:54
Speaker 1: see what would happen. Right, they would wait for gangreen
42:01
Speaker 1: to form and then see the rate of infection and
42:04
Speaker 1: if they could be revived or cured. Another experiment they
42:09
Speaker 1: did was perform transfusions with the wrong blood. Like blood
42:14
Speaker 1: types would be known for Goodwill at this point, and
42:17
Speaker 1: Unit seven thirty one was testing what would happen if
42:20
Speaker 1: you were given the wrong type of blood, which is
42:23
Speaker 1: typically the body reacts to the foreign blood and attacks
42:27
Speaker 1: the white blood cells in your body. Now they didn't
42:31
Speaker 1: just do it with like humans, They also transfused animal
42:35
Speaker 1: blood like. That was another experiment they did. Now, the
42:41
Speaker 1: prisoners that were being experimented on, for the most part,
42:45
Speaker 1: they were well cared for and fed. Right, They were
42:49
Speaker 1: healthy specimens, right. They they had like wheat and fish
42:55
Speaker 1: and all manner of like decent food. Because they wanted
43:00
Speaker 1: to have accurate studies. And you can't be accurate if
43:05
Speaker 1: your subject is also weak or faint or ill. And
43:09
Speaker 1: so you know, they wanted the testing to be accurate.
43:13
Speaker 1: And if you're emaciated. You're not good for half of
43:16
Speaker 1: the experiments. Now that being said, they did also test
43:21
Speaker 1: prolonged hunger and thirst on prisoners. Right they watched them.
43:29
Speaker 1: They sort of took notes of a period of time
43:33
Speaker 1: to see these prisoners waste away to the point that
43:35
Speaker 1: they looked almost mummified, their body's husks of what they were.
43:42
Speaker 1: Some test subjects consumed poison, drinking iopite and lewisite, gas
43:47
Speaker 1: and water, and they were observed to see the effect
43:50
Speaker 1: on the body. Now and sidebar, When I started looking
43:56
Speaker 1: into Unit seven thirty one, I found that the info
43:59
Speaker 1: was quite and that so many experiments were conducted that
44:03
Speaker 1: I would not be able to cover everything in one episode. Now,
44:06
Speaker 1: So I have spoken to Jay from Day Nightshade, my
44:10
Speaker 1: co host from Day Nightshade, and we were already planning
44:12
Speaker 1: on doing a series that was one of the series
44:17
Speaker 1: that would specifically cover World War two poison, and that
44:21
Speaker 1: is something that we are going to cover down the light, right,
44:25
Speaker 1: We're going to do it, and we're going to delve
44:27
Speaker 1: deeper into it. But now we're getting this is why
44:29
Speaker 1: you're getting a brief overview, because there's so much to
44:31
Speaker 1: tell you and there's only so much we can get in.
44:34
Speaker 1: So for now, the scientists and doctors infected these test
44:40
Speaker 1: subjects and took notes as they watched them suffer and
44:43
Speaker 1: again vivisections. So they tested all of this. They tested
44:50
Speaker 1: prolonged starvation and dehydration. They tested exposure to low pressure
44:56
Speaker 1: chambers until their subjects eyes burst. They suspended them upside
45:02
Speaker 1: down until death. We had the velocity tests, crushing they
45:07
Speaker 1: were electrocuted, used hot air fans to dehydrate them the
45:13
Speaker 1: center of youge, just spinning them until they died, exposing
45:16
Speaker 1: them to extreme heat, burning them, injecting them with animal blood,
45:21
Speaker 1: the wrong blood. They injected them with seawater. They also
45:27
Speaker 1: buried them alive again just to see what would happen,
45:35
Speaker 1: because they had incinerators, right, they had specific incinerators just
45:39
Speaker 1: to see, you know, make sure that they were cleaning
45:41
Speaker 1: up their mess. Now. If you thought things were bad, now,
45:48
Speaker 1: they're going to get worse. So if you have eaten dinner,
45:54
Speaker 1: if you are pregnant or postpartum, if you have a
46:01
Speaker 1: sensitive stomach, if you anything that you think could possibly
46:09
Speaker 1: make you want to shut this off and run away,
46:12
Speaker 1: you're gonna want to skip forward like thirty seconds. This
46:15
Speaker 1: is your trigger warning. It's about to get horrific, and
46:18
Speaker 1: I'm going to try and be as clinical as possible
46:20
Speaker 1: with this three to one go. Female prisoners of childbearing
46:25
Speaker 1: age were forcibly impregnated. They were raped so that a
46:29
Speaker 1: range of experiments could be conducted on them, including trauma,
46:33
Speaker 1: poison and weapons, and tests on venereal diseases. Researchers wanted
46:38
Speaker 1: to know the effect on the fetus if the pregnant
46:40
Speaker 1: person was infected. Staff members or infected prisoners who had
46:45
Speaker 1: sexually transmitted diseases or infections like syphilis, for example, would
46:51
Speaker 1: be instructed to rape pregnant people until they also contracted
46:56
Speaker 1: the disease or infection. Now, before any he jumps on
47:00
Speaker 1: me for using the term pregnant people instead of pregnant women,
47:03
Speaker 1: it was any one of childbearing age. So children as
47:06
Speaker 1: young as twelve, and I am not about to call
47:08
Speaker 1: them women. Children were rapped. They were experimented of Pregnant
47:13
Speaker 1: people were also subjected to vivisections, as were the fetuses,
47:21
Speaker 1: and so this would be tested over a period of time.
47:26
Speaker 1: They wanted to see, like how far advanced in different
47:28
Speaker 1: stages this would happen. By nineteen thirty nine, Age had
47:36
Speaker 1: condensed his laboratory discoveries to six potent pathogens anthrax, typhoid, paratyphoid, glandeles, plague,
47:46
Speaker 1: infected human fleas, and dysentery because all roads lead to dysentery.
47:53
Speaker 1: When they had enough data and supplies, they started conducting
47:57
Speaker 1: field tests. They can staminated water sources, dropped contaminated seeds
48:03
Speaker 1: in wheat. They released disease ridden fleas over Chinese territories.
48:09
Speaker 1: They dropped them by plane like they were just flyvver
48:12
Speaker 1: parts of China and drop diseases on them like they
48:17
Speaker 1: were growing and manufacturing pathogens. And they were breeding plague
48:21
Speaker 1: infested fleas, which after a lot of research, is found
48:27
Speaker 1: was the best spreader of disease. It was the most productive,
48:30
Speaker 1: It was the most efficient. They had four and a
48:33
Speaker 1: half thousand flea incubators operating at once, each capable of
48:38
Speaker 1: producing forty five kilograms of fleas. Now, I don't know
48:43
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen a flea how small and light
48:46
Speaker 1: it is. So to have forty five kilograms of fleas
48:52
Speaker 1: like that is and I believe the technical term is
48:55
Speaker 1: a fuck ton of fleas so Unit seven thirty one
49:02
Speaker 1: had also created prototypes of bacteria bombs, the goal being
49:05
Speaker 1: that they would spread bacteria, but the casualties were not
49:09
Speaker 1: as high, and fleas spread fast and had a high
49:13
Speaker 1: rate of infection. And of course they were all doing
49:18
Speaker 1: it for the good of the empire. And Prince Chibu,
49:22
Speaker 1: who was the Emperor's younger brother, he was like, I
49:27
Speaker 1: know you're gonna be shot by this really right wing,
49:29
Speaker 1: by the way, and he would attend vivisections conducted by
49:33
Speaker 1: Unit seven thirty one, as would higher up army officials,
49:38
Speaker 1: directors of the ECHE network of labs in the ec network,
49:41
Speaker 1: I should say, they would visit Japan's best medical schools,
49:46
Speaker 1: including Tokyo Imperial University and Kyoto Imperial University, and they
49:51
Speaker 1: would show their research to recruit the best and brightest
49:56
Speaker 1: at these unis. Like I said earlier, it wasn't a
50:00
Speaker 1: secret now these research facilities, like within them, it is
50:08
Speaker 1: believed that somewhere between three thousand and twelve thousand people
50:12
Speaker 1: were killed like literally just within the research facilities themselves.
50:18
Speaker 1: So biological campaigns, right, they were deployed all throughout the
50:25
Speaker 1: Second World War, large and small scale. The aforementioned flea
50:29
Speaker 1: drops like. They even had soldiers feed cholera infected pork
50:36
Speaker 1: to stray dogs, right and let them go about their
50:40
Speaker 1: way to spread the disease. Intestinotyphus was deployed into rivals,
50:47
Speaker 1: and this even would affect villages because it would contaminate
50:52
Speaker 1: their water supply. And this continued right up until the
50:57
Speaker 1: United States dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. Even in nineteen
51:04
Speaker 1: forty four, Japanese officials proposed using planes to spread weaponized
51:09
Speaker 1: bubonic plague, cholera, typhus, dengey feva, and other pathogens in
51:15
Speaker 1: a biological terror attack upon California. Now this was purpored
51:22
Speaker 1: by Chief of General Staff Yoshijiro Umezu. Now this is
51:27
Speaker 1: where the ship really hits the fan. Two days after
51:32
Speaker 1: the bombing of Hiroshima and the day before the bombing
51:35
Speaker 1: of Nagazaki, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria started. Just like
51:42
Speaker 1: the Red Army had liberated concentration camps, they were ready
51:47
Speaker 1: to tear into every facility run by the quantung epidemic
51:51
Speaker 1: prevention research and whatever else they called themselves, And they
51:57
Speaker 1: were going in hot. Almost three months after Germany had
52:10
Speaker 1: surrendered the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. It was all go
52:17
Speaker 1: the largest campaign of the Soviet Japanese War in Japan
52:22
Speaker 1: surrendered on the fifteenth of August nineteen forty five. And
52:25
Speaker 1: I kid you not. Colonel Sanders arrives in Japan in
52:29
Speaker 1: September nineteen forty five and discovers the existence of Unit
52:33
Speaker 1: seven thirty one, and he threatens to tell the USSR
52:38
Speaker 1: what Japan has been up to all this time, and yeah,
52:43
Speaker 1: that's the last thing they want because they do not
52:45
Speaker 1: want to have to deal with Russian prosecution. See, because
52:48
Speaker 1: they had been warned that someone knew about this, even
52:51
Speaker 1: though Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sandals had an interpreter whose entire
52:55
Speaker 1: job it was to misdirect and misinform him. By the way,
53:01
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders was a highly regarded microbiologist at
53:06
Speaker 1: the US Military Center for Biological Weapons and yeah, yeah,
53:12
Speaker 1: so he saw some information and was like, hey, he
53:15
Speaker 1: threatened Japan, and he did it because he wanted that info.
53:20
Speaker 1: But it backfired because they started a scotched earth policy,
53:27
Speaker 1: worried that they would be prosecuted over war crimes. Unit
53:31
Speaker 1: seven thirty one personnel coordinated the destruction of documentation and
53:36
Speaker 1: agreed on cover stories to limit information if any of
53:39
Speaker 1: them were interrogated, experiments were halted. Prisoners were murdered, some
53:45
Speaker 1: were shot, others fed poison, and others were simply gassed.
53:49
Speaker 1: They had staff collect bones and body parts. Evidence was
53:53
Speaker 1: burned and destroyed. Facilities were blown up, sometimes with staff
53:57
Speaker 1: still inside. Sometimes staff or even higher ups that they
54:02
Speaker 1: thought might be loose slipped were executed in the facilities.
54:08
Speaker 1: Those who were trusted were given cyanide pills and were
54:12
Speaker 1: informed to take them if they were captured by the Soviets.
54:15
Speaker 1: Many of the high ranking medical officials who ran or
54:18
Speaker 1: conducted these experiments went into hiding. How fucking honorable, and
54:29
Speaker 1: this included shiro Ishi. In November nineteen forty five, the
54:34
Speaker 1: American occupational authorities began a search for Ishie, whom they
54:39
Speaker 1: considered a high priority. In possession of around one million
54:46
Speaker 1: dollars in cash, Ischi managed to fake his own death
54:51
Speaker 1: and even set up a fake funeral for himself in Chioda. However,
54:58
Speaker 1: the Americans were tipped off and they caught him. See
55:05
Speaker 1: after Japan surrendered in nineteen forty five, some members of
55:09
Speaker 1: the unit were imprisoned at the Fushan and tai On
55:12
Speaker 1: War Criminals Management Centers, while others were repatriated to Japan.
55:19
Speaker 1: Some later joined the Association of Attorneys from China and
55:23
Speaker 1: publicly testified about what they had done. Wain it Colonel
55:29
Speaker 1: Murray Sanders, or in the act, I just call him
55:31
Speaker 1: Colonel Sandals. He takes the information he's gatherled to General
55:36
Speaker 1: Douglas MacArthur, which is where this story becomes especially grim,
55:41
Speaker 1: and you're like it was bad, now it just gets worse,
55:44
Speaker 1: really because instead of prosecuting the doctors responsible, American authorities
55:52
Speaker 1: secretly negotiated immunity for Unit seventy thirty one's physicians, including
55:59
Speaker 1: its leader. She wrote issue in exchange voice clusive access
56:04
Speaker 1: to their research and data from human experimentation. American authorities
56:09
Speaker 1: even monitored former members correspondents to keep tabs on them
56:13
Speaker 1: so they could use the information for their own biological
56:17
Speaker 1: weapons program. And oh, shock, horror, they didn't want the
56:22
Speaker 1: Soviets getting that information first, because apparently the Cold War
56:26
Speaker 1: could begin with a bidding war over data collected from
56:31
Speaker 1: muddered human beings. Now Carmel Sandals. He went on to
56:39
Speaker 1: say that the experiments were crude and ineffective, and that
56:42
Speaker 1: the US biological weapons program had already surpassed Unit seven
56:47
Speaker 1: thirty one's capabilities by nineteen forty four. You know, the
56:50
Speaker 1: biological weapons that they're not supposed to have AnyWho, the
56:56
Speaker 1: Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal barely touched on the subject. In
57:01
Speaker 1: August nineteen forty six, a Chinese prosecutor mentioned Japanese experiments
57:06
Speaker 1: involving poisonous serums being used on Chinese civilians, but the
57:10
Speaker 1: evidence was dismissed as insufficient and the issue was not pursued.
57:17
Speaker 1: The tribunal did not know the full extent of what
57:20
Speaker 1: Unit seven thirty one had done because evidence had been
57:23
Speaker 1: suppressed by America. Decades later, one of the judges, one
57:28
Speaker 1: of the surviving judges from the Tokyo Tribunal, expressed his
57:32
Speaker 1: bitterness at discovering that the court had been kept in
57:36
Speaker 1: the dark about what he described as Japanese war criminality
57:39
Speaker 1: of an especially disgusting nature. Now what's weird, right, is
57:46
Speaker 1: that German doctors were prosecuted and their human experiments were
57:50
Speaker 1: publicly exposed at the doctor's trial. Meanwhile, the United States
57:56
Speaker 1: concealed information about Japanese biological experimentation and secured immunity for
58:02
Speaker 1: many of the perpetrators. Now you'll find a lot of
58:06
Speaker 1: historians argue that racism contributed to this because a lot
58:11
Speaker 1: of the victims of Unit seven thirty one were mainly Chinese, Korean,
58:16
Speaker 1: and other Asian prisoners. Well, the United States did prosecute
58:22
Speaker 1: Japanese doctors for vivisections on captured American airmen at the
58:26
Speaker 1: Yokohama War crime Trials, but not those who performed vivisections
58:33
Speaker 1: on Asian prisoners. Weird, Suddenly we're interested in justice. The
58:45
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, however, actively pursued Unit seven thirty one and
58:51
Speaker 1: de Zemba nineteen forty nine. The Kabarovsk War Crimes Trials
58:57
Speaker 1: prosecuted twelve Japanese military leaders in science is connected to
59:01
Speaker 1: Unit seven thirty one and related biological warfare units. Among
59:07
Speaker 1: those accused was General Otozo Yamada, commander of the Quantung
59:12
Speaker 1: Army of Manchuria. The defendants were prosecuted for war crimes,
59:18
Speaker 1: including biological warfare and human experimentation, and they received sentences
59:24
Speaker 1: ranging from two to twenty five years in Soviet labor camps.
59:32
Speaker 1: The United States dismissed the proceedings as communist propaganda. Although
59:39
Speaker 1: right by Soviet standards, right, these sentences were lenient to
59:46
Speaker 1: say the least, and all of the defendants were eventually
59:51
Speaker 1: returned to Japan by nineteen fifty six, like they didn't
59:55
Speaker 1: even like do the whole time supposed war. You've got
1:00:02
Speaker 1: these like two competing approaches, right, So you've got the
1:00:07
Speaker 1: Soviets who are publicly like prosecuting Unit seven thirty one personnel,
1:00:13
Speaker 1: and the United States is quietly trading immunity for intelligence. Now, yes, yes, yes,
1:00:20
Speaker 1: the Soviets had their own motives and later you used,
1:00:24
Speaker 1: you know, the biological warfare documentation in their own program.
1:00:28
Speaker 1: But it doesn't it doesn't mean anybody's the good guy. Yeah,
1:00:33
Speaker 1: oh yeah, did I forget to mention the issue. After
1:00:37
Speaker 1: being granted immunity, was hired by the US to give lectures, right.
1:00:44
Speaker 1: He lectured US officers at Fort Deetric on the use
1:00:48
Speaker 1: of biological weapons and the discoveries made by Unit seven
1:00:52
Speaker 1: thirty one during the war. Now allegedly is she helped
1:00:57
Speaker 1: American forces use biological war for in Korea. And when
1:01:00
Speaker 1: I say allegedly, I mean he was specifically named in
1:01:03
Speaker 1: a statement released by North Korea. So he was continuing
1:01:10
Speaker 1: his work and his research after murdering so many people
1:01:18
Speaker 1: like biological warfare and all of the inhuman acts, like
1:01:28
Speaker 1: we do not know how many people were murdered by
1:01:34
Speaker 1: she wrote issue and by his research, because we cannot
1:01:39
Speaker 1: guarantee who was killed by a general disease and who
1:01:44
Speaker 1: was killed by his targeted diseases. Anyway, she wrote, she
1:01:53
Speaker 1: died of Lauren Gio cancer in nineteen fifty nine, and
1:01:56
Speaker 1: frankly that was too good for him. Too bad he
1:01:59
Speaker 1: didn't use the of that medical knowledge to find a
1:02:01
Speaker 1: cure for cancer. Dickhead anyway, long story short, most people
1:02:08
Speaker 1: involved a Unit seven thirty one got away with it.
1:02:11
Speaker 1: And one of the only reasons we know about it
1:02:13
Speaker 1: is because the Soviets dabbed them in, like a lot
1:02:16
Speaker 1: of this information which would not have been released. And
1:02:20
Speaker 1: Unit seven thirty one it had no survivors, like no
1:02:24
Speaker 1: prisoners survived. They were all executed one way or another.
1:02:30
Speaker 1: So when people talk about how this place spread disease
1:02:33
Speaker 1: and how this did that, it's not it's not a
1:02:38
Speaker 1: fairy story. It's just a fear of what has already
1:02:43
Speaker 1: happened historically. But yes, so ends the story of Unit
1:02:50
Speaker 1: seven thirty one and I'm done. I'm done talking about it.
1:02:54
Speaker 1: And that was sufficiently horrible and I'm glad it's over.
1:02:57
Speaker 1: So now it's onto recommendation time for reading. We don't
1:03:01
Speaker 1: need a pallet cleanser, and so I'm going to give
1:03:03
Speaker 1: you The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer by
1:03:06
Speaker 1: Ragnar Johansson. And for listening, you know what I was
1:03:11
Speaker 1: listening to, like literally on your peat this morning as
1:03:14
Speaker 1: I walked to work, right was the Elephant Love medley
1:03:18
Speaker 1: from Mulan Rouge. Like I'm still mad that they didn't
1:03:21
Speaker 1: have like the can can, like the whole can can,
1:03:26
Speaker 1: like edit the Lady Marmalade, that like all the bits
1:03:31
Speaker 1: that were put together from the movie that they didn't
1:03:33
Speaker 1: really sat in the soundtrack because though it's really good anyway,
1:03:37
Speaker 1: that's just me oh soo right, Nicole Kidman not a
1:03:42
Speaker 1: strong singer, makes me very confident when I'm singing along
1:03:45
Speaker 1: to it because I cannot hold a note. But my goodness,
1:03:49
Speaker 1: my goodness, you're Nocgregor, my goodness, you can belt out
1:03:52
Speaker 1: a tune, and can't you anyhow? For watching? You know,
1:03:58
Speaker 1: apart from like Sparta my then you spared my movie,
1:04:01
Speaker 1: so good go see it. I've been enjoying has Been Hotel, which,
1:04:07
Speaker 1: given the subject matter of today, is yeah, has Been Hotel. Now.
1:04:11
Speaker 1: I wasn't expecting to like it, but I was watching
1:04:14
Speaker 1: the first episode of my Son because his friend watches it,
1:04:17
Speaker 1: and their parents were like, I guess we didn't realize
1:04:21
Speaker 1: how bad it was until he started watching it, and
1:04:22
Speaker 1: I was like, Okay, can't be that bad. Well, it
1:04:27
Speaker 1: has some very interesting topics and I'm there to answer questions.
1:04:31
Speaker 1: But I was like, I guess I'm explaining things now
1:04:36
Speaker 1: to you child, but he's gonna be like in high
1:04:40
Speaker 1: school next year, so like it's I may as well.
1:04:43
Speaker 1: I may as well be the one giving him accurate
1:04:45
Speaker 1: and correct information. But yeah, but I was watching it
1:04:49
Speaker 1: and I was like, I was half watching it because
1:04:50
Speaker 1: I was there and I'm just like going through organizing
1:04:53
Speaker 1: stuff and it's on the TV, and I'm like, wait
1:04:55
Speaker 1: a minute, I know that voice. That's Alex Brightman. I
1:04:59
Speaker 1: know that voice anywhere because I've listened to Projuice the
1:05:04
Speaker 1: musical far too many times. But yes, there we go.
1:05:08
Speaker 1: Those are your recommendations. This has been a long episode.
1:05:13
Speaker 1: I'm sorry for mispronouncing words. I can't move my mouth. Probably,
1:05:16
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry. Yeah, hopefully I'll be slightly better next week.
1:05:22
Speaker 1: But yes, so Whens. So ends this episode, and I
1:05:25
Speaker 1: shall bid you good day. Adios. Au revoir of We
1:05:31
Speaker 1: as Them my Friends, Bubba