Allied commitment to justice and accountability.
That said, glaring shortcomings in the Far Eastern Allied war crimes program as outlined above did not necessarily impede the public access to information concerning Unit 731. The Japanese people began acquiring knowledge about Unit 731 as early as the 1950s, thanks in part to confessional accounts that some of the former Japanese soldiers returning from China published, and also to book-length studies of Unit 731 that came in print contemporaneously. These early publications may not have circulated widely since they were distributed by small presses; however, Unit 731 became a household word with the publication in 1981 of Akuma no hōshoku (“The Devil’s Gluttony”), written by popular author Morimura Seiichi. This book offered in a gripping narrative the details of diabolical activities of Unit 731, and set in motion a nation-wide dialogue about Unit 731 and its legacy in postwar Japan. Meanwhile, Unit 731 as a subject of scholarly inquiry gained traction, and researchers in Japan as well as elsewhere came to produce a number of original studies that made extensive use of archival materials in China, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
As of today, Unit 731 is arguably one of the most thoroughly researched and best documented among many known episodes of Japanese war crimes. It may be also said that the highly organized and institutionalized nature of Unit 731’s criminality likely made it comparatively easy for researchers to develop a comprehensive picture of Unit 731’s wartime activities once relevant oral and documentary histories became available. To achieve the same level of comprehensiveness would be challenging with other episodes of large-scale Japanese war crimes, such as the Nanjing Massacre, whose occurrence could not be attributed to the establishment and operation of a single Unit 731-like criminal organization. In a word, the crimes committed by the members of Unit 731 were a case of “criminality of closed systems,” in the sense that the unit members made systematic use of humans for medical experimentation in fulfillment of their specific organizational mission, just like the members of concentration camps in German-controlled Europe gassed to death the Jewish people in fulfillment of the camps’ organizational mission.
The Japanese right in the past decades has contested the veracity of individual confessional accounts by former soldiers and other types of documentation by researchers, in their effort to deny that alleged heinous acts were ever committed in the name of Japan or of the Japanese emperor. However, it is an indisputable fact that the Japanese army leadership at the highest level sanctioned the establishment of Unit 731 for the purpose of researching and developing biological weapons. Furthermore, given the duration of Unit 731’s operations, given the well-established lines of communication between Unit 731 and the army authorities at Tokyo, and given the transmission of human specimens taken from individuals used for medical experimentation from the former to the latter, one could reasonably infer that the Japanese army leadership at the highest level knew and condoned the use of human guinea pigs, if not that they expressly authorized it. The share of responsibility for Unit 731’s activities on the part of Emperor Hirohito, in this regard, is worthy of further investigation. After all, Emperor Hirohito occupied the highest position in the Japanese army establishment for the entire duration of World War II in Asia and the Pacific, in his capacity as “the head of the Empire, combining in Himself the rights of sovereignty, and exercises them,” and concurrently assuming the “supreme command of the Army and Navy” (The Constitution of the Empire of Japan, 1889–1947).
Research and publications on Unit 731, in any event, are abundant at present. However, Unit 731 may not have commanded the kind of attention it deserves from the general public in a continuous or sustained manner. The publication of Akuma no hōshoku may have triggered a nation-wide conversation about Unit 731 in Japan back in the 1980s, but that public uproar is now a distant memory. General readers in the West may be far less acquainted with the history of Unit 731—or, for that matter, the Sino-Japanese War that informs the backstory of Unit 731—for reasons that the remembrance of World War II and war crimes operates on a different plane from the one in postwar Japan. The story of Unit 731 nonetheless needs to be retold and passed on to the next generation of people across the world, as they shoulder the responsibility of protecting those who fall victim to comparable episodes of mass atrocity and grave human-rights abuses in the twenty-first century.
Yuma Totani
Professor of History
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Acknowledgments
Several people deserve to be mentioned here for the invaluable aid which they rendered in the creation of this book. Testimonies came to the author in the form of faxes or photocopies through the generous cooperation of the Secretariat of the Central Organizing Committee for the Unit 731 Exhibitions in Tokyo. Professor Eda Kenji and Professor Eda Izumi of Kyoto also assisted me in accumulating these materials. Ota Masakatsu of Kyodo News Service provided valuable information also.
Finally, I wish to extend my sincerest thanks to my editor, David Friedman, whose finely tuned editorial eye, disdain for rest, and familiarity with Japanese language and history were invaluable in turning my manuscript into a book.
Introduction
Some four decades following the end of World War II, details concerning the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731, which researched and conducted biological warfare, began surfacing with startling impact. Information about this outfit, at whose hands an estimated three thousand Manchurians, Chinese, Russians, Koreans, Europeans, and Americans were killed, had remained largely hidden over the years, either by governmental control or a code of silence adhered to by its former members themselves. Then, newly revealed information stirred interest in an era which Japanese officialdom has been trying to wash away with the detergent of neglect. Japan has been told to leave the past behind and move ahead told to new ties of friendship and commerce with other countries. Yet while business ties develop, and amity is proclaimed to be spreading, old facts emerging as recent revelations increase their magnetic attraction and pull us into a reexamination of what happened then—and again incite us into debates of how and why.
It can be argued that probably no school system anywhere teaches true history; only the degree of rearrangement varies. For the years during which the research units were active, the chasm between history and Japan’s official stance yawns wide. For years, Unit 731 “did not exist.” Requests and demands not just for monetary compensation but for mere recognition of history and apology have been brushed away, turned down because “compensation has been made at government levels.” Instead, Japan offers its dedication to “world peace” with statements that are as vague as they are eloquent.
Information on Japan’s consumption of live human beings as biological test material has been surfacing for many years now. As with the comfort women issue, however, there has never been a jolt of sufficient voltage to rock the national government into acts of contrition or compensation. Rather, it has been local governments who have opened their eyes to history. The efforts of local governments, in conjunction with high degrees of volunteer activity in their areas, can be credited with bringing the Unit 731 Exhibition before the eyes of Japanese in sixty-one locations over the course of a year and a half. The exhibition, in whose final days this book was begun, was arranged by a central organizing committee in Tokyo, and each locality which wanted to plan a local exhibition had to raise its own funds and find its own venue. There was, of course, an admission fee to enter the exhibit, and so for the visitors it could be considered a self-financed course in the history omitted by orthodox education.
The shock to the Japanese people was predictable. In spite of the occasional documentary coverage or newspaper article, Unit 731 was largely unknown and unthought of. It sat safely outside the scope of the consciousness of most Japanese. True, some attention was drawn to Unit 731 when the Japanese government was taken to court for not permitting factual accounts of it in school textbooks, but even those with some knowledge
