中文
By Josef Gregory Mahoney
Lead: The immunity America granted to mass murderer Shiro Ishii established a precedent of impunity that encourages Tokyo to bury its past while returning to militarism.
"Unit 731" might seem a rather ambiguous and even innocuous designation, but among Chinese people, the association is clear: absolute evil.
"Qisanyao budui." You might as well spit when you say it — spit blood, spit poison, a curse among curses. As part of the Japanese Imperial Army, with its main facility located in Harbin of northeast China, the unit masqueraded as a lumber mill and referred to its victims as "maruta," or logs. Internally, the unit was also referred to as "Holzklotz," the German term for wooden blocks. It murdered 14,000 people on-site through lethal experimentation and large-scale biological and chemical warfare research. Indeed, the Japanese had been impressed by the German use of chemical weapons during World War I.
Off-site, Unit 731 tested its weapons against various Chinese cities and villages, killing an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 people. The overwhelming majority of those murdered were Chinese, but victims also included Russians and Koreans. Among them were children and pregnant women, who were poisoned with chemical agents and infected with diseases. Many were also subjected to vivisections, organ harvesting and amputations. In some instances, people were beheaded. This was not for "scientific research," one so-called scientist later confessed, but "just playing around."
Other "experiments" included injecting people with animal blood and seawater, exposing them to extreme heat and burns, starving and dehydrating them, and crushing them with heavy objects. Some were electrocuted. Some were spun in centrifuges until death, while others were subjected to low-pressure chambers until their eyes exploded. How long can you hang someone upside down before they die? What happens when you burn or bury people alive? What happens when they are exposed to mustard gas or white phosphorus? The Japanese researchers subjected the victims to excruciating pain in the most dehumanizing conditions imaginable. They took notes, had their fun, and then thought of new ways to inflict suffering and death. What kind of people would do this? Who would authorize these crimes? Can you comprehend? They even carved up kids. Such are the devil's lumbermen.
In fact, Unit 731 was only the primary site for such research. Later studies indicate more than 1,000 Japanese "scientists" were conducting similar research in other parts of China and Korea. Despite the secrecy, some of their findings were even published in peer-reviewed journals. They accomplished this by referring to their test subjects as nonhuman primates, specifically "Manchurian monkeys." However, most findings were kept secret, and most records were destroyed when Japan's defeat was imminent. Unlike the concentration camps in Europe, there were no known survivors.
And unlike the well-known atrocities committed by the Nazis, including those by the SS doctor at Auschwitz, Josef Mengele, few know the name Shiro Ishii. Ishii held the rank of surgeon general in Imperial Japan and led the unit, expanding it under authority granted by Emperor Hirohito. Few know that he escaped from China and was later apprehended by the Americans in Japan. He was granted immunity from war crimes prosecution in exchange for what his unit had learned. He transferred that knowledge to America's own notorious Fort Detrick, where he was invited to give lectures. By some accounts, he even supported American forces in Korea with biological and chemical attacks against Chinese and North Korean troops.
Ishii would die of cancer in 1959, never facing justice. On his deathbed, he converted to Catholicism and received last rites from Hermann Heuvers, a German Jesuit and former head of Sophia University in Tokyo. As Ishii's daughter later recounted, her father had a great deal of admiration for the Germans and took the baptismal name "Joseph"— Joseph Ishii. Incidentally, Josef Mengele, who conducted "research and experiments" on prisoners at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp, would also escape justice, drowning after experiencing a stroke while swimming in 1979.
Among the last rites offered by a priest is a prayer to God: "Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Save your servant who trusts in you, my God. Lord, send him aid from your holy place and watch over him from Zion. Let him find in you, Lord, a fortified tower. Let the enemy have no power over him."
But what if that servant is evil? What if he is the enemy of all that is decent and good? This is no place for theological interventions, but we can be certain Ishii's last play at absolution meant nothing to the Chinese who remember him for the demon he was and remained.
Why do we return to this story today? First, Russia recently turned over evidence against the unit to China, including facts previously unknown to the Chinese side. This evidence was collected in part to support the Khabarovsk war crimes trials in 1949, in which 12 former members of the unit captured by the Soviets were prosecuted.
Second, Japan today threatens a return to militarism. This includes conspiring with "Taiwan independence" separatists and perhaps Washington, potentially to create a link between the first and second island chain strategies the U.S. has mobilized to contain China. As Japanese leadership calls for nuclear weapons and refuses to acknowledge past atrocities or teach their people about them, we must draw the right lessons from history.
Third, the new U.S. National Security Strategy explicitly valorizes America's past imperial injustices to justify new efforts to reestablish hegemony. As the U.S. asserts a "Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine," the president has made clear his admiration for Andrew Jackson. Jackson was responsible for the "Trail of Tears" and atrocities suffered by Native Americans, which today we would call dispossession, ethnic cleansing and genocide. One could argue this is similar, in part, to what the U.S. recently accommodated in Gaza. This is the message the U.S. sends the world as it threatens Venezuela with invasion.
These are not mere flirtations with evil or simply a failure to acknowledge the evil that was done. Rather, those committed to a shared future for humanity face new evils today. We must be clear-headed about these dangers, including attempts to revive Japanese militarism and even wage a war on the so-called "existential grounds." We should recall all that was done in the past with improved clarity, looking soberly at what happened in in Harbin and at various sites around China. This is what Russia's handover of case files occasions, as well as these words and others like them.
Josef Gregory Mahoney is a professor of politics and international relations and director of the Center for Ecological Civilization at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He is also a senior research fellow with the Institute for the Development of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics at Southeast University in Nanjing.
