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Unit 6—Handout 9
Asia Times 2010 article on Medical Experiments
Japan's Unit 731 victims' remains to be dug up
Ground-zero of Imperial Japan's germ war
By Peter J Brown
In 1989, a mass grave was unearthed at the construction site for a National Institute of Health facility in
the Shinjuku section of Tokyo.
Flash forward 21 years to another site a short distance from where the remains were discovered in
1989. Excavation work will soon commence at this second site, one of three identifi ed in 2006 by a former
nurse who worked at the Imperial Japanese Army Medical College in Shinjuku, and who pinpointed possible
locations where human remains were hastily buried. These were all probably the unfortunate victims of a
string of medical experiments performed on living subjects in Japan as well as in Manchuria and China by the
Imperial Japanese Army. The nurse reported that she and other medical workers were ordered to bury these
complete and partial remains after Japan surrendered to the US in August, 1945.
The Imperial Japanese Army Medical College's Research Institute for Preventive Medicine once occupied
this site. The infamous Unit 731 created in 1932—aka the "Kwantung Army Epidemic Prevention and Water
Supply Department" or simply the "Manchuria 731st Unit"—was also headquartered there. "If the bones are
actually there, they are likely related to Unit 731 itself, because the facility that used to stand in that part of the
compound was closely linked to the unit," Professor Tsuneishi Keiichi of Kanagawa University, one of Japan's
top biological warfare (BW) experts, told the Taipei Times newspaper in 2006. [1]
Today, a soon-to-be demolished government-funded residential complex is located at the Tokyo
compound. "From a procedural standpoint, the government had to wait for the government building built
over the site to be obsolete enough to be torn down," said Yukie Yoshikawa, a senior research fellow at the
Edwin O Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies in Washington DC. "But my sense is that in 1989 [when
the fi rst bodies were discovered in Shinjuku] many of the people involved in this issue were still alive, and
wanted the truth not to be uncovered."
Ishii Shiro, the director of Unit 731 who died in the 1950s, was once described as the "Japanese Mengele,"
a reference to Josef Mengele, the German SS offi cer and a physician in Nazi concentration camps who was
also known as the "Angel of Death." Unit 731's operations in China included a large contingent in Harbin,
along with one in Singapore.
Shinjuku was the source of BW agents that infected thousands of people in China. Estimates of the total
death toll in China range from anywhere between 250,000 and 1 million. The BW experiments conducted in
Shinjuku and elsewhere which Ishii supervised killed more than an estimated 3,000 people, including many
Chinese.
Many of the army offi cers and personnel responsible for these horrifi c acts who were captured by the
Russians were imprisoned. But in Japan after the war, the US turned a blind eye and allowed them to simply
walk away. The perpetrators were never prosecuted or punished in any way.
According to Koga Kei, a 2009-2010 Vasey Fellow from Japan at the Pacifi c Forum Center for Strategic
and International Studies (CSIS) in Honolulu and a PhD candidate in international relations at the Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, the upcoming excavation in Shinjuku is tied to the broader
joint effort recently undertaken by Japan and China to jointly explore historical issues often divisive and
painful in an attempt to gain a better understanding of each other's different perspective, among other things.
"The issue relating Unit 731 is a point of contention. The research group provided its reports both in Japanese
and Chinese last January, and the descriptions in these Japanese and Chinese reports differ," said Koga.
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