Japan's Wartime Medical Atrocities: Comparative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics

Abstract

With four editors, eleven authors (from China, Japan, the United States, New Zealand, Europe, and Russia), eleven chapters, an annotated bibliography, and two appendices, Japan's Wartime Medical Atrocities attempts and largely succeeds in covering a range of history, science, and ethical issues related to the human medical and biological warfare experiments of the notorious Unit 731 led by Dr. (and Lt. General in the Japanese Army) Ishii Shiro that resulted in the deaths of approximately three thousand Chinese. After an excellent introduction surveying many of the issues to be covered in more detail later in the book, the three chapters in Part 1 examine the history of Unit 731 (engaged in human experimentation with anthrax, cholera, plague, tuberculosis, etc.) and medicine-related war crimes trials. With the exception of a few Japanese who murdered American airmen and were subsequently caught and tried by the U.S. Navy, only the Soviet Union's Khabarovsk Trial tried and convicted any Japanese officers involved in medical atrocities of war crimes. These Japanese officers were caught during the Soviet Union's invasion of Manchuria in 1945, the location of Unit 731 and other Japanese biological warfare facilities. Meanwhile, the United States decided not to prosecute Dr. Ishii and his colleagues in their custody after a secret report—known as the Hill and Victor Report of December 1947—concluded: “Information had accrued with respect to human susceptibility to those diseases as indicated by specific infectious doses of bacteria. Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation” (30–31). The U.S. government actually paid Dr. Ishii and his colleagues money for his medical information gained by human experimentation and did not prosecute him at the Tokyo War Crimes trials.