Japans Bio-Warfare Essay example -- essays research papers

While Germany experimented with biological weapons in World War I, the Japanese military practiced biowarfare on a mass scale in the years leading up to and throughout World War II. China became the first nation to experience the horrors of World War II. During the invasion of China, Japanese forces used methods of warfare that led to mass death and suffering on new unimaginable level.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In 1932, a few months after Japanese troops moved into Manchuria, disguised as a water purification plant, Dr. Ishii and his colleagues followed them in. Instead of a water purification plant, they built Zhoghma Fortress, a prison so named because of its location on the outskirts of HARBIN AND ITS INTIMIDATING APPERANCE> EXPERIMENTS WRE DONE ON THE PRISIONERS The majority of these experimental subjects were Chinese, but also included Russians, Mongolians, and Koreans. A notorious division of the Imperial Army called Unit 731 led the destructive aggression. â€Å"My calculation, which is very conservative, and based on incomplete sources as the major archives are still closed, is that 10,000 to 12,000 human beings were exterminated in lab experiments† (Factories of Death: Japanese biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the America Cover-up, Harris, S.H. (1944), London & New York). Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 gave Ishii the opportunity to begin his horrific experiments on human subjects. In 1938 Japan established Unit 731. Unit 731, a biological-warfare unit that was disguised as a water-purification unit, was formed outside the city of Harbin. In truth, it was a secret research laboratory that utilized humans as guinea pigs. The leader of Unit 731 was physician-researcher Dr. Ishii Shiro. Shiro Ishii was an intelligent Army microbiologist whose flamboyant personality soon attracted attention from his senior officers (Factories of Death: Japanese biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the America Cover-up, Harris, S.H. (1944), London & New York). In this evil facility, Japanese Militarists performed live, un-anesthetized human dissections for the purpose of researching the effects of pathogens. Female prisoners were used for studies on syphilis; humans and animal bloods were injected with each other’s blood to observed the physiological effect s; prisoners were hung upside down until death to see the time course of survival; humans were expose... ... frozen for twenty-four hours and then taken to a hot room to be thawed out. â€Å"They froze me until I was unconscious†¦I could not describe how much it hurt. It hurt so much that I begged the Japs to kill me† (Testimony of Art Campbell, US POW, a survivor of Mukuden, adopted from NBC Dateline â€Å"Factory of Death: Unit 731† August 15, 1995). Children were not immune to the horrors of Unit 731. March 17, 1995, The New York Times also reported, â€Å"Other than the partisans fighting the Japanese, Unit 731 also plucked civilians from the streets whenever they needed subjects. In 1943, a 10 year-old boy was kidnapped and taken to the laboratory dissection table. A person wearing a white cap made a Y-incision in his chest. Blood began to drip from his chest. In less than an hour, his stomach, kidneys, liver, pancreas, and intestines were preserved in jars of formaldehyde. Because they were fresh, the organs were still contracting and making soft murmurs. At this time somebody said, ‘Yo, the organs are still alive.’ Then everybody began to laugh. His brain was not wasted. It too was preserved. The boy was left with only his extremities and an empty abdominal cavity. Everything else was jarred.†