Unit 731's atrocities continue to offer a grim reminder

Before and during World War II, Japan committed grave crimes against humanity in its wars of aggression in Asian countries, especially China, bringing profound suffering to the people of those nations.

One of the most heinous of these war crimes was the lethal human experimentation and secret biological warfare carried out by the Imperial Japanese Army's Unit 731, which killed hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in occupied China in the 1930s and 1940s.

Today, there have been signs that Japan is steadily rebuilding its military power and attempting to rewrite the rules that have restrained it, arousing concerns from its Asian neighbors about renewed Japanese militarism.

From deploying long-range, updated Type-12 missiles and its attempt to expand the scope of its military activities, invoking the "right of collective self-defense", to its ground forces' recent participation in military exercises in the Philippines for the first time in the post-World War II history, Japan's remilitarization has worsened regional instability.

Most people in the world probably know little, if anything, of the mass horrors committed by Japan's Unit 731, or of the hidden deal that the United States made with the perpetrators to shield their crimes from public exposure and war crimes prosecution.

What fewer still may be aware of, though, is how the Japanese people themselves suffered and died at the hands of their own country's former Unit 731 doctors after the war and within Japan itself. This shows that old habits die hard, even when it came to their own compatriots — men, women and children.

In 1947, under the auspices of US occupation authorities, Masami Kitaoka, a former perpetrator of Unit 731 human experiments, conducted harmful typhus experiments on unwitting inmates of Fuchu Prison in Tokyo, according to "Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the World War Two Era", a report published in 2002 in the Journal of Military Medical Ethics.

From 1952 to 1956, in Niigata Prefecture, Kitaoka tested the microbe that causes scrub typhus, also known as Japanese river fever, on psychiatric patients who had not given their consent. Eight of the patients died from the disease, and one committed suicide.

Hideo Fukumi, who in 1944 and 1945 participated in Unit 731's biowarfare research, performed harmful germ experiments in 1951 on babies hospitalized at Tokyo's National First Hospital. He made the infants orally ingest pathogenic E. coli bacteria. The following year, Fukumi extended this research to infecting and sickening infants with the bacteria in an orphanage in the city of Nagoya.

From 1967 through 1971, soldiers of the Japan Self-Defense Forces were used without their consent in experiments by Fukumi, which caused serious illnesses. He infected 1,089 of the young men with dysentery-causing shigella bacteria to test the efficacy of a vaccine under development. Of his unsuspecting test subjects, 577 became severely ill.

Many Unit 731 veterans took up positions of power and prestige in the Japanese medical establishment of the 1950s, '60s, '70s and beyond. Among them were the president of the Japan Medical Association and the majority of directors and deputy directors of the nation's leading medical institution, the National Institute of Health.

From 1970 to 1973, Kitaoka held the position of deputy director of Japan's NIH. Fukumi held some of the most powerful health-related offices in postwar Japan. He was director of the NIH from 1977 to 1980, and was appointed president of Nagasaki University.

The atrocities of Kitaoka and Fukumi resulted in lawsuits in the late 1990s against the government on behalf of the victims, led by a Tokyo attorney. The lawsuits generated some public interest but were dismissed by the court system.

Peacetime Japan's passive acceptance of Unit 731 criminals in top biomedical positions created a moral decay that has spanned many decades.

Looking back at history, it is fair to claim that the failure to bring to account the Japanese Army's Unit 731 war criminals, in whose ranks were top scientists and physicians, has contributed to today's right-wing denialism in Japan.

To prevent history from being repeated and to stop renewed Japanese militarism from endangering the regional security environment, it is necessary for people in all parts of the world to have access to the history of Unit 731 and other Japanese atrocities before and during World War II.

The author is an independent historian specializing in Northeast Asia and author of A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.