Stuff You Should KnowUnit 731 was a secret group within the Japanese Army in WWII that committed unspeakable atrocities against humans in the name of scientific research. Listen with caution.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you Should Know. And this is definitely the chipperest I'm going to sound for this episode right now.
Yeah, and another joke free edition.
Yeah. Possibly, we're definitely hitting that.
Should we see oa?
Oh yeah, there's there, Yeah for sure. Please go ahead.
Okay, all right, I did laugh. There are unspeakable atrocities that we will discuss of the horrors of well I was about to say the horrors of war, but it really are just the horrors of human experimentation during war. And so children should not listen to this, and people that are really haunted by that kind of thing should not listen to this.
Yeah, I mean we can. It's not like there's spoilers or anything. We're going to talk about human vivisection, abuse of like children, women, the elderly, like it's it's as bad as humans can possibly do to other humans what we're going to talk about today. So if that's not your bag, we will definitely not blame you for skipping this one.
That's right, But we do need to thank a listener sitting this one in. This came from you know, I don't even know if I'm going to say her last name. Her name is Amy, and you know who you are, and you know, I'm glad you sitting this my way because this is something I knew nothing about and I think people, you know, part of the fabric of the show is is teaching people some of the unspeakable things that have happened that you would not learn in school. And so Amy sitting us in. So thank you, Amy, and we'll just forward any complaints to you.
Yeah, thank you, Amy.
Yeah, exactly.
I had heard of Unit seven thirty one before several times. Nothing. I had no idea the detail that I know now about them, But you know, I was walking on like we'll never talk about that. So thanks again, Amy. But I guess let's just start at the beginning. Let's give a little background, because what we're talking about here is a detachment and I think an Imperial Army unit from Japan that started up in the nineteen thirties and it committed medical atrocities war crimes that actually rival easily rival Joseph Mengel's hideous medical War crimes at Auschwitz Death Camp, like the stuff that the Japanese essentially did during World War Two to Chinese and Russian and to a lesser extent Mongolian civilians and then sometimes prisoners of war, including American It's just it's unspeakable and we're going to try to speak it as best we can, but it doesn't make sense without a little bit of context. If you have a little bit context, in my opinion, of where this evolved from, it doesn't doesn't excuse it doesn't explain it. It just makes slightly more sense than the Japanese just suddenly did this horrible thing and now everything's back to normal.
Yeah, And just to add an additional comment to the sort of comparison to Nazi atrocities, certainly not in scale that was happening in Germany and Poland and elsewhere, but as far as just the how reprehensible some of this stuff is.
You know what I'm saying, No, No, this is a separate thing for sure, and there's no comparison it. This happened. This happened. It's just the reason I'm comparing the two is because most people walk around understanding that the Nazis did these horrible atrocities, and what I'm trying to get across is that the Japanese did too during World War II. Yeah, it's just for really specific reasons that the average person isn't walking around knowing about that, which we'll talk about later too.
Yeah. Absolutely, all right, So you promised talk of backstory, and we'll get into that here, because the backstory is is starting sort of in the late eighteen hundreds. The government of Japan was it sort of went through a movement where it was looking to build itself up into a superpower, like you know, just like Europe was, just like the United States was, And a lot of this was tied up in just sort of modernizing the country, whether it was the military or how they functioned economically, and sort of this ultranationalist movement grew up around all this.
Yeah, so you just said the key word here ultranationalist, which is I mean nationalism is fervent to begin with. Ultranationalism reaches a fanatical level, and that's kind of this journey that began to infect Japanese society starting in the twenties or thirties. And the reason why is because Japan took a number of like kind of punches and was kind of down both economically and as far as like cultural honor goes like. Japan helped the US and UK win World War One, but were left out of the table when the spoils of war were divided up. That was a big black eye and the national pride. The Great Depression hit Japan disproportionately hard compared to some of the other countries outside of the US. There was just a lot of stuff that it was clear that the leaders of Japanese society weren't equipped to handle. And the worse it made Japan look to the Japanese, the more the national pride felt it needed to be defended. And that's where that nationalism and then eventually ultra nationalism came from. And the reason that we're talking about this today is because it became a really thick component of the Japanese military. Nationalist fanaticism.
Yeah, I mean, it can become a very and usually does become a very dangerous thing.
Yes, everywhere anywhere in all of.
History, Yeah, for sure. In the nineteen thirties, there was a part of China and northeastern China kind of near Korea in Russia and Mongolia called Manchuria, where Japan had a lot of people that were living there, had settled there. They had a lot of influence on that area. The Chinese government did not like this, of course, they were in the middle of a civil war with the Nationalists, which was the ruling party at the time. The Nationalist government with Shang Kai Shek and then Malo Zedong's Communists were trying to take control, but they had a common enemy in Japan, and Japan was sort of encroaching on this area in northeastern China in the thirties.
Yeah, and the ulter nationalism, I said, was so thick in the Japanese military it actually created almost like an additional branch, especially for the Kwantung Army that had basically invaded Manchuria. They weren't following orders from the Japanese Imperial Army heads, the leaders of the actual military. They were kind of working on their own to expand the empire and they were successful, so they were getting away with it. They were also getting away with it because they would assassinate you or they would stage a coup attempt, like you did not mess with these people, even though they weren't the leaders the leaders were afraid of like these middling officers who were actually these ulternational fanatics. So the upshot of all that is that Japan ended up controlling Manchuria in the nineteen thirties and set up a puppet government there, and it was like a big first step toward expanding the empire. And one other part of the backstory, and then I'll be quiet about the backstory, is that part of that ulternationalism was a certain amount of genetic and cultural pride in Japan and the Japanese. And there's nothing wrong with having pride in your culture, but the problem is very often, especially in the context of nationalism or ultra nationalism, means everybody else is inferior. And so that kind of gave this ultra nationalist detachment of the military carte blanc to mistreat anybody who wasn't Japanese, which included the Russians, Koreans, Mongolians, and Chinese. That all kind of met in Manchuria, which was at the border of all of these countries, which is where the Japanese had taken over and set up this puppet government.
Yeah, I mean, anytime you throw the word genetic in there, you're probably traveling down a bad road. Yeah, you know, and Japan definitely saw themselves, or at least a faction of Japan. I'm not going to say like everyone in the country, but this ultra nationalistic wing thought they were the superior Asian human being on planet Earth at the time.
Yeah, and the ones who didn't think the same way were too scared to speak up. They were killed, Like they killed the Prime minister, Chuck, the military just killed the Prime minister, assassinated because it wasn't going along with their aims. Okay, so I lied. That was the end of the backstory.
All right. So the puppet government was there in nineteen thirty two in Manchuria. The Chinese, like I said, did not love this. So they had a common enemy and got together to fight, and there was a pretty much a full scale war started which started in nineteen thirty seven that a lot of people are like, you know, you could really point to this as the very beginnings of what would be World War two if you want to get technical, and so this is just sort of what's going on. When Unit seven thirty one is formed in nineteen thirty six under the command of General shiro A Shie. I watched this. It was pretty good documentary. Actually, it's like an hour long on YouTube. I can't remember what it was called, but if you're looking for Unit seven thirty one docs on YouTube, it's the one that's like an hour long on the nose and super professionally done.
It's called There's Something Wrong with Aunt Shiro?
Was that it?
No? No, I was referencing another horrible documentary called There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane. Not horrible, horrific.
Oh, I think I've heard of that one.
Actually, it's It's tough.
Yeah, we'll talk offline. Okay, I'm not sure I'm thinking of the right one.
This is definitely the episode to bring it up, and I'll tell you that.
Yeah. So she E was a doctor in the Japanese army, was a part of that ultra nationalist wing before the war. He was interested in biological weapons and what that might offer the army, and supposedly as early as nineteen thirty was starting to do some human experimentation. I think, you know, as a doctor, though not as a general, correct.
As both I believe he was. He'd been a general for a while, or at least a high ranking military official. For a while when he started. Okay, so the reason that we talked so much about Manchuria a second ago is because doctor General Ishi realized very quickly that even in ultranationalists Japan, people weren't super cool with unwilling human experimentation. So he's kind of successively moved his operation further and further away from the prying eyes of everyday Japanese people and ultimately ended up in Manchuria because it was so it was so lawless as far as like ethics and morals regarding civilian treatment and war crimes goes. It was the kind of place where you could set up a medical experimentation machine using unwilling participants. It was that kind of place. And it also had a steady supply of inferior human beings. I just made scare quotes for those of you who can't see me, who were the Koreans and the Russians and the Chinese and the Mongolians who lived in the area and were just unfortunate to have lived in this area that Japan now controlled.
Yeah. Absolutely, So in nineteen thirty TWOHI became the head of the and this is a new operation, but it was called the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory. This was at the Japanese Military Medical School in Tokyo, and Unit seven thirty one was known officially we call it Unit seven thirty one now for short, but it was the Kwan Kwantung Armies Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department or Manchu Detachment seven thirty one. But like I said, we call it Unit seven thirty one now. And this was the main base of operations. It was a there were like eight village basically where they kicked all the villagers out and said this is ours now they built I mean, it was like a prison camp basically. You know, it was surrounded by barbed wire, there were guard towers. No one was coming in or getting out of there without explicit permission. But some of the people invited in were doctors and nurses and engineers and pathologists and people that specialize in bacterial cultures and stuff like that. So they were just sort of staffing up with you know, legitimate and medical personnel because they were they were set to and as you'll see, it was sort of like, hey, let's figure out anything we ever wanted to know about the human body and how it responds to anything you could throw at it, from bullets to knives to anthrax.
Right, And so they actually started out with a fairly legitimate mandate, which was figure out how to essentially treat things like communicable diseases or things that soldiers, Japanese soldiers might find useful, like, you know, if there were fighting in the Pacific theater, figure out how to treat malaria or something like that. But under the guidance of General Ashi, it became they moved from willing, initially willing Japanese soldiers who signed consent waiver saying you can test on me, to unwilling, unfortunate civilians. And there's a lot, as we'll see, there's a lot of debate and discussion about what happened when, who is involved, And if we were doing this podcast twenty years ago, we would be completely lost by this point totally. So much has come out that we essentially know exactly what happened. And one of the things that has really been established over the years is that awareness of Unit seven thirty one and the unwilling medical experimentation war crimes that was carrying out went all the way to the top. The Emperor was involved the Emperor's family was involved, Prime Minister Tojo was involved. Everybody knew about this. It was incredibly well funded and it was a huge prong of the Japanese military. It was just also kept incredibly secret too.
Yeah, for sure. And when we say unwilling subjects because of where it was located, like we said near Korea and Russia and Mongolia. Sometimes that were Russians and Koreans and Mongolians, but most of them were Chinese citizens. Some of them were criminals, some of them were just communists that were arrested basically and rounded up, and they were brought in like you said, sort of initially like hey, let's see what Let's see what happens when you don't eat for a while if our soldiers are out there and kate get their hands on food and water, Like how long can humans go without food and water? Or what is this? What does milaria do? Like you were saying, like diseases they might encounter, But it really morphed pretty quickly into hey, and this might be a good time to break but hey, I think we can develop biological weapons, so let's see how they react to the human body.
Yeah, that's when it really took a terrible left turn.
Yeah, all right, so we'll be right back. And it gets worse than act too, We'll be right.
Back, okay, Chuck. So when we were last talking, the Unit seven thirty one had started to veer off into developing biological weapons, and they did so apparently because in nineteen twenty five, under the Geneva Convention, a bunch of countries outlawed biological weapons, and apparently that caught the attention of the Japanese, who were like, wow, if it's worth outlawing, those things must really work at killing, so let's try those, right. It pequed their interest enough that they started a program, and so they developed a really extensive pathological development section where they apparently could develop a trillion microorganisms every few days. Like, they just grew so many communicable diseases that I saw in some field tests they would have one hundred and fifty kilograms of it, Like that's how much they could produce. And they were doing things like producing malaria, cholera, typhus, the plague. They were growing this stuff. Yeah, and then they were testing it on those unfortunate, unwilling test subjects to see what happened. And that's where the essentially the medical torture, the war crimes really began.
Yeah, and if you want to see what happened to someone that was infected with typhus or cholera, you don't just ask a bunch of questions and check vitals and see how Say how are you feeling, and we'll write it down. You mentioned vivisection earlier, and that's what would happen. Vis Section is, you know, the dissection of a live thing. So whether it's a frog in biology class or in this case, a human being, it is a live human being in these cases being cut open and studied from the inside out, and a lot of times without anesthesia. I think they did use anesthesia for some stuff here and there, at least a documentary said they did, But a lot of times they didn't even use anesthesia when they would amputate someone's limb or take someone's kidney out to study it.
So on vivisection. Nicholas Christoff, the New York Times reporter, went to Japan in nineteen ninety five as some of this stuff was really coming out and talked to some people who are actually in Unit seven thirty one, and he actually interviewed a man who was a doctor at Unit seven thirty one who had performed one of these unanesthetized vivisections, and he quoted the guy in the article. If you want to hear it, it's it's just insane that people have ever done this to other people. So what the guy said was that the the and I'm paraphrasing this first part, that when they brought the prisoner in, he knew that it was over for him, that his life was about to be executed, but he didn't know how, so he wasn't he wasn't fighting along the way. He came in essentially willingly. But when they put him down on the examination table and a scalpel was produced, he started screaming, and he said that this is this guy, this doctor who performed this said quote. I cut him open from chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound. He was screaming so horribly, but then he finally stopped. This is all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time that that happened. A guy did that to another guy. He killed him by performing surgery on him without anesthesia and opening his his abdomen and removing the organs.
Yea, and this happened a lot at unit seven thirty one. And we'll say that that part and like the next probably five to seven minutes an we're gonna kind of go through some of the worst of it. Yeah, so feel fear to skip ahead, and then you know, we'll talk about kind of ramifications and all that stuff.
But yeah, just listen for the sound of one of us wretching while the other one's talking. You know, we're still in that five to seven minute part.
Yeah, exactly. So I mentioned amputations and stuff like that. Organ removal. Boy, this one is tough. They had men that were infected with different venereal diseases like syphilis, that were forced to rape women there to see how syphilis spreads. There were women who were raped and impregnated that had you know, where the men had communical diseases like you know, make her pregnant so we can see the effects on developing fetuses. Sometimes babies were born. Those babies were experimented on elderly people. You know that they wanted to get a range of not just what would this do to a Japanese soldier, but what would these weapons do to a range of humans, like from literal babies to elderly people. So that's what they did. You want to take over.
Sure, So some of the things in addition to studying what communicable diseases the effects that had on the body. And that's actually the reason why they would give later on why they didn't use anesthesia. Sometimes they were concerned that the anesthesia would affect the effects and that they wouldn't have like an actual picture of what was really going on in the body, So they just didn't anesthetize. But they studied other things too, like what happens when we crush your limb? What happens if you are only allowed to drink seawater for several days? Like just imagine like completely losing all of your morals and ethics being a doctor and saying like what can I pursue here? What just crazy experiments can I come up with and then actually carrying them out? And that's essentially what happened at ping Von.
Yeah, what if you had a blood transfusion of cow's blood? Like what would that do to a human being or a blood type that didn't match your own? What would that do to somebody? There was one guy, he was a physiologist name Yoshimura Hissato that focused on frostbite. So they would, you know, purposely give people frostbite to see what happened to their body and their limbs. They did publish some of this stuff, I believe. The second in command, his name was Masagi Kitano, said that, yeah, we published some of this stuff, but when we published it during the war, we said that we were using you know, research monkeys and stuff like that, and certainly keeping all, you know, anything about humans a secret.
Yeah, so it's not like they didn't realize that what they were doing was considered unethical and immoral.
Yeah, they knew it.
That's also they kept the whole thing secret too, and yet they did it anyway. That frostbite work is very frequently cited as you know, evidence that actual scientific findings came out of this, because apparently before the way that they thought to revive a frostbit and limb was to rub it back into health, and they found that actually makes it worse. That you want to dunk it in water that's between one hundred and one hundred and twenty two degrees farentheight, And so people are like, see, that's a scientific finding. It's weird. It's almost as if they're trying to excuse it in some way, shape or form or say that it was in any way justified. And from what I can tell, that's the only one that anyone's actually able to point to as a scientific experiment that produced actual scientific findings that we weren't aware of before.
Yeah, for sure. So not only were they like saying, you know, what kind of bomb can we make out of poison gas or a plague culture or you know, something that as like infected fleas, like animal fleas as a payload that have the plague dropped on a town. But I mentioned earlier just you know, regular weapons, guns and knives and stuff like, let's just tie people up at a stake and shoot them with different things from different distances to see like how far the bullets travel, what kind of wounds they would produce, you know, flame throwers, knives, swords, anything they could think of to just log sort of what the human body could take and what kind of effect it would have.
Yeah, that area where you're talking about was a second kind of satellite site at a town called Hoda. It's about ninety miles away from Harbin, which is where the ping Fon complex was, right, and everything we're talking about to this point has was carried out at ping Fon and this one huge, sixty five square acre complex of just horror, every single day horror. And imagine hundreds of other people working with them, and all of them are walking around of doing the same thing, hearing the same screams, like carrying out the same atrocities. Yeah, and it's just like the guy said, like it was just all in a day's work. That's just what we were doing. Like imagine that, like try. I can't even conceive of putting myself in a place like that and just going along with it, because you know that there were people who were there who were worried about not going along with it because they knew they would be next on the slab if they spoke up or spoke out against it. I just can't imagine it. When when my brain tries to put me in that that place at that time, it's just like stop, I don't want to go there.
Yeah, did you see the zone of interests yet, No, you should check that out.
What is it a movie? Is it a play?
Yeah, it was a movie from last year, won the Oscar for Foreign Film and was nominated for Best Picture overall. Jonathan later, it's basically a movie true story obviously about the guy who led who was sort of the head of the concentration camp. I think it was Auschwitz and not docu. But you know, it doesn't go in the camp at all. The whole movie is just told from the perspective of the fact that he had his house next door on the other side of the wall, where he had his wife and kids in garden, and they just they live this normal life and it's a very The way that Glazer did it was very, very effective and different than I've seen in any other war movie to get across this sort of horrors without seeing any of them happen.
Wow. Yeah, that's really interesting. I've heard about that. Yeah, I haven't heard anything more than what you just said. So I'll check it out though, because I trust your recommendations.
Yeah. I mean, it's a great film and very effective, And you know, the reason I brought it up is because that's sort of the same idea because I did a little research after about this guy and he was like, you know, I felt like I was, you know, I had to do this stuff or else I would be, you know, shot for not following orders. And that's always sort of the line that you hear.
Sure, no, for sure, especially further down the pecking order.
Yeah.
The thing is is there were very very clearly people who were there who were totally into this and were totally fine with it all in a day's work. Yeah, it's just what they did. Yeah, But I guarantee there were people who were there just crumbling inside every day. I don't know, maybe there weren't. Maybe you couldn't possibly keep quiet in a place like that, who knows. But there were hundreds of people, like you said, from all different fields and professions that were coming together to work to experiment on unwilling humans at ping Fon. And that was just ping Fon because what we said earlier was that their ultimate goal was to create biological weapons. Yeah, and you can sit there and come up with a trillion microorganisms every few days, all like, all year long, and it doesn't amount to anything if you can't infect your enemy with them. If you wanted to carry a biological warfare program, I should say. And so one of the other things that they experimented on was how to deliver, like you said, payloads of plague infected fleas or cholera into local wells, and they did it sometimes successfully. And I think the number for the people who died just at Pingfon was three thousand. That's the number that's generally cited. And they had one hundred percent mortality rate among prisoners. There no one survived Pingfon. Not a single person survived ping Fon. If you went in there as a prisoner, you died just at ping Fon. That was three thousand. When it goes to the actual experiments that they carried out trying to deliver biological weapons in Manchuria, it expands, by some estimates into the hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Yeah. Yeah, And we should point out too when you say that there were no survivors of ping Fan when they closed down, and you know, we're skipping towards the end, but when they did shut it down, whoever was still living, they just murdered straight up to cover up any sign of evidence, and then just dynamited the place beyond recognition.
Yeah, and then they destroyed all the records and then all of the people there took a last order from General Ishi that was never talk about this and never implicate anyone that's ever worked here. They basically took a vow of silence about it.
Yeah. So you mentioned, you know, using actual biological weapons that was mainly against Chinese civilians, and this is some of the stuff that you know, they had sort of considered when they dropped like cotton or wheat or rice infested with disease carrying fleas on different Chinese cities, and they testified in court later on civilians did about like what happened to their community communities, these illnesses that spread through there. It's just it's hard to fathom that this was going on and largely gotten away with, you know.
Yeah. Yeah, there were a couple more that I found, Chuck, that I were just reprehensible. They would infect dogs with cholera, I believe, and release them into villages and collar outbreaks would start. They gave local children chocolate lace with salmonella. The one thing that was super effective they found was mixing wheat grain with plague infested fleas or infected fleas and dropping it from airplanes and then the villagers would feed the grain to their chickens and plague outbreak would start and again. Like over time, at least tens of thousands of people in Manchuria died from these plague and collar outbreaks. Colera is no oh joke. Apparently there was a researcher who was a pathologist at Unit seven thirty one who boasted that they produced enough calera to kill every single person in the world. And they didn't succeed in that, thankfully, but they definitely killed a significant number of people in Manchuria with things like cholera and the plague from just trying to figure out how to get that to those people. Fortunately, that was something they really failed at. They never really figured it out.
Yeah, I mean, mainly we've been talking about like people that they arrested and you know, practice on or when it was like you know, actual biological weapons, it was on civilians, but they also did this on prisoners of war in different places outside of Unit seven thirty one, specifically Singapore and the Philippines. You mentioned US prisoners of war early on. There was one documented case, at least one documented case in May of nineteen forty five when there was a down US plane where they captured eight airmen and in May of nineteen forty five, they were basically medically tortured. There was one medical student later on that said, you know what was going on was just torture at this point, there was no scientific value happening.
Yeah, and that wasn't even Unit seven thirty one. That's how badly like this whole German infected Japanese military. Essentially, the military is like, hey, we got these POWs. We want to we want to do a number on them. So basically just operate on them until they're dead. And that's what it would be dressed up as is like practice surgeries. Like I want to learn how to remove an arm, so that's what they would practice on. Or I want to learn how to remove an appendix, so I'm going to practice that, and like eventually the patient would just die because they didn't have enough organs left to sustain themselves, or they lost so much blood that they died, but they died from surgery. That was how they died.
Well, and if they happened to live through this, they would strangle them till they died.
Yeah. I heard one other thing it's kind of unrelated to this, but it's just stuck out to me, and it's kind of haunted me actually, that there was a group of POWs, American POWs that were being held in Japan, and hours after the surrender had taken place and where it had spread that Japan surrendered. Rather than release these POWs, this group of Japanese soldiers took them to this hillside and decapitated them, killed them, just completely wasted their lives for nothing after a surrender. Somehow, it's bad enough to do that in the context of war, but within hours of surrendering, it makes it exponentially worse. It's way worse than even if that happened five years later, Like they just held them for five years and then killed them somehow within hours of surrendering. It just makes it worse to me. And I can't really get that one out of my head, so I wanted to make sure it was in everybody else's head, I guess.
I guess you want to think that after something as horrific of a war has ended, then everyone just wants to go home and have it be over, you know, and that you know clearly isn't always the case.
Well, I remember also just kind of tied into it. The Nazis did that too, Like the truest believers would just walk around executing people who, like at the end of the war, like they knew, like Hitler was dead and the war was over, but they were executing people who were like trying to go home or running away or whatever. Just a complete waste of life. Yeah, yeah, I don't really have anything else to add to that. Maybe we'll edit that part out, but it just has stuck with me.
Yeah, all right, we'll take our last break, and we're going to come back and finish up with the investigations and kind of what happened afterward, and prepared to be unsatisfied right after this. All right, we are back. We promised, talked of investigation and you know kind of what happened afterward, it you know, became pretty clear that the war was ending. So general is she e like you said earlier, said, you know, no one can ever speak of this. Beginning on August ninth, they started destroying everything, started blowing that place up, killed everyone else who was there, which, as we'll see is you know, one reason they got away with some of these atrocities is because there were no surviving people to testify. So the US started investigating this at a place called Camp Dietrich in Maryland. It was an army base, a pretty new one, and when they started questioning, they kind of realized what was going on. And Japan said, you know, the Cold War is sort of taking hold now, and you know, we're really afraid that some of this stuff might get into the hands of the Soviets. So America made a decision to rather than pursue prosecution, was like, hey, let's work with them, just to get as much much data and information as we can from them that is useful to us, and that in itself is a pretty horrific thing.
Yeah, we actually paid them. We paid them, We paid the unit seven thirty one scientists like, general, is she money to work with us? And it's weird. There's like a lot of papers. I read one from the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics in twenty fourteen that compared like the two prongs that were taken like two different, two different approaches, one toward the Nazis and their medical atrocities, one toward the Japanese and their medical atrocities. And there was one guy in particular named John W. Thompson, who was Canadian who really led the charge to prosecute the Nazi doctors who carried out these horrible experimentations as war criminals. There wasn't a guy like that dealing with the Japanese in the tribunal for war crimes in the Far East, and so the US military and intelligence was able to keep a lid on the whole thing. The Russians were talking about it because their people had been killed, the Chinese were certainly talking about it because their people had been killed, And people as high up as Douglas MacArthur were publicly saying this is communist propaganda, This isn't true, knowing full well it was true, because he was collaborating and the people under him were collaborating with the very people who had performed these atrocities in order to get their medical data. We paid them for it, and we gave them immunity. Some of them apparently even visited Fort Dietrich to help with America's own biological warfare program that we essentially lifted from the Japanese after World War Two.
That's what happened, yeah, I mean, that is that's blood on the hands of the United States because what they're basically saying, they're basically you know, they wouldn't outright say that, but they're justifying these experiments by saying that the data was useful.
Well, yeah, they said that Americans couldn't possibly ever get data like this because we have scruples, but apparently the Japanese don't, so we'll just take their data because they don't have scruples. But that means that by proxy, you don't have scruples if you're willing to use this, And that's what happened with the Nazi stuff like that guy John W. Thompson wanted to make an example out of those Nazi doctors, like attention all scientists everywhere in the world. Even the cover of World War two can't save you like you like you were going to be hung if we ever catch any of you doing something like this, hanged. I guess that that message wasn't given to the Japanese doctors, and in fact, because a lid was kept so tightly on what had happened and was just relegated to rumors as far as America and Japan was concerned, they were allowed to re enter Japanese society and actually become fairly prominent and celebrated in their fields in a lot of cases.
Yeah, absolutely, there were some tribunals from over the course of a couple of years from forty six to forty eight. Other countries were involved, including China and the Soviet Union, but they did not talk about Unit seven thirty one. There was a separate tribunal in Yokohama in nineteen forty eight that convicted twenty three military figures, some medical personnel that were in the Kyushu University torture, and these were specifically of uspows only, and they got death or life sentences, but those sentences were dropped or commuted, I guess because the US was trying to build a friend in Japan at that point and an ally at the start of the Korean War, and then the Soviet you know, eventually in nineteen forty nine said you know, we have to expose some of this. So they put and this is by themselves, they put twelve members of Unit seven thirty one on trial and you know, accusing them of everything that they did, and this is where a lot of like information was brought out. They were sentenced between two to twenty five years in prison, and the US, because we were now in a Cold war with Russia, said that this is propaganda.
Yeah. So this trial where essentially all of the information, the fact factual information we had for decades about what Unit seven thirty one did came out of this trial. But it was just in the USSR. And it wasn't until nineteen eighty two that a journalist named John W. Powell got his hands on it and published an article on what Unit seven thirty one had done during the war and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists journal And it was through those court transcripts, so they came back to haunt them thirty years later, and that's when it really became started to become knowledge among historians, the military, the government in the West, in the United States, and among allies that the Japanese had actually done these things that they'd long been accused of by the Soviets and Chinese, and here was evidence of it by the testimony by the very people who were there, who'd been captured by the Soviets.
Yeah. I mean, most of this stuff has come out at an alarmingly slow rate, and over the course of decades, I believe in nineteen eighty two, there was a museum in China at that ping Fan site obviously that China established, But it took all the way until nineteen eighty eight, you know, forty plus years after the war ended, that the Japanese government finally admitted that it even happened. But they still wouldn't release any information, like most of the stuff that we know. Like you said, if we had done this episode, you know, at the beginning of our run, and we probably wouldn't have known what we know now because a lot of it came out in the nineties, the early two thousands. Well I guess by that time we were around. Yeah, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, it took a long time for this stuff to come out, and you know, we can't go over everyone. You did mention that, you know, many of them went on to have just great lives and careers, but we should highlight a few of these. The second in command that I mentioned earlier, Masaji Kaitano. He co founded a green Cross, a very large Japanese pharmaceutical company, with two other colleagues from Unit seven thirty one. So they did well, they.
Did, and green Cross went on to infect eighteen hundred people with hemophilia with HIV because they were selling them unsterilized blood clotting agents in the nineties.
Yeah, that was what about is she?
She became one of the most celebrated doctors in all of Japan. He supposedly, according to one British historian named Richard Drayton, went to Fort Dietrich to advise the US on the bioweapons program. There. He died in nineteen fifty nine at age sixty seven, never having even been publicly accused of what he had done in Japanese society. He was just a celebrated doctor by that point when he died.
Yeah, the guy hasato that the guy who led those frostbited experiments. He became president of the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine.
This one gets me though, This last one. You gotta say that one.
Yeah, the communicable disease researcher Amatani Shogo, he won the Asahi Prize for outstanding contributions to the field of communicable disease research. And part of that was some of the stuff that he got from Unit seven thirty one.
Yeah, and I looked all over like, hey, how did he disguise that or how did the Asahi Prize people miss that? I didn't see anything like that. Apparently his research came directly from medical experiments on unwilling participants got him the Asahi Prize. Yeah, that's insane, man.
Yep.
So there's no clear evidence that the United States gained much of anything from the deal it made with the Unit seven thirty one leaders for all of their research. Other people say, no, actually it's not true at all. And in fact, the Chinese accused the US of using the same kind of germs for germ warfare in Korea, and the US of course it's like, no, he didn't. But Fort Dietrich is well known as being like a biological research facility. They're like, it's not biological warfare. We're just using gain of function research to see what happens when we make this virus do this, you know, not for biological warfare. It's very bizarre, but it exists. It's definitely there, and it's a strange place. Apparently that's where a lot of MK ultra experiments were carried out.
Yeah, wouldn't that where the men stared at goats?
I think so? Yeah, I mean that was definitely about that, but I don't remember if that was at said at Fort Tetrick or not. I got a funny story about that. I got to tell you sometimes.
Oh well, how about now we could use it.
No, I can't really tell you here on the podcast.
Ah, copy of that, all right?
And then just one more thing, Chuck, This has not revelations that Unit seven thirty one carried out these experiences has not exactly been like embraced in Japanese society, right.
Like, there's a real divide on whether to teach this horrific but very true history of their own country because of the obvious sort of effects that this could have on children and how they feel about their country.
Yeah, I've seen that they're worried that they might make Japanese children ashamed of their country. So you can't teach them that kind of stuff. So that's it. That's the last thing I've got. All Right, you got anything else?
I got nothing else. I'm glad that one's over.
Same here, Thanks a lot, Amy, Yeah, thanks Amy. If you want to know more about you in seven point thirty one, Okay, there's plenty of stuff you can read on the internet. And since I said that it's time for listener mail.
Yeah, this is a little further explanation about backdraft from our Arts and Investigation EP. Hey guys, it's a fan of your work. I was excited to listen to the episode on an Arson Investigation because I'm a firefighter and I've learned about some of what you guys covered and got some cool new information from you. I want to let you know that you were so close on backdraft, but just a little bit off. The way backdraft works is when you have a working fire that does not have access to fresh oxygen. At a certain point, the fire will have consumed all of the oxygen in a space and basically begin to smolder, so it will create a turbulent smoke in a very high and very high temperatures, but not actual flames. So the backdraft occurs when oxygen is suddenly added to the situation, if I say, opening a door or a window. The sudden addition of oxygen to the superheated gases can create a pretty violent explosion, and that explosion itself is the backdraft. I figured I've learned so much from you guys, I thought it'd be cool to share some info back Hope this receives you well and that is from Lindsey.
Thanks Lindsay. That was very cool. Apparently the only way to fight a backdraft is to love it too. I'll let that part out, Linda.
That's right, you got to joke in there. Very nice.
If you want to get in touch with us like Lindsay did and let us know something cool that we didn't know, you can do it. Send it via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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