Japanese Atrocities in the Pacific War: One Army Surgeon's Account of Vivisection on Human Subjects in China
By Noda Masaaki. Quotes from the source will be in italics.
Vivisection is operating on people without anesthetic and taking them apart, piece by piece. This is the type of work that the Japanese Unit 731 did in China, using Chinese people and POWs to experiment upon. The types of things that they did to people are sickening just to listen to and you have to work hard not to let your mind see images of that type of horror passing through. This was not actually science. Some of the work was, granted, to develop biological weapons to use against the Allies, and one of the plans was to send those via the balloons Japan launched that did reach the United States, but fortunately that part of the plan never really got going and the balloons that were launched had an automatic failure rate of about 90%.
When people live as part of a nation state, however, the historical
time in which they live exerts its own influence on them.
People are easily swept up in the mood of the times and lose sight
of the gentle rhythms of life.
People can quite easily become swept up by what is going on, particularly when what they hear about is heavily influenced by propaganda and the Japanese people were not only subject to tremendous propaganda from their military rulers but there was also very, very strong censorship of the media so the Japanese people didn't really get to hear all sides of the issues. Much of what happened in the war they did not even actually know about until the war was over.
Then he goes on to talk about how the present-day Japanese view the WWII things that the Japanese military did.
We make no effort to know the facts about what happened
during the Pacific War, but ignorantly make sophisticated-sounding
excuses for ourselves. We were the victims of war. It wasn't a war
of aggression but a war of self-preservation.
This is connected to the Japanese textbook controversy where some textbooks are being re-written to almost totally avoid any aspect of the Japanese military doing anything along the lines of atrocities during the war. The idea of having a war for 'self-preservation' (when they actually weren't being attacked by anyone) is not far off Hitler's idea of wanting 'living space' for Germany and invading another country to take that space.
He also compares the attitudes during that time to the attitudes today and says that today's approach to things in Japan is not really much different from that which led to their involvement in World War II with the major problem of bullying in schools and:
We still have a pedigree-based society,
we have elite universities, we have uneven systems of justice,
we have an infatuation with rank and title in business, and we have
ways of applying pressure to anyone who harbors doubts about
these values.
Then he talks about Germany's approach to the bad things that country did during the war:
West Germany in the 1980s was teaching children about the
crimes of the Nazis and was making it clear that an understanding
of the past was the basis on which to build the present. As a result
of Germany’s deep sense of regret for having brought the Third
Reich into the world, the countries of Europe were able to accept
the rapid reunification of East and West Germany after the breakup
of the socialist bloc.
In other words, they admitted they did some very horrible things and they apologized for what was done in the past. The apology seemed sincere and other countries were able to at least acknowledge Germany was admitting it's past and felt sincerely sorry for what had happened.
One thing some people forget here is that the United States itself profited from some of the terrible things that were done by the German army. The V-1 and V-2 rockets managed to kill thousands of people in England. Their construction involved the use of slave labor, some 25,000 o which died during that process (more slave labor people died then were actually killed by the rockets). The person behind that, and the people that worked with him, were never tried for what they did but were brought to the United States to work on American rockets. America has never made any kind of apology for doing that. Further, much of the Unit 731 monstrosity was never put on trial. Why? Because a deal was made that most of the people involved avoid trial in exchange for turning the records of their experiments over to the U.S.
Expecting and demanding apologies, and whether the apology is sincere or not, tends to seem to depend on who is viewing what.
Anyhow, the author then goes on to describe some of the actual things that were done by the Japanese.
There was no evidence of careful soul-searching by the
medical profession after the war. For example, the very same doctors
who developed germ warfare in China and carried out medical
experiments on humans as members of the Army Disinfection and
Water Provision Corps (Unit 731) later, in the post-war period,
became professors at medical schools (Kyoto National University,
Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, etc. ) and chief officers of
public hospitals, or found work in government as policy makers in
the Ministry of Welfare and set up businesses such as the Green Cross specializing in the manufacture and distribution of blood
products. The wartime legacy of the medical profession;s failure to
respect human life is apparent in the current corporate culture that
led to the Green Cross AIDS scandal involving contaminated
blood and in the special relationship between the Ministry of Welfare
and the medical profession.
However, germ warfare was the least of the crimes committed
by the medical profession. On the Chinese mainland, military
doctors performed vivisection and medics used Chinese people for
surgery practice. The vivisection of captured American soldiers at
Kyushu University Medical School in the final days of the war are
well known, but they were just the tip of the iceberg. There has
been almost complete silence about the work done by numerous
military doctors during surgical demonstrations or for purposes
of education.
He then goes on to talk about the history of one particular doctor involved in what happened. He talks in detail about what happened when Yuasa, the doctor, saw a vivisection being carried out. After more training and more operations, this is what happened:
Yuasa Ken, army surgeon, was no longer capable of imagining
what human beings who were about to be vivisected might be
feeling. The two men who were to be operated on were nothing
more than medical objects to him.
Thus, they were no longer people to him but just objects.
To First Lieutenant Yuasa, the only human relations that existed
in that room were those involving his fellow army surgeons.
He had no relationship as a human being with the Chinese men
who were to be killed.
This may be similar to what happens during war to soldiers who kill lots of the enemy; they stop thinking of the enemy as people and just think of them as targets.
So, how did he and the other doctors go about getting men that they could do a vivisection on?
Notification by higher authorities was not the only way vivisections
were arranged, however. All the Army Hospital had to do
was tell the Security Police [Kempeitai] how many subjects were
needed, and it could rely on getting exactly that number of Chinese
captives on the day specified; the Security forces always obliged
with the number requested.
Virtually anyone could end up being a subject even if they had not committed a crime other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It turns out Yuasa participitated in seven vivisections in which a total of fourteen Chinese people were killed.
Another thing he participated in was :
sending dyptheria and dysentry germs collected from his patients
to the Disinfection and Water Provision Corps of the army. He was
unaware how these were to be used, but the Water Provision Corps
asked for cut only the freshest and most potent germs in order to
use them in germ warfare. The germs were cultured and delivered
to the army. The army then scattered them as part of their attack
strategy.
Eventually he spent a while in a prison in China after the war. He did not feel that what he and others were doing to living human beings was evil. He and those like him feel that did nothing wrong and why should they apologize for anything? Yuasa finally, though, did repent of the things he did and spoke out and thus opened himself to a lot of negative reaction from other Japanese who had been involved in the killings.
This kind of paper explains, to some degree, why Japan itself has never really acknowledged the worst things that they did during the war which were Unit 731 and the killing, etc, of thousands of Chinese during the Rape of Nanking and similar attacks. No wonder there is still international controversy over this issue and a difficulty in Chinese/Japanese relations.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
|