Unit 731

Human Experimentation

Unit 731 used men, women, and children who were war time prisoners from all different regions such as Mongolia, China, Korea, etc, as live experimental guinea pigs. These experiments were horrific, they tested frost bite to try and determine the effect it would have on the human body, they released bubonic plague infested rats onto victims, they perfomed live vivsections with no anesthetic or numbing, they forced male prisoners with syphillis to rape men and women in the prisons for a multitude of reasons. They wanted to see how syphillis would spread throughout the body, and the impregnated women were sometimes vivisected in order for the scientist to see how the fetus was developing. Japanese soldiers would often refer to their test subjects as Maturas or “wooden logs”.

Human Experimentation

The vivsections not only happened to pregnate women, many of the victims would get infected with diseases like cholera or the bubonic plauge and the scientist would remove their organs in order to examine the effect the diseases caused, this was often done while the victim was alive and without any anesthetic. The unit also tested weapons on victims, they used bayonets, knives and, guns aswell as studying flamethrowers. They had also tested gas chambers that had blistering agents and nerve gas in them while also tapping into x-ray exposure which killed thousands of the prisoners. Within Unit 731 human limits were tested, they were deprived of water and food, had heavy things dropped on them in order to mimic crash landings, and were forced to imitate falling paratroopers and the effects of high G-force by being loaded into large centrifuges and spun until they either lost consciousness or died. Unit 731 stripped people of their humanity and claimed it was all in the name of science.

Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night

Operation CBN

The operation coded “Cherry Blossoms at Night” was going to be Japan’s way of launching biological warfare against southern California in retalliation for the United States firebombing many Japanese cities which had killed hundreds of thousands of japanese citizens. This plan consisted of Japanese aircrafts lauching thousands of so-called “bombs” filled with fleas that had been infected with the bubonic plauge. This plan was set to carry out on September 22, 1945 but Japan had announced its surrenderance on August 15, 1945 and it was finalized in early September of the same year, so their plan was never executed against the United States.

Aftermath

After the end of World War 2 unlike Nazi doctors who were taken to trial and imprisoned many of the scientist and doctors from Unit 731 re-entered society and were accepted, even having successful careers . None were punished for the horrific crimes commited, American forces, specifically General Douglas MacArthur made the choice not to punish those who contributed to horrors that occurred. In exchange the United States wanted the information they had gained through the experiments. He thought that punishing those for their crimes would interfer with American progression in the medical field. Japan never admitted to the wrong doings of the unit until just recentley, however directly after WW2 China decided to bring light to the atrocities commited by Japan, and built a museum directly where Unit 731 operated from and displayed the horrific incidents commited. Because of the decision to never punish the scientist of this horrific unit the victims of Unit 731 would never recieve proper justice.