Did Japan Get Any Benefit From Using Plague in World War II, Essay Example

Introduction

The events in World War II changed the entire world landscape. Started off in Europe, it soon spread to other countries around the world to include, Japan, China, the United States, and other countries that would fight to end the horrific war that affected millions of world citizens. When World War II began in 1939, it was central to just the boundaries of East Europe, soon Japan would follow to align with forces in Italy and Germany. They fought against superpowers, France, Great Britain, and the United States. The reasons behind the cause of one of the most deadly wars were a combination of anti-Semitism and totalitarianism with the aid of Adolf Hitler, the failure of the Treaty of Versailles, imperialistic ventures of Japan, and the failure of the League of Nations. What was kept a long secret for almost half a century was the different types of weapons and tactics used by the Japanese in World War II. During the war, the Japanese military used “plague” (bubonic plague) as a weapon to fight against China. Using bio-warfare has always been a controversial topic, and only in few times in histories has countries used these extreme measures to distinguish their enemies. The question posed and answered by this essay is if the Japanese benefit from using the plague as a weapon against China in World War II?

The details of the types of savagery that was displayed by the Japanese have long since covered up until many began to voice their experiences about what went in China and Japan during World War II. The Chinese people went through a Holocaust of their own in which they over 300,000 Chinese people were killed at the hands of the Japanese. In the city of Nanking alone, there were more people who were murdered than most countries during the war. Tens of thousands were raped, disemboweled, had parts of their bodies cut off including vaginas, breasts, and other parts. Chinese women were subject to torture of being raped repeatedly by being nailed to a wall, forced to partake in incest, and other brutal acts that were people were burned, hanged, buried alive, and attacked by dogs. Military forces in Japan mutilated countless number of Chinese, ran them over with tanks, tied them to trees while tearing off their flesh, and used them as practice targets for bayonets and killing contest where they were beheaded, and set on fire by gasoline. These events were not discussed at length in textbooks as many have tried to forget the awful truths of how citizens of China were treated by the Japanese.

Unit 731

Over forty, years since the end of World War II, the secret buried about the extent to which Japanese went to terminate the Chinese was not known. The extreme war crime that Japan committed was the result of their institution Unit 731, which involved a group of medical doctors and scientists that conducted on Chinese prisoners of war. The program was run by the secret Imperial Japanese Army which based the Unit 731 in Manchuria. Under the commandment of General Shiro Ishii who was also the lead physician of Unit 731, first set up the institution in 1933 during the Japanese occupancy of Manchuria in 1932. The Manchurian occupancy gave Japan the benefit of using the island as their own research station that allowed them the endless supply of Chinese that they used for human experiment subjects.

According to Wu (2002), “aspecial advantage for this move was that the Kuantung Army could kill Chinese at will and provide for unlimited supply of human experiment materials. With Chinese lives at no cost, Japan could lead the world in biological warfare.” (Wu 2002) The institution then moved to Pingfan, on the outside was seen as an “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department” that was a part of the Kwantung Army. However, “was a gigantic complex covering six square kilometers and consisted of more than 150 buildings, with living quarters and amenities for up to 3,000 Japanese staff members, 300-500 of whom were medical doctors and scientists.” (Don Tow 2009)

During the time of the experimentation, there were countless amounts of vivisection of thousands of captured civilians and war prisons that were conducted in the facility. Most of the vivisections that were conducted were without the aid of anesthesia, and the bodies that were used to collect research were believed to be essential in studying the effects of the bio-weapons before the body had a chance to decompose. The doctors and the medical assistants would remove organs while the person was still awake, and disembowel just to connect to another persons’ esophagus. Other crucial organs such as the brain, liver, and lungs were removed from the prisoners without anesthetics.

Those that were vivisected were Chinese, Russian, American, and other prisoners from other countries. Most terrifyingly is that women, children, and even infants were vivisected. The experiments including amputating limbs to study blood loss, reattached to opposite sides of the body, frozen and amputated and thawed out. This was to benefit the research of studying the effects of rotting and gangrene. According to the research, “Unit 731 also performed forced inseminations and gave doses of syphilis under the guise of a vaccination.” (Veronese 2012) This was in part possible because of the trickery used in capturing test subjects. The Japanese Army would enter the villages and towns that were infected by the “rat plague” that the Japanese orchestrated, and tricked them into believing that they were there to help. In reality as the unsuspecting citizens would come to the tents for aid at the help stations in places such as churches and would vivisect the citizens.

The unbearable experiments implemented were part of a larger program headed by the British Military of Supply. The program was conducted in order to develop biological weapons of warfare that include using anthrax, cholera, plague, and other dozens of pathogens. Inside the institution housed several thousand containers that were used to raise fleas, produce various chemicals, and thousands of biological agents. The reasons behind the use of the plague and the institution were created to see which bacterial diseases could be used as a weapon during the war. Before the weapons could be fully used, they were tested on their potential enemies, and tested on those for protective measures if the enemies such as the Chinese or the United States were to use bio-weapons on them. The Chinese were used as the sole human subjects as they were purposely infected and vivisected to see the course of which the disease would have on their bodies. According to Kristof (1995) doctors would place many specimens into a large jar filled with formaldehyde and were picked apart.

The infected subjects would be locked up with healthy ones so that doctors could see how readily the disease would spread. “The doctors locked others inside a pressure chamber to see how much the body can withstand before the eyes pop from their sockets.” (Kristof 1995) Planes would spread the test zones filled with Chinese to test out the new technologies, and to see how many people would die.Prisoners were infected and injected with venereal diseases, infected their clothing, and their supplies. Other tests included grenade launching, using flame throwers on the human subjects, and were tied to stakes in order to test out germ-releasing bombs, explosive bombs, and chemical weapons. The prisoners within Unit 731 were largely deprived of food and water, forced to live with other infected, temperatures that were unbearable, placed in centrifuges and spun to death, exposed to x-rays for various times, injected with animal blood and sea water,, and place into gas chambers,

Bio Weapons Benefited Japan

From Japan’s perspective, Japan researched chemical weapons by using prisoners from allies for experiments, and created chemical weapons to fight against allies. It sounded like a perfect strategy for Japan, and this strategy might be the turning point of Japanese. The Japanese first sought to use biological and chemical weapons during the Sino-Japanese War, as they wanted to expand the imperial empire of the Japanese and colonize. The country of China has always been seen by the Japanese as a prize in being able to colonize such as large population, and the way in which to level to playing ground for the Japanese was to dispense weapons of mass destruction. Although in 1925, Japan signed the Geneva Protocol that prohibited them from using poisonous gases, they ignored this protocol.The Japanese had hoped to use the weapons against the United States as they even proposed balloon bombs that would carry diseases to the United States, and use Kamikazes during 1945 to dump plagued infected fleas on San Diego. (Kristof, 1995) This strategy was however used when the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service dropped bombs of fleas that were carrying the bubonic plague on Ningbo, and later on Changde. (Twigg 2004)

Other mechanisms used in warfare also included spreading the plague on the wheat and rice particles, pieces of paper, and cotton wadding that carried the bacteria were dropped from plans with the strategy infecting and destroying the food supplies and stop the crops from growing. Rats that were held in the facility were also infected as they were the first weapons used in the plague. The care of the rats was tied with keeping the fleas alive, according to research an estimated 3 million rats lived within Unit 731, and after the destruction of the Unit they were released with the bubonic plague into the countryside that caused several epidemics. According to Wu (2002), the rats that were released plagued over 22 countries within China that killed over 200,000 people. (Wu 2002) During the war, the military forces of Japan used the bio-weapons during their battles against the Chinese troops, and took the imprisoned ones to perform more lethal tests.

However, Japan still did not win the war. Japan dropped plagued infected fleas over Quzhou, where the first victims dies within a few days, and within the first year over 2,000 members of the small town died from the plague. (Don Tow 2009) The weapon would then spread to other towns due to a railway worker from Quzhou bringing it to the city of Uiwu, and another 1,000 people died in the region within the year. (Don Tow 2009) During the experiment it lasted for over 13 years that ended only when the Russians invaded the Manchurian island.According to Wu (2002), “On at least five occasions during the first two years the Japanese armed forces have tried to employ bacteriological warfare in China. They have tried to produce epidemics of plague in Free China by scattering plague-infected materials with airplanes.” (Wu 2002) Other examples of Japan using the plague during the war on the Chinese was through a series of glanders and anthrax attacks in villages throughout the Jinhua area of Zhejiang Province, where over 6,000 citizens from the 30,000 inhabitants of the area were infected. At least half of those that were infected died soon after the infection. (Don Tow 2009) From this point, Japan did benefit from the use of the plague at first, but did not get as many benefits as expected.

Japanese Devils

In the movie “Japanese Devils” (Minoru Matsui), Japanese commanders talked about what they did in World War II, and why they did these. Within this movie, the 14 ex-Japanese Imperialist Army servicemen held ranks within the army from lieutenants and privates. While they held backgrounds in medicine and farming, they partook in some of the atrocities during the time that include torture, bacteriological experimentation, rape, and vivisection. According to some of the officers’ accounts, “”When we saw a house, we burned it. When we saw a person, we shot him. When we saw a crowd, we machine-gunned them. That’s what we were doing every day.” (Kajimoto 2002) One on the main reasons for the ex-servicemen to speak out after over 50 years since the war ended, was due to the unsurmountable guilt about what they did. They wanted to find somewhere to release their pain they held inside of their hearts. They wanted to confess because they wanted the public to know the truth about what went on. (Kajimoto 2002) Japanese did not get benefits from their Japanese soldiers because the orders given by Japan are not what Japanese soldiers willing to do, but forced to do. Japanese soldiers would not thank Japanese government for what the government has done to them.Many of the people involved in their army and in Unit 731, have had the opportunity to speak out and voice their regret, as they were just complying with orders.

Many of the orders include releasing plague into water systems and experimenting on babies as young as 3-days old. At the time, the orders were to conduct these experiments out of research for benefiting the country and as a protective measure against the United States whom they feared was developing bio-weapons themselves. Many have chosen to remain in silence as they do not like to think about the events that took place during World War II. Japanese benefiting from using the plague and other experiments with research used for developing new treatments for medical problems such as, discovering the best treatment for frostbite, and other problems not readily identified. (Kristof 1995) However, this research was conducted at immense expense to the lives of countless Chinese and other individuals.

Denial of the Japanese

Japan conducted lots of experiments on Chinese prisoners as they housed their secret facility in China. However, Japanese government still denies what they did about plagues in China, which angers most Chinese. The denial makes some of the Chinese people still hate Japan a lot. Japan certainly did not get benefits from China, and somehow came up with the boycott of Japanese products in China. The denial of China has been happening since the discovery of Unit 731. As Japan surrendered to the United States in 1946, the government destroyed Unit 731 and ordered the execution of the remaining prisoners. As a condition of General Shiro Ishii, the US sought to nullify the public knowledge of the extent to the knowledge of the biological weapons developed by the Soviet Union. At the time, Douglas McArthur struck a deal that would grant immunity to Ishii and others involved in Unit 731 in exchange for knowledge on the research on development of the bio-weapons. However, there was overwhelming accounts from survivors and those involved in Unit 731 that spoke out against the wrong doings of the Japanese, which forced the government and the UN to conduct investigations. They uncovered vast amounts of research, testimonies, documents in the possession of the Japanese government, and diaries from Japanese soldiers. According to Don Tow (2009), the Japanese government still claims, “We do not have sufficient documentary evidence for the biological attacks in China.”(Don Tow 2009) This bodies similar to the denials of many of the tragedies during the World War II such as Nanking Massacre, the slave labor, and the sex slaves.

The protest of 1995 was sparked by the lack of recognition by the world’s superpowers to acknowledge the atrocities that happened during World War II. A small group of Japanese and Chinese aligned to form an alliance that wanted to change the system by filing a lawsuit, and with the concerted efforts of many in both Japan and China to rally the public. On August 27, 2002, the Tokyo District Court for the first time admitted that the Japanese army had used and developed biological warfare on China and its citizens. (Don Tow 2009) Over the course of the 13 year experimentation, over 3,000 people that were held prisoner of the 12,000 died. The evidence of the studies conducted, and the containers were destroyed by the Marutas. (Williams, Wallace 1989) The problem still is not addressed in the history books as evident in 1965, after the discovery of the events, the Japanese government failed to accurately address the problems. The historian for the Japanese did not want the events to be published which sparked a lawsuit from Chinese and anger from the Taiwanese, and the Koreans to attack the leaders of the Japanese as they were being dishonest and insensitive to the memories of the East Asians. According to documents and testimonies, the Japanese government sought to implement former researchers of Unit 731 into positions for government and academic in order to maintain the modicum of control over the events of Unit 731. The Japanese did not benefit in the respect from using the plague. In fact, the Japanese have created resentment from within their country,and from other countries for the lack of public acknowledgment and the constant denial in the textbooks and other parts of the country’s history.

Where Has the Research Gone?

One of the keys questions that many that have uncovered the atrocities and have family members that were affected to question as to where the research has gone. The answer is that, some of the results were taken by the United States and Soviet Union. Japanese did not have those results of researches. Japanese commanders were seen as war criminals, and allies put them on trial. As mentioned for the immunity of some of the members of Unit 731 and Ishii, was to surrender all of the research on the bio-weapon development and the experimentation that was conducted on the human subjects. It was only after the unearthed of two confidential documents by the US that detailed the vast amounts of research that was conducted at Unit 731, and the extent at which to keep this information out of the hands of the Soviet Union.Of all those that were involved in Unit 731, only a few were actually tried on their war crimes.However several that worked in Unit 731 and in Camps run in Siberia and other places were not tried for their crimes. This mainly in part to the United States role in suppressing the efforts of Unit 731 in being brought to trial in Tokyo. John W. Powell Jr was one of the first to raise the issue with the possible involvement of the cover up by the United States. During the years that Japan was experimenting and releasing the plague the United States was already aware. “With an increasing number of Japanese prisoners of war captured in the South Pacific, the U.S. found out that not only was Japan engaged in significant Biological research; its program was on a far larger scale than previously suspected.” (Wu 2002)

One of the main mission of Colonel Sanders of the United States during World War II as he landed in Japan was to locate General Ishii and the biological warfare machine.Over the course of three months, he interrogated many military leaders and scientists of Unit 731. It was under his discretion that he hatched the plan with General MacArthur, “My recommendation is that we promise Naito that no one involved in BW will be prosecuted as a war criminal.” (Wu 2002) This was accepted, andas a result much of knowledge and research has yet to be released or recovered.

Conclusion

From all of the perspectives, Japan did not get as many benefits as they expect to get.Over the 13 year range of the experimentation, Japan killed countless amounts of people within China. With people that not only experimenting on but also those that died after the deployment of the plague in the towns.The benefits that they were initially seeking was to develop a key weapon that could be used on their enemies, which indeed is what they accomplished.However, with the surrender in 1946, it was all shut down and covered up thanks in part to the United State. The Japanese government has longed denied, but they did not benefit overall.

Bibliography

Kajimoto, Masato. (2002). Japanese Devils Shed Light on a Dark Past.CNN.Retrieved from http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/east/04/07/japan.devils/

Kristoff, Nicholas. (1995). Unmasking Horror — A special report. Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world/unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Tow, Don. (2009). Japan’s Biological and Chemical Warfare in China during WWII.Don Tow. Retrieved from http://www.dontow.com/2009/04/japans-biological-and-chemical-warfare-in-china-during-wwii/

Twigg, Graham. (2004). Plague and Bio-Terrorism.Benfield Hazard Research Centre, Disaster Studies Working Paper 10. Retrieved fromhttps://www.ucl.ac.uk/abuhc/resources/working_papers/working_papers_folder/wp10

Veronese, Keith. (2012). During World War II, Japan plotted to unleash a plague on the United States.IO9.Retrieved from http://io9.com/5908290/during-world-war-ii-japan-plotted-to-unleash-a-plague-on-the-united-states

Williams, P. and Wallace, D. (1989).Unit 731: Japan’s secret biological warfare in World War II. Hodder and Sioughton, London.

Wu, Tien-Wei. (2002). A Preliminary Review of Studies of Japanese Biological Warfare And Unit 731 in the United States. Retrieved from http://www.centurychina.com/wiihist/germwar/731rev.htm