A Plague upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation

281 Pages·2004·9.182 MB·English

by  Daniel Barenblatt

__ "A time~y. -irriportant-book that reveals just ~ow far scientists can go'in
their-pursu.it or.know~e~geJ anq. governments in their_pu:rsuit of power." :
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- Iris Chan~.-~uthor .of The Rape Nanking,
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A PLAGUE
UPON
HUMANITY
The Hidden History ofJ apan's
Biological Warfare Program
DANIEL BARENBLATT
-....
Perennial
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPubiishers
Photographs courtesy of li Zhong Yuen; Museum of the Chinese People's Anti-Japan
War, Beijing, People's Republic of China
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2004 by HarperCoilins Publishers.
A PLAGUE UPON HUMANIlY Copyright © 2004 by Daniel Barenblatt. Ail rights
reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address
HarperColiins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 1002'2.
HarperColiins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional
use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperColiins Publish
ers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
First Perennial edition published 2005.
Designed by Joseph Rut!
The library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Barenblatt, Daniel
A plague upon humanity: the secret genocide of Axis Japan's germ warfare
operation / by Daniel Barenblatt.-I st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-06-018625-9
I. World War, 19 39-1 945-Biological warfare-Japan. 2. World War,
f "l" '<J45-Campaigns-China. 3. World War, 1939-1945-Atrocities-Japan .
., 1111111"" npcrimentation in medicine-Japan. 5. Genocide-Japan. 6. Japan.
I~I~IIIIIIII 1\i111(~MlIn. Butai, Dai 731. 7. World War, 1939-1945-Regimental'
hl,IIIII'" 1"1",11 I Tillc.
, III f II 111111' )11/1 f
2003051051
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For the Chinese, Korean, and Russian people
and all other victims of biological warfare,
and for my father and mother
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction xvii
1. A Doctor's Vision
2. Fortress of Fear 21
3. The End of Humanity 37
4. Science Set Free 64
5. Worlds Collide 85
6. The Gathering Storm 114
7. Epidemic 148
8. What America Knew 176
9. The Secret Deal 204
10. What the Deal Bought 225
Endnotes 237
Index 251
PREFACE
WHEN, IN THE EARLY AUTUMN OF 1994, I STARTED TO EXPLORE
the topic of Japanese biological warfare and human experimenta
tion, it seemed at first that I had delved into one of the most inac
cessible, lonely areas of the past that history had to offer. I was
moved to begin my research after watching a television news seg
ment about a traveling historical exhibit that had become a sen
sation in Japan. It chronicled the secret history of Imperial Japan's
biological warfare program during the 1930s and 1940s, led by a
physician and microbiologist named Shiro Ishii under the aegis of
a research facility called Unit 731. Over a period of fourteen
years, that unit metastasized into a network of state-sponsored
biological terror and mass murder, whose death camp and labora
tory locations ranged across the vast expanse of Japan's Asia
Pacific empire. Man-made epidemics were strategically created
by some of the top Japanese civilian scjentists, university profes
sors and medical doctors among them. Germs were deployed as
invisible, untraceable, and silent weapons against unsuspecting
human populations.
The exhibit--complete with relics of equipment used by Unit
731 troops and scientists, and appearances by elderly Japanese
men and women who confessed to their participation in the
secret experi~ents-was drawing huge crowds as it moved from
city to city. At the time, I was a graduate student in experimental
x Preface
cognitive psychology with a strong interest in the history of sci
ence. I was curious about this bio-war program, about which I'd
heard nothing before, and I decided to try to dig up what I could
find on the matter in New York City. Within months, I found
myself spending long hours at the library poring over a fragile old
tome that I had discovered while searching through the stacks for
books about biological and chemical warfare. It bore the less
than-beguiling title of Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the
Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological
·Weapons. Until I came along in the midc t 990s, the last time some
one had checked it out had been in t 979.
Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army
Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons is, at
535 pages, a partial transcript of a t 949 Soviet war crimes trial of
japanese scientists and military leaders captured in Manchuria in
the closing days of World War II. The trial was held in the city of
Khabarovsk, in the Russian Far East, where those in the dock
were accused of waging germ warfare and conducting inhuman
experiments on their prisoners: men, women, and children. The
book's graphic details belied its obscurity and immediately posed
a clear contradiction and a series of. challenges to me, both
morally and intellectually.
The contradiction that I found in its testimony is why the acts
exposed in great detail by witnesses, and confessed to by some of
the bio-war ringleaders themselves, should remain so unknown to
today's educators and the public at large. I searched out other
available sources of information. The japanese atrocities bear a
striking resemblance to the well-known experiments of the Nazi
doctors in the Holocaust, and were carried out before and then
concurrent with those crimes.
Yet unlike the German experiments, the facts of Imperial
japan's biological warfare have remained hidden from public
awareness. I decided to do what I could to amend this situation
Preface xi
by making readers aware of what happened in the war years and
in the postwar cover-up. I wanted also, with this popular history
(a strange-sounding phrase, perhaps, to describe the chronicling
of heinous acts), to convey to a wide audience the profoundly
important scientific knowledge that ca~e of these events and the
equally profound evil that this knowledge represents in a world
where, unfortunately, the past is often prologue.
As I write this in the spring of 2003, mainstream concern
about biological weapons is at unprecedented levels. Back in
1994 I would have described the subject as an esoteric back-alley
study in the fields of-microbiology, weapons development, and
the history of science. Ironically, part of what spurred me in the
early stages of my research was a deep concern that such repel
lent war crimes had languished in obscurity and remained
unknown to the world at large. But I also believed, optimistically,
that humanity would not allow this story to remain untold. A
number of exhibits and academic books on the subject had begun
to appear by the mid-1990s, in Japan, China, and the United
States.
Hoping to make my own contribution, I traveled across
America and to ASia, conducting interviews with American ex
POW survivors of Japanese bio-war experiments, meeting with
Chinese survivors of the germ warfare attacks, making contacts
around the world, and collecting documents. Over the past nine
years I have witnessed signs that this dark piece of history is
finally beginning to move into public consciousness. In 1997 a
lawsuit was commenced against the government of Japan for
restitution to relatives of those who died from infectious
microbes spread in Japanese bio-war assaults, or who were killed
as prisoners in human experiments. That suit, along with the
traveling Unit 731 exhibit and subsequent media attention in
Japan and China, has spurred activism and grassroots calls for jus
tice in those countries. As a consequence, an awareness of the
xii Preface
destruction wrought by Japan's biological warfare program is
beginning to emerge in the United States as well.
At the same time there has in the past decade been a sea
change in scholarly understanding of Japan's biological warfare
campaigns. For decades the conventional wisdom had held that
several thousand prisoners were killed in gruesome studies at
secret bases in Manchuria, and that a number of Chinese civil
ians, perhaps a few hundred or so, were also killed in so-called
field tests of germ weapons. It was in these terms and numbers
that the Japanese military's germ warfare program was usually
explained to an audience-when there was an audience for the
subject.
But the latest research, revealed in this book, shows that in
two bio-war campaigns alone, those in Yunnan Province in south
ern China and Shandong Province in the north, more than
400,000 people died of cholera. Special army forces waged germ
attacks across China, at countless locations under Imperial Japan's
heel of occupation, and even in unoccupied regions that were
subject to fly-overs by Japanese planes. Plague literally rained
down upon people's heads, sprayed from special bio-war air team
planes of the military; cholera, typhoid, dysentery, anthrax,
paratyphoid, glanders, and other pestilences infected their food,
drinking wells, crops, and livestock.
As of 2002, historical researchers in China had estimated the
number of people killed by Japanese germ warfare and human
experiments to be approximately 580,000. This is the figure that
was presented and mutually agreed upon at the International
Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare, a confer
ence on the subject of Japanese bio-war attended by scholars and
investigative journalists, held in December 2002 in the city of
Changde, Hunan Province. Yet even the total of 580,000, large as
it is, must be considered only a preliminary accounting, as it
stems from the summing up of mortality totals from places where
Preface xiii
researchers are still conducting house-to-house interviews with
survivors, victims' relatives, and eyewitnesses, in the growing
number of investigations that are now taking place throughout
China. And each set of interviews contjnues to bring forth addi
tional cases, incidents, and outbreaks to be reckoned.
The number of physicians and scientists involved in these
germ attacks and in the human experiments totaled more than
20,000. Most of them were biomedical professionals in the civil
ian sector of society, men of healing who were recruited into the
secret bio-war projects by Ishii and his colleagues in the military.
With their expertise, the Japanese army exterminated large num
bers of Asian people through its covert harnessing of the ancient
and dreaded scourge of infectious disease. The objective was to
depopulate, make miserable, and demoralize the Chinese people
through the spreading of vast man-made epidemics in strategic
areas. The microbe became an instrument ofimperial rule. Com
parisons with the genocides of Japan's ally and ideological
brother, Nazi Germany, are entirely appropriate. By the standards
of today and those of 1948, when the United Nations recognized
and codified the term "genocide" as "calculated acts of human
extermination resulting in the mass murder of enormous numbers
of civilians, targeting a certain population group," the Japanese
germ warfare program more than meets the definition.
Yet after the war many of the doctors and scientists who
orchestrated Japan's bio-war program returned to their former
lives in academia and medicine. Some of them attained great sta
tus and wealth. Why it happened underscores the need for dis
closure from the Japanese and American governments of the
classified data they hold on the matter. How it happened is
explained in this book.
Today, as advances in biotechnology and genetic engineering
often progress without public scrutiny, Japan's 13-year biological
campaign in the period from 1932 to 1945 has left a legacy that is