The legacy of biological atrocities

Japan has recently released the service records of officers and soldiers before its defeat in 1945, made public on 15 May by the country's National Archives. The documents revealed that some personnel were assigned to clandestine units in China: one in Nanjing, identified as Unit 1,644, and another in Guangzhou, numbered 8,604. The military personnel in those units reportedly conducted bacteriological experiments on human subjects. Until now, only Unit 731, located near Harbin now in China's Heilongjiang province and then the capital of Manchukuo, a puppet state controlled by Tokyo was known for carrying out such activities from 1938 until the end of World War II.

- BY NILANTHA ILANGAMUWA

"The service records confirm the existence in China of a network of units conducting these experiments and coordinating their activities," explained Katsuo Nishiyama, emeritus professor at Shiga University of Medical Science and a specialist in Japan's imperial-era biological weapons programmes. Units 1,644 and 8,604 with the one in Nanjing being the largest were overseen, like Unit 731, by the Tokyo-based Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department.

Their primary activity reportedly involved experimenting on humans to enable Japan to develop biological weapons, in flagrant violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting chemical and biological warfare.

Yet the significance of last week's release gains graver depth when juxtaposed with the declassified "Top Secret" CIA correspondence from 1947, in which Shiro Ishii - the commanding figure of Unit 731 - is directly implicated in aerial dispersion of plague-infested fleas and cholera bacteria over Chinese cities. In one instance, 70 kilograms of typhoid and five kilograms of cholera bacilli were manufactured and released by Ishii and 100 subordinates in Hangzhou. In another, experiments using anthrax and plague bacilli on condemned Manchurian prisoners were personally supervised by Ishii and his staff. The American legal section in Tokyo, reporting these atrocities, concluded that Ishii's group had likely violated rules of land warfare but crucially, advised no prosecutions, citing the need for corroboration. That corroboration never came. What did come was immunity, offered quietly by U.S. occupation authorities in exchange for data.

This is not only history. It is a mirror.