Search results
Koizumi had joined a secret poison gas research committee in 1915, during World War I, when he and other Imperial Japanese Army officers were impressed by the successful German use of chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres, in which the Allies suffered 6,000 deaths and 15,000 wounded as a result of the chemical attack. [20] [21]
Koizumi had joined a secret poison gas research committee in 1915, during World War I, when he and other Imperial Japanese Army officers were impressed by the successful German use of chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres, in which the Allies suffered 5,000 deaths and 15,000 wounded as a result of the chemical attack (Williams and Wallace ...
In 1915, during WW1, he joined a secret poison gas research committee. When the program produced its first chemical weapon in 1918, he was lauded as the Father of Japanese Chemical Warfare. In 1921, he received his doctorate degree in medicine.
- 9 Sep 1884
- Chikahiko
- 13 Sep 1945
- Koizumi
Chikahiko Koizumi helped form a secret poison gas research committee when he and other Imperial Japanese Army officers were impressed by the German use of chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres (1915).
- Overview
- Formation
- Activities
- Biological warfare
- Known unit members
- Divisions
- Facilities
- Surrender and immunity
- After World War II
- See also
Unit 731 (731部隊, Nana-san-ichi butai?, Chinese: 731部队) was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel. Unit 731 was based at the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China).
It was officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army (関東軍防疫給水部本部, Kantōgun Bōeki Kyūsuibu Honbu?). Originally set up under the Kempeitai military police of the Empire of Japan, Unit 731 was taken over and commanded until the end of the war by General Shiro Ishii, an officer in the Kwantung Army.
Between 3,000 and 12,000 men, women, and children—from which around 600 every year were provided by the Kempeitai—died during the human experimentation conducted by Unit 731 at the camp based in Pingfang alone, which does not include victims from other medical experimentation sites. Almost 70% of the victims who died in the Pingfang camp were Chinese, including both civilian and military. Close to 30% of the victims were Russian. Some others were South East Asians and Pacific Islanders, at the time colonies of the Empire of Japan, and a small number of the prisoners of war from the Allies of World War II (although many more Allied POWs were victims of Unit 731 at other sites)[citation needed].
Many of the scientists involved in Unit 731 went on to prominent careers in post-war politics, academia, business, and medicine. Some were arrested by Soviet forces and tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials; others surrendered to the American Forces. It has been postulated that one reason the scientists were not tried was that the information and experience gained in the studies of the biological warfare was of a great value for the United States biological weapons development program. On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence." The deal concluded in 1948.
In 1932, General Shirō Ishii (石井四郎 Ishii Shirō), chief medical officer of the Japanese Army and protégé of Army Minister Sadao Araki was placed in command of the Army Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory. Ishii organized a secret research group, the "Tōgō Unit", for various chemical and biological experimentation in Manchuria. Ishii had proposed the creation of a Japanese biological and chemical research unit in 1930, after a two-year study trip abroad, on the grounds that Western powers were developing their own programs. One of Ishii's main supporters inside the army was Colonel Chikahiko Koizumi, who later became Japan's Health Minister from 1941 to 1945. Koizumi had joined a secret poison gas research committee in 1915, during World War I, when he and other Japanese army officers were impressed by the successful German use of chlorine gas at the second battle of Ypres, where the Allies suffered 15,000 casualties as a result of the chemical attack.
Unit Tōgō was implemented in the Zhongma Fortress, a prison/experimentation camp in Beiyinhe, a village 100 km (62 mi) south of Harbin on the South Manchurian Railway. A jailbreak in autumn 1934 and later explosion (believed to be an attack) in 1935 led Ishii to shut down Zhongma Fortress. He received the authorization to move to Pingfang, approximately 24 km (15 mi) south of Harbin, to set up a new and much larger facility.
Weapons of mass destruction
By type
•Biological
•Chemical
•Nuclear
•Radiological
Japanese scientists performed tests on prisoners with plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, and other diseases. This research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the flea bomb used to spread the bubonic plague. Some of these bombs were designed with ceramic (porcelain) shells, an idea proposed by Ishii in 1938.
These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells, and other areas with anthrax, plague-carrier fleas, typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and other deadly pathogens. During biological bomb experiments, scientists dressed in protective suits would examine the dying victims. Infected food supplies and clothing were dropped by airplane into areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces. In addition, poisoned food and candies were given out to unsuspecting victims, and the results examined.
•Lieutenant General Shirō Ishii
•Lieutenant Colonel Ryoichi Naito, founder of the pharmaceutical company Green Cross
•Masaji Kitano
•Yoshio Shinozuka
Unit 731 was divided into eight divisions:
•Division 1: Research on bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, typhoid and tuberculosis using live human subjects. For this purpose, a prison was constructed to contain around three to four hundred people.
•Division 2: Research for biological weapons used in the field, in particular the production of devices to spread germs and parasites.
•Division 3: Production of shells containing biological agents. Stationed in Harbin.
•Division 4: Production of other miscellaneous agents.
•Division 5: Training of personnel.
The Unit 731 complex covered six square kilometers and consisted of more than 150 buildings. The design of the facilities made them hard to destroy by bombing. The complex contained various factories. It had around 4,500 containers to be used to raise fleas, six cauldrons to produce various chemicals, and around 1,800 containers to produce biological agents. Approximately 30 kg of bubonic plague bacteria could be produced in several days.
Some of Unit 731's satellite facilities are in use by various Chinese industrial concerns. A portion has been preserved and is open to visitors as a War Crimes Museum.
Destruction of evidence
With the Russian invasion of Manchukuo and Mengjiang in August 1945, the unit had to abandon their work in haste. The members and their families fled to Japan. Ishii ordered every member of the group "to take the secret to the grave", threatening to find them if they failed, and prohibiting any of them from going into public work back in Japan. Potassium cyanide vials were issued for use in the event that the remaining personnel were captured. Skeleton crews of Ishii's Japanese troops blew the compound up in the final days of the war to destroy evidence of their activities, but most were so well constructed that they survived somewhat intact.
American grant of immunity
After Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, Douglas MacArthur became the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupation. MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731, including their leader, in exchange for providing America, but not the other wartime allies, with their research on biological warfare. American occupation authorities monitored the activities of former unit members, including reading and censoring their mail. The U.S. believed that the research data was valuable. The U.S. did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal heard only one reference to Japanese experiments with "poisonous serums" on Chinese civilians. This took place in August 1946 and was instigated by David Sutton, assistant to the Chinese prosecutor. The Japanese defense counselor argued that the claim was vague and uncorroborated and it was dismissed by the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence. The subject was not pursued further by Sutton, who was likely unaware of Unit 731's activities. His reference to it at the trial is believed to have been accidental.
Separate Soviet trials
Although publicly silent on the issue at the Tokyo Trials, the Soviet Union pursued the case and prosecuted twelve top military leaders and scientists from Unit 731 and its affiliated biological-war prisons Unit 1644 in Nanjing, and Unit 100 in Changchun, in the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials. Included among those prosecuted for war crimes including germ warfare was General Otozō Yamada, the commander-in-chief of the million-man Kwantung Army occupying Manchuria. The trial of those captured Japanese perpetrators was held in Khabarovsk in December 1949. A lengthy partial transcript of the trial proceedings was published in different languages the following year by a Moscow foreign languages press, including an English language edition. The lead prosecuting attorney at the Khabarovsk trial was Lev Smirnov, who had been one of the top Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials. The Japanese doctors and army commanders who had perpetrated the Unit 731 experiments received sentences from the Khabarovsk court ranging from two to 25 years in a Siberian labor camp. The Americans refused to acknowledge the trials, branding them communist propaganda. After World War II, the Soviet Union built a biological weapons facility in Sverdlovsk using documentation captured from Unit 731 in Manchuria.
Official silence under Occupation
As above, under the American occupation the members of Unit 731 and other experimental units were allowed to go free. One graduate of Unit 1644, Masami Kitaoka, continued to do experiments on unwilling Japanese subjects from 1947 to 1956 while working for the National Institute of Health Sciences. He infected prisoners with rickettsia and mental health patients with typhus.
Post-Occupation Japanese media coverage and debate
Japanese discussions of Unit 731's activity began in the 1950s, after the end of the American occupation of Japan. In 1952, human experiments carried out in Nagoya City Pediatric Hospital, which resulted in one death, were publicly tied to former members of Unit 731. Later in that decade, journalists suspected that the murders attributed by the government to Sadamichi Hirasawa were actually carried out by members of Unit 731. In 1958, Japanese author Shusaku Endo published the book The Sea and Poison about human experimentation, which is thought to have been based on a real incident. The author Morimura Seiichi published the book The Devil's Gluttony (悪魔の飽食) in 1981, followed by The Devil's Gluttony: A Sequel in 1983. This purported to reveal the "true" operations of Unit 731, but actually confused them with that of Unit 100, and falsely used unrelated photos attributing them to Unit 731, which raised questions about its accuracy. Also in 1981 appeared the first direct testimony of human vivisection in China, by Ken Yuasa. Since then many more in-depth testimonies have appeared in Japanese. The 2001 documentary Japanese Devils was composed largely of interviews with 14 members of Unit 731 who had been taken as prisoners by China and later released.
Official government response in Japan
See also: List of war apology statements issued by Japan Since the end of the US Occupation, the Japanese government has repeatedly apologized for its prewar behavior in general, but specific apologies and indemnities are determined on the basis of bilateral determination that crimes occurred, which requires a high standard of evidence. Unit 731 presents a special problem, since unlike Nazi human experimentation which is extremely well documented, the activities of Unit 731 are known only from the testimonies of former unit members, and testimony cannot be employed to determine indemnity in this way. Japanese history textbooks usually contain references to Unit 731, but do not go into detail about allegations, in accordance with this principle. Saburo Ienaga's New History of Japan included a detailed description, based on officers' testimony. The Ministry for Education attempted to remove this passage from his textbook before it was taught in public schools, on the basis that the testimony was insufficient. The Supreme Court of Japan ruled in 1997 that the testimony was indeed sufficient and that requiring it to be removed was an illegal violation of freedom of speech. In 1997, the international lawyer Kōnen Tsuchiya filed a class action suit against the Japanese government demanding reparations for the actions of Unit 731, using evidence filed by Rikkyo University professor Makoto Ueda. All court levels found that the suit was baseless. No findings of fact were made about the existence of human experimentation, but the decision of the court was that reparations are determined by international treaties and not by local court cases. In October 2003, the Prime Minister of Japan responded to an inquiry from a member of the House of Representatives of Japan stating that, while the current Japanese government does not possess any records related to Unit 731, they recognize the gravity of the matter and will publicize any records that are located in the future.
Pacific War (World War II)
•Changde chemical weapon attack •Japanese war crimes •Kaimingjie germ weapon attack •Second Sino-Japanese War
Other human experimentation
•Nazi human experimentation •Josef Mengele •North Korean human experimentation •Tuskegee syphilis experiment •Unethical human experimentation in the United States •Dr. Sidney Gottlieb •Porton Down •Harold Blauer (victim) •Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments •Guatemala syphilis experiment
-One of Ishii's main supporters for the formation of Unit 731-During World War 1 he had joined a secret poison gas research committee- this research commitee was the one to create chlorine gas bombs for the use of poison gas at the second battle of Ypres. The bombs were used by Germany
People also ask
Why did Koizumi join a secret poison gas research committee?
Why did Ishii create a secret research group?
Why was Ishii arrested?
Did Japan disclose details of Chemical Warfare Division?
Dec 2, 2019 · He got support from Colonel Chikahiko Koizumi who was the army’s Surgeon General (later become Japanese Health Minister) and had secretly joined a poison gas research committee during...
