Opium, Heroin, Morphia - Inhuman WMD Drug Warfare
This WMD Drug Warfare is definitely the worst and only known war crime case of systematic massive drug doping of civilian against Humanity committed by a country in our Human History.
During the war, Japan made arrangement between the Yakuza (Japanese organized criminal organization), industrialists (including household names such as Mitsui and Suzuki) and the military produced the profitable Opium Monopoly Bureau, a legalized dope peddling business between the military government and the hoods. Japan used opiates to weaken Chinese resistance, and deliberately fostered drug addiction in the occupied areas of China.
Japan was aware of the social destruction that drugs cause, as well as the devastating role that British Opium had brought onto China. Therefore, following British Opium footstep, the Japanese distributed Opium, heroin and cocaine along the Chinese coast when they took control of Manchuria in 1931.
Japan transformed Manchuria into a vast poppy field. Mitsui then processed Manchurian opium into heroin. Japan was by far the largest Opium producer throughout the first half of the 20th century, initially in Korea and then in Manchuria.
By 1937, Japan and its gangster operated world's largest drug trafficking system and were responsible for 90 % of the world's illicit narcotics.
The WMD Drug Warefare earned Japan $300 million (equivalent of $3.5 billion in 2001) per year from the bankrupt China with its Drug strategy of nation against nation.
To encourage addiction and further enslave the Chinese people in the occupied area, Japanese wartime occupation authorities distributed as much Opium, heroin, and cocaine as possible. Japanese routinely used narcotics as payment for the labor. Heroin cigarettes were offered to children as young as ten. History professor Minser Searle Bates concluded that in Nanjing alone has about 50,000 drug addicted people, 1/8 of city population were using Opium and heroin.
Japan reinstated poppy farms. Koreans were put in charge of the illegal drug operations to ensure that no Japanese agents risked addiction.
During Japanese 36 years of brutal colonial governance of Korea, the Korean farmers were forced to grow opium for Japan's opium operations in China.
Since 1773, British Opium had brought onto China More than a century of devastating social destruction and economic disasters, contributed to the ruin of a once-great nation.
In the early 18th century, Britain was pushing Opium into China at an ever-increasing rate. By the early 19th century, Opium infected China so badly that addicts were found among the king's court, and by 1832 even the military was partially debilitated by Opium addiction. One city of Soochow alone had already 100,000 addicts.
In 1793, China's silver reserve was estimated at 70 million taels of silver (approximately 2.6 million kilograms), but by 1820 this had been reduced to only about 10 million taels.
Alarmed, Emperor of China declares war on Drugs. Emperor appointed Lin Tse-Hsu to suppress the Opium traffic. Twice Lin wrote Letter to Queen Victoria to seek her intercession, but to no avail. Finally resulted in 2 Opium Wars with Britain.
It was the First 2 Wars on drugs in our Human Histroy.
Weakened and corrupted by Opium, China was no match and defeated. China was forced to legalize the importation and sale of Opium by Britain.
For details, refer to History of the Opium Trade in China
Immediately, other Western countries, e.g. American and French traders followed to grab their share of fortune.
Nearly All American company followed to push Opium into China.
Writing home, an American named Warren Delano of Russell & Company, said he could not pretend to justify the opium trade on moral grounds, "but as a merchant I insist it has been fair, honorable and legitimate".
Warren Delano returned to America rich. He gave his daughter Sara in marriage to a wellborn neighbor, James Roosevelt, the father of Franklin Roosevelt.
To preserve the Truth of History, the U.S. President's biographer Geoffrey Ward rejects efforts of the Delano family to minimize Warren's Opium dark secret.
According to Gabriel G. Nahas "The Decline of Drugged Nations" By 1900, China had 90 Million addicts caused by British Opium.
China had become known as the "Sickman of the East".
17 Millions Chinese addicts died directly as a result of the British Opium.
In 1905, with the creation of lagest drug case in Human History, British finally realized that their More than a century India-China Opium Traffic is morally indefensible and proposed to control it. The Chinese unhesitatingly accepted. "It is hereby commanded," the emperial edict ran, "that within a period of ten years the evils arising from foreign and native opium be equally and completely eradicated."
In 1909, an International Conference was convened in Shanghai. All the major countries were invited. 13 states agreed to control the traffic in opium and its derivatives, particularly morphine. In 1911, they met again at the Hague. In 1920, the League of Nations had been established. In 1931, at the Geneva Convention, the Opium Advisory Committee also tried to regulate all production of dangerous drugs.
However, gradually it became clear, it was the great depression that had drastically reduced opium demand; and pushed down the price; and many governments were restricting the production of narcotics mainly in the hope of keeping the drug prices from falling further. When the drug traffic began to recover, the Convention was of little help in controlling it due to the huge profit from the illegal drugs.
Opium of illegal trade by the Britain, U.S., Japan and other Western countries, became one of the world's most valuable commodity at the expense of China.
The eminent Harvard historian J.K Fairbank described it as "The most long continued and systematic International Crime of modern times" - 150 years of crime against China.
With Mussolini leaving the League, Hitler ignoring it, the Japanese defied it by occupying northern China in 1931 and declared Manchuria was to be independent from China as "Manchukuo" puppet state in 1932, then set up its Manchukuo Opium Monopoly only to follow the British Opium pattern.
Although Japan is a signatory to the agreement which forbids the import into China of morphia or of any appliances used in its manufacture or application. Since Morphia no longer can be purchased in Europe, the seat of industry has been transferred to Japan, and morphia is now manufactured by the Japanese themselves. Literally, tens of millions of yen are transferred annually from China to Japan for the payment of Japanese morphia.
Through Dairen, morphia circulates throughout Manchuria and the province adjoining; through Tsingtao, morphia is distributed over Shantung province, Anhui, and Kiangsu, while from Taiwan morphia is carried with opium and other contraband by motor-driven fishing boats to some point on the mainland China, from which it is distributed throughout the province of Fukien and the north of Kuangtung. Everywhere it is sold by Japanese under the extra-territorial protection."
For details, refer to Japan's Opium Monopoly - Japan as an Opium Distributor in China.
In 1935, Peter Fleming visited Manchukuo for The Times to determine the question, "Is the monopoly a crusade or a racket ?". On the evidence, he decided, it was clearly a racket. In Manchukuo, Japanese open the "Opium Dens" or "Opium Divans" to all, even teenagers; consumption was increasing; and the monopoly was already making huge profits as the Japanese authorities cynically acknowledged, by imprinting a flowering poppy on their Manchukuo coins.
The WMD Opium Warfare was conducted with full approval from Tokyo as a state policy, under the directives of an official Japanese umbrella organization, the China Affairs Board, run by Prince Konoye.
The huge profit from the addictive WMD Drug Warfare were used to finance Japanese war machine with the creation of millions of Chinese drug addicts.
Unit 731, 100 - Inhuman WMD Biological Warfare
This WMD Biological Warfare is definitely the worst crime case of systematic biological massacre against Humanity committed by a country in our Human History.
"The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle." recalled the old former medical assistant of a Japanese Army unit in China in World War II, "But when I picked up the scalpel that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped." The former medical assistant who insisted on anonymity, explained the reason for the vivisection. The Chinese prisoner had been deliberately infected with the plague as part of a research project.
Imperial Japan's biological killing fields are a lost chapter of history that the full horror of which is only recently been exposed and understood in all its enormity.
Japan set up Headquarters of Unit 731 in Ping Fan near Harbin and Unit 100 in ChangChun, and Mukden, now called SunYang, in China to develop plague bombs for use in WWII. The base was disguised as Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit. The complex in Ping Fan was completed in 1939, contained more than 150 buildings, including 2 secret prisons and 3 crematoria, and was the largest WMD Biological Weapon research center in the world.
After infecting him, the researchers decided to cut him open alive, tear him apart, organ by organ, to see what the disease does to a man's inside. Often no anesthetic was used, he said, out of concern that it might have an effect on the results.
From July 1993 to Dec. 1994, the "Unit 731 Exhibition" toured Japan and presented at 61 locations over the course of one and half year. It had sent shockwaves throughout Japan. Hal Gold had collected many testimonies in his book "Unit 731: Testimony; Japan's Wartime Human Experimentation and the Post-War Cover-Up". One of the testimonies was provided by an aged former Japanese doctor Kurumizawa Masakuni :
The Chinese woman victim had regained her consciousness while being vivisected alive.
" She opened her eyes. "
" And then ? "
" She hollered. "
" What did she say ? "
Kurumizawa could not answer, then began weeping feebly and murmured,
" I don't want to think about it again. "
The interviewee apologized, waited a few seconds, and tried again for an answer.
He gave it through sobs.
" She said, "It's all right to kill me, but please spare my child's life."
Japanese Dr. Kanisawa testified in NBC Dateline "Factory of Death: Unit 731" on Aug. 15, 1995, the live un-anesthetized dissection was a routine common practice in all units.
"The 1st time, I was very hesitant to do what I was told to do. The 2nd time, you get used to it. The 3rd time, you more or less volunteered."
Yoshio Shinozuka, a former member of Unit 731 said "The first time, my legs were shaking so badly I could hardly stand up". He knew the person on the operating table, " At the vivisection, I could not meet his eyes because of the hate he had in his glare at me."
"We called the victims ‘logs’," he said, "We didn’t want to think of them as people. We didn’t want to admit that we were taking lives. So we convinced ourselves that what we were doing was like cutting down a tree. When you see someone in that state, you just can’t move. Your mind goes blank. The fear is overwhelming." said Yoshio.
The research program was one of the great secrets of Japan during and after World War II : a vast project to develop weapons of WMD Biological Warfare including following deadly diseases :
Bubonic Plague, Anthrax (including inhalation, skin and gastrointestinal types), Smallpox, Typhoid, Paratyphoid A and B, Tularemia, Cholera, Epidemic Hemorrhagic Fever, Syphilis, Aerosols, Botulism, Brucellosis, Dysentery, Tetanus, Glanders, Tuberculosis, Yellow fever, Typhus, Tularemia, Gas Gangrene, Scarlet fever, Songo, Diphtheria, Brysipelas, Selmonella, Venereal Diseases, Infectious Jaundice, Undulant Fever, Epidemic Cerebrospinal Meningitis, Tick Encephalitis, Plant diseases for crop destruction, and a Dozen other pathogens
Unit 731 & Unit 100 were comprised of over 3,000 researchers and technicians. It was a gigantic research center focused on WMD Biological Weapons - the world's most technically advanced at the time, used human as the guinea pigs, known as marutas (logs). The Japanese told the locals that the facilities were lumber mills.
The Ping Fan facility alone could monthly "manufacture as much as 300 kg of plague bacteria... 500-600 kg of anthrax germs, 800-900 kg typhoid, paratyphoid, or dysentery germs, or as much as 1000 kg of cholera germs." If several different diseases were manufactured simultaneously, then the total production of pathogens could be many times higher.
A former member of Unit 731 testified that "to eliminate any chance of leaking out the secret of construction of the 'Square Buildings' by the laborers, they are all sent to special prison and used as the first batch of test objects."
More than 10,000 Chinese, Korean and Russian PoWs were slaughtered in these biological experiments.
The vivisection was routinely used for practicing various kinds of surgery says Dr. Ken Yuasa, a former Japanese doctor working in China during the War. First an appendectomy, then an amputation of an arm and finally a tracheotomy. When they finished practicing, they killed the victim with an injection. "I was evil. I was a devil," Dr. Ken Yuasa says sadly. "We all were." Morimura Seiichi describes in explicit details of vivisection in his book "The Devouring Monster".
Medical researchers also locked up diseased prisoners with healthy ones, to see how readily various diseases would spread.
To determine how much pressure the body can withstand, some were put inside a pressure chamber would suffer terrible agony before their eyes pop out from their sockets and blood forced out through their skin.
Marutas were denied food or water to determine the maximum length of survival, or mummified alive in total dehydration experiments. Some were put into hot water and gradually increase the temperature to study degree of burns and the relationship between temperature and survival.
To determine the treatment of frostbite, prisoners were taken outside in freezing weather and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water until frozen solid. The arm was later amputated, the doctors would repeat the process on the victim's upper arm to the shoulder. After both arms were gone, the doctors moved on to the legs until only a head and torso remained. The victim was then used for plague and pathogens experiments.
Victims were burned with flamethrowers, blown up with shrapnel, bombarded with lethal doses of X-ray, spun to death in centriguges, injected with animal blood, air bubbles, exposure to syphilis, surgical removal of stomachs with the esophagus then attached to the intestines, amputation of arms and reattachment on the opposite side, gassed to death in chambers .......
The doctors experimented on children and babies, even three-day-old baby measuring the temperature with a needle stuck inside the infant's middle finger to keep it straight to prevent the baby's hand clenching into a fist.
Victims were often taken to a proving ground called Anda, where they were tied to stakes and bombarded with test weapons to see how effective the new technologies were. Planes sprayed the zone with a plague culture or dropped bombs with plague-infected fleas to see how many people would die.
White-coated Japanese medics claiming to be from a government epidemic-prevention unit would arrive saying that they were there to implement hygiene measures or to administer vaccinations. After they left, the villages would become sick.
The Japanese army regularly conducted "Field Tests". Planes dropped plague-infected fleas over Ningbo in eastern China and over Changde in north-central China.
Japanese troops dropped cholera and typhoid cultures in water reservoirs, wells and ponds.
Cottony material and feathers coated with anthrax bacteria were used to spread the disease in an airborne manner, as such fibers had been found to be effective in keeping the bacteria alive long enough to reach the intended human victims.
Witnesses recall watching Japanese airplanes dropping a mixture of wheat, millet, soy beans, rice, cotton fibers, paper and fabric cuttings, aerial spraying pathogens over the cities . They all had been coated with the biological organism or with fleas and brought the germs to people.
Japanese distributed infected food, cakes, drink, clothes and children's candies to the locals.
The same mass infections were being repeated all over China, except in Tibet, Qinghai and Xinjiang.
"Glanders was a disease first found in horses, and it could attack human beings," said Furmanski. Human beings' legs are most affected by the disease. "Only one out of 20 people with the disease could survive.
Medical records showed that glanders had virtually been wiped out in 1906, but new cases suddently broke out in the 1940s during WWII in China."
Apr 18, 1942 U.S. shocked Japan with its daring Tokyo Raid or the Doolittle Raid. Led by Jimmy Doolittle, 16 B-25 bombers broke through Japanese defenses and dropped bombs in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka-Kobe, and Nagoya. It was a one-way mission. The planes continued west to the airfield at Chuchow, China. Short of the fuel, most of planes crashed or were ditched over China. Local Chinese hid U.S. survivors and escorted them to safety.
The dramatic Tokyo Raid stunned Japan with the -- True meaning of War.
Enraged Japanese army launched Operation Sei-Go to secure airfields and punish Chinese villager for helping US airmen.
Japanese planes had more than 600 air raids on towns and villages of East China. Japanese burnt to the ground those villages through which the airmen had passed.
"They killed my 3 sons," related one aged Chinese man. "They killed my wife. They drowned my grandchildren in the well."
Catching a villager who had sheltered an American pilot, Japanese soldiers wrapped him in a kerosene-soaked blanket, then forced his wife to set it afire.
It was estimated about 250,000 Chinese civilians were murdered in the revenge.
Japanese showered 7 WMD Biological pathogens on Zhejiang province to retaliate the Doolittle Tokyo Raid.
Even today, one hard-hit village in Zhejiang still bears the nickname "Rotten-Leg Village" because so many older residents are scarred by glanders from the 1942 attacks. Their flesh are still rotten and have not been healed since they were attacked - they have been suffering for more than 60 years now.
Sheldon H. Harris, a historian at California State University and author of the book, "Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover-up" stressed that "My calculation, which is very conservative, and based on incomplete sources as the major archives are still closed, is that 10,000 to 12,000 human beings were exterminated in lab experiments".
Outside the 731 prisons, the "Field Tests" were carried out all over China except in Tibet, Qinghai and Xinjiang.
Scholars believe that the toll from Japanese-seeded cholera epidemics in the southern province of Yunnan alone may reach the staggering figure of 200,000 killed in May 1942.
3 months later, another 200,000 die in Shandong province as a result of Unit 731’s germ warfare.
In the Zhejiang province city of Quzhou alone, over 50,000 perished from bubonic plague and cholera .............
As the war was ending, Japanese purposely released all the plague-infected animals. The Northeastern China immediately became a disaster area and caused outbreaks of plague that killed at least another 30,000 people from 1946 - 1948.
It is also called by some as the Asian Auschwitz of Unit 731.
In 1987, based on first-hand reports of the atrocities, filmmaker T.F. Mou (sometimes referred to as T.F. Mous) is probably best known as the director of the Man Behind the Sun (or Black Sun 731). He followed up later with another travelogue of Japanese war atrocities: Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre.
"There could be over 700,000 or even 1,000,000" lives lost to Japan's biowarfare program" said Daniel Barenblatt, author of new book A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation.
These crimes are more than parallel to the coeval work of Joseph Mengele and the Nazi doctors.
Japanese military scientists killed 12 times the number of civilians as did the Nazi's Angel of Death - Dr. Josef Mengele.
Nazi doctors were held accountable for their crimes in the famous 1947 "Nuremberg Doctors Trials", but there were NO comparable "Japanese Doctors Trials".
The research was kept secret after the war in part because the U.S. granted immunity from war crimes prosecution to the Japanese doctors in exchange for their data and helped covering up the human experiment - An act utterly ignoring international laws and against Humanity.
On May 6 1947, in a radio message to Washington, MacArthur urged the combined US military and State Department group which supervised occupation policy in Japan to give "In Writing" immunity to Ishii and all others involved in the Japanese Germ Warfare and Human experiments.
On Dec 27 1949, MacArthur’s Headquarters announced to the world "that the Japanese had done some experimentation with animals, but that there was no evidence they ever had used human beings."
NGO The Sunshine Project has discovered that even today US is still actively developing Biological and Chemical Weapon. On 24 Sept. 2002 Sunshine Project provided evidence for US Military Secret Chemical Weapons Program violating international law.
U.S. itself in 1943 also set up a major Biological Warfare program with 3,500 people at Camp Detrick, now Fort Detrick, in Frederic, MD. Instead of putting the ringleaders on trial, U.S. gave them stipends to gain some advantages in the WMD Biological Weapon.
On Aug. 13, 1985, British Independent Televison broadcast a documentary "Unit 731 - Did the Emperor Know ? ". It was producted by Peter Williams and David Wallace after years research, hinted broadly that Emperor Hirohito was aware of the human experiments. There was also an interview with retired Lt. Col. Murray Sanders, the first US investigator into Unit 731. Sanders claimed that Gen. Douglas MacArthur authorized him to make a deal with the Japanese if they cooperated with US Biological Warfare scientists.
The producers even sent a copy of the documentary film to the Japanese officials in London.
Murray Sanders was also interviewed by NBC Dateline "Factory of Death: Unit 731" on Aug. 15, 1995 said "It was a mistake for the criminal Japanese to have been pardoned."
William and Wallace also published the book " Unit 731: The Japanese Army's Secret of Secrets". For some reason, a chapter was omitted from the American edition. The chapter was titled " Korea War". They examined evidences from the International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and supported the theory of US-Japanese culpability of using Unit 731's germ techniques in Korean War.
The same conclusion was also reached by Professor Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, author of 1998 book "The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the early cold war and Korea", that "United States had an operational biological weapons system, and that it was employed in the Korea War."
Takai Matsumura, Japanese historian and economist at Tokyo's Keio University, said Japanese WMD Biological Warfare experiments were conducted in at least 10 other cities in China, including Hailar, Harbin, ChangChun, SunYang, Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, as well as Singapore, Burma, Rangoon, Bangkok, possibly in Manila, East Indies.
Bio-Warfare Killing Place - Japanese WMD Bio-Warfare Unit:
Beijing - Unit 1855, Nanjing - Tama Unit 1644, Harbin - Unit 731, ChangChun - Unit 100, SunYang (Mukden) - Unit 100, Hailar - Unit 2646 (Unit 80), Shanghai - Unit ?, Guangzhou (Canton) - Nami Unit 8604, Singapore - Oka Unit 9420, Burma - Unit ?, Rangoon - Unit ?, Bangkok - Unit ?, Manila - Unit ?, East Indies - Unit ?
There were minimum 26 known Japan's killing laboratories in China.
U.S. thundering silence on this issue has allowed the Japanese Government to maintain that there is not enough evidence to prove that the Chinese are telling the truth. When Japanese journalists and academics have stumbled over crucial validating evidence in government archives, the material has been confiscated and re-classified.
However, 2 declassified U.S. government documents, recently found in the U.S. National Archives by professor Keiichi Tsuneishi at Kanagawa University and an expert on WMD Biological and Chemical Weapons, have clearly showed that the U.S. provided money, food, gifts, entertainment and other kinds of rewards to the former Unit 731 members, even 2 years after the end of WWII to obtain data on human experiments conducted in China, according to the report.
When neither Japan nor U.S. are prepared to admit to either the crimes or cover-up, a small group of conscientious Japanese human rights activists, doctors, lawyers and former soldiers formed an un-precedented alliance with the Chinese.
Senior Japanese lawyers are acting for the Chinese, among them Tsuchiya Koken, the former president of the Japanese Lawyers Association. Few old Japanese soldiers who worked on the biological warfare programme have also come forward to give evidence. Their stance exposes themselves to abuse at home and accusations from ultra-nationalists that they are traitors.
"The brutality my parents generation committed in the name of war has to be resolved and addressed by my generation" said Keichiro Ichinose, one of the Japanese lawyers.
In June 1996, they formed the Association to Reveal the Historical Fact of Germ Warfare by the Japanese Armed Forces.
In 1997, 108 survivors and family members, including Wu Shi-Gen, filed a lawsuit against the Japanese Government demanding apology and 10 million yen compensation per victim of biological weapons and acts of brutality. The thousands of victims included 2,100 civilians, whose personal details have been verified in China.
In October 1940, Japanese warplanes that had passed over Wu Shi-Gen's village in Quzhou, southern China, but the bombs dropped did not explode. From them poured a mixture of rice and wheat covered with fleas. Few days later, many villagers were struck down by sickness. His 9 year old brother had bubonic plague.
It is an agonising disease glands swell to the size of grapefruit, limbs fill with fluid and whole areas of flesh turn deep purple. Eventually, his brother died screaming. The plague also killed his 2-year-old sister. His father was also bayoneted to death by a Japanese soldier.
Wang Xuan, whose uncle was killed by the plague, after 8 years relentless fight with the Japanese Government has finally succeeded in making her voice heard around the world. Without any government support, she had to pay out of her own pocket for the investigation. Her endeavours have drawn attention from media and experts both at home and abroad.
Her devotion to Exposing Japan's Germ Warfare, is described by some as the Portrait of a Heroine: Shouting the pain from Japan's Germ Attacks, "If we wait for governments to settle this matter, we will die and the Truth will never come out." She was interviewed by PBS and BBC for their documentary films, including: " Unit 731: Nightmare in Manchuria " , " Rotten Foot Village " and the most recent " Avoiding Armageddon".
She used to live in rural village called Yiwu on China's east coast. She shows visitors the Tragedy Pavilion which lists 1,500 plague victims, and describes how Unit 731 dropped plague-infected fleas from aircraft and killed 20 villagers a day at one point in 1942. She then leads visitors through the gray-brick Buddhist temple where the Japanese performed autopsies to gauge the impact of their biological tests.
Wang Xuan wants Japan to apologise and make a compensatory payment to the victims. " Sorry is Not Enough", she says.
For 63 years, Mr. Chen Chong Wen has had to change the bandages daily on his leg infected by “rotten leg disease" known as glanders. His mother was also infected. And not too long after her heel rotted off, and died in terrible pain. With a pained expression on his face, he sobbed loudly, "I don't want anything else. I just want the wound to close. That’s the only thing I want."
Wang Xuan has assembled 180 Chinese victims and is now suing Japan, charging that Japan had spread bubonic plague and other diseases in China during WWII. However, in 2002, Tokyo District Court rejected their claim for an apology and compensation.
Eisuke Matsui, Japanese Professor of radiology at Gifu University school of Medicine, said he was compelled to uncover Japan's germ warfare in order to educate the young generation of Japan.
Japanese military training leader of Unit 731, Tomobuchi testifed in NBC Dateline Aug. 15, 1995 "Factory of Death: Unit 731" that he participated in July 1945, in training kamikaze pilots for "Sakura at Night" (flowers at night), a secret military plan to use five submarines, each carrying few small aircraft to the California coast where they would attack San Diego with "plague bombs" full of infected fleas.
"They were logs to me," said Toshimi Mizobuchi remorselessly, former Unit 731 member and now a real estate manager living outside the Japanese city of Kobe, "Logs were not considered to be human. They were either spies or conspirators." As such, he said, "they were already dead. So now they die a second time. We just executed a death sentence." He said reunion for the several hundred veterans of Unit 731 was held almost every year. He had organized one of the reunion.
As the war was ending, Japan waited and intended to use plague germs if American had landed on Okinawa. Ironically, Okinawa themselves never knew the plan until Jan. 1994 when the Unit 731 Exhibition opened there. Ito Kageaki recalled, " Okinawa could be thrown away if Japan could gain some military advantage." One local said, "This makes the sacrifices in the Okinawa Battle even more pitiful."
Okinawa Battle had killed approx. 100,000 Japanese soldiers (including local Okinawa conscripts), 12,000 US soldiers, and 100,000 - 150,000 Okinawans civilians. About 1/3 of the population of island were killed. Total death in the Battle of Okinawa is more than the Atomic Bombs of Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined.
An military order was also issued by the Japanese commander of the 32nd Army Headquarters: "Only standard Japanese is to be spoken. Anyone speaking the Okinawan dialect is to be executed as a spy." The Okinawan culture were oppressed and people were forced into the war by Japan.
Japanese historian Ishihara Masaie has pointed out the following factors contributing to the unusual high Okinawa civilian deaths by Japanese Army :
1. Okinawa civilians were tortured and killed as spies by Japanese.
2. Okinawa civilians were forced or made believed into "Group Suicides" (shûdan jiketsu). They were brain-washed and believed they would be tortured, raped and killed if fall into the hands of enemy. They either took their own lives directly with the distributed hand grenades, cyanide, jumped off the Suicide Cliff, or were killed by family member, close relative or friend as part of "Group Suicides".
It was for this reason that Japanese historian Ienaga Saburo argued that the large number of "Group Suicides" should also be included in the number of Okinawa civilians killed by the Japanese Army.
Kinjo Shigeaki, an Okinawa boy who had just turned 16 at war time, describes a typical scene in the book "Japan at War: An Oral History". He described a man "had that stick in his hands, he turned into a madman. Striking his wife and children over and over again, bludgeoning them to death. That was the beginning of the tragedy I saw. As if by a chain reaction, it spread from one family to the next. We all must die that way. Everyone seemed to think so. People began to raise their hands against their loved ones......."
"My memory tells me the first one we laid hands on was Mother. Those who had blades, or scythes, cut their wrists or severed arteries in their necks. Be we didn't do it that way. We might have used a string. When we raised our hands against the mother who bore us, we wailed in our grief. I remember that. In the end we must have used stones. To the head. We took care of mother that way. Then my brother and I turned on our younger sister. Hell engulfed us there........"
When the Battle of Okinawa was ending, no wonder the surrender of large numbers of Japanese soldiers was so shocking to the Okinawa civilians in disbelief.
3. Okinawa civilians were driven out of their shelters by Japanese army.
4. Okinawa civilians were robbed of their food by Japanese army.
5. Japanese soldiers poisoned, stabbed, or strangled many small Okinawa children to death to prevent their noise of alerting US forces to their locations. Japanese soldier often pointed rifle at Okinawan mother and ordered her to kill her baby.
6. Okinawa civilians were forced evacuations to malaria-infested areas by Japanese.
7. Japanese moved their military command posts to areas occupied by the Okinawa civilian evacuees.
In 1981, an article Japan's Biological Weapons: 1930-1945 A Hidden Chapter in History published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had drawn much wider public attention to the Japanese inhuman atrocities. In the beginning of the article, it said,
"When this story first reached the Bulletin, our reaction was horrified disbelief. I think all of us hoped that it was not true. Unfortunately, subsequent research shows that it is all too true. In order to verify the facts set forth here we enlisted the help of a number of distinguished scientists and historians......."
The article continues, ""Any reader with a sense of justice and decency will be nauseated, not only by these atrocities, but equally so by the reaction of the U.S...... By acquiring "at a fraction of the original cost" the "invaluable" results of the Japanese experiments, have we not put ourselves on the same level as the Japanese experimenters ?......."
In Oct. 1999, in a Letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein for the Bill S.9102 , i.e. the Disclosure Act of Japanese War Crime Documents, History Professor Sheldon H. Harris of California State University emphatically stated in his letter that :
The ""sensitive" documents as defined by archivists and FOIA officers are at the moment being destroyed...... Three examples of this wanton destruction......" by U.S.
1. "In 1991, the Librarian at Dugway Proving Grounds, Dugway, Utah, denied me access to the archives at the facility. It was only through the intervention of then U.S. Representative Wayne Owens, Dem., Utah, that I was given permission to visit the facility. I was not shown all the holdings relating to Japanese medical experiments, but the little I was permitted to examine revealed a great deal of information about medical war crimes. Sometimes after my visit, a person with intimate knowledge of Dugway's operations, "informed me that "sensitive" documents were destroyed there as a direct result of my research in their library."
2. "I conducted much of my American research at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. The Public Information Officer there was extremely helpful to me. Two weeks ago I telephoned Detrick, was informed that the PIO had retired last May. I spoke with the new PIO, who told me that Detrick no longer would discuss past research activities, but would disclose information only on current projects. Later that day I telephoned the retired PIO at his home. He "informed me that upon retiring he was told to "get rid of that stuff", meaning incriminating documents relating to Japanese medical war crimes. Detrick no longer is a viable research center for historians."
3. "Within the past 2 weeks, "I was informed that the Pentagon, for "space reasons", decided to rid itself of all biological warfare documents in its holdings prior to 1949. The date is important, because all war crimes trials against accused Japanese war criminals were terminated by 1949. Thus, current Pentagon materials could not implicate alleged Japanese war criminals. Fortunately, a private research facility in Washington volunteered to retrieve the documents in question. This research facility now holds the documents, is currently cataloguing them (estimated completion time, at least twelve months), and is guarding the documents under "tight security".
"After 60 years, we are still finding positive antibodies of bubonic plague in rats, dogs, cats and other animals. Every year a certain number of healthy people develop typhoid. Japan's Germ Warfare has left behind problems that still threaten our lives." said Qiu Mingxuan, a Chinese doctor, "Environmental pollution and damage to the ecosystem are very serious. The issue is still threatening people in China."
Fears of another outbreak still haunt the Chinese cities.
Daniel Barenblatt, author of new book "A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation", said in a recent interview, "There could be over 700,000 or even 1,000,000 lives lost to Japan’s Bio-Warfare programme.... The plague bacteria released then still lingers on in some animal populations today. It is still there.... rodents still test positive for antibodies to the bubonic plague .... What the US did in making the deal with top doctors is unconscionable. As far as we know, no one in the US government raised any more objection to it."
In Aug. 2002, after 27 court hearings since 1998, and with former Unit 731 Japanese soldiers including Yoshio Shinozuka, came forward as witnesses, Japanese court had no choice and finally recognized for the FIRST TIME that Japan had conducted WMD Biological Warfare in China. But the court rejected the demand for apology and compensation.
However, the Japanese government still refuses to recognize that its army ever waged WMD Biological Warfare saying lack of evidence.
Apr 19, 2005 Pointing to the Nazi Concentration Camp of Auschwitz in Poland and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan as precedents for UNESCO protection of war ruins, China would seek UNESCO World Heritage protection for the ruins of a Japanese WMD Biological Warfare center of Unit 731 in Harbin, including its laboratories, prisons and crematoria used for experiments on humans to develop WMD Biological Weapons.
Jul 10, 2005 Evidence of vast plant that Japan used PoWs as human guinea pigs in WMD Chemical and Biological Warfare found in remote grasslands of Inner Mongolia, China. "It covers an area of 40 square miles. It may be the largest and best-preserved gas experiment site in the world ..... Japan conducted WMD Chemical and WMD Germ Warfare in 2/3 of the country, but especially in the north, north-east and south of China," said Mr Jin Chengmin. "It should be qualified for World Heritage status. The ruins serve as a permanent reminder of the atrocities Japanese troops committed in China."