Posted on 02/27/2007 8:58:19 PM PST by zeller the zealot
For 62 years, Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he’d done, but to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he had experience such misery during the Second World War?
He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children, and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team. Last year, at the age of 83, he embarked on a gruelling pilgrimage to 88 Buddhist temples in Japan - after number 40 he collapsed from heat exhaustion, having permanently injured his knees. “My wife didn’t like me going back to the Philippines, she called me ’war crazy’,” said Mr Makino, a frailold man who lives alone in Hirakata near Osaka. “But she let me go anyway. Right up until she died three years ago, I never told her. But over time I think she realised.” Only in the twilight of his life, has Mr Makino begun to talk about the secret which he had carried.
In 1944, as a medical auxiliary in the Japanese Imperial Navy, he was stationed in the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. There he was party to one of the most notorious and poorly chronicled cruelties of the Japanese war effort - the medical dissection and murder of living prisoners of war.
Over the course of four months before the defeat of the Japanese forces in March 1945, Mr Makino cut open the bodies of ten Filipino prisoners, including two teenage girls. He amputated their limbs, and cut up and removed their healthy livers, kidneys, wombs and still beating hearts for no better reason than to improve his ....
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
One of my father's childhood friends was a Bataan Death March Survivor... I heard his stories as a kid, and I have never had any qualms about the use of nuclear weapons on Japan.
bttt
It is indeed ghastly, horrible.
It is not a hijack attempt to note that those war crimes are no more monstrous than what I'll call vivisection-and-vacuum, performed in Planned Parenthood 'clinics' every day here without parental approval, using taxpayer money.
Only the Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ will cleanse it.
Somebody get a rope.
The people who should have been sentenced and convicted were the American military and medical officials who granted the Japanese medics immunity from prosecution in exchange for the medical data obtained from such intentional vivisections, infections, and amputations.
Manny Klystron, Mountain View, CA
Manny, you're an idiot.
True that. We only gave Japanese and German scientists a clean slate and a new laboratory, Akira Makino wouldn't have rated that sort of treatment.
Mind you, it included the worst offenders of Unit 731...Japan has never truly apologised for the atroicities it and the rest of the IJA performed. Those guys were indeed spirit kin to Mengele.
Payment is still needed. I don't feel it for this man because at least he's trying to make amends for what he did although it will never be enough and I'd never trust myself in his company. I also lost relatives in the war though we were spared the letters and firsthand accounts you had.
Even though the worst perps are dead, I do want the Japanese to apologise properly - to us, Indonesia, Malaysia, the pacific islands they invaded, China, everywhere that suffered under their cruelties. Then they need to stop rewriting their textbooks. At that point I might believe they've moved on, but while their rightwing holds on and claws back negative references to the war from textbooks every year, I am not going to cut them any slack. At leadst the Germans haven't stopped apologising and axcctually matched it with enough physical gestures that I'm more inclined to believe they are sorry.
I believe I remember hearing that the Japanese who committed these atrocities were pardoned in exchange for the 'medical' information their experiments provided.
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