A New Look at Japan's Unit 731 Wartime Atrocities and a U.S. Cover-Up

The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue. 44, No. 3, November 16, 2015 Didi Kirsten Tatlow Joy Chen is sitting on a bench outside a new museum in Harbin devoted to the medical atrocities committed by Japan’s Unit 731 in Manchuria during World War II trying to absorb what she learned inside: After the war the United States covered up Japan’s biological warfare research on humans allowing the perpetrators to escape punishment and to prosper. That is detailed prominently in exhibition notes and an audio guide in the black marble building that lies like a split box here in Pinging on the edge of Harbin in northeast China: “Out of considerations of its national security the U.S. decided not to prosecute the leader of Unit 731 and the criminals under him. They all escaped trial for war crimes.” Led by Dr.  Ishii Shiro Unit 731 bred plague microbes and deliberately infected thousands of men women and children. It conducted vivisection and frostbite and air pressure experiments, transfused prisoners with horse blood and studied the effect of weapons on of weapons on the body, among many things. Continue here