A secret Japanese army unit, dubbed Unit 371, sprayed Chinese villages with bacteria, spiked their wells with disease and laced their food with germs, perhaps killing up to a million Chinese in World War II, a new book says.
"There could be over 700,000 or even 1 million" lives lost to Japan's biowarfare program, Daniel Barenblatt, author of A Plague Upon Humanity, said in a recent interview.
The book, published in the US by HarperCollins, tracks Japan's development of biological weaponry from 1931 to 1945 and its use of these weapons -- bubonic plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera -- on civilians, many of them in China.
The biowarfare weapons were sprayed by airplanes on villages, or distributed in food, or passed through bacteria put in water wells. Some early weaponry involved dropping ceramic-shelled bombs filled with live flies and jellied cholera emulsion.
"Japan's biological warfare program in China was, as far as we know, the first use of scientifically organized germ warfare in history," said Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking, the acclaimed book about the brutal Japanese occupation of the eastern Chinese city in the late 1930s.
Barenblatt says the number of lives lost to biological warfare has been difficult to determine because the victims and their families, many of whom lived in remote villages in China, did not know why they became ill after being exposed to biological weapons unleashed by the Japanese army.
"These are poor people who are for the first time telling their stories. They, at first, thought it [their illnesses] was an act of nature. Many had no idea what was happening to them," said Barenblatt.
In addition to those who died as a direct result of diseases unleashed by Japanese scientists and the military, others suffered physical disfiguration and prolonged health problems.
Many of the biological weapons were used in an attempt to sap China's resistance to the Japanese invasion during the 1930s and 1940s, according to Barenblatt's book, which tells of World War II prisoners of war from Britain, the US and Australia who were also test subjects.
According to Barenblatt, the plague bacteria released then still lingers on in some animal populations today. "As far as I know there have not been major plague outbreaks in China in recent years. [But] It is still there ... rodents still test positive for antibodies to the bubonic plague," he said.
One of the largest promoters of Japan's biological warfare efforts was Shiro Ishii, a physician with a doctorate in microbiology from Kyoto Imperial University, according to Barenblatt.
An inventor of a water-purification system, Ishii eventually involved many Japanese universities in biowar research and much of this research was spearheaded by a Japanese army biowar unit known as Unit 731.
Initially based in Harbin, in China, Unit 731's main research center was moved southeast to a more remote locale in Beiyinhe, where the village of 300 homes and shops was burned down to make room for the confidential complex.
The biowar effort -- founded with explicit approval by Japan's Emperor Hirohito, himself a trained biologist -- involved testing on civilians. The elaborate prison facilities allowed scientists to closely track the progression of disease on humans, and live dissections allowed Japanese doctors to study how certain organs were affected.
Barenblatt's book also says the Japanese military considered targeting the US with bioweapons at the end of World War II. It tells of a plan in which a plane from a specially equipped submarine would spray San Diego and saboteurs were to land secretly to poison California's water supply.
Although the US was considered a target and US servicemen were tested on by Japanese scientists, many involved with development of the biowar program were not later convicted of war crimes.
Barenblatt notes that former US General Douglas MacArthur, in charge of post-war Japan, said the research uncovered by the Japanese scientists could be useful.
"Request for exemption [from prosecution] of Unit 731 members. Information about vivisection useful," MacArthur explained in a 1947 radio message to a combined military-State Department group in Washington that supervised Japan occupation policy.
"Details from this period were suppressed during the Cold War. The US government cut a secret deal with these Japanese doctors, giving them immunity from prosecution in exchange for their medical data," said Chang in an e-mail exchange.
Said Barenblatt, "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."
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
Years ago, I was thrilled when I came across a map online showing a fun weekend excursion: a long motorcycle ride into the mountains of Pingtung County (屏東) going almost up to the border with Taitung County (台東), followed by a short hike up to a mountain lake with the mysterious name of “Small Ghost Lake” (小鬼湖). I shared it with a more experienced hiking friend who then proceeded to laugh. Apparently, this road had been taken out by landslides long before and was never going to be fixed. Reaching the lake this way — or any way that would