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."
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
It’s fairly well established that strength training is helpful at every age: as well as building muscle, it strengthens tendons and ligaments, increases bone density and seems to have protective effects against everything from osteoporosis to dementia. But a new study based on data collected over two decades in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, suggests that another physical attribute might be just as important — and it’s one that declines even faster than strength as the years go by. The good news? It might also be less uncomfortable, and even slightly safer, to improve. Also, it will probably make you better
RSS