Lab Report Describes Japanese Atrocities on POWs

In the most detailed accounting yet of chemical warfare and human experimentation by the Japanese army in the 1930s and ‘40s, scientists here Wednesday heard chilling descriptions of Chinese, Soviet and Korean prisoners of war being subjected to deliberate tetanus infection and exposure to mustard gas.

“This is the first time we have an actual laboratory report of an experiment that we can really examine,” Joseph C.Y. Chen, a physics professor and Chinese historian at UC San Diego, told colleagues at an international conference on the history of science in China at UCSD. “Such atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army can never be justified.”

Chen displayed a copy of a lab report that in beautifully lettered Japanese script documents the slow degeneration of human life as doctors watched. As many as 3,000 prisoners died in the experiments, historians believe.

The tetanus subjects--injected in the foot with the tetanus toxin--were monitored as they lost all ability to move their muscles and then died.

Others, placed in a field that was bombarded with mustard gas, were monitored as blisters developed all over them and as their bodily functions degenerated.

The experimental reports were discovered in a Tokyo bookstore in 1984 by Japanese researcher Takao Matsumura and reported at that time, Chen said. Chen and others, citing additional evidence dug up through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, Japanese documents and interviews with Japanese who helped with the experiments, indicated that Wednesday’s meeting was the fullest account ever presented on the subject in the United States.

The Japanese biological experiment program began in 1931 in Harbin in central Manchuria under the direction of Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, a surgeon, the conference was told by Kei-ichi Tsuneishi of Nagasaki University.

After the war, Ishii, who died several years ago, was questioned by U.S. occupation authorities but was never prosecuted. U.S. officials said there was inadequate evidence.

The Ishii organization remained centered at Harbin but expanded to five sites by 1938 to experiment with toxins and organisms responsible for tetanus, typhoid, salmonella, typhus, cholera, tuberculosis and other diseases, Tsuneishi said. The researchers gathered their data by subjecting prisoners of war to barbaric experiments, he said.

These experiments included injections of experimental toxins; freezing subjects’ arms in tests of how to best thaw flesh; shrapnel-induced gangrene; and immersion of a newborn in ice water to monitor the infant’s reaction to the cold, Tsuneishi said.

Historians estimate that 2,000 to 3,000 Chinese, Korean and Soviet war prisoners died in such experiments. Some were killed by the diseases they were given; others were killed to study their tissues as the diseases progressed.

There have been some allegations that U.S. prisoners of war were experimented on. But the Defense Department said it has no record of such atrocities.

Plague-Carrying Fleas

The work on prisoners resulted in airdrops of biological warfare agents, such as plague-carrying fleas in China.

That human experiments were done has been known for years, Tsuneishi said. But he and others are pressing their case that some now-prominent Japanese doctors, who had contracts to assist the Ishii group but did not experiment on humans themselves, should have been held responsible for the tests.

“Ethically, what was the difference between them and scientists who did human experiments in the Ishii unit?” Tsuneishi said. “Contract scientists with Ishii . . . were not criticized at all, but were respected . . . after the war.”

It wasn’t until 1984 that information first emerged about Japanese use of chemical warfare in China before and during World War II, said Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a history professor at Chou University in Tokyo.

Since then, Yoshimi has pieced together documentary and firsthand evidence of 19 separate occasions in which the Japanese used gases in human experiments or to win battles in China and Southeast Asia. The gases were used against Chinese, British, French and Indian troops. Gas for those attacks was produced at a plant on Okuno Island, built in 1928 and which by 1943 was producing more than 400 tons annually of fatal or incapacitating gas for the war effort, Yoshimi said.

Taiwan Atrocity

The first recorded use was in 1930 in Taiwan, when tear gas and asphyxiating phosgene gas were used against Chinese troops, he said.

Yoshimi said the Japanese army kept its gas use secret by adopting a policy to first incapacitate the enemy with gas, then annihilate everyone affected. For this purpose, it often used diphenylcyanicarsine, his records show. This incapacitates victims with extreme sneezing and vomiting for 30 to 40 minutes, during which time they were killed, he said.

The effort was accompanied by testing of the effect of various chemical weapons on prisoners, including the 1940 experiment that Chen spoke of, in which 16 prisoners were placed throughout an area bombed with mustard gas.

Tsuneishi and Yoshimi acknowledge that their efforts to illuminate the bacteriological and chemical gas warfare efforts are opposed by participants in the experiments and by the Japanese government. Yoshimi noted a recent controversy over a textbook account of the gas warfare, in which the Ministry of Education insisted that the gas usage during the war be described as “rare.”

John W. Powell of San Francisco, a longtime critic of U.S. actions on the Japanese biological warfare experiments, contends that Japanese who experimented on humans escaped prosecution as war criminals with U.S. complicity, even though some victims were U.S. prisoners of war.

Even as German officers were being prosecuted at Nuremberg for experimenting on humans, the United States chose to protect scientists and doctors involved in the Japanese research in return for acquiring the results of the Japanese experiments, charges Powell, the former editor of an English-language magazine in China.

Korean War Fever

He and Tsuneishi suggest that a virulent strain of hemorrhagic fever that occurred during the Korean War may have accidentally or deliberately been introduced by the United States using organisms acquired from the Japanese.

Lt. Col. Arnold Williams, chief of the Pentagon press office, denied all those allegations. He said the U.S. Army sent a team of investigators to Japan in 1947 to look at the biological warfare research results, and said the data “was available but there is no way of determining at this time if it was used.”

Edward Drea, acting chief of the research division of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, said it is undisputed that the Japanese conducted biological warfare experiments on humans. However, his agency had been unable to find evidence confirming or refuting the allegation that American POWs were used in the Japanese experiments. Neither has it been proven that the United States made any deals with the Japanese in return for the biological warfare data, he said.

“There’s a difference between allegations and factual evidence, and we just couldn’t find the factual evidence,” Drea said.

Osamu Imai, press secretary in the Japanese Embassy in Washington, said his government could not confirm or deny that biological warfare experiments occurred.

“The Japanese government has no record of the biological tests which are said to have been conducted in China,” Imai said. “All the records of the wartime have been destroyed, so we simply don’t know.”