A Dead Zone’s History : Writer Details Cover-Up of Japan Germ Warfare Tests

A few months after Japan surrendered in World War II, an elaborate funeral was held in a village outside Tokyo to mark the death of a wealthy general who had supervised gruesome human experiments as part of the Japanese Army’s germ warfare program.

But Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii wasn’t dead, according to a new book by retired Cal State Northridge history professor Sheldon H. Harris. The funeral--complete with mourners, priests and burnt incense--was a ruse to throw American war crimes investigators off his trail, Harris writes.

Ishii eventually was found and provided American authorities with details of Japanese biological warfare tests in Manchuria that killed large numbers of Chinese. In exchange, U.S. officials agreed not to prosecute him for crimes against humanity.

In “Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover Up,” Harris writes that American officials struck a bargain with Ishii to avoid a public trial that would reveal details of Japanese germ experiments to the Soviets as the Cold War dawned.

After he came out of hiding, Ishii played a clever game with U.S. authorities, receiving them at his home dressed in his best kimono, releasing tantalizing bits of information as he held out for a written guarantee that he would not be prosecuted.

Wary of the political uproar that might ensue if the deal became public, the U.S. government covered it up for decades and even today continues to withhold information, according to Harris’ book.

Harris learned of the Japanese experiments while lecturing on American history at Chinese universities in 1984. A Chinese professor urged him to visit the remnants of a huge germ warfare plant outside the Manchurian city of Harbin that was run by Ishii’s dreaded Unit 731.

“I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I was very polite and said, ‘Sure. Be delighted to,’ ” said Harris, 65, sitting in the sun-dappled patio behind his Granada Hills home.

In 1989, he was researching in another Manchurian city, Changchun, when the Tian An Men Square massacre occurred in far-away Beijing. Pro-democracy activists clogged the streets of Changchun, making it impossible to reach the railway station. He finally was able to flee by hitching a ride on a plane chartered by some friendly Canadians.

“I can’t say it was a pleasant experience, but it was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my entire life, doing this book. The people I met, the places I went to. . . . I was riding camels in Inner Mongolia. That’s something not many people do, especially at my age,” said Harris, grinning.

Peppering the U.S. government with requests under the Freedom of Information Act, Harris obtained 1,000 pages of documents--many formerly classified--detailing how the U.S. handled Japanese germ scientists after the war. At one government office, he got some unexpected help when a bureaucrat plunked down a stack of papers that he hadn’t been aware of.

“He said, ‘You don’t know where you got this. When you get back to California, Xerox it and send it back,’ ” recalled Harris.

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Although American scientists at first thought that there was much to learn from the Japanese, they later concluded that the U.S. Army’s biological warfare program was far more advanced, Harris said. The Japanese never produced usable germ weapons of mass destruction, but U.S. forces were ready to manufacture enough bacteria bombs for large-scale attacks on Japan by the war’s end, he writes.

“The data Ishii and the others furnished the United States with were--at best--of minor significance,” he writes. “The cost to the United States in terms of honor and integrity appears to be high in comparison to the worth of the material it purchased from Ishii and the remaining BW (biological warfare) specialists.”

In recent years, U.S. officials have reluctantly confirmed giving immunity to Ishii, who died of throat cancer in 1956. But the Japanese government has never acknowledged that Unit 731 carried out experiments on live humans in Harbin and other Chinese cities during the 1930s and 1940s.

Harris’ book focuses on the brilliant but ruthless Ishii, a wealthy landowner’s son who became a doctor before joining the army in 1920.

Possessed of a booming voice and almost superhuman energy, Ishii was a relentless womanizer who often went on all-night drinking binges and prowled local geisha houses after a hard day’s work at an army hospital.

In the late 1920s, he became convinced that biological weapons offered Japan a particularly cheap and effective battlefield weapon, and set out to persuade his army superiors. In the prewar years, his efforts helped make Japan the world’s leader in germ warfare.

In 1932, after Japan had brutally occupied Manchuria in northern China, Ishii, then a major, erected a biological warfare station in the village of Beiyinhe, south of the bustling Manchurian metropolis of Harbin, according to Harris.

In later years, Ishii and his cohorts--many of whom became prominent scientists, academics and businessmen after the war--built several more germ warfare facilities throughout Manchuria, turning the region “into one huge biological warfare laboratory,” Harris writes.

By far the biggest was the Ping Fan complex, also south of Harbin. Its 76 buildings included laboratories, dormitories for civilian workers, barns for test animals, greenhouses and a special prison for human test subjects. Built on six square kilometers, it employed 3,000 Japanese doctors, technicians and soldiers and rivaled Auschwitz in size.

For pure grisliness, Ishii’s experiments were on a par with those of the infamous Nazi doctors, who performed horrific medical “tests” on Jews and other concentration-camp inmates, according to Harris.

Ping Fan prisoners--often Chinese guerrillas, criminals or ordinary citizens snatched off the streets of Harbin--were injected with plague, typhus, smallpox, cholera and other deadly diseases. They died in slow, feverish agony, with Japanese scientists observing them closely to see the exact doses needed to kill humans.

The local population was told that the vast death complex was actually a lumber mill. Among themselves, the Japanese mockingly referred to human test subjects as “ marutas ,” or logs.

While prisoners lived in terror, Ishii and his colleagues lived in relative luxury. They enjoyed swimming pools, a bar, gardens, a 1,000-seat auditorium, a Shinto temple, even a brothel. Ishii lived in a Harbin mansion, commuting to his death lab in a chauffeured limousine heavy with armor plate.

Besides killing captives at Ping Fan, the Japanese conducted “field tests” against both Chinese troops and civilians. Ishii and his operatives slipped into towns and villages, poisoning water wells and even feeding local children chocolates laced with anthrax, Harris writes.

Because many records were destroyed during and after the war, there is no reliable count of how many people died in Japanese germ warfare operations. But Harris estimates that the total was in the hundreds of thousands.

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Ishii and his underlings killed at least 12,000 prisoners at Ping Fan and other death factories, and probably far more, Harris writes. Tens of thousands more died in the field tests and in epidemics that erupted in Manchuria during and after the war.

Harris writes that Unit 731’s victims included Han Chinese, White Russian exiles, Harbin Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. But he casts doubt on the persistent rumor that Ishii experimented on American POWs, saying no U.S. servicemen interned at the big Mukden prison camp reported such treatment.

Ishii and others were able to freely kill human test subjects because “they knew their victims were inferior beings who were being sacrificed to a higher cause,” writes Harris. “The superior Japanese race would benefit immeasurably from the sacrifices of people who were, in general, of little value to mankind.”

Harris says that ironically, the American biological warfare program, begun only in 1943, was far superior to the Japanese. By 1945, the United States was preparing to produce 1 million small bombs laden with anthrax that could have been dropped on Japan.