Essay On Unit 731

Unit 731

The phrase,”Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it” is quite ironic. It is usually misquoted and misattributed to Winston Churchill. In reality, this quote reads,”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”And is quoted from George Santayana, a poet. This shows us how fragmented our views on history can be. We always talk about the Holocaust but everyone seems to have forgotten about the atrocious acts of the Japanese unit 731, essentially the Japanese Auschwitz. This unit would kidnap men women and children for experimentation of weaponry so vile and cruel, that its use was banned in the war.

The story of unit 731 all starts with one man, Shiro Ishii. Ishii was a very smart man and gained entrance

into the Kyoto Imperial University. Ishii was a man who would tower over others and demand respect. At the university, he studied bacteriology. While he was studying at the university, a disease broke out he was very aggressive. The doctors in Japan could not figure out how to stop this but Ishii took a different approach and decided instead of fighting the disease to filter the water so that the parasite that caused the disease could not spread. Because of this successful experiment, Ishii gained much respect and acclaim from his colleagues. After this Ishii left Japan for two years studying all over the world.
After returning, Ishii would set up a lab in Manchuria funded by the Japanese government.

This lab would be built under the ruse of a logging camp and seemed rather harmless at the time. Little did the occupants know that the lab was made for testing biological weapons of war. The lab was divided into 8 different divisions, each hiding their own disgusting secret. Due to the experiments occurring secrecy was highly needed so the facility was surrounded by huge walls protected by high voltage wires. The first big test to occur by unit 731 was infecting fleas and water with disease and testing how effective they were at killing by using them on innocent Chinese citizens. These citizens were then eviscerated without anesthesia to see how the disease affected our

insides.
Due to the secretive nature of unit 731, no full list of experiments but we do have the testimonies of those who helped conduct these experiments.

These accounts are jarring look into these experiments.”The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down," recalled the 72-year-old farmer, then a medical assistant in a Japanese Army unit in China in World War II. "But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time." This experience was recounted by an anonymous surgeon who worked for unit 731. That story reveals how little the Japanese surgeons care for the lives of their victims. This vivisection was done without any anesthetic because of the fear that it might mess with the

results.
Unit 731 testing not only put prisoners through extensive pain, they also were not thought of and referred to as people. They were known as logs. The laboratories at the unit 731 headquarters contained jars of different body parts with labels such as American French and Chinese. Though they had some American specimens, most test subjects were Chinese, Korean, and Mongolian.
Of the many terrible experiments Unit 731 conducted, the one that stood out most was the field tests. In these tests, prisoners were brought to grounds called and. At this cursed place, the subjects were tied to stakes and exposed to the biological weapons the Japanese were testing. This includes but was not limited to plague bombs and poisonous gases.
Another terrible test conducted was the frostbite tests. In these tests, they would use a variety of subjects including babies to find out how to cure frostbite. These tests involved tying the prisoner down outside during the winter and pouring cold water over their arms and legs. This process was repeated until the limbs of the prisoners made thunk like sound when hit by a pole. The scientists would then try and use different methods to try and cure the frostbite.The saddest part is that this tragic loss of life lead to many advancements in frostbite prevention and cure.
To conclude, unit 731 was formed by Shiro Ishii and the Japanese army in 1931 as a biological and chemical weapons research facility in Manchuria China under the ruse that it was a logging camp. Local Chinese prisoners were then kidnapped and experimented on in many awful and grotesque ways. Unit 731 was essentially a Japanese Josef Mengele, experimenting on the prisoners in very unethical and cruel ways.