The main laboratory building at the Harbin remembrance site.
In the relative desolation of the outskirts of the north-eastern Chinese city of Harbin, I enter a large, snow-covered building. It looks more like a bomb-shelter than a museum. The name of its only exhibition catches my eye:
“The museum of evidence of crimes committed by Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army.”
It struck me as an odd name for a museum. Surely the evidence has been presented, the facts determined and the guilty punished? Sadly, there is a good reason why the artifacts are prepared more like a court brief than a historical exhibition.
But to understand the story, we need to step back in time to China at the beginning of the twentieth century.
A brief history
In 1912, China’s last emperor was overthrown. Thereafter internal fighting plagued the country.
In about 1932, Japan (which had occupied the Korean Peninsula since 1905) pushed north, occupying Chinese territory known as Manchuria.
In 1937, Japan invaded China’s east coast, seizing cities including Beijing and Shanghai.
In about 1932, Japan began experimenting with biological weaponry. In about 1938, they built test laboratories in occupied Manchuria, including a large facility in Harbin. Unit 731 and its director, Shirō Ishii, controlled these operations.
In December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. As the US entered the war, Unit 731 intensified its efforts to create devastating biological weaponry.
As Japan neared defeat Unit 731 destroyed evidence, demolished the laboratories and evacuated its personnel back to Japan.
The exhibits
The museum documents the war crimes committed against Chinese inhabitants during the experiments. It is gruesome. There are detailed accounts of the terror inflicted on hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians including the dissection of the living, the deliberate infection of deadly disease and freezing experiments. The extent and brutality of the crimes are overwhelming. I felt nauseous at many points.
The exhibits trace the chain of command responsibility and implicate the very top of the Japanese imperial government with knowledge and complicity in the crimes.
Japan is short of resources. If Japan wants to win, it can only rely on the germ warfare.
Unit 731 Director, Shirō Ishii.
A depiction of a dissection room at the Harbin laboratories.
A depiction of a freezing experiment, where the subject is frozen before being rapidly thawed by boiling water.
The post-war deal
A US military document proposing the immunity deal, May 1947.
But that brings me to one of the saddest aspects of this museum
– and the reason why it is named as it is.
When the war ended, Ishii and other Unit 731 members were arrested by US authorities in Japan. You might expect they would meet as similar fate as the war criminals at Nuremberg. But instead, Ishii cut a deal with the US. In exchange for providing the results of their brutal tests, Unit 731 members received immunity. No charges, no trial and no punishment.
A US microbiologist reported that wrote that the information obtained from Ishii’s experiments “could never have been obtained in the United States because of scruples attached to experiments on humans” and “the information was obtained fairly cheaply”.
One only needs to read some of the brief descriptions of some experiments realise the horror of this statement. The detailed accounts contained in the museum are too gruesome to repeat.
The stories told by the exhibition are not disputed, but they are rarely told. Doing deals with war criminals just doesn’t fit in well to the Hollywood narrative of good defeating
evil on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific theater.
So it is unsurprising that, in this nondescript building on the site of some of these atrocities, the people of Harbin have prepared this dossier of evidence to testify against those who committed horrific crimes against their city.
The exhibits of crime evidences of Unit 731 publically demonstrate the historical facts and crimes of Japanese biological warfare and Unit 731.
The objective of disclosing its war crimes, responsibility and post-war damages to a full extent is to arouse awareness and remembrance of the history, from which lessons can be learnt, and deep reflection can be made about the relationship between war and medical science, war and conscience, as well as war and peace. From there, we should also learn how to respect human rights and freedom, in pursuit of peace and a civilised world…..
With clear conscience we are obliged to defend peace and prevent this tragic chapter of history from repeating itself.
Concluding statement of the Unit 731 exhibition.
