The shameful and harrowing story Unit 731
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. And this is definitely the chipperest I'm going to sound for this episode right now. Yeah. Another joke-free edition. Yeah. Possibly. We're definitely hitting that. Should we COA? Oh, yeah. There's... Yeah. For sure. Please, go ahead. Okay. All right. I did laugh. I did laugh.

There are unspeakable atrocities that we will discuss of the horrors of, well, I was about to say the horrors of war, but it really are just the horrors of human experimentation during war. And so children should not listen to this. And people that are really haunted by that kind of thing should not listen to this.

Yeah, I mean, we can, it's not like there's spoilers or anything. We're going to talk about human vivisection, abuse of like children, women, the elderly, like it's as bad as humans can possibly do to other humans is what we're going to talk about today. So if that's not your bag, we will definitely not blame you for skipping this one.

That's right. But we do need to thank a listener who sent this one in. This came from, you know, I don't even know if I'm going to say her last name. Her name is Amy.

And Amy, you know who you are. And, you know, I'm glad you sent this my way because this is something I knew nothing about. And I think people, you know, part of the fabric of the show is teaching people some of the unspeakable things that have happened that you would not learn in school. And so Amy sent this in. So thank you, Amy. And we'll just forward any complaints to you. Yeah. Thank you, Amy. Yeah, exactly.

I had heard of Unit 731 before several times. Nothing. I had no idea the detail that I know now about them. But, you know, I was walking along like, we'll never talk about that. So thanks again, Amy. But I guess let's just start at the beginning. Let's give a little background because what we're talking about here is a detachment, I think an Imperial Army unit.

from Japan that started up in the 1930s and it committed medical atrocities, war crimes that actually rival, easily rival Joseph Mengele's hideous medical war crimes at Auschwitz death camp. Like the stuff that the Japanese essentially did during World War II to Chinese and Russian and to a lesser extent Mongolian war crimes.

civilians and then sometimes prisoners of war, including Americans, it's just, it's unspeakable. And we're going to try to speak it as best we can, but it doesn't make sense without a little bit of context. If you have a little bit of context, in my opinion, of where this evolved from, it doesn't excuse it, doesn't explain it. It just makes slightly more sense than the Japanese just suddenly did this horrible thing and now everything's back to normal.

Yeah. And just to add an additional comment to the sort of comparison to Nazi atrocities, certainly not in scale that was happening in Germany and Poland and elsewhere.

But as far as just the how reprehensible some of this stuff is, you know what I'm saying? No, no. This is a separate thing for sure. And there's no there's no comparison. It's this happened. This happened. It's just the reason I'm comparing the two is because most people walk around understanding that.

that the Nazis did these horrible atrocities. And what I'm trying to get across is that the Japanese did too during World War II. It's just for really specific reasons that the average person isn't walking around knowing about that, which we'll talk about later too. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So you promised talk of backstory and we'll get into that here because the backstory is starting sort of in the late 1800s.

The government of Japan was it sort of went through a movement where it was looking to build itself up into a superpower like, you know, just like Europe was just like the United States was. And a lot of this was tied up in just sort of modernizing the country, whether it was the military or how they functioned economically. And sort of this ultra nationalist movement grew up around all this.

Yeah. So you just said the key word here, ultra-nationalist, which is, I mean, nationalism is fervent to begin with. Ultra-nationalism reaches a fanatical level. And that's kind of this germ that began to infect Japanese society starting in the 20s or 30s. And the reason why is because Japan took a number of like kind of punches and was kind of down, both economically and economically.

as far as like cultural honor goes, like Japan helped the U S and UK win world war one, but we're left out of the table when the spoils of war were divided up. That was a big black guy in the national pride. The, um, the great depression, uh,

hit Japan disproportionately hard compared to some of the other countries outside of the U.S. There was just a lot of stuff that it was clear that the leaders of Japanese society weren't equipped to handle. And the worse it made Japan look to the Japanese, the more

The national pride felt it needed to be defended. And that's where that nationalism and then eventually ultra nationalism came from. And the reason that we're talking about this today is because it became a really thick component of the Japanese military, that ultra nationalist fanaticism.

Yeah, I mean, it can become a very and usually does become a very dangerous thing. Yes, everywhere, anywhere in all of history. Yeah, for sure. In the 1930s, there was a part of China and northeastern China, kind of near Korea and Russia and Mongolia called Manchuria, where Japan had a lot of people that were living there, had settled there. They had a lot of influence on that area.

The Chinese government did not like this, of course. They were in the middle of a civil war with the Nationalist, which was the ruling party at the time, the Nationalist government with Chiang Kai-shek. And then Mao Zedong's communists were trying to take control.

But they had a common enemy in Japan, and Japan was sort of encroaching on this area in northeastern China in the 30s. Yeah, and that ultra-nationalism, I said, was so thick in the Japanese military, it actually created almost like an additional brand.

especially for the Kwantung Army that had basically invaded Manchuria. They weren't following orders from the Japanese Imperial Army heads, the leaders of the actual military. They were kind of working on their own

their own to expand the empire and they were successful. So they were getting away with it. They were also getting away with it because they would assassinate you or they would stage a coup attempt. Like you did not mess with these people, even though they weren't the leaders, the leaders were afraid of like these middling officers who are actually these, these ultra national fanatics. So the upshot of all that, um, is that the,

Japan ended up controlling Manchuria in the 1930s and set up a puppet government there. And it was like a big first step toward expanding the empire. And then one other part of the backstory, and then I'll be quiet about the backstory, is that part of that ultra nationalism was a certain amount of genetic and cultural pride in Japan and the Japanese. And,

There's nothing wrong with having pride in your culture, but the problem is very often, especially in the context of nationalism or ultra-nationalism, means everybody else is inferior.

And so that kind of gave this ultra-nationalist detachment of the military carte blanche to mistreat anybody who wasn't Japanese, which included the Russians, Koreans, Mongolians, and Chinese that all kind of met in Manchuria, which was at the border of all of these countries, which is where the Japanese had taken over and set up this puppet government. Yeah. I mean, anytime you throw the word genetic in there, you're probably traveling down a bad road. Yeah.

You know, and Japan definitely saw themselves or at least a faction of Japan. I'm not going to say like everyone in the country, but this ultra nationalistic wing thought they were the superior Asian human being on planet Earth at the time. Yeah. And the ones who didn't think the same way were too scared to speak up or they were killed. Like they killed the prime minister, Chuck, the military.

Just killed the prime minister, assassinated him because he wasn't going along with their aims. Okay, so I lied. That was the end of the backstory. All right, so...

the puppet government was there in 1932 in Manchuria. The Chinese, like I said, did not love this. So they had a common enemy and got together to fight. And there was pretty much a full-scale war started, which started in 1937, that a lot of people are like, you know, you could really point to this as the very beginnings of what would be World War II if you want to get technical. And so this is just sort of what's going on

When Unit 731 is formed in 1936 under the command of General Shiro Ishii. I watched this. It was a pretty good documentary, actually. It was like an hour long on YouTube. I can't remember what it was called, but if you're looking for Unit 731 docs on YouTube, it's the one that's like an hour long on the nose and super professionally done. It's called There's Something Wrong with Aunt Shiro.

Was that it? No, no. I was referencing another horrible documentary called There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane. Not horrible, horrific. I think I've heard of that one, actually. It's tough. Yeah, we'll talk offline because I'm not sure I'm thinking of the right one. This is definitely the episode to bring it up in, though. I'll tell you that. Yeah. So, Ishii was a doctor in the Japanese army, was a part of that ultra-nationalist wing.

Before the war, he was interested in biological weapons and what that might offer the army. And supposedly as early as 1930, he was starting to do some human experimentation as a doctor, though, not as a general, correct? As both, I believe. He'd been a general for a while or at least a high-ranking military official for a while when he started. Okay.

So the reason that we talked so much about Manchuria a second ago is because Dr. General Ishii realized very quickly that even in ultra-nationalist Japan, people weren't super cool with unwilling human experimentation. Yeah. So he's kind of successively moved his operation further and further away from the prying eyes of everyday Japanese people. Yeah.

And ultimately ended up in Manchuria because it was so lawless as far as ethics and morals regarding civilian treatment and war crimes goes. It was the kind of place where you could set up a medical experimentation machine using unwilling participants. It was that kind of place. And it also had a steady supply of inferior human beings. I just made scare quotes for those of you who can't see me.

who were the Koreans and the Russians and the Chinese and the Mongolians who lived in the area and were just unfortunate to have lived in this area that Japan now controlled. Yeah, absolutely. So in 1932, Ishii became the head of the – and this was a new operation, but it was called the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory. This was at the Japanese Military Medical School in Tokyo. Mm-hmm.

And Unit 731 was known officially. We call it Unit 731 now for short, but it was the Kwantung Army's Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department or Manchu Detachment 731. But like I said, we call it Unit 731 now. And this was this was the main base of operations. It was a there were like eight village basically where they kicked all the villagers out and said, this is ours now.

They built, I mean, it was like a prison camp, basically. You know, it was surrounded by barbed wire. There were guard towers. No one was coming in or getting out of there without explicit permission. But some of the people invited in were doctors and nurses and engineers and pathologists and people that specialize in bacterial cultures and stuff like that. So they were just sort of staffing up with

you know, legitimate medical personnel because they were set to, and as you'll see, it was sort of like, hey, let's figure out anything we ever wanted to know about the human body and how it responds to anything you could throw at it from bullets to knives to anthrax. Right. And so they actually started out with a fairly legitimate mandate, which was

figure out how to essentially treat things like communicable diseases or things that soldiers, Japanese soldiers might find useful. Like, you know, if they were fighting in the Pacific theater, figure out how to treat malaria or something like that. But under the guidance of General Ishii, it became, they moved from witchcraft

willing, initially willing Japanese soldiers who signed consent waivers saying you can test on me to unwilling, unfortunate civilians. And there's a lot, as we'll see, there's a lot of

debate and discussion about what happened, when, who was involved. And if we were doing this podcast 20 years ago, we would be completely lost by this point. Totally. So much has come out that we essentially know exactly what happened. And one of the things that has really been established over the years is that awareness of Unit 731 and the unwilling medical experimentation war crimes it was carrying out went all the way to the top.

The emperor was involved. The emperor's family was involved. Prime Minister Tojo was involved. Everybody knew about this. It was incredibly well-funded, and it was a huge prong of the Japanese military. It was just also kept incredibly secret, too. Yeah, for sure. And when we say unwilling subjects...

because of where it was located, like we said, near Korea and Russia and Mongolia. Sometimes it were Russians and Koreans and Mongolians, but most of them were Chinese citizens. Some of them were criminals. Some of them were just communists that were arrested basically and rounded up. And they were brought in, like you said, sort of initially like, hey, let's see what happens.

Let's see what happens when you don't eat for a while. If our soldiers are out there and can't get their hands on food and water, like how long can humans go without food and water? Or what is this? What is malaria do? Like you were saying, like diseases they might encounter, right?

But it really morphed pretty quickly into, hey, and this might be a good time to break, but hey, I think we can develop biological weapons. So let's see how they react to the human body. Yeah. That's when it really took a terrible left turn. Yeah. All right. So we'll be right back. And it gets worse in Act 2. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

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And try HealthAid Kombucha today. Get it in 30 minutes or less on GoPuff. Okay, Chuck. So when we were last talking, the Unit 731 had started to veer off into developing biological weapons. Yeah.

And they did so apparently because in 1925, under the Geneva Convention, a bunch of countries outlawed biological weapons. And apparently that caught the attention of the Japanese who were like, wow, if it's worth outlawing, those things must really work at killing. So let's try those. It piqued their interest enough that they started a program. And so they developed a really extensive pathological development program.

Where they apparently could develop a trillion microorganisms every like few days. Like they just grew so many communicable diseases that I saw in some field tests, they would have 150 kilograms of it.

That's how much they could produce. And they were doing things like producing malaria, cholera, typhus, the plague. They were growing this stuff. And then they were testing it on those unfortunate, unwilling test subjects to see what happened. And that's where essentially the medical torture, the war crimes really began. Yeah. And if you want to see what happened to someone that was infected with typhus or cholera,

You don't just ask a bunch of questions and check vitals and say, how are you feeling? And we'll write it down. You mentioned vivisection earlier, and that's what would happen. Vivisection is the dissection of a live organ.

thing. So whether it's a frog in biology class or in this case a human being, it is a live human being in these cases being cut open and studied from the inside out. And a lot of times without anesthesia

I think they did use anesthesia for some stuff here and there. At least the documentary said they did. But a lot of times they didn't even use anesthesia when they would amputate someone's limb or take someone's kidney out to study it.

So on vivisection, Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times reporter, went to Japan in 1995 as some of this stuff was really coming out and talked to some people who were actually in Unit 731. And he actually interviewed a man who was a doctor at Unit 731 who had performed one of these anesthetized vivisections. And he quoted the guy in the article, if you want to hear it. It's

It's just insane that people have ever done this to other people. So what the guy said was that the, and I'm paraphrasing this first part, that when they brought the prisoner in, he knew that it was over for him, that his life, he was about to be executed, but he didn't know how. So he wasn't fighting along the way. He came in essentially willingly. But when they put him down on the examination table and a scalpel was produced, he started screaming.

And he said that this guy, this doctor who performed this said, quote, I cut him open from 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 he finally stopped. This is all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.

That happened. A guy did that to another guy. He killed him by performing surgery on him without anesthesia and opening his abdomen and removing the organs. Yeah. And this happened a lot at Unit 731. And we'll say that that part and...

Like the next probably five to seven minutes or we're going to kind of go through some of the worst of it. Yeah. So feel free to skip ahead. And then, you know, we'll talk about kind of ramifications and all that stuff. But yeah, just listen for the sound of one of us retching while the other one's talking. You know, we're still in that five to seven minute part. Yeah, exactly. So I mentioned amputations and stuff like that. Organ removal, right?

Boy, this one is tough. They had men that were infected with different venereal diseases like syphilis that were forced to rape women there to see how syphilis spreads. There were women who were raped and impregnated.

that had, you know, where the men had communicable diseases, like, you know, make her pregnant so we can see the effects on developing fetuses. Sometimes babies were born. Those babies were experimented on. Elderly people, you know, they wanted to get a range of not just what would this do to a Japanese soldier, but what would these weapons do to a range of humans, like from literal babies to elderly people. So that's what they did.

You want to take over? Sure. So some of the things in addition to studying what communicable diseases, the effects it had on the body, and that's actually the reason why they would give later on why they didn't use anesthesia sometimes. They were concerned that the anesthesia would affect the effects and that they wouldn't have like an actual picture of what was really going on in the body. So they just didn't anesthetize.

But they studied other things too, like what happens when we crush your limb? What happens if you are only allowed to drink seawater for several days? Like just imagine...

Like completely losing all of your morals and ethics, being a doctor and saying, like, what can I pursue here? What just crazy experiments can I come up with? And then actually carrying them out. And that's essentially what happened at Ping Fong. Yeah. What if you had a blood transfusion of cow's blood? Like, what would that do to a human being or a blood type that didn't match your own? What would that do to somebody?

There was one guy, he was a physiologist named Yoshimura Hisato that focused on frostbite. So they would, you know, purposely give people frostbite to see what happened to their body and their limbs.

Um, they did publish some of this stuff. I believe the second in command, uh, his name was, uh, Masaji Kitano said that, yeah, we published some of this stuff, but when we published it during the war, we said that we were using, you know, research monkeys and stuff like that. And certainly keeping all, you know, anything about humans a secret. Yeah. So it's not like they didn't realize that what they were doing was considered unethical and immoral. Yeah. They knew it. That's also why they kept the whole thing secret too. And yet they did it anyway. Yeah.

That frostbite work is very frequently cited as evidence that actual scientific findings came out of this because apparently before the way that they thought to revive a frostbitten limb was to rub it back into health. And they found that that actually makes it worse, that you want to dunk it in water that's between 100 and 122 degrees Fahrenheit. And so people are like, see, that's a scientific finding. It's weird. It's almost as if they're trying to

excuse it in some way, shape or form or say that it was in any way justified. And from what I can tell, that's the only one that anyone's actually able to point to as a scientific experiment that produced actual scientific findings that we weren't aware of before. Yeah, for sure. So not only were they like saying, you know, what kind of bomb can we make out of poison gas or a plague culture or, you know, something that has like infected people,

fleas, like animal fleas, as a payload to have the plague dropped on a town. But I mentioned earlier just regular

regular weapons guns and knives and stuff like let's just tie people up at a stake and shoot them with different things from different distances to see like how far the bullets travel what kind of wounds they would produce uh you know flamethrowers knives swords anything they could think of to just log sort of what the human body could take and what kind of effect it would have yeah

That area where you're talking about was a second kind of satellite site at a town called Anda. It's about 90 miles away from Harbin, which is where the Ping Fong complex was, right? And everything we're talking about to this point was carried out at Ping Fong in this one huge 65-square-acre complex of just horror, every single day, horror. And imagine hundreds of other people working with them, and all of them are walking around

Of doing the same thing, hearing the same screams, like carrying out the same atrocities. And it's just like the guy said, like it was just all in a day's work. That's just what we were doing. Like, imagine that. Like, try. I can't even...

conceive of putting myself in a place like that and just going along with it because you know that there were people who were there who were worried about not going along with it because they knew they would be next on the slab if they spoke up or spoke out against it. I just can't imagine it. When my brain tries to put me in that place at that time, it's just like, stop. I don't want to go there. Yeah. Did you see the zone of interest yet? No.

you should check that out what is it a movie is it a play yeah it was a movie from last year when uh won the oscar for foreign film and was nominated for best picture overall uh jonathan glaser it's basically a movie true story obviously about the guy who led um who was sort of the head of uh the concentration camp i think it was auschwitz and not dachau uh but you know it's it's

It doesn't go in the camp at all. The whole movie is just told from the perspective of the fact that he had his house next door on the other side of the wall where he had his wife and kids and garden. And they just they live this normal life. And it's a very the way that Glazer did it was very, very effective and different than I've seen in any other war movie to to get across this sort of horrors.

without seeing any of them happen. Wow. Yeah, that's really interesting. I've heard about that. Yeah, I haven't heard anything more than what you just said. So I'll check it out, though, because I trust your recommendations. Yeah, I mean, it's a great film and very effective. And, you know, the reason I brought it up is because that's sort of the same idea because I did a little research after about this guy. And he was like, you know, I felt like I was, you know, I had to do this stuff.

or else I would be shot for not following orders. And that's always sort of the

the line that you hear. Sure. No, for sure. Especially further down the, the pecking order. Yeah. The thing is, is there were very, very clearly people who were there who were totally into this and were totally fine with it all in a day's work. Like that's just what they did. Yeah. But I guarantee there were people who were there just crumbling inside every day. I don't know. Maybe there weren't, maybe you couldn't possibly keep quiet.

in a place like that, who knows? But there were hundreds of people, like you said, from all different fields and professions that were coming together to work, to experiment on unwilling humans at Ping Fong. And that was just Ping Fong because what we said earlier was that their ultimate goal was to create biological weapons. And you can sit there and come up with a trillion microorganisms every few days online.

all year long. And it doesn't amount to anything if you can't infect your enemy with them, if you wanted to carry a biological warfare program, I should say. And so one of the other things that they experimented on was how to deliver, like you said, payloads of plague-infected fleas or cholera into local wells. And they did it, sometimes successfully. And I think the number for the people who died just at Ping Fong

was 3,000. That's the number that's generally cited. Right. And they had 100% mortality rate among prisoners there. No one survived Ping Fong. Not a single person survived Ping Fong. If you went in there as a prisoner, you died.

Just at Ping Fong, that was 3,000. When it goes to the actual experiments that they carried out trying to deliver biological weapons in Manchuria, it expands, by some estimates, into the hundreds of thousands of deaths. Yeah. Yeah, and we should point out, too, when you say that there were no survivors of Ping Fong, when they closed down, and we're skipping toward the end, but when they did shut it down, who...

whoever was still living, they just murdered straight up to cover up any sign of evidence and then just dynamited the place beyond recognition. Yeah. And then they destroyed all the records and then all of the people there took a last order from General Ishii that was never talk about this and never implicate anyone that's ever worked here. They basically took a vow of silence about it. Yeah. So you mentioned, you know, using actual biological weapons.

That was mainly against Chinese civilians. And this is some of the stuff that, you know, they had sort of considered when they dropped like cotton or wheat or rice infested with disease carrying fleas on different Chinese cities. And they testified in court later on. Civilians did about like what happened to their community communities, these illnesses that spread through there. Yeah.

It's just, it's hard to fathom that this was going on and largely gotten away with, you know? Yeah. Yeah. There were a couple more that I found, Chuck, that were just reprehensible. They would infect dogs with cholera, I believe, and release them into villages and cholera outbreaks would start. They gave the local children chocolate laced with salmonella.

Um, the one thing that was super effective they found was mixing wheat grain with, um, plague infested fleas or infected fleas and dropping it from airplanes. And then the villagers would feed the grain to their chickens and a plague outbreak would start. And again, like over time, um,

And at least tens of thousands of people in Manchuria died from these plague and cholera outbreaks. Cholera is no joke. Apparently, there was a researcher who was a pathologist at Unit 731 who boasted that they produced enough cholera to kill every single person in the world. And they didn't succeed in that, thankfully, but they definitely killed a significant number of people in Manchuria with things like cholera and the plague from just trying to figure out how to...

get that to those people. Fortunately, that was something they really failed at. They never really figured it out. Yeah. I mean, mainly we've been talking about like people that they arrested and, you know, practice on or when it was like, you know, actual biological weapons, it was on civilians, but they also did this on prisoners, prisoners of war in different places outside of unit 731, specifically Singapore and the Philippines. And,

You mentioned U.S. prisoners of war early on. There was one documented case, at least one documented case in May of 1945 when there was a downed U.S. plane where they captured eight airmen. And in May of 1945, they were basically medically tortured. There was one medical student later on that said, you know, what was going on was just torture at this point. There was no scientific value happening.

Yeah, and that wasn't even Unit 731. That's how badly this whole German-infected Japanese military, essentially, is that the military is like, hey, we got these POWs. We want to do a number on them. So basically just operate on them until they're dead. And that's what it would be dressed up as, is like practice military.

Like I want to learn how to remove an arm. So that's what they would practice on. Or I want to learn how to remove an appendix. I'm going to practice that. And like eventually the patient would just die because they didn't have enough organs left to sustain themselves or they lost so much blood that they died. But they died from surgery. That was how they died. Well, and if they happened to live through the surgery, they would strangle them till they died. Yeah. Yeah.

I heard one other thing. It's kind of unrelated to this, but it's just stuck out to me. It's kind of haunted me, actually, that there was a group of POWs, American POWs, that were being held in Japan. And hours after the surrender had taken place and word had spread that Japan surrendered,

Rather than release these POWs, this group of Japanese soldiers took them to this hillside and decapitated them, killed them. Just completely wasted their lives for nothing. After a surrender, somehow it's bad enough to do that in the context of war, but within hours of surrendering, it makes it exponentially worse. It's way worse than even if that happened five years later. Like they just held them for five years and then killed them. Somehow within hours of surrendering,

It just makes it worse to me, and I can't really get that one out of my head. So I wanted to make sure it was in everybody else's head, I guess. I guess you want to think that after something as horrific of a war has ended...

Then, then everyone just wants to go home and have it be over, you know, and that, you know, clearly isn't always the case. Well, I remember also just kind of tied into it. The Nazis did that too. Like the truest believers would just walk around executing people who like at the end of the war, like they knew like Hitler was dead and the war was over, but they were executing people who were like trying to go home or running away or whatever. Um, just a complete waste of life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't really have anything else to add to that. Maybe we'll edit that part out, but it just has stuck with me. Yeah. All right. We'll take our last break and we're going to come back and finish up with the investigations and kind of what happened afterward and prepare to be unsatisfied right after this.

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All right. We are back. We promised talk of investigation and, you know, kind of what happened afterward. It, you know, became pretty clear that the the war was ending. So General Ishii

like you said earlier, said, you know, no one can ever speak of this. Beginning on August 9th, they started destroying everything, started blowing that place up, killed everyone else who was there, which, as we'll see, is, you know, one reason they got away with some of these atrocities is because there were no surviving people to testify. Yeah. So the U.S. started investigating this at a place called Camp Dietrich in Maryland. It was an army base, a pretty new one. And when they started questioning the

They kind of realized what was going on. And Japan said, you know, the Cold War is sort of taking hold now. And, you know, we're really afraid that some of this stuff might get into the hands of the Soviets. So America made a decision to rather than pursue prosecution, was like, hey, let's work with them just to get as much data and information as we can from them that is useful to us.

And that in itself is a pretty horrific thing. Yeah, we actually paid them. We paid them. We paid the Unit 731 scientists like General Ashii money to work with us. And it's weird. There's like a lot of papers. I read one from the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics in 2014.

That compared like the two prongs that were taken, like two different approaches, one toward the Nazis and their medical atrocities, one toward the Japanese and their medical atrocities. And there was one guy in particular named John W. Thompson, who was Canadian, who really led the charge to prosecute the Nazi doctors who carried out these horrible experimentations as war criminals.

There wasn't a guy like that dealing with the Japanese in the tribunal for war crimes in the Far East. And so the U.S. military and intelligence was able to keep a lid on the whole thing. The Russians were talking about it because their people had been killed. The Chinese were certainly talking about it because their people had been killed. And people as high up as Douglas MacArthur were publicly saying this is communist propaganda. This isn't true.

Knowing full well it was true because he was collaborating and his people under him were collaborating with the very people who had performed these atrocities in order to get their medical data. We paid them for it. We gave them immunity. Some of them apparently even visited Fort Detrick to help with America's own biological warfare program that we essentially lifted from the Japanese after World War II. That's what happened.

Yeah, I mean, that's blood on the hands of the United States because what they're basically saying, they're basically, you know, they wouldn't outright say that, but they're justifying these experiments by saying that the data was useful. Well, yeah, they said that Americans couldn't possibly ever get data like this because we have scruples, but apparently the Japanese don't. So we'll just take their data because they don't have scruples. But that means that by proxy, you don't have scruples if you're willing to use this.

And that's what happened with the Nazi stuff. Like that guy, John W. Thompson wanted to make an example out of those Nazi doctors, like attention, all scientists everywhere in the world, even the cover of World War II can't save you. Like you, like you're going to be hung if we ever catch any of you doing something like this hanged, I guess that that message wasn't given to the Japanese doctors. And in fact,

Because the lid was kept so tightly on what had happened and was just relegated to rumors as far as America and Japan was concerned, they were allowed to reenter Japanese society and actually become fairly prominent and celebrated in their fields in a lot of cases. Yeah, absolutely. There were some tribunals over the course of a couple of years from 1946 to 1948 that

Other countries were involved, including China and the Soviet Union, but they did not talk about Unit 731. There was a separate tribunal in Yokohama in 1948 that convicted 23 military figures, some medical personnel that were in the Kyushu University torture. And these were specifically of US POWs only. And they got death or life sentences, but those sentences were dropped immediately.

or commuted, I guess, because the U.S. was trying to build a friend in Japan at that point and an ally at the start of the Korean War. And then the Soviets, you know, eventually in 1949 said,

You know, we have to expose some of this. So they put and this is by themselves. They put 12 members of Unit 731 on trial and, you know, accusing them of everything that they did. And this is where a lot of like information was brought out. They were sentenced between two to 25 years in prison. And the U.S., because we are now in a Cold War with Russia, said that this is propaganda.

Yeah, so this trial where essentially all of the information, the factual information we had for decades about what Unit 731 did came out of this trial, but it was just in the USSR. And it wasn't until 1982 that a journalist named John W. Powell got his hands on it and published an article on what Unit 731 had done during the war in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists journal.

And it was through those court transcripts. So they came back to haunt them 30-something years later. And that's when it really became...

started to become knowledge among historians, the military, the government in the West, in the United States and among allies that the Japanese had actually done these things that they'd long been accused of by the Soviets and Chinese. And here was evidence of it by the testimony by the very people who were there who'd been captured by the Soviets. Yeah. I mean, most of this stuff has come out at a alarmingly

slow rate and over the course of decades, I believe in 1982, there was a museum in China at that Ping Fan site, obviously that China established, but it took all the way until 1988 to

you know, 40 plus years after the war ended that the Japanese government finally admitted that it even happened. Um, but they still wouldn't like release any information. Like most of the stuff that we know, uh, like you said, if we had done this episode, you know, uh, at the beginning of our run, we probably wouldn't have known what we know now because a lot of it came out in the nineties, the early two thousands. Well, I guess by that time we were around.

Yeah. But that's neither here nor there. The point is, it took a long time for this stuff to come out. Yeah. And, you know, we can't go over everyone. You did mention that, you know, many of them went on to have just great lives and careers, but we should highlight a few of these. The second in command that I mentioned earlier, Masaji Kitano, he co-founded a Green Cross, a very large Japanese pharmaceutical company with two other colleagues from Unit 731. So they did well.

They did. And Green Cross went on to infect 1,800 people with hemophilia with HIV because they were selling them unsterilized blood clotting agents in the 90s.

Yeah. That was, uh, what about Ishii? Ishii became one of the most celebrated doctors in all of Japan. Um, he supposedly, according to one British historian named Richard Drayton, went to Fort Detrick to advise the U S on the bioweapons program there. Um, he died in 1959 at age 67, never having even been, um, publicly, um,

accused of what he had done in Japanese society. He was just a celebrated doctor by that point when he died. Yeah, the guy, Hisato, the guy who led those frostbite experiments, he became president of the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine.

This one gets me, though, this last one. You got to say that one. Yeah. The communicable disease researcher, Amitani Shogo, he won the Asahi Prize for

for outstanding contributions to the field of communicable disease research. And part of that was some of the stuff that he got from Unit 731. Yeah, and I looked all over like, okay, how did he disguise that? Or how did the Asahi Prize people miss that? I didn't see anything like that. Apparently, his research came directly from medical experiments on unwilling participants, got him the Asahi Prize. Yeah. That's insane, man. Yep. Yep.

So there's no clear evidence that the United States gained much of anything from the deal it made with the Unit 731 leaders for all of their research. Other people will say, nope, actually, it's not true at all. And in fact, the Chinese accused the U.S. of using the same kind of germs for germ warfare in Korea. And the U.S., of course, is like, no, he didn't. But Fort Detrick is well known as being like a...

like a biological research facility. They're like, it's not biological warfare. We're just using gain of function research to see what happens when we make this virus do this, you know, not for biological warfare. It's very bizarre, but it exists. It's definitely there. And it's a strange place. Apparently, that's where a lot of MKUltra experiments were carried out. Yeah, wasn't that where the men stared at goats?

I think so. Yeah. I mean, that was definitely about that, but I don't remember if that was at Fort said at Fort Detrick or not. I got a funny story about that. I got to tell you sometime. Oh, well, how about now we could use it.

No, I can't really tell you here on the podcast. Ah, I copy that. All right. And then just one more thing, Chuck. This has not, revelations that Unit 731 carried out these experiences, it's not exactly been like embraced in Japanese society. Right. Like there's a real divide on whether to teach this horrific but very true history of their own country because of the obvious sort of background

effects that this could have on children and how they feel about their country. Yeah, I've seen that they're worried that they might make Japanese children ashamed of their country. So you can't teach them that kind of stuff.

So that's it. That's the last thing I've got. All right. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I'm glad that one's over. Same here. Thanks a lot, Amy. Yeah, thanks, Amy. If you want to know more about Unit 731, okay. There's plenty of stuff you can read on the Internet. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, this is a little further explanation about Backdraft from our Arts and Investigation app. Hey, guys, big fan of your work.

I was excited to listen to the episode on arson investigation because I'm a firefighter and I've learned about some of what you guys covered and got some cool new information from you. I want to let you know that you were so close on backdraft, but just a little bit off.

The way backdraft works is when you have a working fire that does not have access to fresh oxygen, at a certain point the fire will have consumed all of the oxygen in a space and basically begin to smolder. So it will create a turbulent smoke in very high temperatures but not actual flames.

So the backdraft occurs when oxygen is suddenly added to the situation by, say, opening a door or a window. The sudden addition of oxygen to the superheated gases can create a pretty violent explosion, and that explosion itself is the backdraft. I figured I've learned so much from you guys, I thought it'd be cool to share some info back. Hope this receives you well. And that is from Lindsey. Thanks, Lindsey. That was very cool.

Apparently the only way to fight a backdraft is to love it, too. To let that part out, Lindsay. That's right. You got a joke in there. Very nice. If you want to get in touch with us like Lindsay did and let us know something cool that we didn't know, you can do it. Send it via email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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There's a lot of pros to drinking HealthAid Kombucha. No cons that I can think of. Pro, amazing taste. Pro, pairs well with anything. Pro, probiotic. That's a literal pro. And it's deliciously refreshing. It's the perfect pairing to your meal or great on its own, whether you're having Pink Lady Apple, Berry Lemonade, or one of the other great flavors. It's the perfect swap for soda or alcohol. Make it part of your daily routine. Look for the brown bottle with an anchor on it.

and try HealthAid Kombucha today. Get it in 30 minutes or less on GoPuff. Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's back to deals time. Now through August 13th, enjoy store-wide deals and earn four times rewards points. Look for in-store tags for eligible items from Quaker, International Delight, Oikos, La Cologne, Starbucks, and Frosted Flakes for quick breakfast favorites. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event-long savings. Enjoy savings when you shop in-store or online for easy drive-up-and-go

pickup, or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Visit Safeway.com for more details.