The Plague Maker

"There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history. It is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations."

- Claude Vorilhon 

     

       Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel. More than 95% of the victims who died in the research camps were either Chinese or Korean. There were several subsidiary units that practiced biological and chemical testing, however Unit 731 served as the headquarters. Together, all these units instigated atrocities that caused an appalling number of deaths. According to the 2002 International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare, the number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments reaches around 580,000.  However, over 200,000 of these deaths came from the Unit 731 Headquarters alone. This sercret organization operated under an identity exactly opposite of what it represented, the Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit. However, today, we call it what it is... a Death Camp.     
       Although testing was done on plants and animals, a special project with the code name, Maruta, used human beings for experiments. The word Maruta literally means "logs of wood". Because of this, the human test subjects in the camp were referred to euphemistically as "logs". This term originated as a joke because the official location of the camp was in a lumber mill. So, the term spread and it became a common word used when addressing the victims. The test subjects were selected so as to provide a diverse experiment that could be as accurate as possible. They included common criminals, captured bandits, anti-Japanse partisans, political prisoners, and anyone who was taken in for "suspicious behavior". They also included infants, the elderly, and pregnant women.
        One of the experiments which prisoners were subjected to was live vivisection without anesthesia. Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Scientists performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effect of the disease on the human body. These vivisections were conducted while the patients were still alive because scientists feared that the decomposition process would affect the results. Other vivisection practices included amputation in order to study blood loss. Those limbs were sometimes re-attached to the opposite sides of the body. Some prisoners' limbs were frozen and amputated, while others had limbs frozen then thawed to study the effects of untreated gangrene and rotting that resulted. Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and their throats re-attached to the intestines. Parts of the brain, lungs, liver and other vital organs were also removed from some prisoners. These heinous acts were not only implemented among one certain group. The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children, and infants. No one was exempt from the cruelty of these experiments.  
       Other experiments included things like weapons testing. In most cases, human targets were used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in different positions to find the most lethal trajectory. Flame throwers were tested on humans as well. Subjects were tied to stakes and used as targets to test germ-releasing bombs, chemical weapons, and explosives. The list of experiments goes on and on. In some cases, prisoners were subjected to other torturous acts such as being hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death. Another method used was injecting air into the victims' arteries to determine the time until the onset of embolism. There were even occasions where scientists would inject horse urine into the subjects' kidneys. Even more incidents include being deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death, being placed into high-pressure chambers until death, having experiments performed on prisoners to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival. In case these aren't enough, victims were sometimes placed into centrifuges and spun until dead, had animal blood injected and the effects studied, exposed to lethal doses of x-rays, had various chemical weapons tested on them inside gas chambers, injected with sea water to determine if it could be a substitute for saline, and either burned, boiled, or buried alive.     
       However, of all the human testing executed by Unit 731, perhaps some of the most atrocious were germ warfare attacks. In these experiments, prisoners were injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. In order to study effects of venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea. Prisoners were infested with fleas in order to acquire large quantities of disease-carrying fleas for the purpose of studying the viability of germ warfare. Plague fleas, infected clothing, and infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets. The resulting cholera, anthrax, and plague were estimated to have killed around 400,000 chinese civilians. Unit 731 and its affiliated units were involved in research, development, and experimental deployment of epidemic-creating biowarfare weapons in assaults against the Chinese populace throughout World War II. Plague-infested fleas, bred in the laboratories of Unit 731, were spread by low-flying airplanes upon Chinese cities. This military aerial spraying killed thousands of people with bubonic plague epidemics.        
       So, my point by providing this information is to not only discuss a dilemma that took place in our innocent game of Diplomatic Risk, but to show an act of terrorism that seems so hard to grasp. Of course, we did not insinuate biological testing in our game, but the whole idea of bioterrorism is not as far-fetched as we may think. I am surprised to learn how many people are either misinformed or not informed at all about biological warfare and the experiments that took place in Japan during World War II. And even fewer know that these atrocities also took place in Russia, Britain, and, yes, even the United States. The U.S. has admitted to using open-air biological and chemical weapons tests in at least four of its states during the 1960s. I will admit, however, that I was extremely uninformed about this issue until I happened to pick up a book at my local library back home. Plague Maker by Tim Downs changed my entire perspective on World War II, transnational crime, international relations, terrorism, and the possibilities of pure evil in the world. 
       When someone mentions World War II, what are the initial thoughts? Is it Pearl Harbor,  the Nazis, the Jews, or the birth of the United Nations? Although these events are monumental in world history, many other events often get overshadowed. Much like how the Armenian Genocide fell behind the curtain of World War I, the same happens in regards to the devastation caused by Japanese biological testing. I am forever grateful that I decided to pick up Plague Maker because it allowed me to see the littler picture for once. I now view international relations and foreign policy as tools that often become misguided. I have questioned why certain human rights violations become more publicized than others. After all, through my 13 years of school, I was never once taught about the events that took place in Japan during the 1940s. This topic is simply not covered in American history books. So, because of this lack of knowledge, this book was a page turner unlike any other I had previously read. Although the novel was highly dramatized and infused with a fictitious story line, the background information was still there and, for the most part, all the knowledge I have about Unit 731 came from Tim Downs. In the novel, an FBI agent, Nathaniel Donovan, works with the CIA and a elderly Chinese survivor of the experiments to stop the threat of a July 4th attack on New York City. In the novel, Sato Matsushita, a notorious instigator of Unit 731, is planning to launch a bioterror attack by packing Bubonic Plague-infected fleas into a firework and launching in on the harbor, thus infection thousands of innocent Americans. In order to prevent this attack, all areas of U.S. national security must work together and share intelligence.         
       In the real world, some of the same processes would be necessary. However, more often than not, it does not work this efficiently. A bioterror attack is one of the hardest types of terrorism to track and prevent. For years, Unit 731 operated in secret buildings under secret identities. It was not until after thousands of Chinese, Korean, and American people had been brutally killed that the world began to gain knowledge about what was going on. The unit remained a secret until the mid 1950s, and even then, the world did not know how to react. The difference between the novel and the real world is that, in the novel, the U.S. was able to gain enough intelligence on its own and successfully prevented the terror attack. However, many countries have more knowledge on bioterror, and if this occurred today, it would be necessary to share intelligence internationally. Also, it is not likely that the U.S. could even prevent a bioterror attack at all. Although the U.S. is not currently facing a bioterror threat, it is something I believe could occur in the future. Regardless of the many regulations that have been placed on this matter, let Unit 731 serve as a warning that if it happened once in China, it can happen again anywhere else in the world.