Transcription
The man known to history as Shirō Ishii was born in Chiyoda Mura, Japan, on the 25th of June, 1892. Ishii’s father, Katsuya Ishii, was a minor Japanese nobleman, the family having controlled a small village and the lands surrounding it for centuries. Ishii’s father was one of the wealthiest landowners in the region and was a sake, or Japanese rice wine, manufacturer. The combination of feudal income from the local peasantry, combined with the sale of alcohol products, provided a stable income for the Ishii home.
Little more is known about Ishii’s parents, the exploration by historians having so far been extremely limited. While some information is known about his father, Katsuya Ishii, very little information is known about his mother, whose name remains forgotten and shrouded in mystery. While some historians believe that Shiro Ishii was born not in Chiyoda Mura but actually further away from Tokyo, what they do agree upon is that Ishii was the son of local nobility and was born into a privileged life. Ishii would become one of the most notorious and least explored war criminals of the twentieth century.
Despite little being known of the specifics of his family, some of Shiro Ishii’s early history can be reconstructed from his class status. As the son of minor nobility, Ishii would have grown up in a rigid class system that had changed little over the course of several centuries. Even though Ishii was a minor noble, he remained far above the lower-class residents who paid tribute to Ishii’s family in exchange for protection. Furthermore, Ishii grew up knowing his status as a noble separated him from those beneath him. Waited on by servants and entitled to advancement in education and status, Ishii learned from those around him to separate humanity into a series of classes. Rigid rules prevented the integration of classes in the name of social harmony and order.
Ishii was instructed from an early age of the superiority of the Japanese people. Furthermore, the fast advancement of Japan as a world power was a result of the Meiji Restoration, a political and industrial revolution in Japan in the late nineteenth century that was prompted by the young Emperor Meiji, who had seized power back from the shogunates, or regional military leaders. The shogunates had held the royal family hostage in their own realm, forcing the emperor and his family to act as puppets. This arrangement had lasted for centuries. While initially providing stability to a war-racked Japan, the refusal of the shogunates to modernize created a series of disasters in the 19th century that set Japan on the road to being conquered and colonized by European powers. The ascension of Emperor Meiji, a strong-willed leader and brilliant reformer, led to drastic changes, including the royal family shedding the demeaning control of the shogunates. Meiji and his advisors worked to combine Japan’s traditions with the technology of Western nations, renovating the Japanese state and turning it into a modern state. Japan shocked the world when in the early 1900s the Japanese army and navy defeated the larger and more prestigious Russian military in the Russo-Japanese War. The victory earned the respect of military leaders around the globe. Japan, under the imperial government, would no longer be locked in the past. They were to be a world power. As part of these changes, an increase in nationalism flourished in Japan alongside a fervent, at times religious support, for the Japanese emperor. Ishii came of age during this period of Japanese expansion, nationalism, and national revival. He was firmly committed to promoting the Empire and preventing its enemies from gaining the upper hand.
Ishii in school was quickly recognized as bright and intelligent. He performed better than his other siblings in academic pursuits and was known to read and memorize entire books as a young man. His teachers praised the young student, remarking on his gifts and talents. As Ishii became a teenager, he physically stood above his peers, standing at five feet ten inches, and he sought to stand above others intellectually as well. Graduating from primary education, Ishii was admitted to the elite Kyoto Imperial University, a privilege even few of the elites obtained. Ishii took up the study of medicine, quickly earning the praise of his professors who noticed his academic prowess. Soon Ishii was assigned to various research projects that few of his other classmates were given, a privilege that isolated him from his fellow students. Many students believed that a friendship with Ishii was only superficial, promoted by Ishii to advance his own career and prestige. And perhaps they were not wrong. Ishii was power hungry and friendships were another means of achieving the fame and prestige he desired.
Many at the university were shocked by the brashness of the young medical student named Shiro Ishii who gained the reputation of not only being brilliant, but also being a wild partyer. Ishii’s partying often led to extensive drinking and frequent visits to Tokyo’s brothels, all funded by his family’s lavish wealth. His work did not suffer, however, and he worked his way into the confidence of many elites at the University, including the University President Torasa-buro Araki. Early in his time at the university, Ishii had begun visiting the president and conversing with him, to the shock of many who regarded this as a breach of decorum. To add to the frustration of those who envied and disliked the young Ishii, he became even closer with Araki following his marriage to Araki’s daughter Kyoto in 1920, the year that he finished college. From this marriage would result his daughter.
Following his graduation, Ishii, unlike many of his peers who entered private medicine, enlisted in the army and was given a commission as an army surgeon in April of 1922. Ishii was dedicated more to the nation than to the practice of medicine. Assigned to the Army First Hospital in Tokyo with the rank of first lieutenant, Ishii found himself in a position to act upon his desires to serve the empire and improve his nation. He continued to impress superiors as a hard worker, despite still maintaining his status as a carouser. He returned to private life in 1924 and began a Doctorate at Kyoto Imperial University where he worked in blood sera, bacteriology, and human pathology. As he began his doctorate, he also participated in a research expedition to Shikoku, a small Japanese island south of the main island. An epidemic of encephalitis, or an inflammation of the brain, had occurred on Shikoku, leading to a mortality rate of 60 percent, and killing more than 3,500 people there. Ishii produced significant research from the visit, including creating a filter that helped to isolate the virus, which led to increased fame for the young scientist. In 1927, Ishii received his PhD in microbiology from Kyoto Imperial University. During his doctorate, he had earned the respect of peers and professors.
After receiving his PhD, Ishii was stationed at the Kyoto Army Medical Hospital, where he received the rank of captain. He continued to conduct research projects, including a coauthored paper with his friend Dr. Tomosada Masuda. The paper described how Ishii and Masuda caused fever in patients to treat the disease of gonorrhea. Scientific research proved to hold great rewards for the young scientist, and he eagerly continued his work on various projects. One day, while looking through a medical journal, he discovered a report on the Geneva Convention of 1925, which encouraged an idea in his mind that he had had for some time. This idea would have a profound impact on the trajectory of his life. After reading the text of the convention and the reasoning behind the prohibition on biological warfare, including the creation of super germs and diseases, Ishii believed that Japan needed to violate its treaty and cultivate germ warfare in order to strike fear into their enemies. In Ishii’s mind, the fact that nations had outlawed bioweapons suggested that they would be terrified of them.
During his college career, Ishii had held discussions with various officials and friends about the military benefits of disease warfare, though these were largely hypothetical. But now, armed with the conviction that Japan could cause fear in its enemies if it possessed bioweapons, Ishii committed himself to do whatever it would take to produce a military victory for Imperial Japan, and he renewed discussions with military leaders about biological weapons. Though few listened at the time, he was well known around military circles as a result of his proselytizing. Ishii was not deterred in the slightest. Instead, he began a world tour to begin studying biological weapons research that was occurring in other nations. Though much of the trip is not documented, evidence suggests that when Ishii arrived in each port he visited, he immediately located scientists, both in private and government organizations, to converse with about biological weapons. His trip included various stops in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, the Soviet Union, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Great Britain, the British colonies of India and Singapore, and the United States. While in the United States, he visited the US cities of Washington D.C., New York City, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Ishii was not afraid to ask probing questions about the nature of germ warfare, hoping that upon his return to Japan the government would accept the fruits of all his hard travels. Ishii came away from the trip convinced of two things: Other nations and scientists were investigating biological warfare, and it was essential that Japan take the lead in this deadly race.
Arriving home in 1930 after a two-year trip, Ishii was welcomed by new military leaders who had come to power in 1929, soon after the resignation of the government leader Giichi Tanaka, a man who had dominated Japanese politics and had squashed Ishii’s germ warfare plans. The military leaders who welcomed home Ishii were far more willing to go to war to expand the empire and were less concerned about the methods involved in such conquests. Many leaders in the Japanese military believed the next steps to secure Japanese power in the region depended upon an invasion of Manchuria, a region in northeast China, which contained a plentitude of natural riches such as coal, oil, timber, and minerals. Many of these leaders believed that the capture of Manchuria would enable the Japanese Empire to begin attacking the Soviet Union and thereby weaken the threat of communism in Asia. Ishii recognized the militarism of the new civilian and military leaders and launched his campaign to receive permission to begin research in biological warfare. Ishii argued before military leaders that various nations were already developing biological weapons and that Japan would be left behind if it did not produce its own germ weapons. Ishii highlighted the low-cost nature of bioweapons, an argument certainly influenced by the start of the global depression that had been caused by the onset of the Great Depression in the United States in 1929. Ishii was no fool. He understood that military budgets, even in expansion-minded Japan, had suffered as a result of the global economic slump. However, he was most emphatic in pointing out the fear that bioweapons would cause in Japan’s enemies. He stated brazenly in a written statement to the Japanese Military High Command, “Biological warfare must possess distinct possibilities, otherwise it would not have been outlawed by the League of Nations.”
The reception he received was far more than he could have ever hoped. The War Minister Sadao Araki became the foremost supporter of the young scientist. Others, such as military leaders Tetsuan Nagata and Chikahiko Koizumi, threw their support behind Ishii. Nagata, a major general in the Japanese army, helped orchestrate the plot to invade Manchuria in September of 1931. Colonel Koizumi already had significant experience in weapons of mass destruction. During the First World War, Koizumi had spent extensive time studying and producing chemical weapons, such as poison gases, in an effort to set Japan on the same military footing as other nations. Having influential connections throughout the Japanese government, Koizumi was well positioned to help Ishii with his plans. These connections only expanded as Koizumi rose within the Japanese government, becoming first the army surgeon general in 1934 and then the Japanese government’s Minister of Health in 1926. These supporters, as well as countless others, provided Ishii the connections he needed to make a dramatic rise politically and militarily. Not only were Ishii’s ideas better received by government officials, but he was also promoted to the rank of major and appointed chair of the department of immunology at Tokyo Army Medical College. Armed with a higher rank and an academic chair, Ishii was free to research biological warfare more expansively with funds granted by the government in 1931.
As he began to seriously engage in biological weapons research, Ishii continued to carry on his administrative and teaching roles in the college. Following his regular workday, Ishii would join with other colleagues and students in the evening to develop deadly diseases and poisons. Of particular interest to the researchers was bacteria that transmitted bubonic plague, the cause of the Black Death in the Middle Ages, as well as cholera, typhoid, and anthrax. Ishii’s early studies did not involve human beings and were primarily focused on creating vaccines against biological weapons. His research paid dividends as more funds were poured into Ishii’s budget, allowing his research facilities to expand and grow. He was further aided by the reinstatement of Japan’s chemical warfare unit, which depended on biological research for chemical weapons research. All the while, Ishii continued to deploy his charm on friends and foes alike to get greater access to funds for his project.
As Ishii worked to expand his program, even suggesting to supporters that in order to produce weaponized germs they would need human subjects to experiment on, the Japanese military had continued the work of expanding Japan’s empire across the Pacific Rim. Conquests in Manchuria and China opened up new resources, as well as territory for Japanese colonists. As Japanese settlers arrived in the new territories, Japanese officials instituted stratified hierarchies that favored native-born Japanese and excluded those of other races. To enforce this hierarchy, the Japanese government policed the newly conquered communities with the military and a strong police force. Racial discrimination was a common factor in many leaders’ decision-making. Following the September 1931 invasion of Manchuria, the League of Nations, of which Japan was a part, condemned the actions of Japan. Japan, in retaliation, resigned from the already weakened league. As the Japanese consolidated their control over Manchuria between 1931 and 1934, Ishii began looking to expand his bioweapon research facilities into the region. In a letter to commanders in 1931, Ishii wrote, “It is time we start to experiment. We appeal to be sent to Manchuria to develop new weapons.” Military and civilian leaders understood what the phrase “it is time we start to experiment” referred to: human test subjects, specifically those not of Japanese descent. Ishii had no qualms about his program and was eager to test out the research he and his associates had already conducted on those he believed to be inferior to himself.
Manchuria was seen by many in China and Japan as a place of opportunity. Covering a landmass twice the size of California, the region was largely rural and isolated in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1932, the Japanese army in Manchuria offered Ishii 200,000 yen to set up a bioweapon facility in the city of Harbin. Located on the Sungari River, the city was multiethnic, having a large population of Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and other minorities. The city was known as “the Paris of the East” and was a critical hub on the region’s rail line. Ishii named his new facility the “Epidemic Prevention Unit” and moved his equipment and scientists to an abandoned sake brewery. However, the building was far too small for Ishii’s designs, and he quickly pushed for a larger facility in a remote part of the region. Ishii wanted his experiments kept quiet, and the hustle and bustle of Harbin made secrecy all the more difficult. Ishii’s requests were granted almost immediately, and a few months later, in the summer of 1932, a new, larger facility was constructed at Beiyinhe, a village near the local rail line and only a 100 kilometers southeast of Harbin. The Japanese military seized land and brutally evicted locals from the area to make way for the new Japanese structure, which many felt was reminiscent of a medieval Japanese castle. Armed with numerous guards and watchtowers, the facility was built in such a way as to prevent both infiltration and escape. Ishii was thrilled at the support and even more so at the direction of the Japanese military. Many hardliners in the High Command saw the next wars to be directed against the Soviets, who held regions north of Manchuria. Ishii himself favored this strategy, and he codenamed his bioweapons development Togo, after Heihachiro Togo, the Japanese naval hero who had bested the Russian navy in 1905. Ishii likely believed the Japanese military would use his biological weapons on the Soviets in the coming years. He placed a particular focus on weaponizing anthrax, a lethal bacterium which can survive cold temperatures. However, powerful forces within the Japanese government and military stymied those favoring a war with the Soviet Union. Instead, these leaders directed Japanese efforts against the weaker and more badly organized Chinese forces to the south. Regardless of where the war was to be directed, Ishii was ready and excited to begin conducting his experiments.
Ishii later called his program the Secret of Secrets. He understood the outrage that his work would cause and was willing to risk it for the glory of Japan, as well as his own ego. The locals soon realized that this camp, labeled by the local Chinese Zhong Ma Fortress, was not a military fortification. Researchers suggest that the experiments on fellow human beings began in late 1932, and the locals noticed. Trains covered for secrecy brought groups of political and military prisoners, as well as common criminals, to the fortress for Ishii’s use. The building was shrouded in mystery, and rumors circulated of screams emanating from within. Many of the local Chinese villagers sought to avoid it at all costs; however, hundreds of forced Chinese laborers were used to construct and aid the facility. Those who were used to build the inner compound where the medical experiments were to be conducted were killed to prevent the secrets of Zhong Ma from leaking out. Ishii brutally pushed the workers to complete the assortment of buildings that were required for his brutal designs. The fortress had blocks of prison cells that housed between 500 and 600 human prisoners at a time, who were shackled at the ankles and wrists. Unlike many other prisons, the prisoners were well fed. The purpose of this was malevolent in reality, however, as Ishii wanted his victims to be healthy as he infected them with various diseases. His first prisoners were likely all men and nearly always under forty, having been carefully selected by Japanese officers assigned to pick men to be sent to Ishii’s camp. What awaited these unfortunate prisoners was a camp of horrors. Ishii and his band of scientists, in the fall of 1932, tested numerous diseases, including glanders, anthrax, typhoid, smallpox, dysentery, and bubonic plague, on human prisoners. Many of the men forced to undergo these brutal treatments survived no more than thirty days. The tests and procedures used were far too brutal for a human to survive. Those that died were cremated in a nearby building. As morbid and brutal as those of the Nazis in Europe, the Japanese Zhong Ma became a death camp where Japanese scientists horrifically experimented on human beings. For Ishii and his callous supporters, the men killed were a necessary “sacrifice” to protect the Japanese Empire and advance human knowledge. The results, as well as samples of the prisoners, were sent back to Japan. Scientists and officials in Japan were well aware Ishii had begun to experiment on humans. No recorded protests survive; it seems those that disagreed with Ishii kept silent. Military leaders, at the invitation of Ishii, visited the camp. One commander, Lieutenant General Saburo Endo, recorded a diary of his experience. In 1933, Endo watched the brutal conditions and the horrific experiments conducted at the facility, noting many of the brutal practices used on various prisoners. However, he seemed untroubled, instead later describing the efforts of the scientists at Beiyinhe as “superb.” More troubling was that Endo had been part of the delegation to the Geneva Convention of 1925, which banned germ warfare, yet the experiments of his subordinates seemed to have troubled him not in the slightest. Now, as the officer charged with overseeing Ishii’s projects, he backed Ishii unreservedly.
To further add to the horror of Ishii’s experiments, Ishii and his colleagues began filming their experiments. By 1935, these films were being sent to Japanese officers and leaders throughout the Empire to educate policymakers on what was being learned. Films were seen by officials throughout Manchuria showing the brutal projects conducted by Ishii. Hideki Tojo, the future Prime Minister of Japan during World War II, watched many of these, though he later became uncomfortable with their brutality. Still, nowhere is there recorded protest to the brutality exhibited. Over the next two years, the experiments continued as usual until one night in the fall of 1934, a mass prison escape occurred. A man named Li, a Chinese communist freedom fighter, had attacked his guard and succeeded in opening his lock, as well as those of all the other prisoners on the block. Fortunately for the prisoners, many of the guards were drunk due to celebrations related to the Mid-Autumn Festival. Miraculously, a rainstorm had short-circuited the electrified fencing beyond the compound’s wall, as well as the searchlights. While many of the prisoners were too weak to escape due to the experiments conducted on them, a mass of men had begun climbing a human chain up the wall. Li, who had placed himself on the bottom of the human chain, was killed, as were ten others. Twenty men escaped, and eight were soon captured and brutally murdered afterwards. However, the remaining twelve escaped and joined the anti-Japanese resistance, thus helping to spread the word of the horrific experiments being conducted at Zhong Ma camp.
While the escape confirmed the rumors already circulating in the region that the Japanese were conducting human experiments, the results for the remaining prisoners were increased security and the creation of a new camp named Pingfan. Ishii was not to be stopped in his quest to satisfy his pursuit of biological weapons. In 1935, the Beiyinhe Complex was razed, and all traces of Zhong Ma smashed to dust. But across the empire, a new, more sinister program was being implemented by the Japanese military. In its place was a sprawling labyrinth of units across the empire. Emperor Hirohito in 1936 authorized the expansion and integration of Ishii’s unit into the army. The result was the creation of similar biological weapons research units across the Japanese-controlled Pacific rim. Death camps, euphemistically referred to as research stations, were created in Manchuria, China, Thailand, Burma, Singapore, the Philippines, and New Guinea. Each camp was run by between 120 and 500 persons, all vying to expand the knowledge of biochemicals and each conducting inhumane experiments on prisoners. At the center of this web of biological weapons units stood Pingfan, a facility located twenty-six kilometers southwest of Harbin. Secluded, but also near the railway, Ishii had a Japanese company come and build the site. An airport was constructed, allowing a continual stream of planes to arrive at the new facility of death. Hundreds of poor Chinese families were displaced, and their homes destroyed to make way for the megacomplex that would house Ishii’s experiments. Meanwhile, a railroad spur of the South Manchurian Railway was constructed into the camp, allowing for cars full of future victims to be brought in. It took almost three years to fully finish the more than 150 buildings, including labs, barracks, research centers, prisons, breeding houses for animals, and homes for the various officials at the complex. The facility also contained a school for the children of the Japanese officials and scientists, restaurants, bars, a Shinto temple, a swimming pool, a library, gardens, and a theater. It was a small city in the wilds of Manchuria, whose morbid purpose brought some of Japan’s leading scientists and doctors to its environs. As the construction progressed, Ishii did not pause his experiments; he and his scientists continued to do their blood-curdling work in half-completed buildings. By now, Ishii’s units sported a new name, the “Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit of the Kwantung Army,” though many in the army simply referred to it as Ishii Unit. Human prisoners continued to be experimented upon, and the local populations terrorized.
As Ishii expanded his work in Manchuria, the Japanese military launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937. As the war progressed, Ishii continued to develop and deploy his biological weapons on civilian and prisoner of war populations. One method of testing was to tie prisoners to poles in a field and drop bioweapons on them. Other grisly experiments were also conducted to perfect Ishii’s bioweapons. In many cases, he continued to film the atrocities for imperial authorities to watch. Many of Japan’s senior leaders watched these films, including government officials, military leaders, and members of the royal family. Everywhere Ishii’s work was spreading, which likely gave undue pleasure to the man who had masterminded the project. Ishii, in intellectual and military circles, had gained the prestige and power he had always desired. In the early 1940s, the government further escalated its efforts to normalize Ishii’s work by inviting groups of young men, some as young as thirteen, called “boy troops,” to come from Japan to Ishii’s complex in Manchuria. There, they watched the experiments and at times assisted in the brutal procedures. Ishii and his sponsors appear to be making the effort to sanction the atrocities they were committing, to normalize the carnage. Tragically, no official opposition ever appeared. Instead, in 1941, Ishii’s station at Pingfan received the title of “Unit 731,” a designation that stuck with the unit for the rest of the war. The unit, according to the testimony of various former officers, had the approval of the emperor himself. Army officials in Manchuria furthermore expanded the program from 300 “researchers” to over a 1,000, which later expanded to 3,000, including members of Japanese universities. Ishii himself, throughout the 1930s, had continued to hold his academic post in Japan. He considered himself an excellent academic and continued to lecture and recruit in Japanese universities. He authored papers and spread his knowledge throughout Japan’s intellectual circles. He was on the cutting edge of research, though it was accomplished through the destruction of hundreds of human lives. Ishii was more powerful than he had ever before been and exhorted his researchers to continue to set aside their ethics for the sake of what he considered progress. Doctors and academics traveled to Pingfan, seeking to watch the unethical and horrid experiments that they believed would advance the state of modern medicine.
One of Ishii’s greatest successes was his unit’s participation in the Nomonhan Incident, which resulted in enormous prestige to himself and his work. In the summer of 1939, several Japanese units with tanks, mechanized infantry, and artillery units crossed the Manchurian border into Soviet-held territory. The purpose of this foray was to probe the Russian and Mongolian defenses, in the eventuality that war was declared against the Soviet Union. With the army units, members of Unit 731 were sent to place typhoid germs in a river above the Soviet encampment. As Soviet and Japanese forces collided, Japanese Junior Youth Corp members were assigned to assist with dumping the typhoid-laced liquids into local rivers. Oddly, typhoid is a bacterium that cannot survive in river currents, something Ishii would have already known as a microbiologist. Though he left no record of his intentions, his units received extensive praise and commendation from army officials and even from the emperor himself. Even more important than praise and medals, however, was funding. Following the Nomonhan Incident, Emperor Hirohito decreed that additional funds and researchers be allocated to Unit 731. The unit had done little, yet the results of the mission to Nomonhan were fantastic for the unit. Besides allowing Ishii the opportunity to attack the Soviets, who he detested, it also gave him more power. However, Ishii was not done.
In July 1940, Ishii’s men transported fifty kilograms of cholera bacteria, seventy kilograms of typhoid bacteria, and millions of plague-infected fleas from Manchuria south to the Japanese-occupied city of Shanghai, China. In Shanghai, the bacteria were dispersed throughout the region. The typhoid was dropped into hundreds of wells, killing thousands of Chinese villagers. The plague-filled fleas were loaded onto planes outfitted with special equipment designed to disperse the virus from the air. In October, Ishii’s planes launched and began their operation to spread plague on the Chinese-controlled city of Ningbo. Ishii stationed cameramen in the planes to film the bombing of the city. He didn’t want any of his superiors to miss the new experiment. Soon, a plague epidemic broke out in Ningbo that killed numerous Chinese citizens. Memoirs and diaries record the terror that spread through the city in the months of November and December as the Chinese realized what the Japanese had done. Families were broken apart by the raging plague, and many were evicted from their homes to allow the government to burn the buildings in order to prevent the spread of disease. Ishii’s plan of causing terror and fear was working. Furthermore, the diseases he and his researchers had cultivated were significantly more deadly than the natural versions of these diseases, having a 99 percent mortality rate. Other methods of spreading virus were also employed in this campaign, including dropping contaminated wheat laced with bubonic plague, designed to infect local rat populations, after which Ishii sent researchers down to determine how effective his attacks were. Other cities also suffered at Ishii’s hands. In the city of Changchun, modified cholera bacteria were planted by Ishii’s teams. As the cholera spread, Ishii encouraged city officials to organize a vaccine drive to limit the spread of the disease. Fearing the outbreak more than the conquerors of their city, the Chinese city officials complied and organized a drive. As people received vaccines, they little suspected that many of the vaccines had been corrupted with live and extremely deadly cholera bacteria. In other areas, Ishii’s officers and soldiers would give food laced with disease to local children, hoping the disease would spread from the children to the adults of a village. These experiments had the sole purpose of testing the effectiveness of Ishii’s weapons. As these experiments were conducted, other Chinese cities were attacked, including Quzhuo, where the plague spread to also infect the city of Yiwu. In November of 1941, additional plague missions were centered on the city of Changde, where the first victim of the attack was an eleven-year-old girl named Tao-erh Tsai. This plague spread to neighboring villages, and over 7,500 people died as a result of Japanese forces spreading over 36 kilograms of plague-infested materials. The following year, in 1942, the Chinese government officially accused the Japanese government of engaging in biological warfare. However, their report missed dozens of attacks carried out by Japanese teams. Japanese officials were well aware of Ishii’s actions and approved of the attacks. It was a method to win the war.
Between 1940 and 1942, Ishii’s programs and outreach continued to expand and grow at a rapid pace. This was in part a result of the urgency communicated by the Japanese General Staff, which ordered increased research on plague bacteria for biological warfare in 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union by Japan’s ally, Nazi Germany. Japanese officials ordered Ishii’s units to prepare to conduct raids into the Soviet Union and spread plague. Test runs were conducted in which anthrax and glanders were spread near Russian camps. While Ishii’s units prepared for war with the Soviet Union, the atrocities of Ishii’s death camps had expanded beyond Manchuria, even to the Japanese mainland, where experiments were conducted at the Army Medical College of Tokyo, a closely guarded secret that was not revealed until the 1980s when construction crews found the remains of those individuals who were the subjects of experimentation. Ishii enlisted the aid of family and friends to staff the most important positions within his death camps as a steady stream of inmates came to occupy the camp. Pingfan held up to 400 inmates, comprised of men, women, and children, all who became subject to the Japanese war machine’s experiments. Normally, these were people captured in campaigns or in action against local resistance groups, but on occasion, when the number of prisoners reached too low, Ishii would ask the army to grab locals in Manchuria to fill experimental needs. The army always complied. Those affiliated with the facility referred to the prisoners as “logs” in reference to the official Japanese narrative that Pingfan was merely a lumber mill. The degradation of their human victims reflected the sheer brutality of those involved in the camps. Their prisoners were merely materials for scientific experiments, rather than living, breathing people. Those in the facility celebrated the results of their research that they had conducted on victims of all ages, including infants. One former Unit 731 member stated that experiments had been conducted on Americans, British, French, and Soviet citizens, though the vast majority of those murdered were Chinese, Korean, or Mongolians. Few lived more than a few weeks before dying of the experiments or being killed to protect the secrets of Ishii’s program. Women were abused by researchers and guards and subjected to horrendous experiments on various venereal diseases. Some women became pregnant, giving birth to children at the facility. These infants did not survive long under Ishii’s care. Meanwhile, thousands of others were killed in typical procedures conducted daily by Japanese researchers and doctors. There were no survivors of Pingfan; Ishii and his men made sure of that.
As the war progressed, Ishii became a living symbol of the regime’s biological weapons program. Beside recruiting and teaching in Japan and experimenting in Pingfan, Ishii also traveled across the empire to conduct experiments, observe his outreach centers, and even pilot planes dropping bioweapons himself. He was the architect and mastermind behind it all, and he put his energies into the inhumane work with glee, though it should be noted that numerous other Japanese scientists and doctors were equally enthusiastic in their diabolical experiments. The strains developed by Ishii and his fellow scientists were far stronger and more contagious than natural strands of disease. The Chinese constantly faced the threat of Ishii’s bioweapons, which were deployed frequently on unsuspecting Chinese citizens and troops. Gas bombs, fired by artillery units at Chinese forces and cities, were a special design of Unit 731. Ishii even sought to create bacteria-infected clouds that would rain pathogens down on Japan’s enemies. Ishii’s soldiers spread bioweapons that destroyed crops, causing mass starvation in China. At times, his compatriots were harmed in Ishii's experiments. One example occurred in the summer of 1942 when thousands of Japanese troops were infected with cholera, dysentery, and other diseases that Ishii’s men had spread in the region of Zhejiang Province. Rather than regret their mistake, Ishii and his men merely kept statistics and conducted research on their own people. Over 1,700 soldiers died from the accident. Perhaps this is why Ishii was briefly transferred from his death camp of Pingfan between August 1942 and March 1945 to a small station in Nanking, China. Ishii dutifully went, still deeply committed to the cause of his nation. The station in Nanking had been set up in 1939 following the brutal conquest of the city by the Japanese army in 1937. This facility was designed to mass-produce biological weapons, particularly the bubonic plague. In 1942, as Ishii arrived in Nanking, the Japanese leadership escalated its use of biological weapons on the Chinese in an effort to subdue the Chinese Nationalist forces. Ishii was critical in the planning and implementing of biological warfare, which was carried out between March and November 1942. His orders were to “exterminate China’s armed forces…in the region of Zhejiang.” Despite numerous uses of bioweapons and mass casualties within the Chinese forces, the Japanese were driven back from the frontlines. When Japanese forces began a retreat from the region in July of 1943, Ishii and his men launched raids to spread disease in towns and villages that the Japanese had occupied in order to cover the retreat of the Japanese armies. Hordes of plague-infected rats and fleas were released into cities abandoned by the retreating Japanese armies; wells and rivers were filled with waterborne diseases that Chinese civilians and soldiers would drink from. Ishii’s men even covered birds with anthrax in an effort to spread anthrax-coated feathers. As these attacks were carried out, mobile units of Unit 731 and other biological warfare units arrived in infected areas and conducted brutal experiments on local Chinese populations. No longer would the atrocities be hidden behind the walls of death camps. Ishii and his followers were allowed into the open. However, the largest attack influenced by Ishii’s planning occurred against the city of Baoshan in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, as cholera bombs were dropped on the city, which resulted in an epidemic that killed over 200,000 people in early 1942. While Ishii was not present himself, the atrocities followed the same pattern pioneered by him. The purpose of these attacks was to halt the Allied forces' advance in the jungles of Burma, now Myanmar. So much disease was spread in the Yunnan Province that the Chinese Nationalist Army was forced to withdraw from the region, and the Allied advance slowed, thus buying the Japanese army time to regroup. A similar attack was carried out against Communist forces in the Shandong Province. There, Chinese communists under the leadership of Mao Zedong had created endless problems for the Japanese military, leading Japan’s High Command to order a biological campaign against the region. One of Ishii’s close colleagues, Dr. Kiyoshi Hayakawa, spearheaded the bioweapons campaign. Cholera and other diseases were disseminated, and the bioengineered diseases spread to the neighboring provinces of Hebi and Henan, killing over 200,000 people. Ishii’s mentees were now causing as much damage as he himself was causing in the central provinces of China. Despite Ishii being relegated to central China, he remained wildly popular among his peers, despite his erratic behavior. Many of his peers saw him as a genius and visionary, one who could lead Japan’s sciences into the future. One former doctor stated, “Ishii was like a god to us, and we thought that what he was doing was necessary for our country to win the war.” Intensely proud and arrogant, Ishii likely absorbed this praise and adulation with satisfaction.
By the end of the war, Ishii’s programs scattered across the Japanese empire likely had employed more than 20,000 Japanese physicians, surgeons, nurses, and scientists from various disciplines. Following the war, Japanese doctors acknowledged that most of Japan’s medical and scientific communities were aware of the experiments being conducted by Unit 731 and its sister units operating alongside it. Yet, despite the use of deadly bioweapons, the war was not going Japan’s way. As Germany was battered to a pulp by Allied forces on two fronts, Japan faced a relentless campaign from not only various Chinese armies but also from the United States, which had drawn closer to Japan with each passing month. At the start of 1945, victory seemed impossibly out of reach. Ishii’s worst nightmare came true after Japan surrendered to the Allies following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. Ishii, who had now returned to Manchuria, scrambled with his units to destroy all evidence of their activities. Ishii was a deeply committed nationalist, but he was also unwilling to die an ignominious death for his war crimes. His units burned down the facilities of Pingfan as soon as the Soviet armies marched across the border during the second week of August 1945. Ishii’s men killed all the prisoners in their death camps, as well as the majority of Chinese laborers who worked for the camp, with cyanide injections. Some of Ishii’s men near the city of Changchun, however, sought to wreak havoc one last time by releasing horses infected with glanders, as well as thousands of bubonic plague-filled rats near local villages. Further innocents were killed by this final act of evil by Ishii’s men. The war was officially over following Japan’s unconditional surrender on August 15, 1945. However, the contagions spread by Ishii continued to wreak havoc across China and Manchuria. Estimates range on the number of people killed through Ishii’s biological weapons program, though many estimate it to be far greater than the 500,000 people killed. Of those 500,000, around 20,000 were killed in experiment stations and death camps across the Japanese Empire in brutal human experiments. The exact number Ishii himself killed is lost to history. The sheer mind-numbing callousness of Ishii and his compatriots continues to haunt researchers today as casualty totals for regions attacked with bioweapons continue to increase. Yet, Ishii remains a somewhat obscure figure from this era, despite masterminding one of the most brutal experiments of the era. How could this have occurred? The tragic answer is, he was protected.
Near the end of the war, the United States military drafted a plan titled “Operation Flamingo” in which commandos were to be sent to Pingfan to rescue American Prisoners of War, as well as data obtained from the experimentation upon them. American military leadership knew that Japan had been carrying out biological warfare against its enemies, in particular the Chinese. Operation Flamingo is fascinating because around the city of Harbin, there were no POW camps remotely close to Ishii’s center facility, which suggests that American leaders were instead looking for information. However, Operation Flamingo failed to launch due to the quick surrender of Japan on August 15 and the arrival of the Soviet army, which had already captured the ruins of Pingfan and even reached the POW camp near the city of Mukden, where over a 1,000 POW’s were held. Here, officials learned that Ishii had sent men of Unit 731 to conduct experiments upon American soldiers to better understand American immunity. POWs in Tokyo were also the targets of the Japanese experiments, as well as POWs throughout the Pacific. No one was immune from Ishii’s experiments. Numerous prisoners of war, both from the United States and other nations, died as a result of these experiments. The American government had long known about the experiments, in part due to a mistake by a group of Japanese doctors made when they visited New York City’s Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and attempted to take stocks of yellow fever virus. Turned down by the official channels, the Japanese doctors attempted to bribe a technician to pass them the samples. This triggered a State Department investigation, though the matter was kept secret and not disseminated to the public. However, rumors and reports continued to emerge from Japan stating that the Japanese were using biological weapons and conducting experiments. In 1942, this became increasingly obvious as the Chinese Nationalist government released the Chen report, a document accusing and documenting instances of Japanese use of biological weapons. However, the report failed to be widely disseminated among the Allied powers’ populations, despite the propaganda value. As the United States military began taking Japanese prisoners, Japanese POW’s shared information about the biological warfare technologies being used by Imperial Japanese forces. United States intelligence officers also learned that Shiro Ishii was the leading figure behind the program. While plans were laid out by Japanese officials to use biological weapons on the American forces, these plans fell through time and time again. However, the Americans discovered on multiple occasions the plans that Japanese officers had left behind. One plan Ishii himself helped to create was an attack on the city of San Diego on the United States mainland. Ishii and others called for a small airplane-carrying submarine to cross the Pacific with a small plane. Upon arriving near the California coast, the plane, carrying plague-infected fleas, would be sent to spread the disease in the city in a way similar to attacks on Chinese cities. Code-named operation “Cherry Blossoms at Night,” the attack was cancelled just prior to its launch.
As the war ended, the United States government sent some of its own researchers to find and interview the scientists of Unit 731. When the American researchers arrived in Japan, one of Ishii’s closest associates, Dr. Ryoichi Naito, quickly informed the Americans that the officers of Unit 731 would be willing to share their knowledge with the US, on the condition that they be granted full immunity from the war crime proceedings. American military leader, General Douglas MacArthur, the man charged with spearheading the rebuilding of Japan, granted the request of the officers of Unit 731, allowing them complete immunity in exchange for information regarding their research. Ishii and his men responded quickly and soon flooded the American research teams with information. Ishii had been in hiding in Tokyo since the Japanese surrender to the United States; however, in 1946, he resurfaced only to be arrested by American forces. American leadership in Japan soon received instruction from the Pentagon in Washington D.C. to protect the information recovered from Japanese scientists affiliated with biological weapons and keep the experimentations secret from the public. American officials cultivated a friendly relationship with the rogue scientist, even hosting parties with Ishii. Ishii recognized the danger he faced of war crime prosecution and shrewdly worked to strengthen his relationship with the Americans by playing on their fears of the Soviet Union. Ishii promised additional information on his programs provided he received absolute immunity from prosecution and a job from the United States government. Douglas MacArthur pleaded with his superiors in Washington D.C. to grant immunity, stressing that the Japanese had information that the Americans could profit from, including information about vivisections. American officials were aware of Ishii’s crimes, but they wanted the information more than they wanted justice. Even as the Tokyo War Crime trials proceeded, prosecutors avoided mentioning any use of biological warfare. Judges in the trial were frequently misled about the reality of human experimentation and biological warfare by American prosecutors. The United States government was determined to cover Ishii’s and his colleagues’ crimes in order to gain information. In March of 1948, the U.S. War Department granted immunity to Japanese scientists in exchange for their knowledge of human experimentation. For these decision-makers, they argued that the knowledge gained helped to give the American military an edge over the Soviet Union and was sufficient cause to lie and obscure the reality of Japanese wartime atrocities. Ishii gladly exchanged his information for immunity and retired to his home in Chiba, a short distance from Tokyo. Keeping a low profile and avoiding the public eye, Ishii received a steady stream of visitors, including friends and scientists, who came to learn from the deadly man of science. While Nazi and fellow Japanese criminals were tried for war crimes, Ishii and his fellow scientists shared their atrocities with American scientists in exchange for freedom. Meanwhile, plagues continued to ravage communities across the Pacific as Ishii’s man-modified plagues evolved and strengthened. Thousands more than the official wartime deaths tally could be included in the number of people who died at Ishii’s hands. For the next several years, the United States government continued to put pressure on Ishii to turn over all of his records on biological warfare. His daughter Harumi Ishii claimed that American investigators and military officials threatened her father numerous times before his death in order to obtain additional information. Ishii, it seems, was attempting to use his leverage to keep himself, as well as his
fellow scientists, safe from potential prosecution. As long as they held secrets, the Americans would not expose their atrocities, particularly as the Cold War continued to expand. Still, Ishii only turned over roughly 80 percent of his data.
Rumors circulated that Ishii had traveled to the United States and Korea to give lectures on bioweapons, though these rumors were later denied by his daughter Harumi. In 1959, Ishii developed laryngeal cancer, or throat cancer, that proved to be deadly. Prior to his death, Ishii ran tests on himself to learn about the cancer. He also converted to Roman Catholicism, which his daughter claimed seemed to relieve him. Finally, after a brief battle with the cancer, Shiro Ishii, the mastermind of Japan’s biological warfare, lay dead in a hospital in Tokyo, Japan on the 9th of October 1959.
Following his death, Ishii remained a relatively obscure figure in the narratives of World War II. Despite protests by Soviet and Chinese officials that the United States was covering up atrocities for their own gain, few believed the reports from the Communist nations. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, a rush of scholarship, articles, and documentaries on Unit 731 began to appear in the Japanese and Western media. Former members of the units created by Ishii shared their experiences publicly, resulting in a scandal that shocked the Western world.
Some of those involved in the camps remained unrepentant, declaring that their participation was simply part of the war effort. Others felt deep remorse for their roles in the atrocities. In the United States, American POW’s imprisoned in Manchuria testified of being the subjects of Japanese experiments and witnessing brutal operations on their comrades. Evidence from the National Archives pointed to a cover-up by US officials. As more information was uncovered, Ishii’s role in the atrocities became clearer and outrage spread.
In the early 2000s, research continued to document how the plagues unleashed by Ishii on China have created new diseases that have killed thousands of innocent people. Questions have also arisen as to whether the United States itself employed biological weapons during the Korean War based on Ishii’s designs. Though unverified by United States sources, concerns have mounted with the revelations of the American coverup of Ishii’s crimes. Despite this rush of scholarship and the outrage of the 1980s, Ishii and his colleagues continue to remain an obscure part of the dark days of World War II, their crimes against humanity relegated to the background of many histories.
Ishii was the son of Japanese nobles and pioneered Japan’s human experimentation program and biological weapons division. His dedication to protecting Japan and advancing his own perverse quest for knowledge about disease were critical in the development of his personal military units dedicated to creating biological weapons. Ishii orchestrated, with the approval of leading Japanese government officials, biological attacks on Japan’s enemies, with much of his energy spent attacking the people of China. Ishii was cold and brutal, yet also flamboyant about his units’ accomplishments.
His fellow doctors and scientists considered Ishii to be a visionary, a man who would lead the medical and scientific community into the future. Many fell for his flattery, leaving behind their commitment to do no harm to fellow humans on the horrific belief that advancing science was more important than the lives of human beings. Ishii was diabolically brilliant and, at the conclusion of the war, leveraged American military leaderships’ fears of the Soviet Union in order to secure for himself and his men immunity. Ishii thus secured for himself a quiet end to his life, avoiding serious consequences for his crimes. Ultimately, cancer would take his life. His death was barely noted, though his legacy has remained at the edges of the World War II’s history for decades.
What do you think of Shiro Ishii? Should he have stood trial for his role surrounding the human atrocities perpetrated during World War II? Please let us know in the comment section and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.