Unit 731 Testimony

Rating:
Summary: THOUGHT PROVOKING!
Review: A sad episode in human history, this book details the inhuman and sadistic human experimentations perpetrated by the Japanese military, primarily on the populace of China. The evil deeds included vivisection, freezing human subjects to study frostbites, and spreading airborne biological agents to target populations. A clear indictment of Japanese military which lost its accountability to its government and the people, as it had happened in Nanking, China.

While I was reading this book, I was also reading "77 Samurai" by Lewis Bush, which is about Japan's first embassy to the United States. The two books presented interesting contrasts. "77 Samurai" gave a portrayal of Japanese people who were ready to open their doors to the outside world, after a self-imposed seclusion of 250 years, eager to learn everything they could. Less than one hundred years later, they were embarking on their conquest of China, Korea, and Souteast Asia with wanton disregard of human lives, as detailed in this book. These two books present the benevolent and the evil sides of human race. The question is, how can the same people act so differently and are the rest of us any different?

The books contains many first-hand accounts from the participants of the experiments in Unit 731, which lends the book much credibility.

Disturbing contents but very well written. A great read!

Rating:
Summary: Powerful literature on disturing Japanese atrocities
Review: Although the majority of literature on WWII atrocities focuses on Nazi Germany and it's "Final Solution," other horrible acts were being committed as well in Asia by the Russians and Japanese.
Among these were Stalin's Gulags, the Japanese comfort women, Bataan Death March and Rape of Nanking.
Gold's book, "Unit 731: Testimony," takes a look at another wartime atrocity the Japanese have refused to own up to for the past 50 years: a program set up by the military to experiment with biological weapons on humans and other heinous human tortures that were expounded as "scientific advancement."
Gold's book is divided into two sections, a Historical Overview in which he explains how the idea of a human experimentation lab began in the Russo-Japanese War and became a horrific reality due to one man, Ishii Shiro; and a second section in which testimonies are given on criminal acts by the participants, including researchers, Kenpeitai officers, nurses and professors.
The historical overview lays out factual groundwork of Unit 731 and gives explicit details on some of the experiments, including live autopsies, biological tests and frostbite trials; which is some of the most disturbing literature I have ever read. Even as the bilogical weapons scare makes the headlines today, Gold gives proof that this isn't a new event in the world as the Japanese unleashed fleas with the Cholera disease on the Chinese citizens. After the war is over in 1945, Gold continues to explain how Unit 731 was covered up (with American help), and how some of the war-time criminals became wealthy professors and businessmen in Japan and set up world-wide companies like Green Cross. Gold also discusses the Japanese's unwillingness to admit their guilt about such crimes and how the majority of the Japanese citizens either don't know of their country's war-time atrocities or scoff at such notions as unfair accusations. (And people wonder how there are nut-jobs out there who dispute the Holocaust as ever happening.)
The testimony section is equally as shocking in that the participants recall their brutal crimes with some even trying to defend their actions.
Overall, this is a very disturbing and powerful book that I highly recommend. It's one of those books where the reader is shocked as they read the words and a book that will force the reader to keep thinking about it even if they are not reading it at the time. I can only give it four stars though in that as Gold cites very good sources on Unit 731, including personal testimony, he hints at some very serious allegations about the US during the Korean War, including biological bombs dropped by US Troops and the creation of the AIDS virus by the American military, that he gives no evidence to. To throw out accusations like that should force the author into making two choices - backing it up with facts, documents, or other info - or leaving it out of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful literature on disturing Japanese atrocities
Review: Although the majority of literature on WWII atrocities focuses on Nazi Germany and it's "Final Solution," other horrible acts were being committed as well in Asia by the Russians and Japanese.
Among these were Stalin's Gulags, the Japanese comfort women, Bataan Death March and Rape of Nanking.
Gold's book, "Unit 731: Testimony," takes a look at another wartime atrocity the Japanese have refused to own up to for the past 50 years: a program set up by the military to experiment with biological weapons on humans and other heinous human tortures that were expounded as "scientific advancement."
Gold's book is divided into two sections, a Historical Overview in which he explains how the idea of a human experimentation lab began in the Russo-Japanese War and became a horrific reality due to one man, Ishii Shiro; and a second section in which testimonies are given on criminal acts by the participants, including researchers, Kenpeitai officers, nurses and professors.
The historical overview lays out factual groundwork of Unit 731 and gives explicit details on some of the experiments, including live autopsies, biological tests and frostbite trials; which is some of the most disturbing literature I have ever read. Even as the bilogical weapons scare makes the headlines today, Gold gives proof that this isn't a new event in the world as the Japanese unleashed fleas with the Cholera disease on the Chinese citizens. After the war is over in 1945, Gold continues to explain how Unit 731 was covered up (with American help), and how some of the war-time criminals became wealthy professors and businessmen in Japan and set up world-wide companies like Green Cross. Gold also discusses the Japanese's unwillingness to admit their guilt about such crimes and how the majority of the Japanese citizens either don't know of their country's war-time atrocities or scoff at such notions as unfair accusations. (And people wonder how there are nut-jobs out there who dispute the Holocaust as ever happening.)
The testimony section is equally as shocking in that the participants recall their brutal crimes with some even trying to defend their actions.
Overall, this is a very disturbing and powerful book that I highly recommend. It's one of those books where the reader is shocked as they read the words and a book that will force the reader to keep thinking about it even if they are not reading it at the time. I can only give it four stars though in that as Gold cites very good sources on Unit 731, including personal testimony, he hints at some very serious allegations about the US during the Korean War, including biological bombs dropped by US Troops and the creation of the AIDS virus by the American military, that he gives no evidence to. To throw out accusations like that should force the author into making two choices - backing it up with facts, documents, or other info - or leaving it out of the book.

Rating:
Summary: A War Crimes Indictment for Japan and the USA
Review: As some of you know I have already written a review but the reviewer Hiromi said that everything in this book was mostly a lie, so I spent a few months checking things up and it appears that he is wrong, has read some other book(s), but whatever he did he certainly hasn't read this one. This book is probably not only an indictment of Japanese Human Biological Experiments but a condemnation of a US military industrial system that allowed the perpetrators to escape as long as the data fell into US hands and not the Soviets. The first thing to point out is that there are documented photographs of the biological experiments but this book does not reproduce them, even though they are extremely disturbing and show that these experiments occurred. You can find most of these pictures on the net. One picture shows a doctor with his hand inside a live POW on the operating table - another picture shows the bodies being stacked outside. So even though these pictures are not in the book they can be found on-line.

Basically before WWII the Japanese where world leaders in military medicine and during the Manchurian invasion took Chinese POWs to death camps for medical experimentation to advance science under the guidance of Professor Ishii Shiro, one of the most respected members of the Japanese medical community. America was not the world leader in biological weapons experimentation. Neither was the Soviet Union or Britain. It is all started right here in Japan.

The experiments were deemed so advantageous and necessary (because they both saved lives and killed massive amounts of the enemy) that the Japanese military built fortresses entirely devoted to human experimentation and bacteria stockpiling. This involved injecting a rat with a bacteria and then allowing a flea in a jar to feed on the rat. By creating stockpiles of infected fleas they would then design bombs to drop the fleas into towns and cities, but not before they experimented on POWs first. One experiment involved arranging POWs tied to crosses in circles in a field and then detonating the infected flea bombs in the centre to see how far the fleas could travel before infecting the host.

One of the most documented human experiment programs took place in a location called "Ping Fang" and included surgical work done on POWs not under an aesthetic, freezing POWs for frostbite tests and infecting POWs with Cholera, Epidemic Hemorrhagic Fever and THE PLAGUE all of which this book ties to the Japanese civil sector and the government under the control of a special branch called Unit 731.

This book even describes Japanese attempts at launching biological attacks on America and how after America took control of the Japans the whole thing was kept quiet so that the US military could get hold of the data as part of its Cold War. Some speculate that the data was not that important - however, this is no excuse for what happened to the POWs who where experimented on. We have records of what happened. For the first time Hal Gold publishes the transcripts of those documents which show US/Japanese collusion to keep this data out of the hands of the Soviets, period, end of story. But all this war crime stuff is pretty irrelevant these days because currently the White House has not signed up to the International Criminal Court. The denial of this kind of activity is outrageous and all we need to do is look to camp X-ray or even Abu Gharib to see the treatment of POWs even at the hands of what is considered the world leader is 'freedoms' and 'human rights'.

If there where any 'mind control' techniques involved, as some reviewers have suggested to distance Japan and the US from these atrocities, then really you have to point out that these techniques where in fact conducted on the POWs by the scientists that froze their limbs or injected them with poison. The proof in the pudding- America advanced its biological weapons program x 1000 because of what the Japanese had discovered. So much so they where eventually selling advanced prototype weapons (the Japanese also designed PLAGUE BOMBS and photographs of these are in the book) to people like Saddam to fight the cold war in Iran.
The second half of this important book is devoted entirely to witness testimony and confessions - MANY OF WHOM ARE JAPANESE and not communistic Chinese or Russians as some reviewers have suggested. The Japanese or US government have never admitted to these war crimes but the evidence is now available for everyone to see. Many of the death camps and human experimentation factories are still standing today not to mention the fact that mass graves have been found at the experimentation sites and that the bones on the skeletons had been surgically tampered with on nearly every single body recovered that can not be explained as just war victims. Right now these bodies are being examined to try and find where they are from. Many of the skeleton shapes and sizes show that the majority of these bodies are NOT JAPANESE. Also there is the small matter of confessions and witness testimony being backed up physical evidence. The experimentation sites are mostly still standing today!

This is a pocket sized book, but an essential history lesson that is still a holocaust in denial. Learn the history of Saddam's biological WMDs right here.

Rating:
Summary: If it's possible for you...
Review: Go to Harbin City, Hei Long Jiang Province, China. Go to the musume of 731 unit. Go to rent a video of ducumentary of old 731 members' conference held in Tokyo. Who is lying? History won't. Chinese like make this kind of bloody and miserable history for their own? Did they claim a word of "sorry" for these?

Rating:
Summary: Required reading
Review: Hal Gold, Unit 731: Testimony (Yenbooks, 1996)

Over the fifty years since World War II, we have been made aware of atrocities committed during those years. We are most aware of Nazi Germany; less in the consciousness, but still a part of the common knowledge, is Stalin's treatment of Russians during and after the war. But the actions of the Japanese army in China during the thirties and forties-- and their ultimate consequences-- have gone largely unreported in the Western press. Americans were first made aware of the scope and depth of Japan's war crimes in the late 1980s by two investigative journalists, Williams and Wallace, in their book Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II. Soon after, Godfrey Ho released the first of four exploitation films based on the activities of Unit 731, called Men Behind the Sun (a film partially subsidized by the Chinese government). Gradually, Americans became more aware of what happened (especially in the case of the Rape of Nanjing), but the numbers-- conservative estimates put the death toll in China between 1930 and 1945 at thirty million-- and the specific case of Unit 731 are still largely unknown to Americans.

Hal Gold fires another shot in the battle to set things right with his book Unit 731: Testimony. During 1993 and 1994, an exhibition based on the activities of Unit 731 toured Japan, and a handful of ex-Unit 731 personnel testified about their actions and the actions of others. It was the first time the Japanese government had allowed evidence that Unit 731 even existed to be publicized. Gold's book starts with a history of Unit 731, and then provides transcriptions of many of the testimonies given during the exhibition.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Unit 731: Testimony is the quotidian attitude of the employees recounted in much of the testimony. While a number mentioned initial pangs of conscience once they realized what it was Unit 731 was actually doing, almost all of them say that they simply got used to it. And we think kids are desensitized to violence today? Wonder what the average teen would do if he found himself in a room where a live vivisection, without benefit of anesthesia, were being performed.

Gold gets his message across by being invisible. He puts the facts on the table as plainly as possible, and then lets the testifiers speak for themselves. The facts lead to one conclusion: the U. S. government (and specifically MacArthur and Truman) were fully aware of the activities of Unit 731, which turned over all surviving test results and documents in exchange for immunity against war crimes prosecution (many of MacArthur's surviving memos and letters dealing with Unit 731 strongly imply that the general didn't consider those activites to be war crimes at all). Allegations were made during the Korean War that the United States, with help from Unit 731 commander Shiro Ishii, carried out a biological attack on Pyongyang. Gold never conclusively proves the case, but the circumstantial evidence points to the conclusion that those allegations are true.

The testimonials, on the other hand, speak volumes before they are even read. Japan is changing, as a culture, and the government's ability to allow the disclosure of fifty-year-old state secrets are a promising beginning. (As a side note, Gold also mentions at least three aborted operations the Japanese were considering that would almost certainly have altered the course of the war. It really makes one think to realize that the Japanese had a submersible aircraft carrier sitting not far off the coast of Oregon-- and decided not to use it.)

This is a powerful book, and one that should become a standard text in twentieth-century history classes. In terms of scale and in terms of horror, the Japanese occupation of what they called Machuria was the chief atrocity of the twentieth century. And you know what they say about history forgotten. ****

Rating:
Summary: Very good book
Review: I can never imagine how japs did something so cruel to human. I am
so angry that they have denied for half century the crime they have commited. Japs are too cruel......

Rating:
Summary: Unit 731 Testimony
Review: I found this book very interesting and enlightening. These events have been referenced in other books, both fictional and factual. The details, although not always explicit, are sickening. The author has done a very good job of bringing personal interviews and lectures and giving enough of the corresponding history to give the story credence. I think the events depicted here are true, there is very little conflict in the stories and the historical events depicted here have been previously described. The take home message from this book is that "war is hell".

Rating:
Summary: A good factual account of the infamous unit.
Review: I found this book while in the states because I have not seen it in Japan. This book sparked my interest because I recently saw a Japanese TV documentary on unit 731 which pretty much delivered the facts, even going as far a visiting the acutal site in China and interviewing the curator of the Unit 731 museum there. A reader mentioned that this kind of stuff is not taught in schools (I think it should be) but the program was aired during prime time which surprised me. I could not believe that there was one reader who said it was all lies(including the book Rape of Nanking!) Maybe he missed that program.

Rating:
Summary: Who Really Are Those Testified Here?
Review: In any civilised countries, any criminal cases should be re-assessed when the only testimonies are all untested. Is this not a matter of course?

Those testimonies on the Unit 731 are all from the records of accounts in the kangaroo courts held after the World War 2 in the former Soviet Union and the Communist China.
It is fact well documented by the third party including the Amnesty International and the Chinese authority themselves that both the Soviet Union and Communist China were exercising so-called "brain-washing" (named by the Chinese themselves) programme on the inmates of their "thought reform camps" after the war. For the Japanese, it started in July, 1950, according to the former vice-governor of Fuxuan War Criminal Camp where the last Manchu emperor, Pu-yi was also given the brainwashing treatment. This same person told a Japanese left-wing journalist who introduced those "confessions on the barbaric acts of the Japanese soldiers" to the Japanese public that those confession papers have now been stored in the Social Science Institute in China and assumed to be used as "historical documents" in academic studies. The Chinese scholars have been relied on those propaganda materials in their studies and Western scholars have trusted those Chinese studies of their objectiveness.
Does anyone ever realise what this really means?

Be aware! You may be looking at propaganda materials that are only "tested" by the very people in the propaganda department of China and their sympathisers in Japan. Or, may be those who have testified are the victims of the Chinese brainwashing programme. You have to examine those aspects with very fair, objective mind before you decide that they are truly genuine.