FREE ESSAY ON THE FORGOTTEN CHINESE HOLOCAUST

THE FORGOTTEN CHINESE HOLOCAUST

Can you imagine your body being an object for experimentation while you're still alive?
That's one of the things the Japanese did to the Chinese during the forgotten holocaust,
the Chinese holocaust. Among the universal disputes between many countries, Japanese
aggression on the Chinese was one of the worst events in history to ever take place. The
Japanese also destroyed many cities of China. Specifically, they destroyed the city of
NanJing by conducting mass bombings and remorseless killings. Other examples of Japanese
horrific actions against the Chinese happened in a place called Unit 731.
During the 1920's, NanJing only had a population of 250,000. However, during the 1930's,
the city was highly populated with over one million residents. This increase was a result
of the Japanese occupation and countless refugees fleeing to the city from Manchuria and
other Chinese areas to the east of NanJing. The city of NanJing was a safe city for the
Chinese until Japanese forces advanced towards it from Shanghai on November 11th, 1937.
The Japanese planes bombed the wealthy and more populated areas of the city. The most
devastating bombing occurred on September 25th, 1937. Its targets were focused upon
hospitals with a red cross on the roof, refugee camps, power plants, water works, and
radio stations. About 500 bombs were dropped from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and as a
result, there were over 600 civilian casualties. ' 
On November 25th, Japanese forces attacked NanJing from three different directions. The
Chinese city soon fell to the Japanese Imperial Army. As the Japanese entered the city, a
massacre began which lasted six weeks. During that time, the Chinese were not simply
murdered, but were humiliated, and tortured. The Japanese used unthinkable methods of
murder. They chased the Chinese into the Yangtze River with machine guns, drowning them.
They poured gasoline on people, shot them, and watched them flicker up. The Japanese cut
the eyeballs out of men and then burned them while they were still alive.2 Some Chinese
had their hearts cut out. Even babies were skewered and tossed into boiling water.
The Japanese soldiers showed to be heartless when they made games out of these atrocities
and used the victims as toys. Japanese generals organized contests of who could kill the
most Chinese. Whoever killed to most would be the winner. Sometimes the number of bodies
reached as high as five hundred in a single contest.3 News reporters came and observed
the barbaric competitions and the victors were praised back in Japan. Their generals
encouraged the Japanese soldiers to rape whenever they please, and so they did. After
which they killed off the women. The victims has their stomachs cut open or their breasts
chopped off. "Comfort women" were kept as sex slaves to serve the Japanese soldiers
throughout the day. The Massacre of NanJing was therefore also known as the "Rape of
NanJing." 
The Japanese army finally left NanJing when the United States bombed Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. After the six weeks of horror, NanJing was left in ruins. Nothing was left
except the dead bodies that emitted an unbearable smell for miles around.
The Japanese started a secret "research program" during and after World War II. The
program was set up to develop weapons of biological warfare, including plague, anthrax,
cholera, and a dozen other pathogens.4 Even after the Geneva Protocol was signed by 145
countries, including Japan, to ban all gas and biological weapons. By "field testing,"
Chinese cities were invaded by plague bombs dropped by the Japanese to see if they could
start plague outbreaks...they did. The Japanese planes dropped plague-infected fleas over
Ningbo in eastern China and over Changde in north central China. No accounts were found
regarding how many died of this. The plague caused high fever, vomiting of blood,
shivering, respiratory failure, and body pains that resulted in a dark purple body color.
Three out of every 4 who contracted this disease died.5 The Japanese hoped to use the
soon to be developed weapons on the United States. They proposed using balloon bombs to
carry disease to America and they had a plan in the summer of 1945 to use kamikaze pilots
to dump plague infected fleas on San Diego.6 And yet only the Chinese were largely
effected by this plague.
In a place called Unit 731, a part of the research program, human experimentation on
Chinese people took place. The Japanese army, which was then occupying a large chunk of
China, evicted villages near the city of Harbin in Manchuria to make way for the
headquarters of Unit 731. Head of Unit 731 was a man called Shiro Ishii. He was born in
1892 to a wealthy Japanese family. He grew up arrogant and had no regards for those who
he considered lower than him. After the emperor approved his dream of building the unit,
the horror began. 
Unit 731 contained such jars with feet, heads, internal organs, all labeled. Medical
researchers, doctors, dentists, technicians, and scientists all had part to do with this.
Fifty different types of experiments were conducted in Unit 731. All chosen
spontaneously. The researchers took the deliberately plague infected Chinese, who was not
given a vaccine, and cut him open to see the effect of the disease to the man's inside
while he was still alive. The Chinese subjects used for the experiments were called
marutas, or logs. A former medical worker in Unit 731 said he once saw a 6-foot high
glass jar in which a western man was pickled in formaldehyde.7 The man was cut into two
pieces, vertically. Medical researchers also locked up diseased prisoners with healthy
ones, to see how various ailments would spread. The doctors even locked victims in
pressure chambers to see how long the body would withstand before the eyes popped out of
its sockets. Doctors even experimented on a three-day-old baby, measuring the temperature
inside the infant's middle finger.8 The needle was stuck in the finger to keep the baby's
fist from clenching and making the experiment easier. One experiment was to see which
method was best to treat frostbite. Part of the unit held a freezing machine where they
froze different body parts of the "logs" and tried various ways to dehydrate it again. 
The Chinese were used as dummies for other experiments outside of the unit. Tied to
stakes in a pattern in a proving ground called Anda, the Chinese were used to see how
effective the new technological weapons were. They wanted to know how many people the
bomb would kill and the distance from the bomb the person was placed. Few survived that
experiment so few Chinese had surgery, and those who died received autopsies. Ishii's
soldiers even went so low as to hand out chocolate candy laced with anthrax to starving
Chinese children. Japanese troops also dropped cholera and typhoid cultures in wells and
ponds, but the results were often counterproductive. In 1942, germ warfare specialists
distributed dysentery, cholera and typhoid in Zhejiang Province in China, but Japanese
soldiers themselves became ill and 1,700 died of the diseases.9 
A recollection of a doctor, Dr. Ken Yuasa, says he remembers two Chinese men being
brought in and stripped naked. Then he began practicing various types of surgery and when
finished, the patients were killed with an injection. Dr. Yuasa said that the Chinese
brought in for vivisections were used for practice and that they were routine among
Japanese doctors working in China in the War.
Years after the NanJing Massacre, criminal trials were held. The Japanese that were not
class A criminals were tried near the homes of their victims. However, the class A war
criminals were tried at the Tokyo Trials in Tokyo. Twenty-eight men were persecuted and
twenty-five were found guilty. Two of the three not found guilty died during trial and
the third experienced a mental breakdown. Although Japanese criminals were charged and
convicted, many Japanese citizens slowly developed a denial of the NanJing Massacre. Few
Japanese civilians heard about the atrocities because of the Japanese control over the
media, they heard only of the heroic war figures. In 1990, the Japanese began to
officially deny the whole case with NanJing and stated that it was a lie. But, finally,
in 1995 the Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama gave the first clear and formal
apology.
With all these actions taken upon the Chinese civilians, why was the head of Unit 731,
Shiro Ishii, allowed to live peacefully until his death from throat cancer in 1959? It
was partly because the Americans helped cover up the biological warfare program in
exchange for the data collected by the experiments. A farmer who was a member of Unit 731
justified the reason for vivisection without anesthetic by saying that it might have had
an effect on the body organs and blood vessels being examined. He even justified the use
of children in the experiments. He said that the fathers of the children were probably
spies. These attitudes contributed to a collective amnesia in Japan toward war
atrocities.10
The NanJing Massacre and the experiments of Unit 731 could never be erased out of the
past and should never be erased out of our minds. The cost of the breakthrough of new
knowledge was borne by the victims of medical experiments. The apology of Murayama
doesn't include the apology of all, so rather than denying it, it should become excepted
by Japan and a lesson for the rest of us in hopes that history won't repeat itself. And
yet still we can ask ourselves "Can history repeat itself?" The answer is disappointing:
There's a possibility...because in war, you have to win.11 Seems like nothing else
matters.