Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Melody Kemp lives in Laos. Her previous piece for Webdiary was Children into ash. Here she puts a different perspective on the Yasukuni shrine, also discussed in Wenran Jiang's piece A History Lesson for Koizumi

by Melody Kemp

The Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, Minister is currently stirring the regional political pot with his repeated visits to the controversial Yasukuni shrine.

TV news readers allude to the temple as housing the spirits of war criminals. Most Australians probably are wondering what all the fuss is about. After all John Howard is a shrine junkie, visiting any war shrine he can be photographed at.

Two factors have to be considered in unraveling the Yasukuni mystery.

Firstly Koizumi has been emboldened by his deepening relationship with the US who were involved clandestinely in the activities that are commemorated by the shrine.

Secondly attention to the fabulous ceremonial dress worn by the temple priests, indicates that this is a Shinto shrine, and during the war, the then Japanese government forced, not only its own people, but people of countries it occupied, to adhere to Shintoism, the religious ideology used by the military government to justify and promote its imperial wars. It is estimated that 300 to 500 shrines were built in northeast China alone. There was also a shrine which deified war dead who died fighting for Japanese-occupied Manchuria. This shrine had the same role as the Yasukuni shrine founded by Imperial decree in 1869 for the worship of "divine spirits" of the war dead, who "sacrificed themselves for their country".

The innocuous looking building photographed below while not as splendid and architecturally pleasing as Yasukuni, is at the root of all the diplomatic tensions. It was known as Unit 731. Built by the Japanese in a place called Pingfan, near Harbin it was called euphemistically the "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department" when it was built in 1936. It is now a museum of war crimes, and like Auschwitz, deserves to be remembered as an example of human cruelty, self interest and impunity. But it is hardly likely that this will be so, as the victims were largely Asian, some prisoners, some merely unfortunate civilians, and the West has a great capacity to ignore or forget those that aren’t of their tribe.

The main building was part of a huge compound comprising over 150 buildings covering in excess of six square kilometers. Swimming pools and bars were located near laboratories and proving grounds, holding pens and freezing units.

This was the playground of Dr Ishii Shiro who was Japan’s answer to the infamous Dr Mengele. The only difference between the two is that Shiro, with American patronage got away with, it and lived out a wealthy comfortable life assured of immunity from war crimes. Why? Because for a mere USD2000, some international travel and trinkets, he had handed over the records of nearly 20 years of bacteriological and biological research on living victims, to General Charles Willoughby, the then Head of US Military Intelligence.

He also got away with it as his victims were largely Chinese and Koreans, though some captured Russian and US airmen were also used in human experimentation. Some have posited that Australians were also involved, but evidence has proved elusive. When the US took charge of the lab’s bizarre exhibits, some of the livers and limbs preserved in bottles were labeled ‘American’. Dr. Shiro, the fanatical doctor who, taking advantage of Japan being non signatory to treaties banning biological warfare, was keen to see if westerners responded to diseases such as anthrax or bubonic plague differently than their Chinese counterparts.

No one was allowed to live within a three-kilometer radius of the compound. Those who had been moved out of their villages to make way for the compound became objects of the human experimentation. No one was immune. Children were vivisected alive as were women, and old folk. Former unit members say they called their victims "marutas" or "logs."

The things that happened here do not bear thinking about. Hands were amputated and sewn on to opposing limbs, in tests of handedness. In a gruesome prediction of events in Abu Ghraib, prisoners were hung upside down to see how long it would take to choke to death. Some had limbs frozen until they made a ringing noise when struck by a plank of wood. The limbs were then cut from the non-anaesthetized subjects who were left alive in order to offer other bits of their bodies to similar studies. Others were boiled alive to test temperature endurance, others were killed by abnormally high levels of X radiation being directed at their livers; a horrible harbinger of what was to happen to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The results of Japanese tests provided the basis upon which later experimentation to measure radiation effects on humans was conducted in the US.

But what the US was really interested in were the results of the human trials using anthrax, cholera, and bubonic plague, yellow fever, syphilis, rabies and other virulent organisms. Shiro’s experimental lab created vectors in many forms. Infected insects such as flies and fleas became the delivery systems of choice, along with feathers, and leaves that could pass radar detection. Entire Chinese villages were overflown and infected insects released from vials on the planes. Later, Japanese teams would arrive to extent of infection and assess the effects of the diseases usually by dissecting live and awake subjects. In the chillingly effective ways used by the Third Reich, Japan used trains and trucks to deliver humans to Unit 731 for experimentation. It is thought that over 400,000 perished from experiments in the Unit, and in infected villages.

It was the results of these and all other human experimentation that were bought for a mere USD2000, and the promise of immunity from war crimes. The Russian newspaper Izvestia reported the war crimes trial of 12 of Shiro’s men caught while trying to demolish Unit 731. The report was dismissed as ‘communist propaganda’ by the Rayban Man, Gen Douglas McArthur who was in charge of Japan’s occupation. He was also charged with making sure Dr Shiro and his colleagues were assured of highly paid work prior to their comfortable retirement at US taxpayers’ expense.

Later the same techniques used by the Japanese were used against the Koreans during the war on that peninsula. Koreans describe objects, like leaflets, feathers or chaff falling from the sky as US planes passed overhead. This followed Mc Arthur’s devastating ‘Home For Christmas’ campaign, which resulted in the deaths of 60,000 Koreans. Later they would become ill and many died. Numbers who perished are hard to find. US planes dropped leaflets and the chaff contaminated with botulins, anthrax, bubonic plague or one of the many others developed using Shiro’s data and techniques. American Airmen stricken with conscience, revealed some of what was going on, but the CIA launched a Psy Ops campaign to convince the public that these men had been brainwashed by the Chinese in a special camp in Manchuria; a myth that provided the basis for the film Manchurian Candidate.

The biological warfare project was ranked second only to the Manhattan (i.e. nuclear) Project in strategic importance and came in an atmosphere of rising anti communist fervor, and with an injection of USD250,000 enlarged the program to economic warfare by using ricin (used to deadly effect in the Tokyo subway), various forms of grain and crop blights, various plant blasts, plant and animal growth inhibitors, rinderpest, glanders, tulareamia (rabbit fever) mussel poisoning, coccidioidmycosis, rickettsia, psittacosis, neurotropic encephalitis, Newcastle Disease and fowl plague. It would be interesting to know if today’s Avian Flu is an offshoot of US biological warfare experimentation.

They were able to pull in some heavy weight scientists to support their research at the Detrick Laboratory, in particular George Merck, head of the pharmaceutical giant.

Eventually the project was wound down after fear that public perception might turn against the US. While they were signatories to the 1925 Geneva Protocol against chemical weapons, they, along with Japan had not signed the protocol relating to biological warfare. The spirits of those who sprayed the people with infected fleas, who burned, vivisected and froze people alive are laid to rest in the Yasukuni shrine. That is why there is so much anger. It is not merely an issue of separation of religion and state, it is a matter of reparation or owning up to a huge crime, and being complicit with a government whose self interest and complete lack of human, much less political ethics continues to dominate the world.

Recently workers, restoring Unit 731 in preparation for the Chinese government’s quest for UNESCO classification, were effected by residual mustard gas buried in the soil, which indicates that Unit 731 also conducted Chemical warfare experimentation. I include their photographs to impress on readers that we are talking about human beings here, who have children, dreams, debts, and toothache.

Neither the Americans or Japanese have owned up the devastation and deaths caused by their experiments and actions. Scientists were in fact hired to destroy any stories that may have emerged. There have been no reparations, from either power, no apologies, no recognition of suffering. The few still alive have pursued the matter through the courts in Japan, only to be dismissed under a wall of words.

Dr Shiro died a wealthy man at home at the age of 67. Willoughby and McArthur were feted as war heroes, Frank Sinatra starred in the Manchurian Candidate, George Merck went on to greater riches and a global empire … and Saddam Hussein is on trial for the deaths of 148 people.