Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities: Comparative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics (review)

With four editors, eleven authors (from China, Japan, the United States, New Zealand, Europe, and Russia), eleven chapters, an annotated bibliography, and two appendices, Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities attempts and largely succeeds in covering a range of history, science, and ethical issues related to the human medical and biological warfare experiments of the notorious Unit 731 led by Dr. (and Lt. General in the Japanese Army) Ishii Shiro that resulted in the deaths of approximately three thousand Chinese.

After an excellent introduction surveying many of the issues to be covered in more detail later in the book, the three chapters in Part 1 examine the history of Unit 731 (engaged in human experimentation with anthrax, cholera, plague, tuberculosis, etc.) and medicine-related war crimes trials. With the exception of a few Japanese who murdered American airmen and were subsequently caught and tried by the U.S. Navy, only the Soviet Union’s Khabarovsk Trial tried and convicted any Japanese officers involved in medical atrocities of war crimes. These Japanese officers were caught during the Soviet Union’s invasion of Manchuria in 1945, the location of Unit 731 and other Japanese biological warfare facilities. Meanwhile, the United States decided not to prosecute Dr. Ishii and his colleagues in their custody after a secret report—known as the Hill and Victor Report of December 1947—concluded: “Information had accrued with respect to human susceptibility to those diseases as indicated by specific infectious doses of bacteria. Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation” (30–31). The U.S. government actually paid Dr. Ishii and his colleagues money for his medical information gained by human experimentation and did not prosecute him at the Tokyo War Crimes trials.

Part 2 comprises three chapters on the guilt and responsibility of individuals and nations in the commission and cover up of these medical atrocities. These chapters make clear that Japanese doctors and their assistants who participated in human experimentation and biological warfare on mostly Chinese civilians (referred to by Japanese doctors as maruta, or “logs” for experimentation) justified their work in the context of wartime nationalism and the belief that their experiments and vivisections of Chinese would ultimately save the lives of Japanese soldiers. One doctor told an interviewer many years later, “Although I wielded the surgical knife for almost four years, I did not have even the slightest sense of guilt. Everyone believed we were doing this for the Emperor” (109). Other interviews with Japanese who participated in these medical experiments revealed that if they had any sense of guilt about the morality or scientific worth of these experiments, they rationalized their participation by the need to follow orders. In addition, it was a belief that the data compiled by Dr. Ishii and his colleagues would be in the national interest that led the U.S. government, albeit reluctantly and aware of the double-standard of prosecuting Nazi doctors, to cover up the medical atrocities of Dr. Ishii and his colleagues. As two authors (Till Barnighausen and Jing-Bao Nie) point out, it is doubtful that the United States ultimately found much of Dr. Ishii’s data useful. Many of the experiments, such as with Francisella tularensis, produced symptoms and results that “were well known at the time” (87). Ten Chinese were killed as “subjects” in one, irrelevant experiment. Barnighausen also has the most thoughtful and thought-provoking explication of medical ethics in Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities. Citing and condensing studies of others, he clarifies three basic positions as to “whether unethically obtained data may ever be used for scientific purposes . . . ” (91). First, is a position of strict nonuse. The negative consequences of unethically obtained medical data always outweigh any good that might be accomplished. Second, is a position...