THE TWENTY FIFTH OF OCTOBER
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
October 25, 2004
Twenty four hours of forever just for today: let us confer immortality on the twenty fifth of October.
On this day in 1881, Pablo Ruiz came into the world. An obstinate man of many temperaments, he chose many names for himself as he cascaded through his conjured worlds. Once he called himself 'P.R.'; another time he named himself 'Pau.' In the end he settled for Picasso.
In the Polish city of Wroclaw at a world congress of intellectuals for peace in 1948, for the first and only time in his life, Pablo Picasso makes a speech: "I have a friend who ought to be here." He is "the greatest poet of the Spanish language and one of the greatest poets on earth, who has always taken the side of the unfortunate: Pablo Neruda, persecuted by the police in Chile, cornered like a dog," the famed painter declaims as the thunder of verse and canvas intersect.[i]
On this day in 1898 in Malolos, Philippines, the Filipino Military Academy was established. The school was set up to train officers in the revolutionary army of the Filipino Republic but it does not prosper: America invades the first republic in Asia three months later. It takes America over a decade before it finally crushes armed Filipino resistance. At least 250,000 Filipinos perish in the war between the US and the Philippines.[ii]
The regiment of Marvin B. Russell arrived in Manila Bay on October 25, 1900. Russell was a veteran of the Spanish-American War who rejoined the US army to take part in America's occupation of the nascent Philippine Republic. "[A]s we struggled through the jungles pursuing our elusive foe," wrote Russell in a letter to his homeland, "we grew to hate everyone, and sometimes we took our frustrations out by abusing hapless civilians who got in the Army's way."[iii]
On this day in 1929, American newspapers, bankers and businessmen spend the day and the entire weekend trying to assure the public that the US financial industry is stable and secure. On the same day the US stock market was lurching terminally, The Casa Loma Orchestra conducted by Glen Gray records "Happy Days Are Here Again."[iv]
From October 25 to October 26 in 1944, "the greatest naval battle in history" blazed and boomed across Surigao Strait in the Philippines.[v] Across the roiling waters the fleets of America and Japan lock horns. America emerges victorious and humbles the imperial Japanese forces. Years later, after extorting economic and military basing concessions from the Philippines in exchange for Philippine independence, the US rehabilitates the economy of Japan.[vi]
The child Sadako Sasaki, died on this day in 1955 at the age of twelve. Sadako was two when the atom bomb was dropped on her hometown of Hiroshima. She was 11 when she was diagnosed with what her city called "the atom bomb disease" - leukemia.
While hospitalized, Sadako's closest friend told her of a Japanese legend - if she folded a thousand paper cranes, the gods might grant her wish to be well again. Sadako folded medicine paper, newspapers, magazines and other scraps of paper her family and friends brought her. She folded and folded hundreds of cranes even as she watched friends and other people die in the hospital alongside her. One day Sadako realized her wish had changed. She no longer wished for her own health. "I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world," Sadako whispered to her cranes as she wished for a world without bombs and wars.
Sadako manages to fold only 644 cranes before she dies, but friends, classmates, and family fold for her the remaining 356 cranes. The message of Sadako is lifted by other cranes: a statue of Sadako is unveiled at Hiroshima Peace Park; another is erected in Seattle. Thousands upon thousands of paper cranes fly over from all over the world, the manifold wishes of children and adults soaring across borders and time.[vii]
On October 25, 1960, Lady Liberty pays a visit to Decatur, Georgia, USA. Martin Luther King, Jr. is held over on old traffic ticket charges and jailed. He is denied bail and sentenced to four months of hard labor the next day.
American author John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature on this day in 1962. "Literature," said Steinbeck in his acceptance speech, "was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tin-horn mendicants of low calorie despair . . . Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed . . . The ancient commission of the writer has not changed."[viii]
On this day in 1966 the Black Panther Party was founded. America is shaken. At a massive anti-war demonstration in Manhattan six months after it's founding, prominent Black Panther member Stokely Carmichael denounces the Vietnam war draft as "white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend land they stole from red people."[ix]
On October 25, 1981 150,000 participate in an anti-nuke protest in London. Across borders and time Sadako's paper cranes continue to fly.
On this day in 1983, America - the protector of the weak and foe of oppression - invades Grenada, a country whose population numbered only around 100,000.
"There is something of mortality about the smell of musty books," said Pablo Neruda. "It assaults the nostrils and strikes the rugged terrain of the soul, because it is the odor of oblivion, or buried memory."[x]
To live is to remember. To keep away the mildew from memory's manuscripts - this is the urgent task at hand.
NOTES:
[i] Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire: Century of the Wind, W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
[ii] "Keeping the Spirit of 1896 Alive," Onofre D. Corpuz, in Hector Santos, ed., Philippine Centennial Series, October 10, 1996. Adapted for the internet from a speech delivered by Corpuz on June 14, 1996 to the U.P. Alumni Council.
[iii] Letter of Marvin B. Russell Late member of Co. I, Thirty fourth, United States Volunteers. See The Arkansas News
[iv] From The Daily Bleed - a website that is often, as it self-description states, "a wake-up call that is better than boiled coffee." The site is managed by Bleedmeister David Brown and is freely produced by Recollection Used Books.
[v] From the Depart of Tourism website of the government of the Philippines.
[vi] "The narratives of friendship," Renato Redentor Constantino, Today, October 18, 2004.
[vii] Visit these two valuable sites for more information and for new ways to contribute world disarmament and peace: http://www.sadako.org/ and http://www.sadako.com/.
[viii] The Portable Steinbeck (Revised and Enlarged Edition), ed. Pascal Covici, Jr., Penguin Books, 1985.
[ix] Quoted by Arundhati Roy, in "Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy, Buy One Get One Free," transcript of audio address in New York, May 13, 2003.
[x] "Odors of Homecoming," Pablo Neruda, Novedades, 1952, in Pablo Neruda, Passions and Impressions, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1984.
Recent political and travel essays by Renato Redentor Constantino. Email Red at redcosmo(at)gmail(dot)com.
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
THE MERCIES OF CHOICE
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
October 11, 2004
"We know," wrote George Steiner in 1963, "that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning." And what if history turned out differently and someone - or many - managed to hide the horror of the Holocaust? Who would have been the greater criminal? The perpetrators or those who covered up the deed? Good question.
America already had in its possession all the proof it needed to convict Japanese war criminals of waging biological warfare in the tribunals held in Tokyo just after the Second World War. Yet not one individual was charged in the trials with biological warfare crimes. [1]
It was called Japan's "Secret of Secrets" - a nightmare program of human experimentation that known to some as Unit 731, the name of the program's central headquarters near the city of Harbin in China.
From 1932 to 1945, Unit 731 carried out its ghastly work - mostly on Chinese peoples but also on Russians, Mongolians, Koreans, and prisoners of war from Britain, Australia and the US. Fortunately, Japan's inhuman warfare program was brought to a close when Japan was defeated. Sort of.
Led by the head of the Allied occupation forces in Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur himself, the American military gathered after the war a grisly river of evidence that showed in detail the work of Unit 731. After America's officials - led by MacArthur - promised the veterans of Unit 731 immunity from the Tokyo war crimes trial, an ocean of evidence flowed.
America acquired documents. US military personnel interviewing and interrogating Unit 731 members "received a flood of information," wrote the scholar Daniel Barenblatt. The information included "autopsy reports of Chinese and Russian vivisection victims, and thousands of slide samples of human tissues and germ warfare pathogens." Said Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders, a microbiologist working for the US army and a member of MacArthur's Unit 731 investigative team, "The data came in waves. We could hardly keep up with it."[2]
America received testimonies. An April 29, 1946 affidavit submitted to American lawyers of the IPS titled "Certificate of Crimes of the Japanese Army" written by Hasane Hari, a Unit 731 program veteran: "the epidemic prevention unit outwardly maintained the health of soldiers as its mission, but actually manufactured germs of cholera, typhoid, bubonic plague [and] dysentery to be used to attack Chinese soldiers and civilians."
America received more and covered up more. Why? As MacArthur advised Washington: "Request for exemption [from prosecution] of Unit 731 members. Information about vivisection useful."
Inside Unit 731 laboratories, Japanese doctors prepared plague-infected people to be cut up alive "so that the unit could study the progress and potency of their biological weapons. Samples removed from the prisoners were used to produce more bacteria."
"The first time, my legs were shaking so badly I could hardly stand up," recounted Yoshio Shinozuka of his first live vivisection. Shinozuka knew the person on the operating table. "I'd seen him a few times," he said. "He seemed like an intellectual. He wasn't even 30. But by the time he was brought in to the dissection room, he was so black with the plague that he looked like a different person. He was clearly on the verge of death."[3]
Another man used a stethoscope to make sure the victim was still alive and then assisted a third man, who quickly but methodically cut the victim open and removed his organs.
"We were told, said Shinozuka, "that it was crucial to extract the specimens before putrefaction had time to set in and contaminate our research . . . We called [our] victims 'logs.' We didn't want to think of them as people. We didn't want to admit that we were taking lives. So we convinced ourselves that what we were doing was like cutting down a tree.
The consequences of America's choice of silence of course meant a different fate for many. "In a just and rational world," Barenblatt tells us in his book, The Plague of Humanity - a work of immense pain and impeccable scholarship - "one would expect the physicians of Unit 731 to serve prison terms or be executed for their genocidal atrocities, as were many of the Nazi criminals. Yet in the years after 1945, they headed not for a courtroom dock to face their victims, or a jail cell, but instead for plush, influential positions in the dean's offices of major universities or the corporate boardrooms of pharmaceutical companies."[4]
But not all Unit 731 veterans chose the nourishments of delusion and forgetting. Some preferred the oblivion of suicide. A few, like Yoshio Shinozuka, chose to devote the remainder of their days to making amends, despite knowing that he "will never be forgiven."
Shinozuka has testified on behalf of his Chinese victims and has written a book for schoolchildren. In 1998, he tried to speak at peace conferences in the United States and Canada - but immigration inspectors turned him away as a war criminal. It is a label he accepts.
"It took me a long time to get beyond the excuse that I was just following orders," Shinozuka tells those who wish to listen. "I was doing what I was told. And I might very well have been killed had I disobeyed. But what we did was so terrible that I should have refused, even if that meant my own death. But I didn't do that."
Shinozuka has visited China often in recent years and has been back to Unit 731's former headquarters, which is now a museum. "The Chinese have been very generous with me," said Shinozuka. "They tell me that I, too, am a victim."
Shinozuka has not granted himself the clemency of forgetfulness. And perhaps because of this his fate is no longer indentured to the evil he once nurtured in his heart. An evil he now feeds daily with two poison pills called memory and conscience.
NOTES:
[1] "The past as prologue," Renato Redentor Constantino, Today, October 4, 2004. Can be considered the first part of this article but was really written separately. Both delve on different themes.
[2] A plague upon humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ warfare Operation, Daniel Barenblatt, 2004, HarperCollins. Really as I described the book - a painful read, tremendously interesting, written with impeccable scholarship.
[3] "Horrors of war haunt old soldier," China Daily, September 18, 2004.
[4] There was another more public trial, Barenblatt tells us, held in 1949 in the Soviet city of Khabarovsk - one which actually bore results. According to Barenblatt, "twelve Japanese bio-war complicit officials were convicted" in proceedings that could not be considered mere show trials. In the same year, when the Soviet newspaper Izvestia reported the guilty verdicts of the Khabarovsk tribunal and called for the leader of Unit 731, Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, "to be apprehended and tried by US occupation forces in Japan as the ringleader of the secret Japanese program," Gen. MacArthur's office in Tokyo "denounced both the Khabarovsk trial and Izvestia's charges of Japanese biological warfare and a U.S. cover-up as false communist propaganda."
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
October 11, 2004
"We know," wrote George Steiner in 1963, "that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning." And what if history turned out differently and someone - or many - managed to hide the horror of the Holocaust? Who would have been the greater criminal? The perpetrators or those who covered up the deed? Good question.
America already had in its possession all the proof it needed to convict Japanese war criminals of waging biological warfare in the tribunals held in Tokyo just after the Second World War. Yet not one individual was charged in the trials with biological warfare crimes. [1]
It was called Japan's "Secret of Secrets" - a nightmare program of human experimentation that known to some as Unit 731, the name of the program's central headquarters near the city of Harbin in China.
From 1932 to 1945, Unit 731 carried out its ghastly work - mostly on Chinese peoples but also on Russians, Mongolians, Koreans, and prisoners of war from Britain, Australia and the US. Fortunately, Japan's inhuman warfare program was brought to a close when Japan was defeated. Sort of.
Led by the head of the Allied occupation forces in Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur himself, the American military gathered after the war a grisly river of evidence that showed in detail the work of Unit 731. After America's officials - led by MacArthur - promised the veterans of Unit 731 immunity from the Tokyo war crimes trial, an ocean of evidence flowed.
America acquired documents. US military personnel interviewing and interrogating Unit 731 members "received a flood of information," wrote the scholar Daniel Barenblatt. The information included "autopsy reports of Chinese and Russian vivisection victims, and thousands of slide samples of human tissues and germ warfare pathogens." Said Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders, a microbiologist working for the US army and a member of MacArthur's Unit 731 investigative team, "The data came in waves. We could hardly keep up with it."[2]
America received testimonies. An April 29, 1946 affidavit submitted to American lawyers of the IPS titled "Certificate of Crimes of the Japanese Army" written by Hasane Hari, a Unit 731 program veteran: "the epidemic prevention unit outwardly maintained the health of soldiers as its mission, but actually manufactured germs of cholera, typhoid, bubonic plague [and] dysentery to be used to attack Chinese soldiers and civilians."
America received more and covered up more. Why? As MacArthur advised Washington: "Request for exemption [from prosecution] of Unit 731 members. Information about vivisection useful."
Inside Unit 731 laboratories, Japanese doctors prepared plague-infected people to be cut up alive "so that the unit could study the progress and potency of their biological weapons. Samples removed from the prisoners were used to produce more bacteria."
"The first time, my legs were shaking so badly I could hardly stand up," recounted Yoshio Shinozuka of his first live vivisection. Shinozuka knew the person on the operating table. "I'd seen him a few times," he said. "He seemed like an intellectual. He wasn't even 30. But by the time he was brought in to the dissection room, he was so black with the plague that he looked like a different person. He was clearly on the verge of death."[3]
Another man used a stethoscope to make sure the victim was still alive and then assisted a third man, who quickly but methodically cut the victim open and removed his organs.
"We were told, said Shinozuka, "that it was crucial to extract the specimens before putrefaction had time to set in and contaminate our research . . . We called [our] victims 'logs.' We didn't want to think of them as people. We didn't want to admit that we were taking lives. So we convinced ourselves that what we were doing was like cutting down a tree.
The consequences of America's choice of silence of course meant a different fate for many. "In a just and rational world," Barenblatt tells us in his book, The Plague of Humanity - a work of immense pain and impeccable scholarship - "one would expect the physicians of Unit 731 to serve prison terms or be executed for their genocidal atrocities, as were many of the Nazi criminals. Yet in the years after 1945, they headed not for a courtroom dock to face their victims, or a jail cell, but instead for plush, influential positions in the dean's offices of major universities or the corporate boardrooms of pharmaceutical companies."[4]
But not all Unit 731 veterans chose the nourishments of delusion and forgetting. Some preferred the oblivion of suicide. A few, like Yoshio Shinozuka, chose to devote the remainder of their days to making amends, despite knowing that he "will never be forgiven."
Shinozuka has testified on behalf of his Chinese victims and has written a book for schoolchildren. In 1998, he tried to speak at peace conferences in the United States and Canada - but immigration inspectors turned him away as a war criminal. It is a label he accepts.
"It took me a long time to get beyond the excuse that I was just following orders," Shinozuka tells those who wish to listen. "I was doing what I was told. And I might very well have been killed had I disobeyed. But what we did was so terrible that I should have refused, even if that meant my own death. But I didn't do that."
Shinozuka has visited China often in recent years and has been back to Unit 731's former headquarters, which is now a museum. "The Chinese have been very generous with me," said Shinozuka. "They tell me that I, too, am a victim."
Shinozuka has not granted himself the clemency of forgetfulness. And perhaps because of this his fate is no longer indentured to the evil he once nurtured in his heart. An evil he now feeds daily with two poison pills called memory and conscience.
NOTES:
[1] "The past as prologue," Renato Redentor Constantino, Today, October 4, 2004. Can be considered the first part of this article but was really written separately. Both delve on different themes.
[2] A plague upon humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ warfare Operation, Daniel Barenblatt, 2004, HarperCollins. Really as I described the book - a painful read, tremendously interesting, written with impeccable scholarship.
[3] "Horrors of war haunt old soldier," China Daily, September 18, 2004.
[4] There was another more public trial, Barenblatt tells us, held in 1949 in the Soviet city of Khabarovsk - one which actually bore results. According to Barenblatt, "twelve Japanese bio-war complicit officials were convicted" in proceedings that could not be considered mere show trials. In the same year, when the Soviet newspaper Izvestia reported the guilty verdicts of the Khabarovsk tribunal and called for the leader of Unit 731, Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, "to be apprehended and tried by US occupation forces in Japan as the ringleader of the secret Japanese program," Gen. MacArthur's office in Tokyo "denounced both the Khabarovsk trial and Izvestia's charges of Japanese biological warfare and a U.S. cover-up as false communist propaganda."
Saturday, October 02, 2004
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnnews.com
October 4, 2004
So many good wars launched. So many wars-to-end-all-wars concluded. And yet.
When will respite come? Where will it come from? Difficult to say.
Dr. Shiro Ishii was born in 1892 to a wealthy family of landed aristocrats in Chiyoda Mura, a farming village near Tokyo. Charismatic and driven, Dr. Ishii towered over most people. He was five feet, ten inches tall, had a booming voice and possessed "soaring intelligence."
Ishii was the architect and leader of Imperial Japan's biological and germ warfare program. A program known to a few today as Unit 731 - the name of the nightmare's central headquarters near the city of Harbin in Manchuria.
Unit 731 was his government's "Secret of Secrets," as Ishii himself described the program - one under which many of the best and brightest doctors of Japan's medical and biological research community applied their considerable talents. Talents employed in running an assembly line of human experimentation "in the pursuit of scientific goals completely untethered to morality."
From 1932 to 1945, Japan carried out its biological warfare program with the same horrific efficiency that marked the work of German Nazi doctors. Unit 731 sought to determine the efficacy of the germ and biological arsenal that Japan was developing, using humans as lab rats.
Ishii and his doctors administered tainted vaccine injections to children in selected villages; poisoned food was handed out to hungry people by smiling Japanese soldiers and physicians. Different strains of pathogenic germs such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid were bred and tested on humans alongside the development of tools with which the disease microbes could be let loose.
Virulent strains of malaria "were injected into [captured] Americans suffering from beri-beri and tuberculosis patients were injected with strange concoctions of acid mixed with dextrose, ether, or blood plasma." The objective, recounts the scholar Daniel Barenblatt, in his soul-searing work, The Plague of Humanity, "was to develop medicinal treatments, using Americans as expendable guinea pigs." Australian and British prisoners of war were also subjected to unspeakable pain. Of course, many did not make it.
While Unit 731's ghastly experimentation smote as well the peoples of Russia, Mongolia and Korea, it was the Chinese who suffered the brunt of the madness. Millions of bubonic plague-infected fleas were raised and released aerially on unsuspecting Chinese villages. Feathers contaminated with anthrax were released over population centers by Japanese air squadrons while on the ground, disease-carrying horses, dogs, rats and birds were dispersed and made to mingle with livestock and humans.
And on the doctors of Unit 731 diligently worked, tallying the effects of their creations by performing vivisections on prisoners, recording deformities, and putting together a macabre roster of distress, torment and death.
Non-germ warfare tests were also performed on Unit 731's prisoners: animal-to-human blood transfusions, for instance. And frostbite experiments where limbs of live humans were exposed to extreme frost, struck with a stick and broken off and reattached to places where they were originally attached - and other places.
It is estimated by scholars that at least 20,000 people were killed inside Unit 731's human experiment prisons in China. And outside, well, it was the same hell.
May 1942: a cholera epidemic created by Unit 731 in Yunnan province kills over 200,000 people. Three months later, another 200,000 die in Shandong province as a result of Unit 731's germ warfare. In the Zhekiang province city of Quzhou alone, over 50,000 perish from bubonic plague and cholera. And so on and so on and so on.
How did it all end? As typical stories go, the good side eventually prevails over the butchers and the malevolent: Japan's imperial drive is defeated and Unit 731's designs are discovered and trounced - its army of ghoulish doctors and the infamous Shiro Ishii captured, tried and executed. That should be a nice story but reality is not typical and the story of Unit 731 is not a typical story. "Few," said Goethe, "have the imagination for reality."
Within months after World War II ended US army officials - acting upon the instructions of the very head of the Allied occupation forces in Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur - were already in Japan meeting - over dinner - with Shiro Ishii and other veterans of Unit 731. The Americans desired the knowledge possessed by Ishii and his colleagues. Ishii promised the Americans the full set of keys to his secret kingdom if ...
In return for immunity "for myself, my superiors, and subordinates," Ishii replied explicitly in one of the meetings, "I would like to be hired by the U.S. as a biological warfare expert. In the preparation for the war with Russia, I can give [America] the advantage of my 20 years research and experience."
In a radio message to Washington on May 6, 1947, MacArthur urged the combined US military and State Department group which supervised occupation policy in Japan to give - in writing - immunity to Ishii and all others involved the Japanese military's germ warfare and human experiments program.
"Additional data possibly including some statements from Ishii," said MacArthur, "probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'war crimes evidence' ... complete story to include plans and theories of Ishii and superiors, probably can be obtained by documentary immunity to Ishii and associate."
MacArthur advised Washington: "Request for exemption [from prosecution] of Unit 731 members. Information about vivisection useful."
On December 27, 1949 - against the mountain of evidence that American forces had gathered since the surrender of Japan - evidence in the form of reports, documents, photographs and testimonies from victims who lived through the ordeal and confessions of captured Japanese soldiers and physicians - MacArthur's headquarters announced to the world "that the Japanese had done some experimentation with animals but that there was no evidence they ever had used human beings."[1]
At the Tokyo war crimes trial, which the press had dubbed "the Nuremberg Trial of the East," the Americans suppressed evidence concerning the atrocities of Unit 731 and "not one individual was charged in the Japan hearings with biological or chemical warfare crimes." Thus did thousands of Unit 731 doctors enjoy the rest of their lives - some more prosperous than others, some heading Japan's leading universities; others leading Japanese conglomerates.
Crimes against humanity on top of genocidal deeds. Crimes that allowed the US government to use Ishii's secrets against its enemies, such as the "systematic spreading of smallpox, cholera and plague germs over North Korea" which, during the period in which it was unleashed, "shocked and horrified the entire world."[2]
Where else has the American government used Ishii's secrets? And who else has had access? Fifty years is a long time. Did not America invade Iraq to protect the world "from the potential horror of Saddam Hussein's supposed germ warfare capability?"[3] Stuff happens, said Donald Rumsfeld. Will Ishii's weapons ever be used again? Where? By who?
Hard to answer these things. Painful to contemplate. Yesterday may have already brought whatever it is that tomorrow was never meant to bring.
NOTES:
[1] A plague upon humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ warfare Operation, Daniel Barenblatt, 2004, HarperCollins.
[2] The quote is from US journalist John W. Powell who covered the Korean War and who was later charged with thirteen counts of sedition by the US government for publishing his reports of the American military's germ warfare us in Korea. In Barenblatt's Plague Upon Humanity.
[3] "Japan's Genocide: Review of Daniel Barenblatt's A Plague Upon Humanity," Richard Garrett, Asian Review of Books, March 3, 2004.
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnnews.com
October 4, 2004
So many good wars launched. So many wars-to-end-all-wars concluded. And yet.
When will respite come? Where will it come from? Difficult to say.
Dr. Shiro Ishii was born in 1892 to a wealthy family of landed aristocrats in Chiyoda Mura, a farming village near Tokyo. Charismatic and driven, Dr. Ishii towered over most people. He was five feet, ten inches tall, had a booming voice and possessed "soaring intelligence."
Ishii was the architect and leader of Imperial Japan's biological and germ warfare program. A program known to a few today as Unit 731 - the name of the nightmare's central headquarters near the city of Harbin in Manchuria.
Unit 731 was his government's "Secret of Secrets," as Ishii himself described the program - one under which many of the best and brightest doctors of Japan's medical and biological research community applied their considerable talents. Talents employed in running an assembly line of human experimentation "in the pursuit of scientific goals completely untethered to morality."
From 1932 to 1945, Japan carried out its biological warfare program with the same horrific efficiency that marked the work of German Nazi doctors. Unit 731 sought to determine the efficacy of the germ and biological arsenal that Japan was developing, using humans as lab rats.
Ishii and his doctors administered tainted vaccine injections to children in selected villages; poisoned food was handed out to hungry people by smiling Japanese soldiers and physicians. Different strains of pathogenic germs such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid were bred and tested on humans alongside the development of tools with which the disease microbes could be let loose.
Virulent strains of malaria "were injected into [captured] Americans suffering from beri-beri and tuberculosis patients were injected with strange concoctions of acid mixed with dextrose, ether, or blood plasma." The objective, recounts the scholar Daniel Barenblatt, in his soul-searing work, The Plague of Humanity, "was to develop medicinal treatments, using Americans as expendable guinea pigs." Australian and British prisoners of war were also subjected to unspeakable pain. Of course, many did not make it.
While Unit 731's ghastly experimentation smote as well the peoples of Russia, Mongolia and Korea, it was the Chinese who suffered the brunt of the madness. Millions of bubonic plague-infected fleas were raised and released aerially on unsuspecting Chinese villages. Feathers contaminated with anthrax were released over population centers by Japanese air squadrons while on the ground, disease-carrying horses, dogs, rats and birds were dispersed and made to mingle with livestock and humans.
And on the doctors of Unit 731 diligently worked, tallying the effects of their creations by performing vivisections on prisoners, recording deformities, and putting together a macabre roster of distress, torment and death.
Non-germ warfare tests were also performed on Unit 731's prisoners: animal-to-human blood transfusions, for instance. And frostbite experiments where limbs of live humans were exposed to extreme frost, struck with a stick and broken off and reattached to places where they were originally attached - and other places.
It is estimated by scholars that at least 20,000 people were killed inside Unit 731's human experiment prisons in China. And outside, well, it was the same hell.
May 1942: a cholera epidemic created by Unit 731 in Yunnan province kills over 200,000 people. Three months later, another 200,000 die in Shandong province as a result of Unit 731's germ warfare. In the Zhekiang province city of Quzhou alone, over 50,000 perish from bubonic plague and cholera. And so on and so on and so on.
How did it all end? As typical stories go, the good side eventually prevails over the butchers and the malevolent: Japan's imperial drive is defeated and Unit 731's designs are discovered and trounced - its army of ghoulish doctors and the infamous Shiro Ishii captured, tried and executed. That should be a nice story but reality is not typical and the story of Unit 731 is not a typical story. "Few," said Goethe, "have the imagination for reality."
Within months after World War II ended US army officials - acting upon the instructions of the very head of the Allied occupation forces in Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur - were already in Japan meeting - over dinner - with Shiro Ishii and other veterans of Unit 731. The Americans desired the knowledge possessed by Ishii and his colleagues. Ishii promised the Americans the full set of keys to his secret kingdom if ...
In return for immunity "for myself, my superiors, and subordinates," Ishii replied explicitly in one of the meetings, "I would like to be hired by the U.S. as a biological warfare expert. In the preparation for the war with Russia, I can give [America] the advantage of my 20 years research and experience."
In a radio message to Washington on May 6, 1947, MacArthur urged the combined US military and State Department group which supervised occupation policy in Japan to give - in writing - immunity to Ishii and all others involved the Japanese military's germ warfare and human experiments program.
"Additional data possibly including some statements from Ishii," said MacArthur, "probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'war crimes evidence' ... complete story to include plans and theories of Ishii and superiors, probably can be obtained by documentary immunity to Ishii and associate."
MacArthur advised Washington: "Request for exemption [from prosecution] of Unit 731 members. Information about vivisection useful."
On December 27, 1949 - against the mountain of evidence that American forces had gathered since the surrender of Japan - evidence in the form of reports, documents, photographs and testimonies from victims who lived through the ordeal and confessions of captured Japanese soldiers and physicians - MacArthur's headquarters announced to the world "that the Japanese had done some experimentation with animals but that there was no evidence they ever had used human beings."[1]
At the Tokyo war crimes trial, which the press had dubbed "the Nuremberg Trial of the East," the Americans suppressed evidence concerning the atrocities of Unit 731 and "not one individual was charged in the Japan hearings with biological or chemical warfare crimes." Thus did thousands of Unit 731 doctors enjoy the rest of their lives - some more prosperous than others, some heading Japan's leading universities; others leading Japanese conglomerates.
Crimes against humanity on top of genocidal deeds. Crimes that allowed the US government to use Ishii's secrets against its enemies, such as the "systematic spreading of smallpox, cholera and plague germs over North Korea" which, during the period in which it was unleashed, "shocked and horrified the entire world."[2]
Where else has the American government used Ishii's secrets? And who else has had access? Fifty years is a long time. Did not America invade Iraq to protect the world "from the potential horror of Saddam Hussein's supposed germ warfare capability?"[3] Stuff happens, said Donald Rumsfeld. Will Ishii's weapons ever be used again? Where? By who?
Hard to answer these things. Painful to contemplate. Yesterday may have already brought whatever it is that tomorrow was never meant to bring.
NOTES:
[1] A plague upon humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ warfare Operation, Daniel Barenblatt, 2004, HarperCollins.
[2] The quote is from US journalist John W. Powell who covered the Korean War and who was later charged with thirteen counts of sedition by the US government for publishing his reports of the American military's germ warfare us in Korea. In Barenblatt's Plague Upon Humanity.
[3] "Japan's Genocide: Review of Daniel Barenblatt's A Plague Upon Humanity," Richard Garrett, Asian Review of Books, March 3, 2004.
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