[twitter - edited/threaded]
Vincent Lee
@Rover829
WaPo: Seiichi Morimura, a Japanese writer who helped force a reckoning
upon his country with his 1981 exposé of Unit 731, a secret biological
warfare branch of the Imperial Army that subjected thousands of people in
occupied China to sadistic medical experiments during World War II, died
July 24 at a hospital in Tokyo. He was 90.
At a time when Japanese textbooks often minimized atrocities committed by
Japan during the war, Mr. Morimura interviewed dozens of veterans of Unit
731 and documented in harrowing detail the conduct of the operation, which
was established in 1938 near the Chinese city of Harbin by Japanese
medical officer Shiro Ishii.
Disguised as an epidemic prevention and water purification department, the
unit functioned through the end of the war as a testing ground for agents
of biological warfare. Mr. Morimura's work helped prompt more
investigations in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn led to a court case
that further revealed the extent of the atrocities.
The perpetrators included many respected Japanese physicians. Thousands of
people - mainly Chinese, but also Koreans, Russians and prisoners of
eight total nationalities, according to Mr. Morimura - endured medical
experiments [a] that have been compared to those of Nazi doctor Josef
Mengele.
Victims, referred to in Japanese as "marutas," or wooden logs, were
infected with typhus, typhoid, cholera, anthrax and the plague with the
goal of perfecting biological weapons.
"I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly,
and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he
was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped," one unnamed
member of the unit told the New York Times in 1995, recalling a victim who
had been infected with the plague.
The same year that Mr. Morimura's book was released, an American
journalist, John W. Powell, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
that the U.S. government had granted immunity to members of Unit 731 in
exchange for the laboratory records from their research. Mr. Morimura
alleged the same.
A long-running lawsuit brought by the surviving family members of victims
of Unit 731 led a Tokyo court to confirm in 2002 that Japan had engaged in
germ warfare during World War II, dismissing government claims to the
country. But the court awarded no compensation to the Chinese plaintiffs.
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https://twitter.com/Rover829/status/1684698361549512705
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