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Summary
Summary
In wartime Japan's bid for conquest, humanity suffered through one of its darkest hours, as a hidden genocide took the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Cloaked in secrecy and protected under the banner of scientific study, the best and brightest of Japan's medical establishment volunteered for a major initiative in support of the military that involved the systematic murder of Chinese civilians. With the help of the United States government, they were allowed to get away with it. Based on important original research, this book reveals as never before the full extent of this crime, in a story that is as compelling as it is terrifying.
Beginning in 1931, the military of Imperial Japan came up with a new strategy to further the nation's drive for expansion: germ warfare. But they needed help to figure out how to do it. So they recruited thousands of doctors and research scientists, all of whom accepted willingly, in order to develop a massive program of biological warfare that was referred to as "the secret of secrets." This covert operation consisted of horrifying human experiments and germ weapon attacks against people whose lives were seen as expendable, including Chinese men, women, and children living in Manchuria and other areas of Japanese occupation. Even American POWs were targeted.
At the forefront of this disturbing enterprise wasan elite organization known as Unit 731, led by Japan's answer to Joseph Mengele, Dr. Shiro Ishii. Under Ishii'sorders, captives were subjected to deeds that strain the boundaries of imagination. Men and women were frozen alive to study the effects of frostbite. Others were dissected without anesthesia. Tied to posts, victims were infected with virulent strains of anthrax and other diseases. Entire cities were aerially sprayed with fleas carrying bubonic plague. All told, more than five hundred thousand people died. Yet after the war, U.S. occupation forces under General Douglas MacArthur struck a deal with the doctors of Unit 731 that shielded them from accountability for their atrocities.
In this meticulously documented work, Daniel Barenblatt has drawn upon startling new evidence of Japan's germ warfare program, including firsthand accounts from both perpetrators and survivors. Authoritative, alarming, and gripping from start to finish, A Plague upon Humanity is a powerful investigation that exposes one of the most shameful chapters in human history.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Only last year did a Japanese court acknowledge that Japanese germ warfare experiments in China took place during WWII. A useful overview of the history of biological warfare provides a historical context for the gruesome experiments on humans that began in northern China in the early 1930s, linked to the military expansion Japan began during the 1930s and fathered by scientist Shiro Ishii, who figures prominently in the book among the 20,000 Japanese professionals involved (some of whom knowingly distributed tainted food). The accounts of experiments on humans and massive germ warfare attacks against civilians-more than 400,000 Chinese died of cholera after two attacks in 1943-include the testimony of Chinese victims and witnesses as well as some Japanese. While most atrocities were committed against Chinese and Koreans, some Westerners, including American prisoners of war, were also victims. The most thoughtful portions of the book, Washington Post contributor Barenblatt's debut, explore how such atrocities "...coldly preserve medicine's scientific devices while annihilating all its high ideals." Shameful U.S. government efforts, spearheaded by MacArthur, to protect the Japanese perpetrators from prosecution in exchange for their research, even to the extent of characterizing the only war crimes trial that prosecuted perpetrators as propaganda (it was conducted by the Soviets), are well documented. The postwar material includes highly controversial claims of America's use of biological warfare during the Korean War. Although many of the gruesome facts have been published before, Barenblatt brings together the many contexts of how Japan's war machine came to commit medical-biological war crimes on a massive scale, with a final death toll of 580,000. (Jan. 6) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A surprisingly tortuous study of Imperial Japan's biological warfare program of the 1930s and '40s. The work of the research group called Unit 731 is no longer secret, having figured prominently in news accounts of ongoing demands for reparations on the part of the Chinese. But debut author Barenblatt has been tracking the story for a decade and uncovers some hard-won facts. The unit was founded by a medical doctor named Shiro Ishii, who was inspired to found a biological weapons facility after reading the text of the Geneva Convention of 1925, which specifically forbade biochemical methods of warfare. Ishii petitioned the military command unsuccessfully until, in 1928, a more hawkish regime came into power and pressed the Japanese to invade Manchuria. In 1931, following the so-called Mukden Incident, that invasion was staged, and Ishii's soldiers concocted dozens of biological weapons to deploy against Chinese soldiers and civilians, as well as Russian and Mongolian troops stationed on the Manchurian frontier; Chinese researchers have estimated that as many as 580,000 people were killed by Japanese germ warfare, and Barenblatt adds that the Allied powers knew of Unit 731 and its terrible program as early as 1939. Barenblatt plainly considers Shiro Ishii to be the Japanese counterpart of Joseph Mengele, writing that he "was the archetype of a highly functioning sociopath, playing the dramatic role of the unstable 'mad doctor' with flourish." Villainous, too, were the cold warriors of the Pentagon, who, after the Japanese surrender, decided to "immunize Japanese [biological warfare] and medical atrocity suspects from prosecution" and spirited away their records of experimentation on unwilling humans. Some of these immunized scientists, Barenblatt notes, went on to found pharmaceutical and biotech companies, one of which sold HIV-tainted blood to Asian and American hospitals in the late 1980s and, under a new name, "lives on even now as a distinct corporate entity within the enormous Mitsubishi conglomerate." Yet more illumination of the atrocities of WWII in its vast catalogue of inhumanity. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Journalist Barenblatt, an expert onapanese biological warfare, valuably summarizes the known facts and reasonable speculations about it. Like many other aspects of science inapan, the country's knowledge of biology was much more advanced before World War II than the rest of the world believed.apan's biological warfare capability, carefully developed with the direct support of the emperor, had been tested upon Chinese and Western subjects and deployed operationally at the cost of as many as a million Chinese lives. After the war, cold war politics prevented war-crimes prosecution ofapanese biowar experts and may have led to the use of their talents and stocks of material inorea (Barenblatt grants that such use has not been proven). Barenblatt's useful addition to the literature on biological warfare and WWII belongs on the same shelf as Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking (1997) and studies of the comfort girls, where it may, however, raise the hackles ofapanese still in the dark about their country's war crimes. --Roland Green Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Truly a story for our times, though it took place during World War II. Barenblatt chronicles how Japanese doctors infected some 250,000 individuals-mostly Chinese civilians, though POWs were also victimized-with virulent strains of anthrax, cholera, and other epidemic diseases but were ultimately shielded from prosecution by Gen. Douglas MacArthur himself. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
A Plague upon Humanity The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation Chapter One A Doctor's Vision Few have the imagination for reality. -- Goethe It began in Kyoto in 1927. Dr. Shiro Ishii had his decisive revelation while going about his customary routine, thumbing through a stack of scientific research journals, making his usual effort to keep abreast of the latest research literature. At the age of thirty-five, the physician had just received his Ph.D. in microbiology from Kyoto Imperial University, one of the world's top institutions in that field and a school comparable in distinction to an American Ivy League college. Ishii was a rather eccentric young man, but he was even then highly respected among his Japanese peers and professors, with a reputation for brilliance and innovation that caused many of them to overlook his extracurricular activities and tastes. Browsing through a medical periodical, Ishii came across an article that electrified him. He had discovered a report on the Geneva Convention of 1925, to which Japan had been a signatory. The article, written by a War Ministry delegate to the conference, First Lieutenant Harada, explored why Japan had signed the convention, a treaty organized by the League of Nations that banned the use of chemical weapons. As of 1925, some 1.3 million men in Europe and North America still suffered severe health problems resulting from their exposure to poisonous gas in the battles of World War I. Few in the league wanted to see this calamity repeated, and to the convention was added one more prohibition: It was also forbidden to make weapons from the germs responsible for infectious disease epidemics and pandemics such as bubonic plague, or the Black Death, as it was called, which wiped out 25 million Europeans in a five-year period during the fourteenth century. Ishii read the text of the Geneva Convention over and over again, with both fascination and a sense of validation, for this was the direction in which he had been heading for some time. Titled the "Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare," the compact states that "the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world ... [T]he High Contracting Parties ... accept this prohibition, agree to extend this prohibition to the use of bacteriological methods of warfare and agree to be bound as between themselves according to the terms of this declaration." The treaty was signed in Geneva on June 17, 1925, by 128 nations -- nearly every country on the planet. The prospect of germ warfare obviously created universal feelings of terror and revulsion among the civilized nations of the world. But Shiro Ishii took a different lesson from the Geneva Convention. If the prospect of germ warfare created such dread, he reasoned, Japan must do everything in its power to create the most virulent germ weapons, as well as effective methods for destroying wartime enemies with lethal diseases. For years Ishii had spoken to colleagues and military officials of the strategic military potential of disease, and now the framers of the Geneva Convention had inadvertently done the Japanese physician a great service. Their fear of germ warfare catalyzed him to new levels of action. He would visit offices of Japan's top military officers, trying once more to persuade them that a program to conduct biological and germ warfare was the key to victory for Imperial Japan in any future wars. By 1927 the nation had already conquered and occupied Korea and large portions of China, and powerful men in the ruling circles of Japanese society hungered for further expansion. Ishii now saw the way to make real his dream of state-of-the-art laboratories that could produce billions of deadly germs upon a general's request. The bacteriological weapons so reviled by the dignitaries who had traveled to Geneva in 1925 would become Japan's secret weapon. Ishii would be their mastermind. At nearby Kyoto Army Hospital, to which Ishii had been attached as an active duty officer soon after attaining his doctorate, he proselytized about the military's need to make biological weapons. He took a train to Tokyo to see his old army buddies posted at the Tokyo Army First Hospital, where he had been on staff as a military surgeon five years earlier. There he managed to charm his way into the offices of high-ranking officials. He also got in to see top commanders and tacticians in Japan's War Ministry. Ishii pleaded with them to begin researching biological weapons, citing the Harada article. He urged them to make tactical plans for the deployment of germ weapons. He also reminded them that most of the nations that had used chemical gas weapons in World War I also had ratified the Hague Convention of 1899, which banned the use of poison gas. One had to expect, he argued, that in the event of war, other countries would again develop banned weapons regardless of whatever international treaties to which they had sworn agreement. The generals, colonels, and military scientists listened politely to Ishii, and not for the first time. The young doctor's face was well known around staff headquarters. "He always emphasized the role of bacteriological warfare in our tactical planning," wrote General Saburo Endo in his diary. But Ishii's ideas fell on deaf ears at the War Ministry. The government at the time, under Prime Minister Giichi Tanaka, had stressed a more limited role for the military and a less aggressive foreign policy. The Japanese army and navy commanders went along for the most part with the Tanaka directives, and those heading up Japan's military were unimpressed with the theoretical concepts of biological warfare. They preferred to abide by Japan's moral obligations as outlined broadly in the 1925 Geneva Convention, which Japan had signed, although not ratified. Japan had ratified the 1899 Hague Convention, which banned chemical weapons ... A Plague upon Humanity The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation . Copyright © by Daniel Barenblatt. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from A Plague upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation by Daniel Barenblatt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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