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Shake up your meal routine. Go to cookunity.com mealtime50 or enter code mealtime50 before checkout for 50% off your first week. That's that's cookunity.com mealtime50 we all know about the Nazi human experiments, this grotesque bit of history that we are not allowed to forget. But what about the other horrors that happened in Asia? In Japan there was unit 731, which is a secret military bioweapons programs where doctors performed live dissections, people froze to death, unleashed plague anthrax on entire villages. It was really the creation of a lot of the modern day bioweap happened there at the Ishi Labs, which is called Unit 731. Here's the part most Americans never heard is that the United States government granted full immunity to the man who ran it, Dr. Shiro Ishii, in exchange for this research, this makes us not just a culture that hides this story but was actually complicit. So while we condemn Nazi doctors at Nuremberg and our own government then on the other hand quietly welcomed Japan's war criminals because their crimes and that data was useful. Joining us to discuss this are two researchers who have been on this story for a long time and are the right people to tell this story. Jenny Chan is the director of Pacific Atrocities Education. She spent over a decade uncovering World War II atrocities in Asia through survivor interviews and she has helped to declassify some U.S. records. Also joining us is Kayla Jones. She wrote and produced Deadly Science, a six part series for Pacific Atrocities Education which reveals untold stories of Japan's wartime experiments. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me.
- [03:07]
D
Thank you for having us.
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B
Absolutely.
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C
So can you give us a summary of the ISHI labs or UNIS 731 for people who have not heard this story before in broad strokes. But you can give it to us, give us the real talk, how horrible it was.
- [03:25]
D
Yeah. So Ishishiro really saw the opportunity to use germs and to cultivate and to conquer other people. When the other nations were signing the Geneva Protocol, Japan signed it, but they never ratified it. So Ishii really saw an opportunity to harness the germs and to basically conquer the world with this. And so at first, when he first was trying to get funding, he developed this water filter and he peed into it and he peed and then he drank the filter pee in front of the Emperor who was a biologist at the time, who was a hobby. Well, he's a hobbyist biologist. And the Emperor was very impressed and gave him a grip of money to start his lab. And so then at first he started it in Tokyo, but then it was way too, way too out there to do this in the middle of Tokyo. And so when Japan occupied China in Manchuria, he saw the opportunity to really expand his lab. So at first he started it in this soy sauce factory, but then he got found out because some people escaped the lab, his human experimentation subjects escaped the lab and started telling everyone. So he moved to an area named Pingfong. And in Pingfong near Harbin was where he really got out there and started doing and started experimenting on a lot of human subjects and developed a lot of flea bombs and figured out how to treat frostbites, all through very inhumane ways with using human humans as experimentation matter. And he also had his brother work as a prison lab guard. So then, no, there was no survivor and there was no one that was going to escape from his human experimentation lab.
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C
Now during the war, I have read that he presented some of this work to the Japanese military and that there were even high up generals who said, I can't even watch this. This is, this is too much. They knew it was going on. No one stopped it. But can you give us some of the. I mean, let's go there. Tell us some of the more horrific things that you have seen come out of the. The unit. 7:30.
- [06:06]
D
Yeah. So he tied victims onto these crosses at the anti experimentation lab and he had his own jet and he would drop flea bombs or whatever, bacterial bombs that he was experimenting at the time at these victims. And he was also tying victims because Manchuria or Harbin is very cold in the winter. And so he would have victims be out there and they would get frostbites, their limbs would freeze and he would cut their limbs open to see how. To see what, how their limbs are interacting with the cold. And these are just two things. And then toward the end of the, as the war was progressing, he encouraged like local villagers to breed these rats and he would incentivize people to breed rats. The reason being is that so then he can cultivate more fleas and create more germ bomb. And there are these flea bombs that would spread the plague. Kayla, what. Have some things, what are some things that you've seen while producing the series? Yeah.
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C
Stuff of nightmares. Tell us what, what haunts you the most?
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B
Yeah. So when Jenny brought this information to me, I was completely blown away. I told her I can't actually read this at night because I'm gonna have nightmares. Yeah, I think the, the live vivise sections and performing these surgeries in front of the emperors, the Japanese emperors, some of them were incredibly intrigued while some were disgusted. The royal family actually there were members that were fascinated by this research. And so he would perform this in front of high level individuals. And I think that understanding this grotesque history and in regards to bioweapons, bio labs is incredibly relevant to today. And so understanding that history, this hidden secret history that no one wants us to know about, especially in regards to the CIA's involvement of this research, is incredibly relevant today.
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C
I have two part question about this and it relates to why this may have been redacted from history. First of all, it does very much feel like the victims of World War II are concentrated on the Jewish holocaust, even though their death count by the most. The least conservative number is in the 6 millions there were 20 million Chinese killed by the Imperial Japanese, upwards of 20 million Russians. And so these are stories that need to be put on a moral equivalency. But when I told my story about my grandfather as a survivor of the Imperial Japanese, because he is Hawaiian, he was a merchant marines and he was bombed in the Philippines on December 8th, which is again we're only told Pearl Harbor December 7th. That's where the story ends, not the rest of the Pacific going up in flames. I was accused of being anti Japanese, which is interesting because when we tell the story of Mengele, we're not being accused of being anti German. Where does that propaganda come from? Being this, this anti. We're not impugning Japan.
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B
I don't under.
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C
I didn't know that this was a thing. Can you explain it?
- [09:58]
D
I have a lot of comments on the Gram page and sometimes when I post on X I get a lot of hate at this. One individual even called himself Hideki Tojo and said that Unit 731 never existed. This is communist propaganda. And I said, well, all of my documents came from the US National Archives. So is the United States now a communist country now? How is this a communist propaganda? And then they will continue on and on. And even if you're trying to debate them, there's no end to it. And they are used to that because at first when the Soviets with their Operation August Storm going into Manchuria, they then put some of these doctors on trial. But then a lot of the Cold War propaganda stated that these are communist propaganda. And so then you should not believe it. And so a lot of rhetoric came from that. And a lot of it also I think comes from a sense of, I hate to use this word, but kind of racism. Because why is it that certain group matter more than other groups? But if you also think about it too, it's very complex because it's not just Asian people who are victims of this. I was reading somewhere that there were POWs used for human experimentation as well. And the POWs were US soldiers and. But the interesting thing is that. And if they were put into a camp doing slave labor for the Japanese, then there's like 75% of more of a chance of them dying than Nazi concentration camp even. Yes, and yeah, and so it's. But there's no really statue or monument in Japan talking about all of the survivors or of the victims, whereas Germany had done so. I think there's still a lot of room for growth for this. And recently they elected a Prime minister who frequently go visit Yasukuni shrine. And this prime minister is in the LDP party, which is very interesting because LDP party was funded by Eisenhower and the CIA to. And the founder of LDP was Kishi Nobushisuke who was a war criminal. He was a class A war criminal and you might have heard of his grandson. If you don't know about Kishi nobusuke his grandson is the infamous Shinzo Abe. And so then his family is continuously in power. And in 1931 when Japan occupied China, Kishi Nobusuke was the one who drew up the economic plan to exploit slave labor. And the slave labor eventually went from Chinese to Koreans to also American soldiers who were captured in the Mitsubishi Zero airplane POW camp. And out of the. According to declassified documents, 4 million people, 4 million Chinese were captured by Kishi's economic plan to build Manchuria. And 40% died. So 1.6 million people died in his so called Manchurian Utopia before the war even got started. And not to mention of all these other POW victims who were also captured after the Bataan death march in the Philippines. And then they were then sent to the lab. Not the lab. First they were sent to the Mitsubishi Zero airplane factory and then they were sent to the lab. So this is very systematically brutal in a way. And there are so many efforts from the US government and also from the Japanese government to hide it. In fact, the current Prime Minister was also endorsed by Taro aso, who, whose family was related to enslaving these slave laborers to mine in, to do slave labor in their Asso mines during World War II. So the truth would probably never come out in like the mainstream.
- [14:41]
C
Yes. Also, there's no political use value in making the Chinese a victim class in the same way as other groups are made of victim class from the Holocaust. And I feel like that's a simplistic take, but how can we see it otherwise?
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B
Well, I was really amazed to learn that Americans fought side by side with Chinese soldiers.
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A
Yes.
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B
And Chinese villagers helped rescue American pilots. And so there was this, this connectivity between China and the US that for some reason has never surfaced. And if we were to understand this information, it may help build relations in the future. But by understanding that there was solidarity between these two countries during World War II.
- [15:42]
C
Right. And so when we are sold an alliance with Israel, it's because of sympathy to the Nazi Holocaust and there's no moral equivalency for any Asian culture. And so that's the thing that just, it stands in my brain as an inconsistency. So we'll just leave it there and let people draw their own conclusions. But why don't we move on to talk about how the United States was complicit in hiding and profiting from unit 731, whichever of you.
- [16:16]
B
Yeah, this. Sure. Well, this is my, my favorite part of this entire story. Personally, when, when I was first going through all of the documents that Ginny was presenting to me, she presented declassified top secret CIA documents. And this was fascinating to me. And I created an entire episode around this kind of relationship that the CIA had. It's episode three of Deadly Science. But we really break down how the CIA reached General Shiro Ishii, how they were able to conduct these negotiations, get all of his data, protect him, and then continue to develop this research for the last 80 years. And that's an incredibly important point, that no matter what administration comes in or out of the American government, the CIA is there and they're developing things and they have a long history and in regards to bioweapons and bio labs. And so I was able to pull in all of these current events of Robert Kennedy talking about their involvement with the Wuhan lab. We were able to highlight Tulsi Gabbard talking about the biolabs in Ukraine and how there needs to be more safeguards. She actually advocated for all of these labs to be shut down because they're in a middle of a war zone. And so really bringing about this, this connection of, you know, our government has known this information for quite some time. They've continued to develop it. And how do we as the American public feel about that? I mean, what, what. You know, I had this professor asking, well, what do you want out of this series? You know, and it's like, gosh, I don't know, is it, is it a new Geneva Convention? Because obviously Japan saw what was happening and they said if that science is so deadly, obviously we need to develop it to be the new power structure of the world, you know, and so it's like, how do we develop this technology but also have safeguards and to honor humanity even in times of war? So we don't have the shiver ishis of the world doing vivisections, creating biological weapons and implementing it on prisoners of war?
- [18:54]
C
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, just to answer the question of what do you want out of this? I want to not be an unwilling participant in this through my tax dollars, for starters. Can we start there? What were you going to say, Dani?
- [19:08]
D
Yeah, and it's very interesting for me because I have been trying to also get some, get my hands on some declassified documents from Fort Detrick and because I know that's where exact where they were going. Since some of the declassified unit 731 documents became for Dietrich documents and on these plague reports of how when unit 731 was experimenting on their victims, they were from like 3 year old to like 80 year old on how the plague developed in their body. And the craziest thing to me is that after the Soviet invaded Manchuria during Operation August Storm and Ishishiro was fleeing Manchuria, he then staged his whole funeral and the CIA was still able to find him, which was pretty much pretty incredible. And they found him alive and well next to his pet monkey. And he was able to not only be granted immunity, but also pay for the amount of service that he's done at unit 731. So like you said, like can our tax dollar not go toward it? Like can we, can we just.
- [20:28]
B
Yeah, yeah, right, yes.
- [20:33]
D
And not the gas lit.
- [20:36]
B
Yes, yes, well, and we have the documents Jenny's provided them in regards to the CIA purchasing this research for $20 million. And, and that was 80 years ago. I mean, so if we think about, you know, what the price tag would be for that information in this day and age, it's, it's concerning now going.
- [20:59]
D
Forward to Fort Detrick as well. It's crazy how then they were testing these bioweapons on American soil. And that's how Lyme disease came out from, for Dietrich as well. So not only are we paying for it, we're also taking suffering from the price of doing all these biological research as well. And in the recently JFK files they had them, they had evidence of the United States government destroying the Cubans sugar cane. So if that, that's what they were doing in Cuba, what else are they doing around the world?
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C
I did not know that. Okay, that's straight out of a page from the Americans, the series something. Now I became aware of Fort Detrick because the Chinese government accuses the United States of having a lab break of a Covid type virus in the summer of 2019 out of Fort Detrick. And so that ended up being true that the Fort Detrick did admit that there was a lab break of a respiratory virus. There was a breakout at certain places in the summer of 2019. And the United States government refused to investigate that and was very comfortable pointing the fingers at China. And of course China then pointed the fingers back. So we can never know. What we do know is that gain of function research was being done in 2019. There was a lab outbreak. And so it would seem that this is not ancient history, but recent history. What do we make of this? Can either of you give a comment on this?
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B
Well, I'll speak to that a bit because through this series I was able to send it to Dr. Andrew Huff. And I'm not Sure. Have you met him or heard of him?
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C
No.
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B
He's a whistleblower. You have got to look into him. He blew the whistle in regards to top level level people exchanging bioweapon data with China. And he talks about how he actually had access to these level four bio labs. And he talks about the development of bioweapons, the impacts, and it's really a totally fascinating conversation. And he appreciated the series because it gives him a historical context. Again, it's not that these things just come, come out of nowhere. There's history, there's depth. And so the more that we can understand that, the more that we can be empowered to make decisions for our future.
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D
I also wanted to add into for Dietrich. So if you take a look at our digital archive that I've scanned from the national archives on the PAE's website, you can see that Pfizer has been a subcontractor for Dietrich for a very long time. And for Dietrich is also subcontracting to other labs and other universities. Just like how Shishi was also subcontracting to other university. It was not just one lab in Manchuria. He had multiple other labs and he had other colleges that were working under him. For example, when the B29 bombers were shot down over Kyushu Imperial University, they vivisector. They vivisected a lot of the bombers, five of the bombers from the B29 in front of a bunch of university students. So we never know from all these.
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C
Lab outbreaks these are American. American pilots?
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D
Yes. The American pilots were bombing Japan mainland at the time because it was the end of the war and close to the end of the war. And they were captured and they were vivisected in front of the Kyushu Imperial University students. And they were pumping salt, salt water to try to replace their blood to see if it works as saline as well. And then they remove their lungs to see how long these people can last for. They did all kind of experimentation. And so the thing is this, with all these biological weapons research and whatnot, how do we know about the next outbreak or because they're all subcontracted in one way or another. And if you think about it also, there's a lot of debates about this and I am not sure because I haven't done research into it. Then how come Pfizer can come up with the vaccine for Covid in like records time? Is it because they already knew something? Because they have been with for Dietrich for decades. So there's just a lot of questions that are unanswered and have no answer to. What do you think?
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C
What do I think? Well, again, because my business is, the narrative is, why don't we know this? And do the families of these American pilots know this? And where is their voice in, you know, elected government? Again, because we're so busy fixating on only certain histories, Right. And this is not one that seems important to us. And yet there are biological weapons and data on biological weapons that now the United States has access to, is complicit in. And so this is not a dead story by any means. That's what I think, I guess. Would you like to respond to that, either of you? That's not a question, but I'm enjoying this conversation.
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B
Yeah, I feel the same way.
- [26:56]
D
Yeah, I think so. It's just like, why is it that. In fact, I. I think. I think in a lot of way, the Imperial Japanese story has a lot more to do with Americans than, for example, other activities that was happening since Americans were also captured. I don't know if you read James Bradley's book Fly Boys. He talked about. About how eight. Well, he talked about how nine American pilots were captured at the war and, well, eight of them were beheaded and cannibalized, and the ninth one that escaped was George Bush, and he later became president. Right. So it's not like. So even our George Bush had experienced Japanese brutality, in a sense. Then why is it not. Why is it not more talked about?
- [27:57]
C
Yeah, right. And there's a Chinese journalist I really like, Chinese American, Carl Zha, and he says everybody in China knows this story, but they understand that the west doesn't care and they just see it as another, you know, anti Chinese rhetorical peace. Even though we're focused right now on the Chinese, my stepfather, his. His father was in a Japanese labor camp in Indonesia, you know, so we're talking about Koreans as well. You know, I mean, I. The list can go on and on.
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D
Right.
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C
The Vietnamese, the many comments I got on my previous video, Australians, New Zealanders, they also died at the hands of the Imperial Japanese. So this is a story that's broad and wide. It's not for racial classes. It's for all of us. Right?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we need to look at the history, the curriculum. One thing that I appreciate so much about Ginny and her organization is she personalizes these stories, these moments that are incredibly impactful. History is more than just dates and locations. You know, it's like there's stories, there's real people behind it, and Pacific atrocities. Education does such a beautiful job of bringing those people's stories to the forefront. And I think we also need to look at how our media frames things and really take accountability. I mean, to be an American and have your head in the sand and just carry about what's happening here, we need more of those international stories, those international investigations into the media landscape. Like it's just not happening. It's not there. So I think those are two things. You know, the curriculum and how our media is framing these stories. It's incredibly important to add a little bit more depth to it.
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C
Well, I want to encourage everybody to reach out, look at some of these, the archives that Jenny has put together on the Pacific atrocities education. We'll provide links to that as well as your work, Kayla as well. And I really appreciate your perspective on this. It's been absolutely a pleasure to. I mean, well, not because this is horrible, but a pleasure to talk to you about your expertise. Thank you so much.
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D
Thanks for having us.
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C
Thank you.
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