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Unit 731. Hal Gold
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Thus, by the turn of the century, Japanese military medicine and wartime bacteriology were the best in the world. Their standards, according to the American doctor, were far higher than those maintained by the United States and Great Britain, and medicine was treated by the Japanese as being equal in importance to guns and shells in contributing to military performance.
To address the problem of ingesting bacteria with food, the Japanese army issued creosote pills, an old standby formerly used in bronchial troubles, as a prophylactic measure. The army issued them to the soldiers with instructions to take one pellet after each meal. They tasted bad, though, and most of the pellets ended up in the fields. Japanese officers were concerned, and the problem of how to get the soldiers to take the creosote was sent back to headquarters in Tokyo to be discussed among top leaders. Sitting in on the conferences as a guest was a young American lieutenant, Douglas MacArthur, fresh out of West Point and son of the military attaché to Japan. The American’s opinion was that soldiers were soldiers, and that there was no way to make the soldiers of any nation follow orders to swallow something that they didn’t like.
The solution was found by a Japanese officer who suggested having the tins carry a message that “it is the will of the emperor that each soldier take this medicine after each meal.” What followed is best described by MacArthur in his book Reminiscences: “The result was instantaneous. Not a pill was wasted. Nothing but death itself could stop the soldiers from taking the medicine.”
The creosote was also given a new name which translates directly into “Subjugate Russia Pellets.” It retained its name for a long time after the war, becoming a popular over-the-counter medicine for intestinal troubles. Then, after World War II, the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare ordered a change to eliminate the anti-Soviet connotation. A simple change of one of the ideographs in favor of one that resembled it left the pronunciation, seirogan, unchanged, while turning the name of the medicine into a term with no particular meaning. Even today, seirogan can be found in any pharmacy in Japan.
The Japanese success in minimizing deaths from illness proved that they were correct in attaching equal priority to germs and bullets, and soon after the war’s end, a Department of Field Disease Prevention was established. It was a natural outgrowth of the lessons learned in Manchuria and a peacetime continuation of what the American medical observer termed “the most elaborate and effective system of sanitation ever practiced in war.” Commendable though this move was, though, it had its dark side. The original bacteriological aims of Japan were soon to be warped in the direction of causing, rather than preventing and curing, disease. And the fiber of the high morality of Japanese troops, praised by the American surgeon and foreign journalists and observers in Manchuria, would be shred and rewoven into racist ugliness at the hands of the Japanese military and medical elites.
Ishii Shiro
Ishii Shiro was born on June 25, 1892 in the village of Chiyoda, in an area about two hours’ drive from what is today central Tokyo. His family was one of the wealthier ones in the region by village standards, with respectable land holdings that gave them the aura of rural aristocrats. This economic status earned respect and, more importantly, loyalty from the surrounding inhabitants. Ishii would put this loyalty to good use for himself in the coming years.
In 1916, Ishii entered Kyoto Imperial University. It was a prestigious establishment, and its medical department was especially known for its work in bacteriology. The “Schweitzer of Japan,” Noguchi Hideyo, in addition to honors and awards he earned in the United States and Europe, received his Doctorate of Medicine from this university in 1911.
As a student, Ishii seemed to have had personality problems: more succinctly, he created problems for others. He was pushy, inconsiderate, and selfish. In harmony with these personality traits, he was also a ladder-climber. In a society where Confucian-rooted respect for superiors and a strong consciousness of hierarchy dictates boundaries of behavior, Ishii’s forward drive ran roughshod over protocol.
Ishii felt a calling to the military, perhaps to serve his country, but surely to advance his own goals of medical research. In 1920, he graduated university and enlisted in the army. Shortly thereafter, he was commissioned a lieutenant, and by the summer of 1922, he had managed to gain a transfer to the First Army Hospital in Tokyo. His fever for research was appreciated by his superiors, and two years later he was assigned to return to his alma mater for postgraduate work in bacteriology, among other fields.
During these days, he was a frequent visitor to the home of the school president, an affront to Ishii’s university instructors in that he was socializing not only out of his own league, but theirs, as well. He eventually grew close enough to the top man at Kyoto Imperial University to marry his daughter. This marital link cemented his position with the university’s medical research people and facilities; in a sense, thus, it also laid the beginnings of a foundation for his human experimentation in China.
Japan was a signatory to the Geneva Convention of 1925, which led to the prohibition of biological and chemical warfare. As a specialist in bacteria-related fields, Ishii actually found this development encouraging; he reasoned that if something were bad enough to be outlawed, then it must certainly be effective. In a way, Ishii’s thoughts could be considered par for someone in a bureaucratic environment. Anyone familiar with life in a bureaucracy—especially a large and ponderous one—realizes that a large part of its total energy is expended to protect and enhance individual members’ own roles in the organizational machinery.
Inspired by these developments, Ishii pressed for the establishment of a military arm whose activities centered around weapons based on biology. This was his field; the more important it became to the military, the greater his own importance would grow within the system. Financial considerations provided logic to support his cause. Compared with the costs of building, manning, and maintaining huge conventional forces, for example, bacteria and gas were far less expensive. Other advantages were to appear later, but the cost factor was a major selling point for Ishii in his appeals to the top levels of the Imperial Japanese Army.
Protection of one’s own troops was still also part of the thinking about germs, a continuation of the military hygiene success of the Russo-Japanese War. While Ishii was a researcher at Kyoto, in fact, he was dispatched to help cure an epidemic that had broken out in a region of Japan, and during the course of his work he developed a water filtration system that could be transported along with troops. In general, however, he brought a new approach to military thinking about bacteriology. Why not enlist the “silent enemy” as a “silent ally”? He traveled frequently to Tokyo, still shaking hands with the top leaders of the army high command, still social-climbing, and still pleading his case for the development of bacteriological research as a weapon for offensive warfare.
The army had a policy of sending certain officers overseas to study foreign military facilities. Ishii left Japan in the spring of 1928 on a costly tour whose expenses came partly out of his own pocket. He spent more than two years visiting over twenty European countries, the United States, and Canada. Despite the fact that his own money was involved in funding his travel, however, his object was public-spirited: the furtherance of chemical and bacteriological warfare as Japanese military orthodoxy. He researched the history of gas weapons during World War I, and he studied what various countries were doing in the fields of bacteriological and gas warfare.
The climate he found in Japan when he returned in 1930 was more conducive to these thoughts than when he had left. Nationalism burned hotter. The old slogan of “a wealthy country, a strong army” that had attended the launch of the Meiji Restoration six decades earlier was echoing among the upper echelons of the military establishment. One of the men Ishii convinced to sponsor his efforts was the Minister of the Army, who coincidentally had the same family name as the president of Ishii’s university. Araki Sadao—found guilty of overall conspiracy and waging war against China at the war crimes trials in Tokyo—was impressed with Ishii’s findings and ambitions and set the army into action along the lines mapped out by Ishii.
Manchuria
The South Manchuria Railway was the Japanese-operated nerve