Unit 731 Memorial Site

"Zhang Bo, a 40-year-old driver, says he sometimes brings a surprising kind of visitor down from central Harbin. “Japanese tourists often come here. The old people fall down on their knees and pray. The young people — judging by their faces afterward, they think it’s funny.” 

In WW2, Unit 731 was a secret complex created by the Japanese government in Harbin, China for the sole purpose of conducting inhumane torture on civilians.

The Japanese poisoned local towns water supplies and dispersed food to starving villages infected with plague. They tied farmers to stakes in an open fields and used chemical gas, plague infected fleas and other biological weapons on them to measure how quickly and painfully they died.

Civilians were cut open and organs removed while they were alive, without anesthesia. Limbs were chopped off, attempted to be reattached to another person.

"Question: Why did you help to cut out his eyes?
Answer: I received an order.
Question: Are you a puppet? Don’t you understand that was sadistic?
Answer: It was an order."

After the war, the United States, in exchange for the data the the experiments provided, offered protection to those who led the experiments. Part of that was due to fear the Russians would obtain that information and use it in warfare, part of it was for the Americans own use.

"Most of the Unit 731 war criminals went on to respectable careers in Japan. Lt.-Col. Ryoichi Naito, a military physician, became the founder of the Japan Blood Bank, the predecessor of Green Cross. Gen. Ishii Shiro (who had escaped the Soviet forces and was never tried) lived in peace until his death from throat cancer in 1959."

In my high school Latin class, our teacher said to us something to the effect of: war tends to skip a generation because it takes a generation to forget.

At the Unit 731 memorial site, there is hardly any effort for preservation.

"On a cold day in Harbin recently, there was little to see at the remnants of the boiler house. It sits in a muddy, walled enclosure freely used by dogs as a squatting ground. A stone marker and plaque memorialize those who were murdered here. There is a sense that if the right offer were made, this corner of Unit 731, too, would be replaced by a furniture factory covered in white swimming-pool tiles."

"Zhang Bo, a 40-year-old driver, says he sometimes brings a surprising kind of visitor down from central Harbin. “Japanese tourists often come here. The old people fall down on their knees and pray. The young people — judging by their faces afterward, they think it’s funny.”

I'm moved by the elderly Japanese who visit to make penance on behalf of their country, their leadership, their society.
 

At the same time I'm terrified by the peace-sign-photo-posing Jap youth raised on Western culture and oblivious to the penance of their grandparents.

source:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2001/06/05/commentary/world-commentary/the-trial-of-unit-731/#.VZMAXEbrRmM

http://www.unit731.org/Experiments.html