“Science” + nationalism =
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https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14988305
93 year old determined to expose war horrors.
This reminds me of the David Peace novel Occupied city which uses a framing device of a serial killer thriller to look at unit 731 (and also casts a pall over the serial killer genre by posing it against the backdrop of the world war and the atrocities of the Japanese army).
Wikipedia has a useful article on the Unit (I see that several of its members were princes, so it was clearly supported to the highest levels of the regime).
I suppose we should look at the world context of Japan as a dictatorship developing late and expanding it’s own colonial sphere: while looking at it’s mighty rivals, this line from the wikipedia article is chilling: “Japan started its biological weapons program in the 1930s, partly because the use of biological weapons was banned in interstate conflicts by the Geneva Protocol of 1925; they reasoned that the ban verified its effectiveness as a weapon.” I’d guess racist attitudes to the Chinese and other colonised peoples would have played a part, the idea of killing off ‘different’ people often appeals to colonisers.
Japanese racism was essentially Japan vs all, since the Japanese did not give any special regard to white caucasians, unlike the other colonial powers of course.
You could be a blonde, blue-eyed American airman or British soldier, and 731 would have especially relished vivisecting you, and American prisoners were used. The Chinese were the main victims because they were the locals, but it could be anyone.
Unlike the German Nazis, 731 also used nonhuman animal victims. Nothing done by 731 has not been done, and still is, daily, by all nation-states, to nonhuman but fully sentient animals, with barely a murmur. It is a small step, history shows, to human vivisection therefrom. It is simply a psychological “red line”, which to Ishii, and to such people in wartime, is “my nationality vs others.”I think it is almost certain that the US made use of Ishii in the Korean War also.
“Men Behind the Sun”, called an exploitation movie, shows in fact nothing that has not been attested to as having happened in 731.
It is a Chinese film.
Bear in mind that the burning alive of the rats toward the end is real. But this won’t bother any speciesists watching it.Also shown in this film is what we know from records of Nazi “doctors” toward human child victims and from Hans Ruesch’s exposés of animal vivisection: the smiling and playing with the victims prior to killing them, as in the case here of the mute Chinese boy.
This full movie uncut version is dubbed in English.
@Thomas More
Could you please start including some text (more than just one sentence) when you post a link: to give people confidence that they are not linking through to a harmful site, and also to comply with the purpose of the forum as a discussion place. I’m going to start binning posts that contain nothing more than a link.
What nationalities were in the Unit 731?
A member of the Yokusan Sonendan paramilitary political youth branch, who worked for Unit 731, stated that not only were Chinese, Russians, and Koreans present, but also Americans, British, and French people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki
Unit 731 – Wikipedia
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