Japanese Medical Atrocities

In 1997, Iris Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking: the Forgotten Holocaust, broke a six-decade-long international silence about the 1937 massacre at Nanking (Nanjing). A catastrophe perpetrated by the Japanese Imperial Army who butchered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and raped more than 80,000 women within a span of six to eight weeks. Three hundred thousand people…

In 1997, one hundred and eighty Chinese survivors and families of the victims sued the Japanese government charging that its military forces had spread bubonic plague and other germ diseases in China. They demand full disclosure, an apology and compensation in the amount of 10 million yen per victim of biological weapons. The plaintiffs were assembled…

The phrase “comfort women” is a controversial term that refers to an estimated 200,000 girls and women who were recruited as prostitutes by the Imperial Japanese Army during the 1930s and 1940s. Though the majority were Korean and Chinese, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and some Japanese women were also abducted. The women – many of…

The truth is slowly making itself known regarding Japan’s ghastly treatment of American prisoners of war during WWII. After more than five decades of denial, prevarication and outright lying on the part of its government, its military, its neonationalist historians and corporate leaders, Japan’s criminal behavior has been ferreted out and documented. “Within six months…

 “For the 10,000-odd soldiers of the Indian Army who endured extreme torture at the hands of their Japanese captors, cannibalism was the culmination. Evidence suggests the practice was not the result of dwindling supplies, but worse, it was conducted under supervision and perceived as a power projection tool.” (War Crimes in WWII: Japanese Practiced Cannibalism…

Professor Takashi Tsuchiya, a professor of philosophy and medical ethics at Osaka University, is credited with initiating forthright moral examination of the taboo subject that Japanese bioethics had ignored for decades; namely, Japan’s heinous human experiments and live vivisections conducted (mostly) on Chinese people, but also Korean, Mongolian, Russian, and several American prisoners of war. Professor Tsuchiya…

Dr. Jing-Bao Nie has written several follow-up comments on Takashi Tsuchiya’s essay in which he compares and contrasts how the world and the Japanese people, in particular, have responded (or more accurately, denied) the atrocities committed by both Nazi and Japanese doctors. Below are excerpts from his article, “Challenges of Japanese doctors’ human experimentation for…

The first discovery of a mass grave near one of Dr. Shiro Ishii’s infamous laboratories was made in 1989. Then, in 2006, Toyo Ishii, a former military nurse came forward to reveal that she and colleagues had buried numerous corpses and body parts during the weeks following Japan’s surrender in August, 1945 before the American…

House of Sharing, a Korean living memorial with nine “comfort women” survivors “Yi Ok-seon is a frail old lady with a walking frame who has difficulty speaking. But her eyes, when you meet them, are still sharp.  She says she was 15 when a Korean and a Japanese man forcibly took her to north-west China,…

The Emperor Hirohito was the longest reigning monarch in Japan’s history (1926 –1989); his reign is known as the Showa era. The release of an official, 61-volumes (12,000 pages) biography of Emperor Hirohito, in preparation since his death in 1989, continues to maintain the fictional image of Hirohito as a powerless puppet, and fails to…