Seiichi Morimura, who wrote a searing exposé of the Japanese Army’s secret organic warfare program in occupied China, describing the way it forcibly contaminated 1000’s of prisoners with lethal pathogens, died on July 24 in Tokyo. He was 90.
The announcement of his demise by his writer, Kadokawa, was cited in Japanese media.
Mr. Morimura detailed the atrocities dedicated by the Japanese program — referred to as Unit 731 — in a broadly bought guide, “Akuma no Hoshoku,” or “The Devil’s Gluttony” (1981). Among the horrors he described have been vivisections carried out with out anesthesia on those that had been intentionally administered germs; docs wished to see firsthand how the following ailments contaminated the physique.
Under the Japanese occupation, earlier than and through World War II, a minimum of 3,000 prisoners — males, girls and kids — turned guinea pigs at a facility euphemistically named the 731st Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Headquarters, on the Manchurian plain close to Harbin. Most of the victims have been Chinese, however some have been Korean, Russian and Mongolian.
All are believed to have died from the torture.
In addition to these uncovered to pathogens — together with plague, typhus, cholera, syphilis and anthrax — some males have been subjected, bare, to freezing temperatures for lengthy durations; their frozen flesh and limbs have been then pounded with boards to measure their sensitivity.
Others, Mr. Morimura wrote, underwent transfusions with horses’ blood. Some have been uncovered to X-rays for extended durations. Some have been locked in a stress chamber to see how lengthy it took earlier than their eyes popped out of their sockets. Still others have been tied to stakes whereas a canister of a pathogen was exploded close by.
The unit additionally developed germ bombs that have been examined in Chinese cities, reportedly killing a minimum of 200,000 folks. In a minimum of one case, planes dropped plague-infested fleas over Ningbo, in japanese China.
The unit had proposed sending balloon-borne illness bombs to the United States as properly, Mr. Morimura discovered. He believed that they might have been used if not for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the conflict within the Pacific.
Mr. Morimura, a thriller novelist and a pacifist, had talked about Unit 731 in a novel and was contacted by one among its employees, transferring him to analyze its brutalities. He first wrote in regards to the unit in a sequence of articles for a Communist newspaper in Japan.
He stated the purpose of his guide was to convey steadiness to Japanese accounts of the conflict.
“Almost all Japanese war themes are from the standpoint of Japan as a victim,” he informed The Age, a newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, in 1982, “but mine is from the point of view of Japan the transgressor doing violence against other nations.”
Mr. Morimura’s guide bought greater than 1.1 million copies inside seven months of its publication. It was not the primary account of Unit 731’s brutality — there have been two others within the Sixties and ’70s — however Mr. Morimura’s was drawn from interviews with 60 Japanese individuals in this system.
“Mr. Morimura’s 246-page book is believed to be more accurate and more believable” than the others, The New York Times reported in 1982. The article quoted Mr. Morimura as saying: “This story should be told to all Japanese, to every generation. Japanese aggression should be written about to prevent another war.”
The guide prompted grudging acknowledgment of Unit 731’s atrocities by a Japanese authorities official, who informed the nation’s Parliament in 1982 that the grisly experiments had occurred “during the most extraordinary wartime conditions” and have been “most regrettable from the viewpoint of humanity.”
Separately, an article within the journal The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported in 1981 that officers behind Unit 731 — together with its chief, Lt. General Shiro Ishii, who remained free till his demise in 1959 — have been granted immunity from prosecution as conflict criminals by the United States in change for Americans’ securing “exclusive possession of Japan’s expertise in using germs as lethal weapons.”
Seiichi Morimura was born on Jan. 2, 1933, in Saitama Prefecture, north of Tokyo. He survived the United States bombing of Tokyo close to the tip of World War II. According to his writer, he graduated from Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo and labored in inns earlier than he turned to writing.
Information about his survivors was not instantly accessible.
Mr. Morimura is reported to have written about 300 books, practically all of them thriller novels. A current guide ventured into nonfiction, nevertheless, about his dedication to defending Japan’s postwar pacifist Constitution in opposition to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s marketing campaign in 2015 to extend army exercise, The Associated Press reported.
But “The Devil’s Gluttony” earned Mr. Morimura probably the most renown.
His function in making public the horrors of Unit 731 — and the publication of books on the topic that adopted his — has reverberated for many years. In an investigative article in The Times by Nicholas Kristof in 1995, a farmer who had been a medical assistant in Unit 731 recalled dissecting a person with out the usage of anesthesia.
“I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony,” the person was quoted as saying. “He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”
Such revelations echoed in a lawsuit filed in 1997 by members of the family of a few of Unit 731’s Chinese victims. A Tokyo District Court decide dominated in 2002 that this system had “used bacteriological weapons under the order of the Imperial Japanese Army’s headquarters,” however the decide rejected awarding them compensation, saying that they had no proper as overseas residents to demand cash from Japan below worldwide legislation.
Nor did the plaintiffs have assist from China, which prevented them from organizing, or the United States, which was cautious of alienating Japan, a staunch ally.
“We are fighting Japan, China and the United States all at once,” Wang Xuan, one of many plaintiffs, informed The Times after the choice. “We need endless amounts of time to do this, and time is running out.”
Three years later, the Tokyo High Court upheld the choice denying compensation.
But because of Mr. Morimura’s work and that of others, the Japanese authorities have more and more acknowledged the enormity of Unit 731’s horrors. In 2018, Japan’s nationwide archives launched the names of three,607 folks — amongst them medics, docs, surgeons, nurses and engineers — who had been members of this system.
And at a Unit 731 museum, in a suburb of Harbin, an indication by the exit reads: “The Unit 731 site is by far the largest historical site of biological warfare in world war history. It is also a historical witness to human suffering, a legacy and special memory of a brutal war.”
Source: www.nytimes.com