Japanese Surveillance, Enslavement, and Experimentation in Wartime China

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. Welcome to SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe. During World War II, the Asia-Pacific Theater saw its own scenes of brutality, but many of us don't know about them. Jenny Chan co-founded Pacific Atrocities Education to raise awareness on these lesser-known horrors. Our conversation focused on the Imperial Japanese Army, which occupied parts of China between the Second World War and the Second World War. We're going to take a look at the history of the Pacific Theater, and we're going to take a look at the history of the Pacific Theater, is basically rape day and night. sometimes, you know, five, 10 times a day. And until her father tried to work with like a local military informant to actually release her. And was she able to leave that way? Or did she ultimately escape? She was able to leave that way. I think her father was able to bribe someone who actually let her go. So she was able to leave that way. And her family never talked about it. A lot of these women don't talk about it until like decades later, because it's a taboo topic. And I think that's also part of the reason why a lot of the memories started fading away from World War Two in China, because people don't want to talk about that kind of shameful experience. And they just move on. And I think that's, you know, that's how we know so little about it. Was it hard for her to talk about it even all those years later? Yeah, I think when I was interviewing her in 2014, it was hard for her to talk about it even decades later, because it's just so traumatic. She's passed away, but she was also one of the Chinese survivors from these kind of military system that actually sued this government. Right? Yeah, that happened in 1998. I'm curious to know, in the midst of these horrific days, were the allies ever tasked with learning from these women? Did they ever try to gain intelligence from them because these women were there against their will? Not in rural China, unfortunately, because it was just very out there. But I think, you know, I think the Allied soldiers did relieve a lot of the comfort women from photographs and from records that we've seen. And I'm sure that they have also gathered intelligence from these women who were leaving comfort stations. And what did the other women say? Was there a common thread that you found from the ones who survived by the time you found them in 2014? Yeah, I find that the women who survived are the women who have the will to survive. They're very strong. And I have never really seen, like, rural Chinese women until I visited them. And I have to say that they're much stronger than what I had imagined. And of course, I had read, like, documents about them and also historical account before meeting these people. But then interviewing them really changed my understanding of human rights. And I think that's one of the things that I've learned from these women. And what it takes to survive something like that, like, that horrible. And some ended up getting pregnant. Yes. One of the women that I interviewed was pregnant after the war. And because of social pressure and rejection already of her experience, and all the expectation that she didn't want to carry that kind of shame with her. That's like kind of trading in her future. So she kept her pregnancy a secret. And later after the war, she buried her child in a rural cave near her home. What a horrific, horrific image. And some of these women ended up being involved in Unit 731. This is the Imperial Japanese Army's covert biological and chemical warfare research unit, which operated out of Manchuria, now China's northeast. It's estimated some 3,000 people were experimented on here. Who is there other than these comfort women? So the same blockhouse surveillance system also worked the same way in recruiting these civilians as well into Unit 731. And so the same blockhouse surveillance system also worked the same way in recruiting these civilians as well. And Unit 731 ultimately did human experimentation on them. A lot of the victims were Russians and Koreans as well, because of how northeast China were actually pretty close to Korea and Russia. But most of them were actually Chinese civilians. They were also monitoring the streets to see like, "Hey, if this is a homeless guy, and he doesn't seem like any family members looking for him, then let's capture him." So they were monitoring the streets to see like, "Hey, if this is a homeless guy, and he doesn't seem like any family members looking for him, then let's capture him." So And they would then drop the ceramic bomb from the plane to see how these victims would react to these biological weapons that they have produced. We've heard about the brutality of the Japanese during World War II, but this takes it to a completely different level. And you ended up finding a man who had been a janitor on the grounds. Can you explain what he shared? Yeah, so he was actually a part of the youth corps in Unit 731. He was actually dragging victims who were vivisected outside of rooms and transported to the incinerator to erase that person, basically, what he remembered. Because after a vivisection was completed, then the scientists would order him or another youth corps member. He's also a teenager at the time. To take care of the remains. And then they would remove the human body from the vivisection room, from the surgical table, and drag them away and put them into the incinerator. Did any of these people who, as you described, were so horrifically experimented on escape? Were there survivors who could talk about some of these atrocities? There were no survivors from. Unit 731 complex itself. But there were people who actually were. Because Unit 731 was ultimately developing weapons. So there were people, like an American missionary named Archie Crouch, who survived a bubonic plague incident that was from a biological weapon dropped from the plane. And he survived that at Ningbo in 1940. Wow. What did he have to say about it? So he actually wrote a whole memoir. And at that point of the war, he was already very used to air raids because Ningbo was very close to Occupy Shanghai, which were then sending airplanes and air raids into Ningbo. And he had a child toddler and they were trying to hide in the cemetery just to hide from the plane and whatnot. And the child had thought that they were playing hide and seek. And when the plague actually was dropped, he saw a plane with white plumes. And he didn't know what it was because it wasn't a. plane. Normally, planes would come in three, six, and nines and drop bombs. But the one time that they actually had dropped bubonic plague, they didn't know what it was. Afterward, people started dying and eventually there were contaminated areas. The city officials of Ningbo actually burned down the areas that they suspected were contaminated with bubonic plague. An entirely different kind of weapon. Absolutely gruesome to think about. Now, Unit 731 was led by Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, a Japanese microbiologist and army medical officer. Can you tell us more about who he was and why he concocted this complex? He was a Japanese army physician, microbiologist, and really highly effective institutional entrepreneur, I believe. I think his real talent was not merely microbiology. It's also persuading a modern state to fund his vision. He first started making a water filter because during the Japanese war, he noticed that a lot of the Japanese soldiers actually perish from unclean water instead of weapons on the ground. And also, he had done this whole study abroad trip and he had read about the Geneva Convention. And he was thinking that if the germs are so powerful that nation states are writing laws about it, then he needs to basically weaponize it for Japan. And so he convinced military leaders that biological warfare could actually give Japan a strategic advantage, particularly since pathogen could kill populations and leaving infrastructure intact, like what we had talked about at Ningbo. And one of his important early patrons was Shikahiko Koizumi, who was a senior army physician who later served as Japan's Minister of Health. And one of his important early patrons was Shikahiko Koizumi, who was a senior army physician during the war. And Koizumi actually helped Ishii institutional credibility and access to military funding. He even set up the meeting between Ishii and the emperor where Ishii actually peed into his water filter and show the emperor that is drinkable water being filtered by his water filter. And so his program grew because of institutional funding and also because of physician and government officials that were willing to support it, finance it, and place authority of medicine behind it. To have created such a demonstration and then used it to conduct these kinds of experiments. I mean, you just, you can't make that up. So ultimately, what happened to General Ishii after the war ended? Ishii ordered Dina Seventh, three-one personnel to destroy Ping Fong complex and killing the remaining prisoners and concealing their wartime affiliations and basically telling them to take the unit's secret to the grave. He then tried to disappear. He even planted a false report in the local newspaper, claiming that he had been shot and killed. His friends staged a full funeral for him in Chiba in November, 1945. And he was shot and killed. And so he attempted to turn himself into a dead man before investigators could get to him. When we come back, how the U.S. gave Japan's military scientists immunity in exchange for intelligence. In the modern AI enterprise, adversaries no longer break in. They log in. As autonomous AI agents and machines gain privileged access, your risk is becoming invisible and legacy tools can't keep up. Introducing IDERA from Palo Alto Networks. IDERA is the next generation identity platform built for the scale of the AI workforce. It helps you discover hidden risks instantly, eliminate static privileges with just-in-time enforcement, and automate governance at machine speed. Secure every identity, human, machine, and agentic, with IDERA by Palo Alto Networks. Visit paloaltonetworks.com slash I-D-I-R-A to get started. Meanwhile, the U.S. has now occupied Japan after the war and so began the war against Japan. The war against Japan begins the Tokyo War Crime Tribunal to, quote, try and punish Far Eastern war criminals. But notably, military scientists are not actually involved. They're not on trial. Why is that? I understand the evidence is destroyed, but why are they excluded from this? Yes. So after Ishii had pretended that he died, when the American investigators reached him, he was actually able to negotiate an immunity deal for himself. And how did they reach him? So there were counterintelligence and investigators that were actually working to establish where he was. They were getting details from the Communist Party members in Japan at the time, and they located him in January of 1946. And when the American investigators finally reached him, they were able to find him. And they were able to find him. You know, he was not a dead general, but actually a man living privately. And during later interrogations at his home, Ishii's daughter, recalling his family pet, playing with the visiting American officers. And it's really a surreal domestic image, if you think about it. A man who was responsible for mass human experimentations being questioned in the comfort of his own home and his family and his pet moved around him. So then the investigation soon became a negotiation. And American military and scientific officials wanted access to Japan's biological warfare research, especially findings that would derive from experiments that could have never been legally been conducted in the United States. They also fear that Soviet Union might obtain the information first. So then they were sending investigators to actually reach this group of scientists first. And Ishii, being the very well institutional entrepreneur that he was, he understood that his knowledge would give him leverage. So he was remaining evasive and release information gradually and make clear that the full cooperation depended on protection from prosecution. So ultimately the United States decided to shield him and his key associates from war crimes proceeding in exchange for access to the reports, testimony, experimental findings. So these military scientists, including Ishii himself, were given immunity in exchange for the results of these medical experiments. Did the U.S. military or the CIA, for that matter, actually end up finding this intelligence useful? Yes and no. I think that they obtained interviews, experimental summaries, pathological findings, microscopic slides, and also like detailed reports on how biological agents were tested on human prisoners. The most significant material included like three large studies on, they were called Report A, G, and Q. Report A were with anthrax, which is about 406 pages long, and examined how anthrax infection could affect the human body. The Report G concerned Glander and how like this bacterial disease normally associated with horses were also capable of infecting humans. The report was documenting also the progression of diseases through human organs and tissues. Then there was also Report Q, which concerned the plague, which is the largest report that they got from them. And it examined how the plague infection in the human subject includes the infection of the human body. And it examined how the human body including the pathological changes and produced as the disease progressed through the body. And also Frostbite's report on how to actually treat frostbite was also handed over to the United States. Some historians did argue that they're not really useful, but I think they were pretty much useful information given that the United States actually traded for it. And also like the reports, if you think about it, reduce really these murder prisoners into case studies like organ charts, and microscopic observations. These subjects on these reports are not identifiable by names. Part of the reason why we don't really know the amount of people being subjected to experimentation is because of how those prisoners were being labeled. They were experimented from like zero to 1,000, and then they will start again from zero to 1,000, and then they will be sent to the incinerator. So there might have been internal taps, but maybe the evidence was also destroyed after the war. And meanwhile, you can look at what the Soviets did, because they did have a trial in the Far East, 12 officers linked to Unit 731. And while it did expose some of what the program entailed, it was then also used as propaganda against the United States. And so it was used as propaganda against the United States. Yes, I still have a lot of questions as to how she endured the occupation and what she was doing day to day. But I guess these kind of questions I will never be able to ask since she passed away. Jenny, really appreciate you sharing your research. It's incredibly grim, but something that people ought to face. So thank you. Thank you so much for having me today. Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. If you like the episode, give us a follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And leave us a rating or review. It really helps. If you have any feedback or you want to hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycast at spymuseum.org. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber. And the show is brought to you by N2K Network's Goat Rodeo and the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.