Seiichi Morimura, who wrote a searing exposé of the Japanese Army’s secret biological warfare program in occupied China, describing how it forcibly infected thousands of prisoners with deadly pathogens, died on July 24 in Tokyo. He was 90.
The announcement of his death by his publisher, Kadokawa, was cited in Japanese media.
Mr. Morimura detailed the atrocities committed by the Japanese program — called Unit 731 — in a widely sold book, “Akuma no Hoshoku,” or “The Devil’s Gluttony” (1981). Among the horrors he described were vivisections performed without anesthesia on those who had been deliberately administered germs; doctors wanted to see firsthand how the ensuing diseases infected the body.
Under the Japanese occupation, before and during World War II, at least 3,000 prisoners — men, women and children — became guinea pigs at a facility euphemistically named the 731st Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Headquarters, on the Manchurian plain near Harbin. Most of the victims were Chinese, but some were Korean, Russian and Mongolian.
All are believed to have died from the torture.
In addition to those exposed to pathogens — including plague, typhus, cholera, syphilis and anthrax — some men were subjected, naked, to freezing temperatures for long periods; their frozen flesh and limbs were then pounded with boards to measure their sensitivity.
Others, Mr. Morimura wrote, underwent transfusions with horses’ blood. Some were exposed to X-rays for prolonged periods. Some were locked in a pressure chamber to see how long it took before their eyes popped out of their sockets. Still others were tied to stakes while a canister of a pathogen was exploded nearby.
The unit also developed germ bombs that were tested in Chinese cities, reportedly killing at least 200,000 people. In at least one case, planes dropped plague-infested fleas over Ningbo, in eastern China.
The unit had proposed sending balloon-borne disease bombs to the United States as well, Mr. Morimura found. He believed that they would have been used if not for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war in the Pacific.
Mr. Morimura, a mystery novelist and a pacifist, had mentioned Unit 731 in a novel and was contacted by one of its workers, moving him to investigate its brutalities. He first wrote about the unit in a series of articles for a Communist newspaper in Japan.
He said the goal of his book was to bring balance to Japanese accounts of the war.
“Almost all Japanese war themes are from the standpoint of Japan as a victim,” he told 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 book sold more than 1.1 million copies within seven months of its publication. It was not the first account of Unit 731’s brutality — there were two others in the 1960s and ’70s — but Mr. Morimura’s was drawn from interviews with 60…
2023-08-03 21:06:22
Original from www.nytimes.com