I was unaware of this horrific piece of World War II history until I stumbled upon it reading a history of Korea. Unit 731 of the Japanese army was slightly different than the often compared German concentration camps. The Germans were exterminating and using forced labor. The Japanese were researching biological and chemical warfare and using prisoners as live guinea pigs. a b c "Japan – Insects, Disease, and History | Montana State University". Montana.edu . Retrieved 2022-06-01.

Cholera was dumped into wells used by the Chinese populace. Fleas were carefully collected, infected with plague and then dropped in aerial bombs over Chinese cities and villages.a b c d e Gold, Hal (2011). Unit 731 Testimony (1sted.). New York: Tuttle Pub. pp.157–158. ISBN 978-1462900824.

Grunden, Walter E., Secret Weapons & World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science, University Press of Kansas, 2005. ISBN 0700613838. Some of Unit731's satellite (branch) facilities are still in use by various Chinese industrial companies. A portion has been preserved and is open to visitors as a museum. [100] Branches X, X (1950). Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged With Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Vanderbrook, Alan Jay (2013). Imperial Japan's Human Experiments Before And During World War Two (MA thesis). University of Central Florida. Archived from the original on 2018-01-17 . Retrieved 2017-10-27. Neuman, William Lawrence (2008). Understanding Research. Pearson/Allyn and Bacon, p. 65. ISBN 0205471536

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Later, the Japanese took especially virulent forms of the plague and other pathogens that were developed at Unit 731, put them in canisters and dropped them on nearby towns to see if their weapons would work. They did.

General Yoshijiro Umezu, who served as the Army’s chief of staff, was a member of the elite war cabinet that held the reins of power in Japan from April 1945 until it surrendered to Allied forces on September 2, 1945. According to Lt. Gen. Kajitsuka Ryuji of the Japanese Medical Service and former Chief of the Medical Administration for the massive Kwantung Army (located in Manchuria), Ishii was given permission to begin the Ping Fang experiment in 1936 by “command of the Emperor.” Immune from prosecution as war criminals, many of Unit 731’s doctors went on to prominent careers in universities, hospitals, and industry, rising to positions that included governor of Tokyo, president of the Japanese Medical Association, and head of the Japanese Olympic Committee. The ringleader, Dr. Shiro Ishii, quietly returned to private practice and died in 1959 of throat cancer at the age of 67. Skeleton crews of Ishii's Japanese troops blew up the compound in the final days of the war to destroy evidence of their activities, but many were sturdy enough to remain somewhat intact.

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Japanese biological warfare operations were by far the largest during WWII, and "possibly with more people and resources than the BW producing nations of France , Hungary , Italy , Poland , and the Soviet Union combined, between the world wars. [123]

As atrocities go, or as much as sane human beings can rank them, this doesn’t sound any worse than Nazi experiments. But unlike the Nazis, Imperial Japan actually weaponized its biological horrors.The final months of World War II saw the liberation of hundreds of ghastly concentration camps and the awful reality of Nazi racism. For more than seven decades those atrocities, including the use of human beings for medical experiments, have been common knowledge. Far less known is the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Chinese by a Japanese organization known as Unit 731. X (1950). Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged With Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. p.374. a b c d e f Kristof, Nicholas D. (1995-03-17). "Unmasking Horror – A special report. Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2019-07-14 . Retrieved 2019-07-14.