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COVER UP - JAPAN / WWII

After the defeat of Japan in World War II, the United States government discovered that the Japanese had committed horrific crimes of medical human experimentation as a part of their biological weapons program. Such experimentation was most notably committed by Japanese Unit 371, who deliberately infected and killed thousands of unwilling patients (primarily Chinese civilians and prisoners of war) in attempts to develop powerful disease-spreading biological weapons. 

 

These crimes were justified by the Japanese as merely eliminating the “racially inferior” Chinese and Koreans who stood in the way of Japan’s imperial expansion. According to some top secret American documents, the Pentagon and U.S. Military Intelligence not only allowed these medical torturers to go free, but also paid them in exchange for the 20 years worth of knowledge and information these Japanese torturers had gained in biological warfare, which was viewed by the U.S. government as a “critically serious form of warfare” according to General Charles Willoughby. 

 

Despite the exposure of this cover-up starting in 1981, there is still much information about these Japanese war crimes and the American cover-up that is still kept under wraps by both the American and Japanese government, much to the anger of countries whose people were victims of those atrocities (such as China).

References

Beckham, H., & Pyykkönen, M. (2021). Unit 731 cover-up: The operation paperclip of                                      

           the East. Pacific Atrocities Education. 

Brody, H., Leonard, S. E., Nie, J.-B., & Weindling, P. (2014, April 23). U.S. Responses to 

           Japanese Wartime Inhuman Experimentation After World War II. Cambridge 

           quarterly of healthcare ethics : CQ : the international journal of healthcare ethics 

           committees. Retrieved from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24534743/ 

Reed, C. (2006, August 14). The United States and the Japanese Mengele: Payoffs and 

           Amnesty for Unit 731. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. Retrieved from 

           https://apjjf.org/-Christopher-Reed/2177/article.pdf 

Tatlow, D. K. (2015, November 16). A New Look at Japan's Unit 731 Wartime Atrocities 

            and a U.S. Cover-Up. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. Retrieved from 

            https://apjjf.org/-Didi-Kirsten_Tatlow/4399 

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