Ishii Shiro: Josef Mengele of the East

by Jenny Chan

The Japanese occupation of Manchuria promised many opportunities for young scientists who wanted to utilize their training and curiosity to advance Japanese military capabilities. Recently graduated medical student Ishii Shiro seized this occasion, and with funding from the War Ministry of Imperial Japan, founded Unit 731, a biological and chemical warfare research and development arm of the IJA. With consent and funding from the military and government, he recruited the brightest minds from Japan to conduct fatal human experimentation, develop bubonic plague bombs to unleash on nearby villages, and test biological and chemical weapons.

Within a few years, he rapidly climbed the ranks, going from Captain to General for the Imperial Japanese Army. His impact and power overshadowed his European counterpart, Josef Mengele. After the war, he faked his death, but the CIA was able to locate him. However, he negotiated immunity and was never brought to justice in what came to be known as the elaborate American coverup of Japanese war crimes.

Ishii Shiro: Josef Mengele of the East is a biography based on declassified documents found in the National Archives and Records Administration. This book includes documents from the CIA, Far East Asia Command Center, U.S. Naval Operations, the Khabavosk War Crimes Trial, and precords that survived by chance in Tokyo.

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Who was Ishii Shiro?

a husband, and later, a father
a trained surgeon and physician
director of Unit 731 during the Second Sino-Japanese War
a Japanese officer responsible for > 500,000 innocent deaths
a key crafter of Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, a plan by Japan to unleash the bubonic plague on American citizens in Southern CA (never carried out due to the end of the war)
a war criminal who received immunity by the U.S. after WWII
a man who, upon death, received an extravagant funeral chaired by his second-in-command at Unit 731 despite the fact that both of their German counterparts responsible for large-scale murder in Europe had been executed by death penalty decades prior

What was Unit 731?

the brainchild of Ishii Shiro
a bioweapons facility under Ishii's direction during the course of WWII/Pacific War/Second Sino-Japanese War
a cluster of buildings spanning > 2 sq. miles in Eastern China
where thousands of Allied POWs, Russians, Chinese died
where 3,000 Japanese doctors and scientists conducted bacteriological experiments using live, forced human test subjects
where surgeons performed live amputations, dissections, and vivisections on human captives they referred to as "logs"
a prison camp where enough germs were created to kill the world population 3x over
a place forgotten by the West due to an post-WWII elaborate coverup

"Our God-given mission is to challenge all varieties of disease-causing microorganisms…to block all roads of intrusion into the human body; to annihilate all foreign matter resident in our bodies; and to devise the most expeditious treatment possible... [but the new approach to research in medicine must be] based upon the dual thrill of 1), a scientist to exert efforts… probing for the truth in natural science and research into, and discovery of, the unknown world and 2), as a military person, to successfully build a powerful military weapon against the enemy."

Ishii Shiro's message to Unit 731 faculty
Military Medical Ethics, Vol. 2, Ch 16: "Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the World-War-II Era" by Sheldon H. Harris, PhD.

"General Ishii Shiro was working on a far greater scale than his German counterpart Josef Mengele. Compared to Ishii Shiro, Josef Mengele would have been only one of hundreds of similar workers in Unit 731, following orders. An example of the hypocrisy of the Allies following World War II is that they hunted Mengele down in the jungle like the animal he was. Yet many of the researchers of Unit 731 were professors of Japanese Universities and directors of Japanese medical companies and Ishii Shiro died in American occupied Japan fourteen years after the war."

Gregory Dean Byrd, Unit 731 Historian, in "General Ishii Shiro: His Legacy is That of Genius and Madman" (2005)

Learn more about the life and legacy of Ishii Shiro, a man whose ambition allowed him to scale the ranks of the Japanese Army, and figure largely forgotten about by the West.

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"Ishii was brilliant, unstable, charismatic, flamboyant, mercurial, and a spell-binding advocate for causes he supported. He was also an ultranationalist, who sought fervently to further his country’s leadership role in Asia and, at the same time, to advance his career through the promotion of BW research... Ishii had created a BW empire and he was its sovereign ruler."

-Dr. Sheldon H. Harris, historian & author of Factories of Death