Establishment in Manchuria
Dr. Ishii Shiro’s plan required considerable funding, something only the Emperor of Japan at the time could approve. Fortunately for Ishii, Emperor Hirohito was a biologist and his love of science became evident in the fourth year of his regency in 1925. Hirohito had a small, well-equipped biological laboratory constructed within the Akasaka Palace, and three years later, in 1928, he had the Imperial Biological Research Institute built within the Fukiage Gardens.
As an ambitious young researcher, Ishii needed a large scale unit where he could roam free. This could have only been done in Manchuria. Despite Japan experiencing an economic depression, he was provided an annual budget of 200,000 yen with a consistent yearly increase even when other units were suffering from budget cuts. It was a sign of how effectively charming Ishii was or how promising his presentations were.
Due to confidentiality surrounding the biological weapons research, Ishii used the alias “Tōgō Taro.” Togo Heihachiro was one of Ishii’s favorite war heroes and the greatest naval strategist who brought Japan victory over Russia during the Russo-Japanese War. Ishii adapted the name Captain Togo Hajime. He initially built a garrison facility in Beiyinhe, a village about 70 kilometers southeast of Harbin known as the Zhong Ma Complex. One day in 1932, Ishii and the Japanese army entered the village and evacuated the entire block where Xuan Hua and Wu Miao intersected. They occupied a multi-use structure which had supported 100 Chinese vendors selling clothes and food to the local villagers and set up a temporary site. In 1932, Saburō Endō, Director of Operations of the Kwantung Army, once inspected the “Tōgō Unit.”
In his book, The Fifteen Years’ Sino-Japanese War and Me, he described it as follows:
As an ambitious young researcher, Ishii needed a large scale unit where he could roam free. This could have only been done in Manchuria. Despite Japan experiencing an economic depression, he was provided an annual budget of 200,000 yen with a consistent yearly increase even when other units were suffering from budget cuts. It was a sign of how effectively charming Ishii was or how promising his presentations were.
Due to confidentiality surrounding the biological weapons research, Ishii used the alias “Tōgō Taro.” Togo Heihachiro was one of Ishii’s favorite war heroes and the greatest naval strategist who brought Japan victory over Russia during the Russo-Japanese War. Ishii adapted the name Captain Togo Hajime. He initially built a garrison facility in Beiyinhe, a village about 70 kilometers southeast of Harbin known as the Zhong Ma Complex. One day in 1932, Ishii and the Japanese army entered the village and evacuated the entire block where Xuan Hua and Wu Miao intersected. They occupied a multi-use structure which had supported 100 Chinese vendors selling clothes and food to the local villagers and set up a temporary site. In 1932, Saburō Endō, Director of Operations of the Kwantung Army, once inspected the “Tōgō Unit.”
In his book, The Fifteen Years’ Sino-Japanese War and Me, he described it as follows:
[It was] converted from a rather large soy sauce workshop, surrounded by high rammed earth wall. All the attending military doctors had pseudonyms, and they were strictly regulated and were not allowed to communicate with the outsiders. The name of the unit was “Tōgō Unit.” One by one, the experimental subjects were imprisoned in a sturdy iron lattice and inoculated with various pathogenic bacteria to observe changes in their condition. They used prisoners on Harbin’s death row for these experiments. It was said that it was for national defense purposes, but the experiments were performed with appalling brutality and the dead were burned in high-voltage electric furnaces, leaving no trace.
Inside these walls, Ishii was ruthless. Since he had an unlimited supply of “bandits” or “criminals” to experiment on, he did not keep his prisoners for more than a month. If he needed a brain specimen, his guards would enter a cell where prisoners were kept and smash open a prisoner’s brain before discarding the remains in the crematorium. Due to the Russo-Japanese relationship at the time, Ishii’s work was especially important regarding the potential for border disputes along the Manchurian Soviet border. The border was also known for its natural plague area. It was at Beiyinhe, when Ishii experimented on captured bandits using cholera and plague infected fleas, that he realized their effectiveness as biological weapons.
Because such activities were prohibited by international law, out of consideration for actual combat and taboo in human relations, the Tōgō Unit established a strict security system to keep its research highly confidential. Surprisingly, during the Mid Autumn Festival on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month in 1934, 16 Chinese prisoners escaped from prison, making it difficult for the Tōgō Unit to sustain its confidential nature. Of the 16 Chinese people who escaped, 12 fled to the Third Route Army of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. After learning about the situation, the Third Route Army from the Chinese Communist Party attacked the Tōgō Unit in Beiyinhe. According to Japanese documents from that time, there were Japanese casualties after the attack. After the prison break incident, the secret was out. The Tōgō Unit closed its operations at Beiyinhe to prevent further disclosure of internal secrets. They first withdrew to the Army Military Medical School in Tokyo but later moved to Nangang, Harbin.
Because such activities were prohibited by international law, out of consideration for actual combat and taboo in human relations, the Tōgō Unit established a strict security system to keep its research highly confidential. Surprisingly, during the Mid Autumn Festival on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month in 1934, 16 Chinese prisoners escaped from prison, making it difficult for the Tōgō Unit to sustain its confidential nature. Of the 16 Chinese people who escaped, 12 fled to the Third Route Army of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. After learning about the situation, the Third Route Army from the Chinese Communist Party attacked the Tōgō Unit in Beiyinhe. According to Japanese documents from that time, there were Japanese casualties after the attack. After the prison break incident, the secret was out. The Tōgō Unit closed its operations at Beiyinhe to prevent further disclosure of internal secrets. They first withdrew to the Army Military Medical School in Tokyo but later moved to Nangang, Harbin.
Members of Unit 731
Although the secret was out, Ishii’s inventions gained him recognition in the science community. The 1930s was a great decade for Ishii. As was his personality, he boasted about his supposed progress and medical advancement in Beiyinhe. He was so proud of his invention, he peed into the water filter and offered Emperor Hirohito a drink from his filtered urine during a visit in 1933. The Emperor refused his offer and he allegedly drank his own filtered urine. He was flying between Manchuria and Japan giving lectures at both Kyoto Imperial University and Tokyo Army Medical College as well as lobbying military High Command and recruiting students from colleges. Of course, Dr. Ishii Shiro maintained a work-life balance by never letting work get in the way of his pleasure. At this point in his life, he was raising a large family, overseeing research at Beiyinhe, lobbying military commanders, recruiting the brightest minds in Japan, and frequenting the geisha houses. On August 1, 1935, he was promoted to Surgeon-Lieutenant Colonel.
Tōgō Unit
The world did not have much research on biological weapons so it was hard for Ishii’s enemies and his peers to question his presentations. His amazing showmanship served to be very convincing regarding his research during his presentations. On May 30, 1936, the Tōgō Unit, also known as the “Kamo Unit”, led by Shirō Ishii was awarded the “Army Regulation ‘A’ No. 7” i.e., confidential military matters of the Japanese army by the Emperor and became an official army. With such a large unit and budget, it seemed that Ishii must have had friends in the highest of places in Japan. It was no longer an agency part of the Epidemic Prevention Institute of the Army Military Medical School but was directly under the Kwantung Army. Moreover, it established a large base in Pingfang district: Central Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army for the formal formation and adaptation of the army under the order of the Japanese Central Army. On August 1, 1936, Ishii was appointed as Chief of the Kwantung Army Boeki Kyusui Bu, which meant, Anti-Epidemic Water Supply and Purification Bureau.
His invention not only earned him a boost in the military, he was able to sell it to private companies and sold his water filter design to the Nippon Tokushu Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha company. The company’s water filter manufacturing plant was conveniently located near Ishii’s Tokyo laboratory. For the design, Ishii earned a handsome consulting fee of 50,000 yen, notably merely a slight hint of his corrupt career.
His invention not only earned him a boost in the military, he was able to sell it to private companies and sold his water filter design to the Nippon Tokushu Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha company. The company’s water filter manufacturing plant was conveniently located near Ishii’s Tokyo laboratory. For the design, Ishii earned a handsome consulting fee of 50,000 yen, notably merely a slight hint of his corrupt career.
The Unit 731 complex
In 1939, the Battles of Khalkhin Gol broke out as a consequence of Soviet-Japanese border conflicts. This conflict was named after the river Khalkhin Gol where the battles mostly took place. As the Kwantung Army was located in Manchuria, they were deployed for the battle. As an opportunist, Ishii used this incident to test his biological warfare theories. The Ishii Unit showed off their defensive water filter since he was the expert in water purification at the time. Although Ishii’s Unit was present, a large number of Japanese soldiers still died from open wounds and 30% of the deaths were caused by dysentery, which the Japanese believed was caused by an aerial bomb of the Soviets.
Ishii had lobbied the military leaders into allowing him to deploy biological warfare against the Soviets. However, his superiors did not allow such tactics until they were about to lose. Ishii then executed his strategy. In August of 1939, toward the end of the war, his superiors approved. He used 24 of his Youth Corps recruits as “suicide squads” to drop pathogens onto the Soviet side of the Holsten River, a tributary of the Halha River. All of his Youth Corps recruiters were from his same village, so even in the war field, he was able to employ his feudal status on fellows from his region Although his efforts were too little too late, he did demonstrate that biological weapons could work against enemies and allowed the empire to explore this particular method for future tactical warfare. The data on this attack was incomplete and it is not clear how many Soviet soldiers actually suffered from the attack, meaning that casualties were not widespread enough for the official data to be tracked. This could have been due to the typhoid bacillus and other pathogens losing their effectiveness in a large body of water such as a river. However, the combat did backfire and at least one Japanese soldier lost his life after becoming infected when he spilled liquid from a drum filled with contaminated water while dumping it into the river. He died of typhoid fever in Hailar at an army hospital.
After the affair, the Ishii Unit received a special commendation from the Kwantung Army Commanding General. On April 29th, 1940, he received a 3rd Order of the Golden Kite and the Middle Cord of the Rising Sun for his service at the Nomonhan Incident.
Ishii had lobbied the military leaders into allowing him to deploy biological warfare against the Soviets. However, his superiors did not allow such tactics until they were about to lose. Ishii then executed his strategy. In August of 1939, toward the end of the war, his superiors approved. He used 24 of his Youth Corps recruits as “suicide squads” to drop pathogens onto the Soviet side of the Holsten River, a tributary of the Halha River. All of his Youth Corps recruiters were from his same village, so even in the war field, he was able to employ his feudal status on fellows from his region Although his efforts were too little too late, he did demonstrate that biological weapons could work against enemies and allowed the empire to explore this particular method for future tactical warfare. The data on this attack was incomplete and it is not clear how many Soviet soldiers actually suffered from the attack, meaning that casualties were not widespread enough for the official data to be tracked. This could have been due to the typhoid bacillus and other pathogens losing their effectiveness in a large body of water such as a river. However, the combat did backfire and at least one Japanese soldier lost his life after becoming infected when he spilled liquid from a drum filled with contaminated water while dumping it into the river. He died of typhoid fever in Hailar at an army hospital.
After the affair, the Ishii Unit received a special commendation from the Kwantung Army Commanding General. On April 29th, 1940, he received a 3rd Order of the Golden Kite and the Middle Cord of the Rising Sun for his service at the Nomonhan Incident.
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