RedHanded - Unit 731: Japan’s Secret Human Testing Program | #420

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

One of WWII’s lesser-known horrors, Japan’s secret biological warfare testing program is so brutal and inhumane that it’s hard to believe it could ever happen. And at its helm was a twisted microbiologist Shiro Ishi. Victims, known inside as “logs”, were injected and exposed to countless pathogens including typhoid, cholera, and the plague, then watched like lab rats as they were gripped by the diseases. Even in their last moments, the poor souls stuck inside Unit 731 weren’t safe, as they were cut open and examined, while they were still alive…Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. I'm Hannah. I'm Surruti. And welcome to red-handed Halloween war crime. edition. Uh-oh. Yeah, big uh-ohs, actually. And I didn't want to say anything, but we've actually, we're recording these in like the reverse order of that they're going out.

So we've just had a story about breaking bones and also some rats made an appearance. Loads of rats and loads of broken bones in this one as well. And I did just Google Japanese for uh-oh, and it came up. Like somebody else had searched for it. And I can't say it because it's shown me in Japanese. script, but apparently it has a little mic for it next which. Shall we ever listen? Sure. Ah. Ah. Well.

So, ah, ah. Uh-uh. Like I say to my dog. Ah. Get away from that muddy puddle. Get away from that biological chemicals. Fush, you'd be straight in there. Honestly.

Revolting. Uh-uh. Uh-uh. Uh-uh. Okay. We've been wanting to do this for fucking years. And now we have. I'm so glad my stomach is empty.

Yeah. And hopefully your hands and your plates and anything else around you, your mouths are also empty. Probably. Don't eat. That's what I was trying to say. I know that's what you're trying to say, but obviously my brain immediately went to who's sucking dick while listening to this? Uh-uh. If you are, you're a pervert.

And I want no part of it. Exactly. I don't consent. All right. We are getting quite wary over here at Red-Handed HQ of opening episodes telling you that this week's story is the most somethingy that we've ever covered. It's kind of unavoidable when you've done as many episodes as we have, but also a statistical impossibility that everything is going to be the superlative of the thing that it is every single fucking week. We've had the most disgusting, the most extreme, the most vile, the most inhumane. I could go on. And, yeah, impossible for every episode we bring you to be the superlative of the particular genre of terror. that we jump into on a weekly basis, but this time, I think we might have to mean it. Unit 731 is a staple of morbidity circles, and it has been, ever since we all found out about what the Japanese got up to after the Pacific Theatre belted out its last Imperial encore. We're talking state-funded Ed Geinery that went on for years in a land that has exported Kauai culture

so expertly that we've all forgotten that they were Hitler's allies, not so long ago. they really have done a very good job of that. That's masterful. Yeah. Masterful. Mm-hmm. And just like, look at this cute little, look at this cute little there. I don't even, I don't know, cute little emoji.

Whatever, cute little emoji face person. Aren't they cute? Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Uh-uh. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Completely.

It's like, it is, I mean, K-wave's similar, but very different. But it, it's an intentional export. And it's just been. it's been done so well. It truly has. And yeah, actually on the way here, I did see a news post that were saying that the Koreans were once again

like, Japan, please can you acknowledge all of the horrible sex slavery? And Japan's just like, uh-uh! No fucking way. Absolutely not. We might give you a half-assed apology, but we're not going to.

Yeah, and look, I think it's a tricky thing, right? Because there is the total whitewashing of your own history where you're just like, No, fucking nothing. Don't worry about it. Let's just love whatever fucking weird shit we're loving now and like look all cute and cuddly and whatever.

And then there is just like dwelling in it and being like we're the worst, we're the worst, we're the worst, which is like what the West is currently doing. And something in the middle, I think. Something in the middle would be ideal. Long before the Pokemon epoch, the Meiji Restoration brought Japan. to the international trade table

and the land of the rising sun got bang into the colonization game and they were good at it. An international expansion meant international influence by the time Germany invaded Poland in 1939, biological warfare was the name of the game

and with the world at war, Japan were way ahead of the curve. I think there is a bit of a rhetoric of they didn't want to get left behind so they went round sort of a different way around how to win wars, basically. It's not true.

They, like, as we will go on to discuss, when it came to military medicine, the Japanese were way ahead of everyone else. And so, a secret biological testing facility was built, hidden away in northeastern China. Inside, Japanese scientists conducted unimaginably cruel experiments on human subjects. The walls of Unit 731 contained horrors

beyond comprehension. Men, women and children were sliced open so the medical staff could observe their organs as they failed. Those who found themselves imprisoned there were infected with plague, cholera, typhoid,

STIs, and studied as they perished. Like the Nazis and the CIA post-paperclip, the man behind Unit 731, the diabolical brains of the operation, had been tasked with finding out exactly what a human body can withstand. Just how far can a person be pushed before their light is extinguished for good?

Dr. Shiro Ishi, and his team of civilian employees, were set on finding out. Now we're going to give you a red-handed rundown on how such a state-funded horror hospital came to be. And if this episode isn't enough for you, then please go forth and critically engage. Be very careful where you get your information from because a lot of analysis out there is shallow at best and repackaged wartime propaganda at worst. Yes, especially in this country and in the US, a lot of wartime propaganda was about the Japanese.

My grandma, for example, hates the Japanese more than anyone on this planet. She calls them a cruel race. And that's a very common thing for people of her generation to say, because that's what they were told in the cinemas during war and for the years afterwards. And similarly, in America, obviously, I mean, they were putting Japanese people in internment camps not very long after this at all. I think it is dangerous because by saying that Unit 731 only happened because of the, they were Japanese and because of Japaneseness and because of their culture, it makes them seem so removed from us. Like, we could never possibly be this cruel. Everyone does this. And this is the thing that we see with all sorts of historical situations, right? It's this

idea that, oh, well, only this could have happened here. And we see it time and time and time again. And I think colonization, colonialization, empire building is another thing where it's like everybody forgets the Japanese were really fucking good at colonization. And it's like when people talk about it, they talk about it like, oh, only the British shadow colony. I'm like, no, pretty much like every civilization at some point had a go. Some were just more successful than others. The Germans also did this. The Japanese did this. The North Koreans, I'm sure, are doing this.

The Americans do it in a big grape. This is what I mean. And it's like there is nothing inherently specific to any culture that links them or predisposes them more or less to having a monopoly on cruelty, on colonialism, on self-supremacy or anything. Given the chance, everyone will fucking do anything. Exactly. So there isn't that much out there on Unit 731.

Granted, there are books. Please go and read them. but also just check who wrote it and what their intentions may have been because if the Japanese are a specifically evil race that can do specifically evil things that only they can do, then it was fine to atom bomb them, then wasn't it? So just think about the context of the situation. I am not for a second saying that the Japanese didn't do abominable things. But it's not because they're Japanese.

It's not because they are Japanese. Just in the same way that the Belgians did horrible things, the Dutch did horrible things, the French did horrible things, the Germans, the British, we all did horrible things. But it's not because they are of that race. Exactly. You know those creepy stories that give you goosebumps? The ones that make you really question what's real?

Well, what if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories are not found in haunted houses or abandoned forests, but instead in hospital rooms and doctor's offices. Hi, I'm Mr. Ballin, the host of Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries. And each week on my podcast, you can expect to hear stories about bizarre illnesses no one can explain, miraculous recoveries that shouldn't have happened, and cases so baffling they stumped even the best doctors. So if you crave totally true and thoroughly twisted horror stories and mysteries,

Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries should be your new go-to weekly show. Listen to Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. All right, should we talk about the Signal Awards? Sure. Sure. That is the level of enthusiasm. We would love you guys to have for us too.

Because if you remember, we made the podcast series Flesh and Code with Wondery. We were super excited, like, the minute they brought that story to us, because if you haven't listened to Flesh and Code, it's essentially about following people who essentially fall in love with their, like, AI companions. It's about Russian interference and all sorts of crazy things and about how these AI companions are to be trusted, whether this is a good thing, how it was impacting on a larger scale, and the ramifications when a replica that was the company at the heart of it took away the erotic roleplay function and didn't go well. spoilers. So we loved making it. We spent, what, 18 months making that show and we worked so, so hard on it. And so we are going to ask a very small favour of you guys, shockingly to us. Flesh and Code has been put up for the listener's choice category of the Signal Awards 2025. So we would love you guys to please help us out and basically try get some more eyes and ears on Flesh and Code because it was a real labour of love for us. What you guys need to do is go to

Signal Awards website and vote for Flesh and Code. Again, it's in the listener's choice category and you can find us under documentaries. That's the category you're looking for. And then under limited series and specials. Voting is open until the 9th of October, so you really don't have much time, like literally go do this now. And we would just be so incredibly grateful because if we did win the listeners choice for Flesh and Code at the Signals Award, then it would just mean the world to us. Thank you. I've also seen some, like, online commentary of people who've done YouTube videos or podcasts on this particular subject and people having come for them saying that they were propagating, like, anti-Chinese propaganda or something, I don't know. And they'll be like, oh, well, like, Japan today has just as much to do with Japan in the, like, in World War II as Germany does, which is nothing at all.

No, it's not nothing at all. Come on. None of this exists in a vacuum. And like, we can't just, everything is cumulative as what I'm very ham-fistedly trying to say. And you cannot isolate these events or anything ever. Having said that, Japan is unique in quite a lot of ways, which is the reason that the post-bomb rebrand has been so successful. And also the reason that the national tree is the cherry blossom is because it grows really quickly and it's the first one to bloom in spring. So it's like a symbolism of how quickly they got back on their feet after the bombs.

Mm-hmm. But we're going to jump back to the time before, before the atom was split. Actually, when Galileo was insisting that the universe didn't revolve around us, in the far east, the Japanese archipelago existed in almost total isolation. The Tokugawa shogunate, also referred to as the Edo period, was a 250-ish-year period of peace between 1603 and 1868, and that is the longest period of peace held by any regime that we can remember or know about. The third and final shogunate pulled all of this piece off by enforcing a bunch of rules that maintained a collectivist society.

Environmentally speaking, the people occupying the 14,000 islands of Japan, are more primed for a socialist structure than most, because it's so bloody dangerous to live there. Japan makes up just 0.28% of our global landmass, but is home to 7% of the world's active volcanoes and 10% of the planet. earthquakes. Ah. Mm-hmm. And also, the land of the rising sun is 70% mountain. It can betray you at any moment. And I'm throwing this in.

It's completely irrelevant. But I didn't know Japan had 14,000 islands. But Hannah, do you know the country with the most islands in the world? The most islands in the world? Mm-hmm. Philippines? No. That would have been my guess.

No. Most islands in the world? Mm-hmm. Canada. No. Can have a clue? Uh-huh. Europe. Not EU, but Europe.

Oh, Norway. Near, close. Finland. Close. Sweden. Correct. Correct. Correct.

It's Sweden. No, I don't think so. I'll check. Let me check. They were neutral in World War II. I know that. Oh, it is a member of the EU. Yeah, I think Norway's, because they've got all that delicious oil. Yes, yes, yes. I don't eat it.

Yes, but they use their own currency, crona, which is why I got confused. Anyway. Guess how many islands they've got? This is bonkers. 25,000. Like, so much more. Really? Like, so much more.

A million. Less. 267,570 islands. So a quarter of a million islands. Should just go live on a fucking Swedish island. Buy one or to yourself. You can. It's cold and dark.

I'm not going there. Lovely. All that pickled herring and shit. though. Is that them? Or is that one of the others? Never mind. No comment. So, in Japan,

with all its volcanoes and its mountains and its earthquakes, on your ones, with no tribe to run with, you don't really stand a chance. Therefore, in Japan, cooperation and collectivism has always equated to survival.

And this is really interesting. Radio 4 just did a series called the power of guilt about this guy who it was an accident but he caused his girlfriend to fall while they were climbing and she was really, really injured and the show is about how he approached carrying the guilt of that because obviously it's not about you like you're not the one with a broken spine but like how can one even go about living life after something like that has happened? It was just really interesting and he spoke to I believe a evolutionary biologist who said that the reason we feel shame.

So like guilt is internal. Guilt is you beating yourself up. Shame is from other people. And the reason we have it is because in the caveman times, if you pissed off your group and they left you on your own, you would die. So that's why we have this, it can feel uncontrollable worry and anxiety around being shamed by other people because our brain thinks,

that it literally means we're going to die if we're ostracized. And I thought that was really interesting. Anyway, the dangerous land to live on was a nice foundation for the Tokugawa Shogunate and the administration kept the country collective in other ways. Land was divided up into a clan-based feudal system and a family registry was introduced

which meant that leaving one's hometown was difficult, if not impossible. A handy car system was enshrined. there was heavy restriction on foreign trade and Buddhism was phased out in favour of neo-Sintoism and neo-Sintoism is much heavier on the respect for your elders and do as your lords tell you stuff than the Buddha was. And so, not overnight, obviously, submission became an honour

and the most virtuous in Tokugawa Japan were the ones who did what they were told to preserve the good of the group. And yeah, it makes sense why they would move away from Buddhism to that because Buddhism is very much more about you as an individual internal looking you, you, you. It is not the collective, which if you are going to make that rapid whole scale, society move towards we are going to really double down on collectivism. Buddhism just doesn't vibe with that. And I think, yeah, there's some interesting research that's been done into which countries had which religious practices and which religions based in those countries.

and then the outcome because of course it does on society and the development and growth and yeah obviously you know if you're a buddhist you're listening might not be too happy with me things but yeah a bunch of people sat around just thinking about how they're going to develop themselves actually doesn't lead to a very prosperous society is what the study found yeah there's i watched a really interesting youtube video which i'll put in the source list about we're going to talk about this a lot later but like the way of the warrior bushido like the this, you know, the Tokugawa period of like these are the things that make you a good member of this society. There's a bit of a resurgence of Bushido in Japan at the moment and

there's a book called The Lie of the Japanese People and this YouTuber was explaining how Japanese people because of this like loyalty and do as you're told and don't rock the boat and I'm not going to be the first one to go home. That's the consequence of this collective mindset of it doesn't matter what I want. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't matter what I want. It doesn't matter what I think. What is important is the good of the group. And now in Japan, that's leading to all sorts of societal problems, because once you introduce rapid capitalism, which is what Japan now has, it doesn't really fit with that mindset in the same way. So it's a bit of a clash. It's a really interesting, I'll put the book in the sources as well, because it's just a really interesting,

like, thought experiment. Anyway, so under the Tokugawa Shogunate submission was an honour. And if you lost your honour by disobeying or leaving or not being nice to your mum, that meant your privileges were gone too. And that's how they managed 250 years of peace. And also, it just means that culturally speaking, Japanese people are the best in the world at following orders and not trusting outsiders. And interestingly, when Japanese people go to other countries, lowest levels of crime committed by them as an ethnic group. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's not just not part of it. So, you know, there are pros and cons.

The Edo ruling class were the most honourable. Those who obeyed the best and embodied the way of the warrior were the samurai. And nothing distills a culture like centuries of solitude. This period of not playing with the other children is why Japan's culture is so distinctive and particularly interesting to outsiders. Because not only were people not allowed in,

no one was allowed to leave. And that's why I say that it is unique because there isn't another culture. that was just on its own. In modern history, really, it's only the 1800s that it finishes, for that extended period of time. It's also why the country experienced literally no economic growth during the time either.

And when the US Commodore, Matthew Perry, sailed into the Edo Bay on a steam-powered warship in 1853, the Samarai's kingdom was still doing all of their fighting with swords and fists. The rest of the world had rolled out the Industrial Revolution, decidedly, gunny. As usual, this naval visitation from the Americans was followed by a series of treaties and trade deals that did the Japanese absolutely no favours. Known as the black ship incident because of the large black plumes of smoke that billowed from the U.S. warships,

this was a significant turning point in Japan's history. Once the black ships had puffed off into the distance, isolation was over. and the Meiji Restoration kick-started the industrial engines. Japan entered the international market and banged on their colonization casas as well. Feudal loyalties were swapped out for submission to one supreme emperor,

a divine entity with one mission, make Japan great, not again, but in a way that other countries would be scared of and they wouldn't even think about invading. And it was into this newly centralized governance, proudly bearing the motto wealthy country strong military that a baby

Shiro Ishi was born and he would grow into the mingala of the east. Shiro Ishi was born in the village of Chayodomura, which is now called Shibayama, about 50 miles to the east of Tokyo

in 1892. He was the fourth son of a landowning sake maker and Shiro Ishi grew up in luxury as part of one of the richest families around. He excelled academically, but wasn't so good at making mates. Wherever he went,

he took with him an arrogantly brash attitude. It was very obvious to him that he was better than everyone around him. He was more clever, he was more rich, and at over six foot, he was taller than all of them. All of those things may be true, but popular Shiro is she was not.

Apparently had a very deep voice, which won everyone over. As the fourth son of a rich family, the natural choice for Shira Ishi's future was to become a doctor, and in a time of such nationalism, where better to be a doctor, than in Japan's Imperial Army.

As World War I tour through Europe, in 1916, Shira Ishi was accepted into Kyoto Imperial University, where he studied medicine for four years. First, do no harm, didn't really get a look in, the School of Medicine, under which he trained, it was very much a problem-solving situation.

And I will say here, when he's training, human testing in Japan had already been happening. Everyone knew it. Medical journals would publish that whatever experiment had been conducted on a monkey, but everyone knew that was code for human. Within the medical community, everybody knew. It wasn't a secret. And he didn't invent it either. Yeah.

Another thing you will see is Dr. Jekyll, like Frankenstein, mad scientist who's behind the whole thing and it's just him. No, it's not. It's just not. You can already see the arrogance and the ego and the like ends justify the means we can do whatever. And the idea that he just invented it, it's like what? He just comes along. And I was like, oh, we never thought of that. You could have just tried all this on some random people.

Like, come on. Stop it. Yeah. So that's an addition to your reading list warning if you do decide to go off and find out more. Over his four years at medical school, Shiro Ishi pulled all the same shit that he had at home growing up and he quickly gained a reputation as a teacher's pet and also a complete on wanker. He would regularly stay late after class conducting experiments and research of his own, much to the delight of his tutors, but he'd never clean up his own mess.

he just expected his classmates to do that for him when they came in the next day. So it's exactly what you said. He's a fucking piece of work, but the system for him to flourish in already existed. Shura Ishi graduated in 1920, and a month later, he joined the Japanese Imperial Army. Once again, he swiftly got on the good side of his superiors, but not of his fellow soldiers.

He still managed to get out on the lash, though. After basic training, Shura Ishi was stationed, in an army hospital in Tokyo, where he spent his evenings drinking and shagging his way around the notorious red light district. Despite this, he was still recommended to do a postgrad. And Ishi returned to his alma mater to bang out a PhD in bacteriology. When he graduated with his doctoral degree in 1927,

Shura Ishi turned his attention to biological and chemical warfare. Japan had been the envy of the West for some time when it came to wartime sanitation. Back then, disease was killing far more soldiers than enemy combatants were, and Japan had just cracked the cause of dysentery in their field hospitals, which made them the world leader on military medicine. The scientific approach to victory continued in peacetime, and the silent enemy of disease became Japan's silent ally.

And Dr. Shiro Ishi would become quite the expert in weaponising illness. and his specialist subject would drastically change the trajectory of his life and cause the deaths of untold thousands. Yeah, they do a lot of pre-shirishi Japanese military medicine. They were just really good at keeping camps clean and understanding why that was important and why sanitation was important. And if you crack sanitation, you're not going to have to deal with typhoid or cholera, dysentery obviously like very difficult especially in trench warfare they were just better at it so the attitude was very much well if we can cure it if we can prevent it we must be able to invert that somehow two years earlier the world had come together to sign the geneva conventions which this is confusing Geneva conventions there are loads of them and the first ones were signed like in the 18th

It's like the Geneva Convention that we all think of now happened post-World War II. This is not that. These ones were a set of rules, regulations and treaties agreed upon by every major international power in order that the horrors of the Great War were never repeated. And quite a large section of these treaties was focused on the use of biological and chemical weapons. And that particular section is called the Geneva Protocol. Both chemical and biological weapons had been used with impunity in the trenches and they

were horrifyingly effective, and the Geneva Protocol unequivocally banned utilizing both kinds of weapons in warfare. In World War I, biological warfare was much more used on animals, like anthraxing a herd of cows, basically, but obviously mustard gas, etc., used all the time in World War I. The Geneva Protocol did not, though, ban the production of such weapons. But let's face it, even if they had America, still would have napalmed the shit out of Vietnam and dropped 2,000 tonnes of depleted uranium on Iraq in 2003. However, back in 1925, the unwavering focus of the Geneva Protocol on banning chemical and biological weapons convinced Shiro Ishi that such weapons must be highly effective.

Therefore, Japan should figure out how to make them. And it is worth pointing out, I think, that although Japan were allied with the Entente and World War I and they did engage in naval operations, no Japanese troops were deployed to Europe. So nerve gas, anthrax, glanders, mustard gas, etc., had left no mark on their men or the trauma that they took home with them after the war and never again doesn't really have the same ring to it if nothing really happened to you in the first place. On the hunt for what all the fuss was about, in the spring of 1988, Shira Ishi went on a grand tour of the West, trying to gather as much information as he could about these now internationally

illegal weapons. But he didn't do a very good job. His European and American contemporaries were not overly keen on sharing top secret illegal weapon secrets with this new kid on the nationalist bloc. Nevertheless, Shura Ishi didn't return to his homeland completely empty-handed. He also wasn't the only one, like Japan said, a bunch of different people, one of whom went to the White House and asked if he could have a couple of vials of yellow fever just to take home, but absolutely only to develop a vaccine, nothing else. You promise? Promise?

Ah, uh-uh. So yeah, he doesn't go home with nothing. Shira Ishi returned with a hail Mary. He convinced a department of military affairs that even though he had collected literally zero data on how chemical war could be waged, researching it was still worth Japanese. state time and money. Here was this pitch.

1. If the Geneva Conventions were specifically banning the use of chemical and biological weapons, those weapons must be, by definition, very effective. Number two, while an envoy from Japan did sign the Geneva Protocol, it wasn't passed through the Japanese Parliament. So Japan wasn't actually bound to follow the rules of the agreement in any real way. And three, Japan is lacking natural metal deposits, so the domestic manufacture of traditional weapons is tricky. The only option the nation had was to buy guns from other countries. And manufacturing biological and chemical weapons in-house would be a lot cheaper than importing arms from overseas.

Which if you've got no ethics or morals, all makes sense. Also, Japan had withdrawn from the League of Nations. so they had literally no external rules binding them to do anything really apart from kind of the Geneva Protocol but like they just think they're just above it like why would we like we'll trade with you fine you can buy all of our stuff that we're exporting we don't want your guns not paying you money so the Japanese top brass were convinced by these arguments the threat of invasion had been hanging heavily over them for years

and their land grabbing campaign could only benefit from some military and And if the emperor didn't have to spend a whole load of yen on foreign weapons to keep expanding into the Asian continent, then even better. The Japan's Shiro issue returned to, after his fact-finding mission, was a lot more nationalistic than the one he had left two years before. Before World War I even broke out, Japan had been making serious moves. In 1905, Japan shocked the whole world and snatched a naval base called Port Arthur from Russia, and that made them a major player in Manchuria. in 1910 Japan annexed Korea and seized German colonies and more of China in the First World War itself

and then just after Shiro is she returned from his Western Recon mission the Japanese military exploded a train so well that they gained full control of the whole Manchurian region it's a false flag operation it's called the Manchurian incident you can go and look at it

and after that the next stop on the Japanese runaway empire train was the rest of China all that to say in the 1920s and 30s The stakes were high, and the emperor's military commanders were very interested in anything that could give them an edge on the battlefield. It was no secret that this island nation was spreading its newly industrialized military might,

worryingly thin. Japan couldn't keep fighting traditionally, on so many fronts forever, and Shura Ishi claimed he had the solution. Bombs and guns were not the answer. Burns and germs were. So, the Japanese State Department of Military Affairs offered Shura Ishi a prison camp in the newly seized Manchurian region. Within the bounds of Zong Ma prison camp, Shura Ishi was given a budget and free reign to develop biological and chemical weapons via any experimentation means necessary. The scientific center of the fortress was so top secret that the Chinese laborers who built it were executed once a single.

structure was completed. Shiro Ishi was also given a position at the Qantong army epidemic prevention and water supply department, which like all future planning committees sounded boring as fuck, but was actually hiding Japan's alternative weapons testing program. Yeah, the water supply department bit is just like, we'll just put loads of germs in your water, get you that way. Shiro Ishi's first targets within the sprawling labyrinth of containment cells and labs that was Zong Mar was to develop vaccines for diseases running rife through the Japanese troops. And he did that by infecting the camp's inmates with a catalogue of infectious ailments to observe how the infections progressed.

And we're not talking influenza or chicken box. The poor souls at Zongmar were given the plague. Shura Rishi and his team of doctors and medical students also studied the World War I Trench Warfare favourite anthrax, which actually is the name of the illness you developed after inhaling bacillus anthrasis spores. And that fatally causes your lungs to fill up with fluid until your organs give up, a fate that met many of the prisoners at Zongmar camp,

many of whom were Chinese citizens, the secret police equivalent. They would just grab people off the street. Once these people did expire, they were cut open and then burned on purpose-built furnaces. The smell of burning flesh was noted for miles around. and we haven't even got to Unit 731 yet. The world outside, the Zongmar prison fence,

was inching closer to the war that everyone had double-pinky promised wouldn't happen again. And Japan knew trouble was coming. So the government sank yet more funding into Shiro Ishi and his experiments, anticipating a weaponisable epidemiological breakthrough that could take out any enemy. Shiro Ishi became the de facto, leader of the Kuangang army epidemic prevention and water supply department, and at least

18 more testing camps popped up across Japan's occupied territories. After a successful inmate escape at Zhongma, Shiro Ishi and his entire department will move to a brand new purpose-built facility in Ping Fan, in the northeast of China, and near quite literally nothing at all. And this was Unit 731. The bespoke people farm were novel weapons were the only currency. Human life bore no value at all.

The term lab rats doesn't even really cover it. Many civilians were kidnapped by the secret police off the streets and shipped off to be experimented on. Prisoners of war, usually Chinese or Russian, were captured in the Japanese invasions. and transported to Unit 731 via train. Those who found themselves in Unit 731 had a new name bestowed upon them, Maruta, which in Japanese means log.

Inside the facility, they would not be counted as people, but just as a number of logs. Over the two years it took to build the unit, a joke circulated in nearby areas that the army were building a timber mill, and people were the logs. It is estimated that 3,000 men, women and children lived and died in the Unit 731 facility

between 1936 and 1945. The complex stretched over four miles and everyone knew why the walled city was there. Yeah, it was no secret even. The surrounding villages are all lived in by Chinese people. They all knew what it was. We just weren't going up there. And there's no way.

And there was a train line that passed just a kilometer away and the rule was you had to have the blinds closed as you went past it. The airspace is completely shut off. Everybody knew what it was. And yeah, he, sure she is called the Mengler of the East and I think, you know, okay, maybe fair enough there. But you will see quite a lot of articles that say that Unit 731 was worse than the death camps in Europe.

Again, I am not saying that absolute atrocities weren't carried out, but 3,000 versus 6 million is not really the same. thing. And yeah, I think, you know, obviously the numbers are there and it's all very clear on that front. But like, how can you measure human misery anyway? Yeah, true. It's all horrific. But yes, of course, the numbers speak for themselves. Not that we're excusing anything we're about to tell you in the rest of this episode. No, no. I think more what I'm trying to get at is sort of more of what I was saying earlier of this. Of course we had to, we had to bomb here. Hiroshima. Yeah, yeah. There were worse than Auschwitz. Yeah. They weren't. Yeah.

So, yes, let's get back to this complex in this walled city. There were 70 buildings that contained prison blocks, designed just like the cages that hold vermin at conventional testing centers. Generally, men and women were kept separately. Children were housed with the women. Many victims were manacled to the walls. All cells in Unit 731 had an opening. into the central corridor so that the prisoners could extend their arms into the corridor to be given injections or have their blood drawn without staff members having to actually go into the cell. The openings were on the floor so the prisoner could stick their arm out to be needleed even after they had become too weak to stand. It's things like that that is to speak so much to the banality of evil. I think that's a phrase it's thrown around a lot and I think

sometimes people have forgotten what it means. This is what it means. It means it's somebody who's like a bureaucrat or an engineer or somebody who's thinking about building these facilities are like, oh, we're finding that the prisoners are too weak to stand but their arm through the door. So let's make a hole in the floor so they can still keep doing it after they can no longer stand. And also, this is not something that devolved. Unit 731 was built exactly for what it was used for. It's all very premeditated. This isn't just the mad scientist that gets flung into Manchuria to do what he wants. It's just not that at all. Some prisoners would even be injected with blood

mismatched to their own blood type just to see what would happen and others were injected with animal blood for the same reason Oh god What does happen if you get injected with blood that's the wrong type Nothing good It's like you know how people can reject organs

Wow It's bad shit yeah What blood type are you? I think I'm B negative I don't actually know A-B-positive Very useless Very useless blood type My sister gives blood quite regularly

But I can't because I keep going to South Africa Yeah, I can't because I used to I gave blood like three times And then they were like, please stop coming back You have very useless blood They actually sent me a letter Being like, it's a waste of time for us to stock your blood Because only 2% of the population have my blood type

And my blood type can only go to people with api-positive blood. So it is like the most useless. And actually male abipositive blood, they can use the plasma for something. I forgot on what, but for something. Female obipositive blood, they can't even use it for that.

So like, you are literally pointless. Oh, yeah. Your immune system will recognize the donut blood cells as foreign invaders and attack them. Oh. Mm-hmm. It's all a lighthearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid. We're your hosts.

I'm Alina Urquhart. And I'm Ash Kelly. And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy. The stories we cover are well researched. Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group. With a touch of humor.

Shout out to her. Shout out to all my therapist out there's been like eight of them. A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing. That mother f***er is not real. And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tail of the paranormal, Or you love to hop in the way back machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes. You should tune in to our podcast. Morbid.

Follow Morbid on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to episodes early and ad free by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. You may have read that the prisoners of Unit 731 were kept in squalid conditions. But ill health or malnutrition would make the data colloquial. from the testing program totally invalid. No one accidentally became ill in Unit 731. Infections were precisely controlled. Everything was clinically clean.

Even the three massive incinerators where bodies were disposed of when they were no longer of use to the Japanese weapons testing program were immaculate. According to a former member of unit staff, by the time that the bodies made it to the incinerator, the bodies always burned up so fast because all of the organs were gone. The bodies were empty. And the bodies of the deceased prisoners were empty

because they had been vivisected, which is the same as dissection, but on something that is still alive. I think vivisected is one of, or vivisection is like one of my least favorite words. Yeah, it's not great. And we've got a quote here from a medical assistant and what they had to say about the vivisection process.

The fellow knew that it was over for him, so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach. He screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted and agony. He made this unimaginable sound. He was screaming so horribly, but then he finally stopped. This was all in a day's work for the surgeons,

but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time. Fucking out. There is no one who can't. and convince me that the people working in unit 731 didn't see the people in there as people. They saw them as people and that makes it worse. Yeah. Because, I don't know, it's complicated, right? This idea of, like, we talk about it all the time, like the Nazi guards,

and they're just like, I was just following orders and they're like, how many people there could truly, really have been sadists or psychopaths or sociopaths and really have just been like, ah, this is fucking chill? Yep. I'm having a great time. statistically it is an impossibility that everyone who worked in any of these camps, whether it's in, you know, Nazi Germany or in Unit 731 or Imperial Japan, that were all just like, yeah.

Oh, exactly. And that's why I think it is so dangerous to pin it on some sort of pathology of the mind of a handful of people. It wasn't, it was hundreds of civilians, medical students, doctors, surgeons. And that's a problem I see itself with the way in which. which we like interpret history, in a lot of conversations that people have around history, we kind of do a way with what we understand to be basic human behavior, how people are acting always in a self-interested way. They are doing what they need to do in that moment because that's what they want to do

because that's what's going to serve them best. It's not like people in the past or people from this country are more or less evil than we are. And what a like self-absorbed way to think we are so like pure and good and living our lives in such a holy way now? Totally. Also, this weird affliction we have where we like to blame certain cultures for doing things or blame our own culture for being uniquely evil. It is preposterous. This is all just basic human behavior.

And that is why we love true crime. I think that's it. We are all capable in a specific set of circumstances of doing something like this. And if you think you're not, you're arrogant. And foolish. Yes. So weapons development research in the Pan-Fing compound was made up of four different pillars. First off, like the Zhongmar camp, infectious disease.

Prisoners were exposed to plague-infected rats and fleas, just to see how quickly the disease would spread and how fast it killed people. When it comes to biological warfare, the plague has long been the favourite. It's contracted in close contact and can kill someone in as little as three days. Yeah, the Mongols were flinging bodies over ramparts. Hundreds of years ago, that is biological warfare. It's not a novel concept. No, no, no.

And if you want to hear more about that, go listen to our shorthand about the Black Death. So at Unit 731, infected prisoners would be thrown into cells with the well, and the contraction time would be monitored. The fleas that carried the most deadly strain of bubonic plague were collected and shipped off,

like a really perverse sort of like animal husbandry. It's exactly what it is. It's exactly what it is. I do enjoy that word. Husbandry. Victims who pulled through were shot. But the infected who deteriorated the fastest were bled to death on a mortuary table

by their carotid artery and their blood was used to infect others to create a more violent generation of the disease. Once the prisoner's heart couldn't pump blood anymore, according to a former unit member, An officer would climb on the table and jump on the person's chest, crushing their ribcage and ensuring the last splat of blood went into the container. We now know that there were Unit 731 sub-branches all over Asia,

including one in Singapore, where local children were hired to pick infected fleas off rats with tweezers. Everything to do with the Japanese program within the period of time we're talking about, so much of the information was destroyed or given to the Americans and they kept it and won't tell us what happened. The Singapore branch of the testing program is significant because they employed local people who came forward much quicker than the Japanese did. There's one particular interview with someone who worked in the Singapore branch as a child and the way he describes the goings on there is basically the closest we have to a data. day, day and day out of what it was like at Unit 731.

Typhoid, TB and cholera were all also tested in Unit 731. The lethal pathogens isolated, packed into ceramic jars, and dropped on occupied rural villages to see what would happen. In 1941, the Japanese military dropped plague-infected fleas onto the province of Hunan, which started an epidemic that killed over 7,000 people. The drop site was cordoned off until the 1960s. They did that at least six times in different areas. What they would do is they would put the plague-infected fleas into kerosene containers

with wheat and corn flour and they would drop it from the sky, like dust, and, as I say, at least six times. As we know, Shiro Ishi was also charged by. the state of Japan with researching how to cure diseases that plagued Japan's own soldiers. And as Virginia Hall's brothel full of resistance taught us, nothing puts a soldier out of action more often than sexually transmitted infections. Chlamydia syphilis and gonorrhea was studied extensively within Unit 731, but those diseases were not transmitted via injection or even by parasite bite. The male prisoners were forced to rape the female prisoners, so the transmission and progression of the STIs could be

analyzed from the first moment of infection. If the first rape didn't result in infection, the ordeal would be repeated until the female prisoner contracted the disease in question. And should any of the female inmates become pregnant, then infection experiments would be conducted on the fetus in utero. The effects of disease on unborn babies were treated the same as everything else. Shira Ishi was not alone in his diabolical vision. He had a whole team. of like-minded physicians working alongside him within the unit. It's really easy to think of the atrocities carried out

in the name of science at Unit 731 as the brainchild of a twisted man with too much power and that no one else in the world knew what he was up to. But that just isn't true. It's a lie we like to tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better about being human. Unit 731 had hundreds of people working in it, watching people die,

and then adding them to the log count. The most famous of Shiro Ishii's disciples, though, was Dr. Yoshimira Hissato. Due to their recent clashes with the Russians in Siberia, the Japanese military decided to try get better at cold weather warmongering. Moscow was becoming a lot more foe than frenemy, and fingers and toes were falling off due to sub-zero trench conditions, which was another true problem that the Japanese were not very good at treating. To that end, Yoshimiro Hissato was seen.

sent to Unit 731 to research Frostbite. Again, you will see articles and content out there that sort of paint him as this person who was just fascinated with Frostbite and he just had, he just loved watching feet freeze

and it's this like fetishistic thing. No, the government were like, hello, we would really like to solve this problem. Can you go and figure it out, please? It's because we're treating them more like serial killers. Exactly. He doesn't have a fucking, as far as we know, some sort of sexual drive to freeze people's feet off.

Like you said, he's not particularly necessarily fascinated with that. He's just, not just as if like he's not doing anything bad. He's doing his job. Yeah. In, I'm not even going to say society, in a world where human testing was standard everywhere. Everybody was doing it. And animal testing is limited. It just is.

That's a fact. And if we run with the like man sexually obsessed with frozen hands and feet narrative, it means we don't have to look at the bigger picture, which is a dangerous place to be. Kanagawa University professor Senei Kaji's knowledge of Unit 731 is second to none, having dedicated his career to researching the facility. According to him, the Frostbite Program was the cruelest set of experiments. experiments Unit 731 ever conducted. I'm just saying quite a lot.

At Unit 731, under Yoshimira Hisato and his underlings, human test subjects were tied up outside in the Manchurian wilderness, where temperatures can get as low as minus 30 degrees centigrade. These people had water poured on them at regular intervals, when ice formed on their bodies was chipped away by the lab assistants. The test subjects' limbs would then be hit with woodward. clubs until they made a hollow sound, indicating that the arm or leg was frozen solid all the way through. Sometimes electric fans were pointed at the victims to speed up the process. If that still

wasn't enough, subjects would be carted into a specially made refrigeration lab, which was capable of becoming as cold as minus 70. Sometimes the frozen flesh would shatter off the bones of the victims as they were beaten with the wooden clubs. But the end game was always the same. The prisoners who didn't freeze to death succumbed to gangrene and their frozen appendages would be amputated. This was a reveal to the world in the war crime trials conducted by the Soviets after World War II. Witness statements from people who confessed to working at Unit 731 decades later

claim that it was very common for prisoners to have missing hands and feet. Other inmates at Unit 731 were attached to large wooden boards and stood in the desert at incremental distances from an explosives testing site. A bomb would be detonated and researchers would come back to see at what distance the victims had survived the explosion. Prisoners were herded onto firing ranges and blasted with all manner of artillery to determine the effectiveness of various calibers and wound patterns and penetration depths of the dead would be meticulously recorded.

Other inmates were not granted quite so fast or conventional death. Flamethrowers were used to blast covered and uncovered skin and the differences in injury were compared and contrasted. X-rays were used in the same way, sterilising hundreds of inmates. People were tied up and crushed with heavy objects, so crush syndrome could be monitored. And to study the effect of G-force on pilots and paratroopers, unit inmates were loaded into centrifuges and spun

until they lost consciousness or died. Loss of consciousness usually happens between 10 and 15 Gs, and unsurprisingly, children withstand a lot less than that before they die. And then there were other inmates still who were left without food or water to see how long it would take them to die. Some of them were given salt water, some were given distilled water, some were given no water, some were given normal water, and it's all just written down on a spreadsheet.

So who were these victims, these prisoners, inmates, specimens, marutas or logs. According to a former Unit 731 worker, this name for the prisoner stuck because we didn't want to think of them as people. We didn't want to admit that we were taking lives. So we convinced ourselves that what we were doing was like cutting down a tree.

When you see someone in that state, you just can't move. Your mind goes blank. The fear is overwhelming. Nope. I don't believe you. And you will see that specific quote in lots of places of like, oh, well, they were called logs because the workers didn't want to see them as people. No, it was a joke. It was a joke about the building of the unit that stuck.

And it's, as you say, it's the banality of evil. The majority of these so-called logs were most likely Chinese, Korean and Russian prisoners of war, although they bore none of the protections that are supposed to come with that title. not a single inmate of Unit 731 made it out alive so we'll never really know who they were although there are reports from civilians who work there that Western Europeans were experimented on at Ping Fang too Maybe I'm not going to say majority

I think the majority of them were Chinese and Russian I don't think many Western Europeans were sent there if any Japan has always denied experimenting on Allied troops captured during World War II. Although, plenty of veterans have their suspicions to the contrary. Yeah, to pantonise a lot of things. An example of such a suspicion

can be found in the diary of American soldier Mark G. Hurst, the diary describes how he and other American soldiers were given huge numbers of inoculations and vaccines to protect them from foreign diseases they were told, but far more than would ever be necessary to actually do that. Mark G. Hurst diary was recovered from the Philippines

where there were a large number of prisoner of war camps in which Americans were held. And according to Hearst Journal entries, soldiers who were given these injections often came down with serious illnesses and many died. In fact, the only reason Hearst's diary survived was because

it was hidden under the bed of a soldier who was so unwell that the Japanese guards wouldn't risk going anywhere near him, let alone touching his stuff. So perhaps the strains of pestilence concocted at Unit 731 were sent to internment camps further afield. I don't doubt that at all. What I'd take issue with is people saying

that American soldiers were sent to camps just like Unit 731, because no, they weren't. Japan deployed large-scale biological campaigns throughout World War II, right up until Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. Intestinal typhus

material was thrown into rivers, and the ensuing infection cleared the surrounding villages of people. So-called cholera campaigns were quite common. We read one account from a Japanese soldier who told a war crimes council that his fellow troops fed pork infected with cholera to stray dogs.

These dogs spread the disease through multiple villages and a few days later, the only people left were those too sick to move. After Japan surrendered, the USSR stopped right into Manchuria and declared a different war on Japan. Just like they liberated the death camps in Europe, the Soviets shut down Unit 731 and every other facility run by the war. the Kuantang Army Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Department.

The Japanese knew they were coming. Every document was destroyed and the facilities themselves were burned to the ground, all blown up with dynamite. There are still a few that still stand, and all of the prisoners were executed and thrown in the river. Some sources estimate that Shiro Issue's testing program was responsible for 10,000 deaths on top of the 3,000 plus inside Unit 731 itself. But we don't know.

We just don't know. We do know that fleas infected with pubonic plague were released many times. And China has reported outbreaks of bubonic plague as recently as last year. So I don't think you can truly put a number on it. Shura is she was never prosecuted for his crimes against humanity. Far from it. Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders of the US Army was sent to Japan to find out what they had been doing during the war. He was assigned a translator who had been an active participant

in Unit 731. His entire job was to misdirect the American investigation into war crimes committed by Japan. Do you remember the doctor that I was talking about at the beginning who went to the White House and was like, can I have some yellow fever, please? That's the translator that they give him. Uh-huh. And this scheme worked, and Colonel Sanders wasn't just making chicken. He recommended to President Harry Truman that Shiro Ishi

and his subordinates should be given immunity for handing over their research. Once the deal was agreed, information on the biological and chemical warfare testing program was suddenly much easier to come by. There are literally minutes of this meeting that happened two months after the war ended. And it's Colonel Sanders, the yellow fever translator, and one other person, not sure if she was she but equivalent. And they all agree that immunity will be handed over two months after the end of the war. It's that fast. Again, self-interest.

It's like, what's to be gained from that? Who's going to give us a medal for that? Let's just take all this information and use it in a way that's going to help us. Yeah. I know. I think it's complicated. Obviously, we've talked throughout this episode about how, like, it's remiss to be, like, a specific culture led to this specific thing.

But I think it is also interesting to maybe think about, like, the fact that as we have done this show, over nearly a decade now, you do see specific types of crime occurring in specific countries. that don't occur somewhere else. And culture absolutely plays a part in that. So it's not like we're saying it's unimportant. But in these large-scale atrocities, we're saying it's not that it couldn't have happened anywhere.

Exactly. And I wonder if with Japan maybe that collectivist mentality where I'm like, oh, this person's suffering, but it's for the greater good. Whereas in a country like in the West, it would have been more individualistic. So that person, it wouldn't have been as maybe easy for that to have happened, perhaps. potentially but I think it's

we're all over all spares in love and war as well you know like I think the the way I define social construction to people who care which is nobody living in a society is that we all agree a set of rules and one of those rules the most important one is that you can't kill anyone else unless X Y Z you're a soldier and then you're celebrated that's social construction it's a change in the rules Well, that is a rule in a specific place.

The reason I say X, Y, Z is because other cultures will be like, you can't kill a person unless this, this or this happens, in which case it's totally fine to kill your own daughter. If she marries a person that you don't like, for example, and that would be an ideology that would be acceptable in some places and not in some other places. So, yeah, it's not that culture's unimportant, but it's not the whole reason that evil or killing exists. No. So yes, while the Americans were busy handing out immunity like fucking sweeties, the USSR, on the other hand, prosecuted 12 generals, doctors and officers linked with Japan's biological testing program. The USSR's criminal trials weren't just to uphold justice. As part of the lengthy court process, the 12 officials were heavily interrogated

and forced to give up every detail of the biological warfare program. so the USSR got the dated they wanted to just a different way equally though had those trials never been held the vast majority of what we do know now about unit 731 would have been kept in secret service files forever and never ever shared with the world all of the quotes that we have about unit 731 specifically come from those trials so if they'd never happened we wouldn't know not one of those 12 officials they were tried

was Shura Ishi, however. He handed over his data to the Americans and was rewarded with immunity. Then went on to live in relative obscurity in Japan for the rest of his days. The emperor always insisted that he had no idea what was going on a UNICE-731. Bullocks!

Which is hard to believe, considering that right up until the end of the war, exhibitions were held to show off the scientific discoveries that were being made in Pingfax. After the USSR left Japan, and Shura Ishii spent a few years giving lectures on biology and lethal pathogens at Japanese schools. Annie even worked as an advisor for the Japanese government for a bit, before settling down and practicing medicine again.

He eventually died in 1959 from throat cancer. As for Frostbite Man, Yoshimura Hisato, he went on to become the president of the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine. The Japanese Physiology Society published a lot of his research in the 50s, and didn't hide the human subject element, his experimentation. He's actually the person who discovered that warm water is the best thing to do with frostbite. Before that, everyone thought just rubbing it would be the best thing, but it's because of Unit 731 that the warm water thing is now widely circulated. In 1984, he published a book in which he alludes to his work at Unit 731 multiple times

and claimed that his experiments were never cruel. And he even includes a picture of an inmate who looks basically fine. Great. Yep. Every time he was accused by students or governing bodies or journalists of human experimentation and cruelty and war crimes, his answer was always the same. That he didn't do anything cruel,

but even if he had, that was besides the point. Because the country was at war. So everything was fair game. All of the normal rules didn't apply. And besides, it wasn't the people who were to blame for any sin, it was their government who asked them to do it when we've heard that one before. China built a museum on the site of Unit 731 in 1982, and in 1998, more than 100 Chinese citizens filed a lawsuit in Japan asking the Japanese government to acknowledge that they

had committed biological testing and warfare in China. And in August 2002, Japan did accept that Unit 731 had existed, but they refused to pay the Chinese citizens that accuse them of it any kind of compensation. The American government also refuses to acknowledge what they offered Shiro Ishi and his contemporaries in return for immunity. It was about 50 years until they admitted that that is what they had done, and they still haven't told anyone what they were given. A lot of stuff out there on Unit 731 will spend a lot of time on how uniquely Japanese

it was, that because the prisoners of war had surrendered, they were considered less than human and deserved everything they got in the eyes of a Japanese person. That's not true. You've probably heard about samurai's falling on their own swords and disemboweling themselves rather than being taken prisoner by an enemy. That's called Sapuku, and it did happen in feudal Japan, but not nearly as much as the internet wants you to believe. And it was actually used as a punishment more than anything else

so that a general could atone for a failed raid or campaign or something like that. It was very, very rarely voluntary. And by the 1930s, there'd been such a surge of Christianity in which suicide is a sin and other Western influences that Japanese people actually found the whole Sapuku concept a bit embarrassing. There was, having said that, a resurgence of Japanese soldiers taking their own lives in World War II rather than being captured. That is true.

But a lot less frequent than we're led to believe. And also a lot less to do with the shame of capture and a lot more to do with them being told that the Americans would torture them to death in their own POW camps. And also, Americans didn't really take many hostages because they too had been fed this propaganda on the other side. So the mentality, I'm not saying everyone, but generally speaking, was shoot them all just in case. So there's a lot of things at play there, not just the Japanese people view surrender so horrendously that you're worthless if you ever do it. Which firstly, show me a military culture that's like, yeah, please surrender. We love that.

love that so much. It's so honorable. And secondly, Japan surrendered. That's why the war ended. Everyone seems to forget that. And they actually said that they were willing to surrender before the bomb was dropped. Yes, that's very nuanced and complex. Don't come for me. I know. I'm just not going to explain it. Anyway, so be very careful what you believe. The horrors of Unit 731, the war crimes, the atrocities, the crimes against humanity that have. happened inside Unit 731 and its sub-branches all over Japanese-occupied territories weren't to do with the shamefulness of surrender. Shiro Ishi's victims were considered subhuman because they weren't Japanese.

And therefore, the horrors that we've heard this week were the consequence of nationalism and nationalism can come for us all if we're not careful. Identitarian supremacy. Cultural imperialism. Yeah, just be careful. go and read and make your own mind up also. Like, I just be wary of a source that tells you it's uniquely Japanese. Mm-hmm.

And I hope you're all doing all right. I'm feeling quite sick. But that is it, guys. Wanted to do that for a long time. And this just felt like the best opportunity. So, happy Halloween. And we'll see you next week for something I've forgotten. More bones, more rats.

Oh, out. Crack. Less international politics there, few. Goodbye. Bye.