The horrors committed by the Nazis are well known and extensively documented. The fact that their allies, the Japanese Empire, committed even worse atrocities - which seems hard to imagine - is much less known. Hence I thought this article was worth sharing. I found it on Quora.
©️️ Alex Mann
I reproduce it here as it is not sharable from Quora.
This is not an attack on the people of Japan. The Nazis, the Soviets, Mao's followers, the Khmer Rouges, various African war lords etc. all committed genocides and horrendous atrocities.
There are psychopaths in every human population. The real problem is that all too often, such psychopaths gain power over institutions that give them enormous leverage and power over others. Every time there's some sort of centralized power - even in private businesses, as illustrated by Big Tech and Big Pharam, these days - this attracts psychopaths like shit attracts flies.
This guy was a Doctor and microbiologist- and a rather smart one at that. He was regarded as a brilliant person for nearly his entire life. He was well educated and joined the army as a doctor. While there he caught the eyes of his superiors and was sent for further education at Kyoto Imperial University.
During WW2 he was placed in charge of Unit 731 and this is what he was known for.
What was unit 731? Well, they were a scientific unit that conducted experiments and thought up new ways to win the war. Some examples of things they did include
Imprisoning women, raping them until they got pregnant, and then running horrid painful experiments on them just so they could see how certain poisons affected pregnant women.
They would infect people with syphilis and then cut them open (while alive and awake) so they could see what their bodies did as the infection progressed. Women, men, and even children were forcibly infected
This is called vivisection- its the practice of cutting someone open while alive to see what their body is doing and its typically done when experimenting on animals. In unit 731 they did it to people without anesthesia- always resulting in a slow agonizing death for the person.
In all, around 10,000 prisoners were killed by Unit 731 and as many as 20,000 were tested on. The biological weapons produced by this unit were used to kill as many as 500,000 civilians
On a side note not even the Nazis used chemical weapons in WW2 (they only did in concentration camps). The ONLY nation to employ chemical weapons against civilian and military targets in WW2 was Japan.
You may wonder what happened to Shirō. I mean we caught him and put him on trial for war crimes right?
Nope
He was given full immunity in exchange for full disclosure of his tests. American microbiologists stated that Shirō’s findings were extremely valuable and impossible to replicate unless the experiments were done again.
Shirō lived out the remainder of his life a free man and died in 1959.