Overview
- Operated by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied China, Unit 731 functioned as a covert center for biological and chemical warfare research that exploited detainees including accused criminals, political prisoners, the mentally ill and the homeless.
- Prisoners were deliberately infected with plague, cholera, anthrax, typhoid and sexually transmitted infections disguised as vaccinations so researchers could track disease progression.
- Medical abuses included vivisections performed without anesthesia, rape and forced pregnancy to examine how infections affected pregnant women and fetuses.
- Captives were used as live targets for weapons testing and subjected to extreme cold experiments that froze and thawed limbs to study injury and nerve damage.
- Accounts describe heavily guarded Buildings Seven and Eight with low windows for blood draws and capacity near 400, secret tunnel transfers into the site, disputed death counts with an unverified claim of tally resets after 1,500, and Osaka professor Nakagawa Yonezo’s testimony that many experiments appeared driven by curiosity.