World War Unit 731

The Nazi atrocities of World War II are well documented – rightly so given the horrors they perpetuated and the scale at which they managed to commit their crimes. However, the level of the Nazi crimes often overshadow other atrocities that occurred throughout the war, such as those of Japanese Unit 731, but that wasn’t the only thing keeping Unit 731 out of the mainstream.

Unit 731 was set up in 1938 in Japanese-occupied China with the aim of developing biological weapons. It also operated a secret research and experimental school in Shinjuku, central Tokyo. Its head was Lieutenant Shiro Ishii.Scholars and former members of the unit say that at least 3,000 people -- by some accounts several times as many -- were killed in the medical experiments;

One advantage of China, from the Japanese point of view, was the availability of research subjects on whom germs could be tested. The subjects were called marutas, or logs, and most were Communist sympathizers or ordinary criminals. The majority were Chinese, but many were Russians, expatriates living in

The end goal here was to utilize the plague in bombs which were to be deployed against enemy cities and military personnel; once a subject had been exposed to any of the above conditions, he or she was likely subject to dissection without anesthetic. The purpose of cutting open live, unsedated subjects was to observe the effects of the experiment without the potential effects of anesthesia on the human body.

Unit 731 committed large-scale, systematic crimes against humanity and ethnicity. Those crimes must be revealed and recorded, so that humanity can remember the price of peace and cherish it. Some countries in Europe are still suffering from war, which is proof that humanity needs constant reminders of how important peace is.

The vision for the museum comes from the metaphor of a black box of a plane crash. The point is to say that the site of Unit 731 is the black box that recorded one of the darkest periods of human history.
In showing the contents of the black box, we find out what happened and remember the lessons learned from the disaster. The area round the museum was made to