by Ken Liu
there is insufficient evidence to confirm exactly what experiments were
carried out by Unit 731 or the details of their conduct. Official denial
and silence continue despite the dedicated efforts of some Japanese
scholars to bring the truth to light.
But numerous former members of Unit 731 have come forward
since the 1980s to testify and confess to the grisly acts they committed .
And we have confirmed and expanded upon those accounts with new
eyewitness accounts by volunteers who have traveled to Pingfang .
Every day , we are finding out more about Unit 731's crimes . We will
tell the world all the victims' stories.
Yoshida : I am not sure that “ telling stories ” is what historians
should be doing. If you want to make fiction, go ahead, but do not tell
people that it is history . Extraordinary claims require extraordinary
proof. And there is insufficient proof for the accusations currently
being directed against Japan.
Wei
There is a simple solution to all this. Will you take a trip to
Pingfang in 1941? Will you believe your own eyes?
: Ambassador Yoshida, is your position really that nothing
happened at Pingfang? Are you saying that these reports by the
American occupational authority from immediately after the War are
lies? Are you saying that these contemporaneous diary entries by the
officers of Unit 731 are lies? Are you really denying all of this?
Yoshida : I'm —I am not —I'm making a distinction—It was a time
of war, Dr. Wei, and perhaps it is possible that some unfortunate
things happened. But “ stories ” are not evidence.
Wei: Will you take a trip, Ambassador?
Yoshida : I will not . I see no reason to subject myself to your
process . I see no reason to undergo your “ time travel” hallucinations.
Rowe: Now we are seeing some fireworks!
Wei
In the past, their task was easy . Unless the denials were actively
resisted, eventually memories would dim with old age and death, and
: Ambassador Yoshida, let me make this clear . The deniers are
committing a fresh crime against the victims of those atrocities: not
only would they stand w ith the torturers and the killers, but they are
also engaged in the practice of erasing and silencing the victims from
history, to kill them afresh.
the voices of the past would fade away, and the denialists would win .
The people of the present would then become exploiters of the dead,
and that has always been the way history was written.
But we have now come to the end of h istory. What my wife and I
have done is to take narrative away, and to give us all a chance to see
the past with our own eyes . In place of memory, we now have
incontrovertible evidence . Instead of exploiting the dead, we must look
into the face of the dying. I have seen these crimes with my own eyes. You
cannot deny that.
History is a narrative enterprise, and the telling of stories that are
true, that affirm and explain our existence, is the fundamental task of
the historian . But truth is delicate, and it has many enemies . Perhaps
that is why, although we academics are supposedly in the business of
pursuing the truth, the word “ truth” is rarely uttered without hedges,
adornments, and qualifications.
[Archival footage of Dr. Evan Wei delivering the keynote for the Fifth
International War Crimes Studies Conference in San Francisco, on
November 20, 20XX . Courtesy of the Stanford University Archives]
Every time we tell a story about a great atrocity, like the Holocaust
or Pingfang, the forces of denial are always ready to pounce, to erase,
to silence, to forget . History has always been difficult because of the
delicacy of the truth, and denialists have always been able to resort to
labeling the truth as fiction.
One has to be careful, whenever one tells a story about a great
injustice. We are a species that loves narrative, but we have also been
taught not to trust an individual speaker.
Yes, it is true that no nation, and no historian, can tell a story that
completely encompasses every aspect of the truth . But it is not true
that just because all narratives are constructed, that they are equally far
from the truth . The Earth is neither a perfect sphere nor a flat disk,
but the model of the sphere is much closer to the truth . Similarly,
there are some narratives that are closer to the truth than others, and
we must always try to tell a story that comes as close to the truth as is
humanly possible.
The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does
not absolve us of the moral duty to judge and t o take a stand against
evil.
I have been called a denialist, and I have been called worse . But I
am not a Japanese right -winger who believes that Unit 731 is a myth. I
do not say that nothing happened there . What I am saying is that,
unfortunately, we do not have enough evidence to be able to describe
with certainty all that happened there.
Victor P. Lowenson, Professor of East Asian History, Director of the
Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley:
I have enormous respect for Wei, and he remains and w ill remain
one of my best students. But in my view, he has abdicated the
responsibility of the historian to ensure that the truth is not ensnared
in doubt . He has crossed the line that divides a historian from an
activist.
As I see it, the fight here isn't ideological, but methodological .
What we are fighting over is what constitutes proof . Historians trained
in Western and Asian traditions have always relied on the
documentary record, but Dr. Wei is now raising the primacy of
eyewitness accounts, and not e ven contemporaneous eyewitness
accounts, mind you, but accounts by witnesses out of the stream of
time.
There are many problems with his approach. We have a great deal
of experience from psychology and the law to doubt the reliability of
eyewitness accounts. We also have serious concerns with the single- use
nature of the Kirino Process, which seems to destroy the very thing it
is studying, and erases history even as it purports to allow it to be
witnessed . You literally cannot ever go back to a moment of ti me that
has already been experienced—and thus consumed—by another
witness . When each eyewitness account is impossible to verify
independently of that account, how can we rely on such a process to
establish the truth of what happened?
I understand that from the perspective of supporters of Dr. Wei,
the raw experience of actually seeing history unfold before your eyes
makes it impossible to doubt the evidence indelibly etched in your
mind. But that is simply not good enough for the rest of us. The
Kirino Process requires a leap of faith: those who have witnessed the
ineffable have no doubt of its existence, but that clarity is incapable of
being replicated for anyone else . And so we are stuck here, in the
present, trying to make sense of the past.
Dr. Wei has ended t
he process of rational historical inquiry and
transformed it into a form of personal religion . What one witness has
seen, no one else can ever see . This is madness.
I have seen the videos of the old soldiers who supposedly confessed
to these horrible things. I do not believe them . They cry and act so
emotional, as though they are insane . The Communists were great
brainwashers, and it is undoubtedly a result of their plot.
Naoki, last name withheld, clerk:
I remember one of those old men describing the kindness of his
Communist guards. Kind Communist guards! If that is not evidence
of brainwashing, what is?
The Chinese are great manufacturers of lies. They have produced
fake food, fake Olympics, and fake statistics. Their history is also
faked. This Wei is an American, but he is also Chinese, and so we
cannot trust anything he does.
Kazue Sato, housewife:
The soldiers who “ confessed ” have brought great shame upon their
country.
Hiroshi Abe, retired soldier:
Interviewer
: Because of what they did?
Because of what they said.
We live in an age that prizes authenticity and personalized
narratives, as embodied in the form of the memoir . Eyewitness
accounts have an immediacy and reality that compels belief, and we
think they can convey a truth greater than any fiction . Yet, perhaps
paradoxically, we are also eager to seize upon any factual deviation and
inconsistency in such narratives, and declare the entirety to be mere
fiction . There's an all- or -nothing bleakness to this dynamic . But we
should have conceded from the start that narrative is irreducibly
subjective, though that does not mean that they do not also convey the
truth.
Ienaga Ito, Professor of Oriental History, Kyoto University:
Evan was a greater radical than most people realized . He sought to
free the past from the present so that history could not be ignored, put
out of our minds, or made to serve the needs of the present . The
possibility of witnessing actual history and experiencing that past by all
of us means that the past is not past, but alive at this very moment.
What Evan did was to transform historical investigation itself into
a form of memoir writing . That kind of emotional experience is
important in the way we think about history and make decisions .
Culture is not merely a product of reason but also of real, visceral
empathy. And I am afraid that it is primarily empathy that has been
missing from the post- War Japanese responses to history.
Evan tried to introduce more empathy and emotion into historical
inquiry . For this he was crucified by the academic establishment . But
adding empathy and the irreducibly subjective dimension of the
personal narrative to history does not detract from the truth . It
enhances the truth. That we accept our own frailties and subjectivity
does not free us to abdicate the moral responsibility to tell the truth,
even if, and especially if, “ truth” is not singular but a set of shared
experiences and shared understandings that together make up our
humanity.
Of course, drawing attention to the importance and primacy of
eyewitness accounts unleashed a new danger. With a little money and
the right equipment, anyone can eliminate the Bohm - Kirino particles
from a desired era, in a specified place, and so erase those events from
direct experien ce . Unwittingly, Evan had also invented the technology
to end history forever, by denying us and future generations of that
emotional experience of the past that he so cherished.
It was difficult during the years immediately after the
Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium was signed. Evan was
denied tenure in a close vote, and that editorial in the Wall Street
Journal by his old friend and teacher, Victor Lowenson, calling him a
“ tool of propaganda, ” deeply hurt him. Then, there were the death
threats and harassing phone calls, every day.
Akemi Kirino:
But I think it was what they did to me that really got to him . At
the height of the attacks from the denialists, the IT division of the
Institute asked me if I would mind being de - listed from the public
faculty directory . Whenever they listed me on the web site, the site
would be hacked within hours, and the denialists would replace my bio
page with pictures where these men, so brave and eloquent, displayed
their courage and intellect by illustrating what they would do to me if
they had me in their power. And you probably remember the news
reports about that night when I walked home alone from work.
I don't really want to dwell on that time, if that's all right with you.
We moved away to Boise, where we tried to hide from the worst of
it . We kept a low profile, got an unlisted number, and basically stayed
out of sight . Evan went on medication for his depression . On the
weekends we went hiking in the Sawtooth Mountains, and Evan took
up charting abandoned mining sites and ghost towns from during the
gold rush . That was a happy time for us, and I thought he was feeling
better. The sojourn in Idaho reminded him that sometimes the world
is a kind place, and all is not darkness and denial.
But he was feeling lost. He felt that he was hiding from the truth. I
knew that he was feeling torn between his sense of duty to the past,
and his sense of loyalty to the present, to me.
I could not bear to see him being torn apart, and so I asked if he
wanted to return to the fight.
We flew back to Boston, and things had grown even worse. He
had sought to end history as mere history, and to give the past living
voices to speak to the present. But it did not work out the way he had
intended . The past did come to life, but when faced with it, the present
decided to recast history as religion.
The more Evan did, the more he felt he had to do. He would not
come to bed, and fell asleep at his desk . He was writing, writing,
constantly writing. He believed that he had to single- handedly refute
all the lies, and take on all his enemies . It was never enough, never
enough for him . I stood by, helpless.
“ I have to speak for them, because they have no one else,” he would
tell me.
By then perhaps he was living more in the past than in the pre sent .
Even though he no longer had access to our machine, in his mind he
relived those trips he took, over and over again . He believed that he
had let the victims down.
A great responsibility had been thrust upon him, and he had failed
them . He was trying to uncover to the world a great injustice, and yet
in the process he seemed to have only stirred up the forces of denial,
hate, and silence.
[A woman's voice, flat, calm, reads out loud the article text as th e camera
swoops over the ocean, the beaches, and then the forests and hills of
Manchuria. From the shadow of a small plane racing along the ground
beneath us we can tell that the camera is shooting from the open door of the
>
airplane . An arm, the hand clenched tight into a fist, moves into the
foreground from off-frame . The fingers open. Dark ashes are scattered into
the air beneath the airplane.]
Excerpts From The Economist, November 26, 20XX
We will soon come upon the 90th anniversary of the Mukden
Incident, the start of the Japanese invasion of China. To this day, that
war remains the alpha and omega of the relationship between the two
countries.
...
[A series of photographs of the leaders of Unit 731 are shown. The reader's
voice fades out and then fades back in.]
...
The men of Unit 731 then moved on to prominent careers in post-War Japan. Three of them founded the Japan Blood Bank (which later
became the Green Cross, Japan's largest pharmaceutical company) and
used their knowledge of methods for freezing and drying blood derived
from human experime nts during the War to produce dried- blood
products for sale to the United States Army at great profit. General
Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731, may have spent some time
after the War working in Maryland, researching biological weapons .
Papers were p ublished using data obtained from human subjects,
including babies (sometimes the word “ monkey” was substituted as a
cover- up)—and it is possible that medical papers published today still
contain citations traceable to these results, making all of us the
unwitting beneficiaries of these atrocities.
...
[The reading voice fades out as the sound of the airplane's engine cuts in .
The camera shifts to images of clashing protestors waving Japanese flags
and Chinese flags, some of the flags on fire.
Then the voice fades in again]
...
Many inside and outside Japan objected to the testimonies by the
surviving members of Unit 731: the men are old, they point out, with
failing memories; they may be seeking attention; they may be mentally
ill; they may have been brainwashed by the Chinese Communists .
Reliance on oral testimony alone is an unwise way to construct a solid
historical case. To the Chinese this sounded like more of the same
excuses issued by the deniers of the Nanjing Massacre and other
Japanese atrocitie s.
