Complicating MacArthur’s dilemma was the war crimes trial, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), which had already opened on May 3, 1946. The Joint Chiefs and MacArthur didn’t want any information about biological weapons to become public. On June 23 MacArthur cabled Washington that any pressure to put Ishii on trial for war crimes “will endanger present status of valuable intelligence” relating to biological warfare. A month later he had his instructions from Washington: “Under present circumstances intelligence relating to research and development in the field of science and war material should not be disclosed to nations other than the British Commonwealth.” Another cable from Washington stated:
Since it is believed that the USSR possesses only a small portion of this technical information, and since any “war crimes” trial would completely reveal such data to all nations, it is felt that publicity must be avoided in interests of defense and security of the United States. . . . The value to the U.S. of Japanese BW data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from “war crimes” prosecution.
Unlike U.S. experiments performed on animals, this information was unique: “the only known source of data from scientifically controlled experiments showing the direct effect of BW agents on man.”
In the meantime Sanders went back to America and was succeeded by another American investigator from Camp Detrick, Lt. Col. Arvo Thompson. Unlike Sanders, he refused to use Ryoichi Naito as his lead translator/interviewer. Naito was the last person he wanted in the room. Thompson, using American translators, spent many hours with Ishii and concluded that the man was being “guarded, concise, and often evasive.” In other words, Ishii was lying. The investigation dragged on and on. The major sources of leads were letters addressed to SCAP, but unfortunately, in what apparently was a widespread Japanese cultural leaning toward secrecy, almost all of them were anonymous, thus hindering attempts to follow up and verify. Anonymous letters, hearsay affidavits, and rumors do not make for a sound investigation any more than did the mystery man who came shimmying down the water pipe to Murray Sanders’ window.
The Joint Chiefs ordered MacArthur not to put Ishii on trial. They sent a memo to Tokyo instructing the BW investigation to be placed under the control of G-2, the intelligence arm of the U.S. Army: “The utmost secrecy is essential in order to protect the interests of the United States.”
Ishii still continued to hem and haw, offering no hard information of value. No matter how tempting it must have been for MacArthur to have him subjected to torture, no efforts at coercion were made. Even though he was a supreme commander and could do virtually anything he wanted, even in secret, there were certain things he would not do. The only tool left at his disposal was a plea deal. On May 6, 1947, he cabled Washington: “Additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as ‘War Crimes’ evidence.”
On June 23 a meeting took place in Washington to discuss the immunity request. Present in the room were senior members of the War, State, and Justice Departments. At the meeting it was informally agreed to accept the recommendation that all information be held in intelligence channels and not be used to prosecute war crimes trials. The decision was then kicked upstairs to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to implement. The Joint Chiefs, however, do not approve political policies, which meant that final authorization would have to come from President Truman.
For the rest of 1947 MacArthur’s investigators went back and forth with Ishii. Where’s the hard information on your BW?, they demanded. Where’s the signed agreement?, responded Ishii.
Then an act of terrorism occurred, dominating Japanese newspapers for all of 1948. Fear gripped the population. Should such an attack happen again, widespread panic might ensue. For an occupation responsible for the health and safety of the Japanese people, this terrorist act was like a blow to the solar plexus, a threat to the very legitimacy of the occupation. The White House would have to make a decision.
18
“Cherry Blossoms at Night”
THE STREETS OF Tokyo were cold and muddy on a late January day in 1948 when a well-dressed doctor walked into the Teikoku Bank at the three o’clock closing hour. He was from the Health Ministry, he said, and he had come to inoculate the bank employees against a local outbreak of dysentery. Stacks of money tempted the eye: 125,000 yen in the bank’s open safe and 250,000 yen from the day’s deposits piled high on the table in the middle of the room, waiting to be double-counted. This was a new drug, the doctor informed the employees, so they were to follow instructions carefully: Take the first drug by pouring two drops onto the middle of the tongue and swallow quickly before it got diluted by saliva, then after a minute drink a mouthful of the second drug from a teacup, and wash the cup immediately. The sixteen employees did as they were told, and as they collapsed and fell to the floor, the doctor grabbed the 125,000 yen from the safe, stuffed it in his medical suitcase, and beat a hasty retreat out the door. Why he didn’t take the other 250,000 yen was never explained.
Ten minutes later one of the employees managed to crawl out into the street, clutching her throat and gasping for breath. Within hours twelve of the sixteen employees were dead, and newspapers had a field day. The mass murder became a sensation, and for months the Teikoku Bank poisoning dominated the news. The Japanese police assigned no less than twenty thousand out of one hundred thousand men solely to finding the killer. But because MacArthur has ordered the police force to be purged of militarists and undesirables, the majority of policemen were brand-new recruits who didn’t even know how to lift a fingerprint, much less solve a difficult murder case. Because the teacups had been washed, and poison inside the body changes in chemical composition, identifying the specific agent was virtually impossible. It appeared to be a form of potassium cyanide, but nobody was sure. The Japanese police were stumped.
Across the street from General MacArthur’s office was the Allied Occupation Public Safety Division (PSD), responsible for transforming Japan’s police force into an effective crime-fighting unit. The PSD sprang into action. It was clear this was no normal bank robbery: Only a third of the cash was taken. Upon learning that there were two earlier instances of a health examiner walking into a bank branch and inoculating bank employees, though with no harmful results, the PSD concluded that this was a medical crime, not a financial one. Some madman was experimenting, trying to find the best way to kill people. The Americans did their own analysis of the minute portions of poison evidence and concluded it was not potassium cyanide but something quite different: acetone cyanohydrin, a very exotic poison that dissolves in less than sixty minutes, leaving virtually no trace.
Ishii, under house arrest by SCAP, was read the riot act: One of his men must be doing this, and it better be stopped, now. Ishii, who had been playing games with the Americans for almost two years, reminded them he wanted ironclad guarantees of freedom from war crimes prosecution. It was now time for the White House to make a decision. On March 13, 1948, the Joint Chiefs of Staff cabled MacArthur, granting immunity: “Information obtained from Ishii and associates may be retained in intelligence channels.”
SCAP, of course, wanted this arrangement kept quiet.
So neither SCAP nor Ishii was happy when the Japanese police zeroed in on a doctor who had worked in Manchuria in Unit 731 and who matched the physical description given by the four survivors. The PSD stepped in and announced that the occupation authorities were holding all Ishii personnel under “special protection.” At a meeting at PSD’s offices the Americans surprised the head of the Japanese police by introducing him to the mastermind, Ishii. Ishii, a smooth talker, convinced the police chief that the police were going after the wrong man and should lay off. The Americans, who didn’t want anyone to know any more than necessary about biological warfare, breathed a sigh of relief.
In August the police arrested a
man long considered to be a serious suspect: Sadamichi Hirasawa, a struggling artist with an arrest record, who confessed after sixty-two interrogations during thirty-five days’ confinement in a police station. No matter that he promptly recanted afterward, or that the signature at the bottom of the confession was not his, or that none of the four poison survivors could identify him in a police lineup, his arrest brought much-needed closure to a case causing the police a lot of headaches over their inability to solve a headline-grabbing crime. Hirasawa was due to be sentenced for execution any day. For unknown reasons he was not sentenced until 1954, and he was never executed. He spent practically all the rest of his life on death row—thirty-two years, a world record—until finally pardoned by the emperor in 1986. He died a year later, age ninety-five, proclaiming his innocence to the very end.
The mystery killer, whoever he was, never struck again.
THE RUSSIANS, PROBABLY because serious biological warfare had been conducted so close to their country’s eastern border, wanted to put Ishii on trial themselves. The Americans refused. In a brief to MacArthur dated March 27, 1947, Charles Willoughby had written: “The United States has primary interest, has already interrogated this man, and his information is held by the U.S. Chemical Corps as TOP SECRET. The Russian [chief investigator] has made several attempts to get at this man. We have stalled. He now hopes to make his point by suddenly claiming the Japanese expert as a war criminal. Joint Chiefs of Staff direct that this not be done.” MacArthur, because he headed a joint command, couldn’t keep the Russians away from Ishii, but he could have his legal staff coach Ishii on what to say and what not to say to the Russians. Here Ishii—finally—kept his end of the bargain.
In 1949 the Russians went ahead with a full-blown trial of twelve Japanese military doctors associated with Unit 731. It was the only official inquiry conducted by any of the Allies, and thanks in part to presumed Russian methods of interrogation best not described, the information revealed was chilling. Ishii, it was proved beyond doubt, was a sociopath. He had proposed using biological weapons at Iwo Jima, only to be denied by the Tokyo surgeon general’s office. He had proposed a germ attack on the West Coast of the United States; it was blocked by former prime minister Hideki Tojo. Then came his most blatant effort—what he called “Cherry Blossoms at Night”—an attempt to launch his latest germs on the United States in the waning days of the war. It would be a full-scale attack to bring America to its knees: Planes would attack San Diego with anthrax spores, sending the nation into panic. The attack was scheduled for September 22, 1945.
Before it could take place, America used the atom bomb on August 6 and August 9. President Truman had beaten the Japanese to the punch. Did he know specifically about “Cherry Blossoms”? No. But he certainly knew about all the gas masks in the White House. Truman also knew about Japan’s desperate BW efforts from his friend Dr. Karl Compton, and that biological weapons would undoubtedly be used by the Japanese in defending the homeland. He certainly shared the pugnacity of Admiral Leahy, chief of staff to the president from 1942 to 1949 and America’s highest-ranking military officer (even higher than Marshall, Eisenhower, or MacArthur), who had gone on record with FDR, during their trip to Honolulu for the MacArthur-Nimitz conference in July 1944, that any American plans to use germs and poison “would violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all of the known laws of war.” Yet in none of the volumes of Truman’s memoirs is there any mention of this most sinister and terrifying weapon of the Second World War. “Why has Truman never mentioned the great war secret?” a British journalist asked years later. “Is it possible that the real planned reason he dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was the knowledge of the existence and planned use of frightful weapons developed over nine or ten years by the scientists of Japan?”
In 1950 the Russians released a partial 535-page trial transcript, Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons. Among the evidence uncovered in court was the claim that the emperor had met Ishii twice and personally approved the construction of the facility at Pingfan (it was never disclosed precisely what kind of medical research Unit 731 was to be used for). Also mentioned was the fact that the emperor’s brother Prince Mikasa had toured the Pingfan facility and witnessed experiments of prisoners choking on poison gas. Along with gruesome photographs, the trial revealed numerous crimes, including the fatal infection of more than one hundred thousand people with cholera in China.* It put to rest the American pretense that no BW offenses had been committed, and proved MacArthur’s headquarters wrong when it reported that “the Japanese had done some experimentation with animals but that there was no evidence they ever had used human beings.” To the contrary, said the Russians, Pingfan was “the Auschwitz before Auschwitz,” a ruthless killing machine. According to one of the confessions:
If a prisoner survived the inoculation of lethal bacteria, this did not save him from a repetition of the experiments, which were continued until death from infection supervened. The infected people were given medical treatment in order to test various methods of cure, they were fed normally, and after they had fully recovered, were used for the next experiment, but infected with another kind of germ. At any rate, no one ever left this death factory alive.
MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs downplayed the Russian trial by claiming it was a show of Communist propaganda. Such a blatant misstatement was clearly intentional. It was in no one’s interest to make public how close the Japanese had come to terrorizing America. For almost two hundred years the United States had thought itself protected by two big oceans. No more: Any day hordes of balloons could come floating across the ocean, carrying firebombs and germs. The Russian trial revealed the magnitude of Japanese crimes against humanity, especially Ishii’s vow to attack America with his “Cherry Blossoms”: “In the summer of 1945, we shall have to employ our last means, among them the bacteriological weapon, in order to turn the tide in Japan’s favor.”
However, the Russians did in fact use their trial largely for propaganda purposes. Despite their heinous crimes against humanity, the dozen Japanese scientists tried and convicted were not put to death; they were imprisoned, and by 1956 most of them had been repatriated to Japan. To American intelligence, the short prison sentences suggested that the Russians had used the scientists for information just as the Americans had, and that MacArthur had probably been right in going along with the Joint Chiefs in granting leniency to Ishii. The horrors of BW were so unimaginable that they justified using extreme means to gain access to Unit 731’s trove of secrets, especially after reading paragraphs from the Russian transcript like the following: “Experts have calculated . . . that it was capable of breeding, in the course of one production cycle, lasting only a few days, no less than 30,000,000 billion microbes. . . . That explains why . . . bacteria quantities [are given] in kilograms, thus referring to the weight of the thick, creamy bacteria mass skimmed directly from the surface of the culture medium.”
With Ishii’s cooperation, American investigators uncovered not only the treasure trove in his backyard but also another six hundred pages of reports and eight thousand slides of body parts, pathological diseases, and autopsy reports stashed away in temples and buried in the mountains of southern Japan. There was research data on anthrax, botulism, cholera, frostbite, gas gangrene, influenza, meningococcal diseases, mucins, mustard gas, scarlet fever, smallpox, tick encephalitis, tuberculosis, tularemia, typhoid fever, and typhus. The investigators’ summary report, presented to MacArthur by General Willoughby, was read carefully and passed on to the experts at Camp Detrick in the hope that America forewarned would be America forearmed. Observed Dr. Edward Hill, Camp Detrick’s technical director, who conducted the final investigation of Ishii:
Evidence gathered in this investigation has greatly supplemented and amplified previous aspects of this field. It represents data which have been obtained by Japanese scientists at the expenditure of many
millions of dollars and years of work. Information has accrued with respect to human susceptibility to those diseases as indicated by specific infectious doses of bacteria. Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation.
The report went on to say: “It is hoped . . . that every effort will be made to prevent this information from falling into other hands.”
Under MacArthur this was successfully done.
Distasteful though it must have been to make a plea deal, MacArthur’s foremost priority was to do whatever it took to forestall the Russians, who were so anxious to get their hands on BW technology. This concern was well founded. Over the next forty years the Soviet Union would plunge ahead recklessly and build up the world’s largest BW operation, with dubious safeguards, resulting in the 1979 outbreak of anthrax at Sverdlovsk, an accident that came to be known as the “biological Chernobyl.”
As for the Americans who got hold of Ishii’s research after so much effort had been expended, the result turned out to be a dud: There wasn’t much there. The scientists at Camp Detrick spent a year poring over all the reports and photographs and came away singularly unimpressed. The Unit 731 experiments had been performed under sloppy conditions, the blood and tissue samples had been tested many hours after the experiments, thus making them worthless, and no new scientific revelations had emerged. The United States, the scientists concluded, was far ahead of Japan in understanding germs, disease, and military medicine. The four trunkloads of Ishii’s files were promptly put into storage, never to be looked at again.
19
The Nuremberg of the East
Asia under the Japanese was a charnel house of atrocities. As soon as the war ended, evidence of war crimes began piling up, in mountains. POWs, civilian internees, and Asian natives starved, beaten, tortured, shot, beheaded. The water cure. Electric shock. Cannibalism. Men strung up over open flames or coiled in barbed wire and rolled along the ground, nails torn out, balls burned with cigarettes, dicks cut off and stuffed in mouths. Women dragged naked behind motorcycles, raped and ripped open, babies skewered on bayonets.
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