In a presentation at the Abraham Shapiro Academic Complex on Tuesday evening, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prof. Jeanne Guillemin ’73 explained the complicated history of Japan’s war crimes during World War II and how American officials worked to prevent the prosecution of Japanese generals  after the war in her presentation, “The War Crimes That Disappeared.” 

Guillemin is currently a senior fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Security Studies Program, and she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for her book “Hidden Atrocities: Japanese Germ Warfare and American Obstruction of Justice at the Tokyo Trial,” the contents of which served as the basis for her lecture.

The obstruction of justice began at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the “Tokyo Trials”) which took place from 1946 to 1948, Guellemin said. Unlike the earlier Nuremberg Trials, in which German officials were tried before an international tribunal by four prosecutorial teams representing different countries, the Tokyo Trials had just one team. The IMFTE proceedings were led by a Chinese prosecutor who ceded his position to an American prosecutor who was more familiar with the common law being used in the court. 

Guillemin explained that America’s leadership in the trial became a problem when the U.S. government decided to redact key documents about Japan’s human rights abuses in China in the name of national security. The U.S. deliberately dismissed information regarding  “more than a thousand cases [of war crimes] documented by the [United Nations] and the Chinese government” because it was interested in exploring biological warfare strategies and wanted to keep the results of the Japanese experiments secret, according to Guellemin As a result, the Japanese government was never prosecuted for those war crimes at the Tokyo Tribunal.

The nature of the documented war crimes was extensive, conducted mostly by the head of Japanese Unit 731, Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii. In addition to mustard gas attacks, Guillemin said, Ishii oversaw biological weapon attacks on four Chinese cities: Ningbo, Jinhua, Quzhou and Changde. For example, soldiers in Unit 731 dropped tick-laden grain shipments on the four cities. The ticks were infected with the Bubonic plague as well as Glanders, a disease that primarily affects horses and donkeys. When rats and birds ate the shipments before people found and disposed of them, the ticks would infect the animals, and the disease would spread from city to city.

Guillemin also recounted the live experiments performed under Ishii’s leadership on Allied prisoners of war in the Chinese city of Harbin, then occupied by Japanese military. Some POWs were placed in glass cages, into which anthrax spores were pumped to infect the human test subject while scientists observed their condition. Others, Guillemin said, were vivisected, as  Japanese scientists tried to understand the progression of diseases in infected hosts.

According to Guillemin, the U.S. suppressed information about these crimes because they were simultaneously conducting their own secret chemical and biological weapons research and did not want Cold War rivals to benefit from Unit 731’s discoveries.

The first time this information became more widely available was during the Khabarovsk Trial at the end of 1949. A tribunal held in the Soviet city of Khabarovsk found 12 members of Unit 731 guilty of war crimes and sentenced them to work in a labor camp. But the escalation of the Cold War led to the generals’ parole in 1956. The U.S. dismissed the information revealed during the convictions as part of a greater Soviet disinformation campaign, she said.

It took more than 50 years for Japan’s war crimes to gain international recognition. Guillemin explained that three major events in the latter half of the 20th century changed attitudes towards the atrocities. The first happened in 1972, when the United States ratified the Biological Weapons Convention, which outlawed the use of chemical and biological weapons in war. Guillemin said that Richard Nixon, who thought biological weapons were “medieval,” was responsible for the push. He also recognized that biological warfare was “cheap” compared to conventional warfare and that its low cost would lead to proliferation.

The second event happened in the 1990s, when a combination of Japanese grassroots activism and Chinese “reform and opening up” brought attention to the war crimes. The final event came in 2002, when Chinese families demanded financial compensation from Japan for their biological weapons use in WWII. Several Chinese families filed a lawsuit against Japan, requesting $84,000 be paid to each person affected by the chemical and biological weapons. A district court in Tokyo ruled that Japan could not be held responsible for paying the plaintiff’s requested compensation of $84,000 per person affected by Japanese warfare, according to an article from the Washington Post. However, the district court did acknowledge Japan’s use of chemical and biological weapons, which the country had been denying for decades.

Guillemin said California Senator Dianne Feinstein was instrumental in making the U.S. documents public by centralizing them at the National Archives. All the documents are now available in one location for easier access, whereas before they were scattered across state lines in various archives and databases.

Guillemin said she hoped her book demonstrated the need for government transparency. Summing up the governmental failure of these tribunals with regard to victims, she said, “Nobody spoke for them.”