Japanese admit live dissection of soldiers
University makes long-taboo topic subject of display
None of the crew … survived and their remains were preserved in formaldehyde until the end of the war.
TOKYO A university museum in Japan has broken a seven-decade taboo on discussing the dissection of live American prisoners of war by medical personnel.
The museum opened on Saturday in the grounds of Kyushu University, in the city of Fukuoka, and details more than a century of innovation at one of Japan’s foremost medical schools. But one small section provides details from the Second World War of a darker chapter in the university’s history, according to Kyodo News.
A B-29 Superfortress that had taken off from the Pacific island of Guam and completed a bombing run against an airfield near Fukuoka was rammed by a Japanese fighter on May 5, 1945. Local records indicate that 12 of the crew bailed out, but one died when his parachute cords were severed by another fighter and two others were stabbed to death by local people when they landed. Nine of the crew were taken into custody, with Capt. Marvin Watkins separated from his men and sent to Tokyo for interrogation. The remainder were transported to Kyoto Imperial University’s College of Medicine.
In testimony against 30 doctors and university personnel presented to a hearing of the Allied War Crimes tribunal in Yokohama in 1948, it was claimed that doctors gave the prisoners intravenous injections of sea water to test if it could serve as a substitute for sterile saline solution.
Others had parts of their livers removed to determine if they could survive. Another experiment was to determine whether epilepsy could be controlled through the removal of part of the brain.
None of the crew of the aircraft survived and their remains were preserved in formaldehyde until the end of the war, when the doctors attempted to cover their tracks by destroying the evidence.
One doctor committed suicide in prison before the trial and charges of cannibalism were dropped due to a lack of evidence, but 23 people were found guilty of carrying out vivisection or the wrongful removal of body parts. Five were sentenced to death, four received life prison terms and the rest received shorter sentences.
Two years later, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the military governor of Japan, commuted all the death sentences and reduced most of the prison terms. By 1958, every one of the people involved in the case had been released.
The university has for seven decades been keen to avoid discussing the incident, but it came up at a meeting of professors in March and it was agreed to include the details of the case in the display.