From: phung@attmail.com
Subject: NYT Book Review: Collective Amnesia in Tokyo (part II)
Organization: The Ohio State University; Department of Phyiscs
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 07:37:57 GMT


	An organization known as Unit 731 was established by the Japanese to
conduct experiments -in bacteriological warfare. Unit 731 reportedly used
Chinese and Allied prisoners as guinea pigs to gather data on such 
diseases as bubonic plague, syphilis, typhoid and various fevers. Asked
if he had any pity for the victims, Yoshio Tamura, a member of Unit 731,
replied, "None at all.... We disparaged all other races." The, majority
of Unit 731 members were allowed to escape prosecution and return to 
Japan by agreeing to cooperate with the Americans following the war, 
and secrecy still shrouds their operation. "Their knowledge of 
bacteriological warfare techniques and defenses against it, together 
with the records of their human experiments, allegedly contributed 
directly to American biological warfare research after the war," the 
authors say, and some of them became prominent figures in Japanese 
universities and scientific institutes. Certain leaders of the unit even
belong to a brotherhood known as the Seikonkai, or Refined Spirit
Association.

	There are no surviving kamikize pilots, but a Japanese war 
correspondent, Uichiro Kawachi, spent time with a few in their final 
hours. He remembers them as young and innocent, reeking of perfume and 
sporting white silk scarfs, like the flying aces of song and story.
Anxious to leave a "flashy legacy" before embarking on their suicide 
missions, they wrote "terrible" poetry and considered making ink prints 
of their hands to be displayed in schools to inspire other youths. "Some
even wanted to have their teeth fixed before they took off, because they
wanted to die in perfect shape," Mr. Kawachi says.

	Shortly after the United States mobilized its full industrial might,
Japanese managers, engineers and factory workers knew they could not 
compete. But Japanese troops in the field blindly fought on. Nearly 
150,000 perished on New Guinea alone. Masatsugu Ogawa recalls here that
of the 261 men in his company, which served there, only he returned home.
Fewer died in battle than from the relentless heat and humidity of the
jungle. Soldiers ate lizards and worms to stave off starvation, and many
succumbed to disease. Numbers of them insanely wandered back and forth 
over the same trail. Mr. Ogawa saw a man kill his crazed brother. An 
army doctor offered to shoot those unable to keep up; Mr. Ogawa says he
considered this "sacred murder." Men who returned late from scouting 
missions were executed for desertion. Mr. Ogawa, who is now a professor
of medieval literature, has written a book on his experience titled 
"Human Beings in Extremis: The Island of Death, New Guinea."

	The struggles for other Pacific islands were equally ghastly. The 
defense of Saipan cost the Japanese almost 60,000 military and civilian 
lives, including some 4,000 women and children who committed suicide by
leaping from cliffs rather than be captured by the advancing American 
forces. They, like the troops, had been exhorted to sacrifice themselves
by an ancient Japanese poem repeatedly broadcast by Japan's radio 
stations:

  Across the sea, corpses soaking in the water,
Across the mountains, corpses heaped upon the grass.
   We shall die by the side of our lord.
      We shall never look back.

	Nobody who visits Hiroshima today can fail to be moved by the 
poignant relics on display in its museum, relics that starkly testify to
the city's ordeal during America's atomic bomb attack in August, 1945.
The subjects in these oral histories conspicuously avoid any attempt to
justify the Japanese wartime atrocities by drawing parallels with that
attack, the nuclear raid on Nagasaki and the devastating firebombing of
Tokyo -- acts, it has been argued, that were no less inhuman. They
have not forgotten those events. But while they regularly pray for their
dead at shrines throughout Japan, their grief is a personal rather than
a national exercise.

	The authors have made a significant contribution by recording the
recollections of these Japanese people, who have not, long to live now. 
Their purpose was not to question younger Japanese men and women about
their views of the war, but such an endeavor would be an obvious sequel. 
It would surely raise different questions and evoke different answers. 
Should it be undertaken, this superb book might well serve as a model.

--------
*Staffley Karnow's most recent book, "In Our Image: America's Empire in 
the Philippines," was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1990. He 
is now working on a book about the Asian experience in America.


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