Sadistic human experiments inside Japan's notorious WW2 Unit 731 where PoWs were infected with plague, raped and buried alive are brought to life in ultra-violent Chinese movie | Retrui News | Retrui
Sadistic human experiments inside Japan's notorious WW2 Unit 731 where PoWs were infected with plague, raped and buried alive are brought to life in ultra-violent Chinese movie
SOURCE:Daily Mail
There are no documented survivors of Unit 731, the covert department of the imperial Japanese army that conducted lethal experiments on thousands of living humans in occupied China.
There are no documented survivors of Unit 731, the covert department of the Imperial Japanese army that conducted lethal experiments on thousands of civilians in occupied China.
As it sought to develop chemical and nuclear weapons, the unit subjected its mostly Chinese victims to a catalogue of horrors beyond the human imagination between 1936 to 1945, when the Empire of Japan surrendered.
Civilians were dissected alive without without anaesthesia, infected with bubonic plague, typhus and cholera and used as human guinea-pigs for frost-bite treatments in spine-chilling torture laboratories.
A new Chinese film called 'Evil Unbound' has brought to life the unspeakable acts that occurred in the germ warfare prisons, where even pregnant women - raped by guards - were subjected to vivisections, and the dead were hastily disposed of in electric furnaces.
The ultra-violent movie, directed by Linshan Zhao, isn't just a deep-dive into old wounds, but has the potential to stoke anger in the present day due to its disturbing revelations about the crimes against humanity committed by the Japanese.
In fact, before its theatrical release in China on September 18, the Japanese embassy issued a security advisory cautioning Japanese nationals to be 'vigilant against anti-Japanese sentiment' due to films and events held in conjunction with World War Two's 80th anniversary.
Its debut was even abruptly postponed from its original July 31 date, sparking speculation in Japanese media that the delay may have been aimed at avoiding diplomatic tensions.
While the gory spectacles showcased throughout 'Evil Unbound' may seem excessive, in reality the film hardly touches the surface of what truly occurred in the notorious facilities.
Screengrab of a scene from Chinese film 'Evil Unbound', showing a victim being burned alive during an experiment at Unit 731
A human 'subject', seemingly a young Chinese civilian, is subjected to an unknown form of bacteriological test at Unit 731
Disturbing images show how Chinese civilians and allied POWs were dissected alive and infected with the plague
The trailer of 'Evil Unbound' is a litany of nightmarish scenes, showing hundreds of Chinese prisoners hooded and subsequently naked while a disturbing announcement says in a high-pitched female voice: 'In our view, you are patients. From now on, you will undergo strict health management and testing.'
It follows fictional Chinese prisoner Wang Yongzhan, an anti-Japanese hero leading prisoners to escape after he discovers various torture laboratories and an onsite crematorium in the prison.
The film makes no effort to censor the depths of cruelty that occurred within Unit 731, with scenes showing bloodied medical tools, patients screaming as doctors crowd around them, and victims flailing as they are forced to bathe their hands in toxic chemicals.
'Once we've used up these logs, just get some more,' a commander says - in reference to the fact that Unit 731 doctors called the victims they experimented on 'maruta,' or logs - in other words, simply not human.
Viewers also catch a glimpse of an immobile body eerily suspended and preserved in a tank, presumably for the purposes of scientific experimentation.
Such horrors have all appeared in archival photographs, documents and witness testimony given by former commanders and researchers from the real Unit 731 - who were originally sworn to secrecy by the department's leader, Lt Gen Shiro Ishii.
In fact, the notorious microbiologist even ordered the demolition of the unit's headquarters in Harbin, northeastern China (in what was then Japanese-occupied Manchuria), as a way to destroy evidence of the department's crimes when Japan headed towards defeat in the summer of 1945.
Films revisiting the barbarity of the unit such as 'Evil Unbound' are all the more important considering how perpetrators were never brought to justice: at the end of the war, US authorities secretly granted officials immunity in return for access to their research, meaning they all escaped prosecution.
At Unit 731's headquarters in the far north of Manchuria, around 14,000 victims were murdered - 3,000 by live experiments - but scholars estimate that between 250,000 and 500,000 civilians from surrounding villages may have been killed through the deliberate contamination of water supplies, food, and agricultural land.
Screengrab from the Chinese film 'Evil Unbound' showing a prisoner with hand injuries after being tortured at Unit 731
The effects of various remedies were tested on the victims' frostbitten limbs at Unit 731
Wound of a plague patient during bacteriological test directed by Japan's Unit 731
An aerial image shows the camp in Manchuria, in northeast China, which housed prisoners of war on whom experiments were carried out
While the victims were mostly Chinese civilians, Korean, Russian, British and American prisoners of war were also subjected to sadistic experiments at the headquarters, which was originally run under the guise of a lumber mill, then a water purification plant.
Officially called the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, Unit 731 had a staff of several thousand and was housed in 150 buildings equipped with laboratories, operating rooms, military barracks, and several cremation facilities.
It was presided over by ultra-nationalist fanatic Ishii, who received significant government funds and the blessing of Emperor Hirohito, who approved the policies and methods set out to him.
While babies were born in Unit 731, all of the hundreds of prisoners who were alive when Japan surrendered at the end of the war were murdered and buried as the imperial army tried to conceal its crimes.
Try as they might to destroy the evidence, the Ping Fan headquarters today - now a museum - still contains remnants of the countless atrocities, including rows of cages that housed giant rats which Japanese doctors used to produce the bubonic plague.
The horrendous disease was later unleashed on hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians, after plague-carrying fleas were dropped on villages as part of experiments in biochemical warfare.
In fact, enough germs were apparently created by the unit to slaughter everyone on earth many times over, with 300 kilos of plague bacteria produced every month, 500 kilos of anthrax, and nearly a tonne of dysentery and cholera.
Children were given chocolates laced with anthrax and biscuits infected with plague, while older inmates were fed typhoid-infected dumplings and drinks.
Men were infected with syphilis and then forced to rape other inmates so doctors could ascertain how the disease was transmitted.
Inmates or 'logs' were used for flamethrower practice, forced inside low-pressure chambers until their eyeballs burst, and were injected with animal blood before their torturers sliced them open alive.
They also had limbs amputated and organs removed before the depraved surgeons reattached their body parts - often in the wrong place - to see the effects.
As a result of American immunity, Ishii was never tried for his crimes and died of cancer in 1959, while other members of Unit 731 went on to become high-ranking officials in the Japanese government and the medical profession.
An immobile body eerily suspended and preserved in a tank during the Chinese film 'Evil Unbound', presumably for the purposes of scientific experimentation
Shiro Ishii was a charismatic surgeon and ultra-nationalist who is considered the architect of Unit 731's atrocities
The ruins of one of Japan's germ warfare facilities during WWII in China's northeastern city of Harbin
Picture shows inmates - known as 'maruta', meaning logs - and guards at the death camp
The ruins of one of the germ warfare facilities, featuring two large chimneys
It's not just the film 'Evil Unbound' that's been forcing Japanese war crimes into public debate in China, but also 'Dead to Rights', directed by Shen Ao.
Released in summer, it depicts the Nanjing Massacre of late 1937, during which the Japanese army killed more than 300,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers and allegedly raped around 20,000 women.
State media rigorously promoted both films, with the Communist Party's official outlet People's Daily praising 'Dead to Rights' as a 'global lesson in historical justice', declaring: 'Real history is undefeated.'
The Global Times compared the film to 'Schindler's List' and called 'Evil Unbound' a 'history lesson Japan must not miss'.
'History is the best textbook,' the article said. 'For many years, the Japanese right wing has shown a serious lack of reflection on that war.
'From altering history textbooks and downplaying or even glorifying acts of aggression, to politicians year after year visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Class A war criminals, and even attempting to revise the post-war pacifist constitution, Japan is gradually deviating from its commitment to post-war peaceful development.'
Following the unexpected postponement of 'Evil Unbound' from July to September, China Central Television reposted the trailer on Weibo with the message: 'The truth cannot be forgotten.'
Indeed, the Japanese government has never apologised for Unit 731's actions, and insists that it has found no evidence that the unit experimented on Chinese prisoners.
In 1997, eminent professor Saburo Ienaga won a 32-year-long legal battle with the Ministry of Education after Japan's Supreme Court ruled that the censorship of school textbooks is unlawful.
He had written a textbook about the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731 but the Ministry of Education demanded that passages dealing with those atrocities be deleted or revised.
In 2002, a Japanese court rejected claims for compensation brought by 180 Chinese people who claimed they were victims of war crimes in the 1940s.
The group sued the Japanese government, demanding an apology for its use of germ warfare against Chinese citizens and ten million yen (£48,000) each in compensation.
The court ruled against handing over compensation, but the three judges did acknowledge the facts of the case - the first time a Japanese court has admitted Japan conducted biological warfare during the World War Two.
A scene from the Chinese film 'Evil Unbound' showing a prisoner suffering with a skin disease
During 'Evil Unbound', one of the researchers experiments on a prisoner by burning them alive
November 1940: Staff of the Manchukuo puppet state carrying out bacteriological tests on babies and small children, as directed by the Japanese Army's Unit 731
Workers were ordered to bury the burnt bones of murdered inmates in an effort to conceal the unit's crimes towards the end of the war. Pictured: Digging at Unit 731
Chinese archaeologists in 2023 excavated a research facility hidden five feet underground, they that believed was the largest and most frequently used test site for Unit 731.
The U-shaped bunker, built in 1941, is an interconnected network of laboratories, dissection rooms and holding cells, measuring 108 feet long and 67 feet wide.
Located near the city of Anda in Heilongjiang province, the torture chamber was used for sadistic experiments, including subjecting victims to dehydration, frostbite and anthrax bombs.
Over a decade ago, excavations began at the site of a former medical school in western Tokyo, after a nurse came forward with evidence about the Japanese army's wartime illicit activities.
Toyo Ishii said workers were made to bury dozens of bodies there after Japan's surrender.
A nurse in the hospital's oral surgery department, she said she had no knowledge of any experiments on humans at the site, but she and her colleagues were ordered to take bodies and body parts for burial in the compound before US troops arrived.
'We took the samples out of the glass containers and dumped them into the hole,' she wrote in a statement in June 2006.
'We were going to be in trouble, I was told, if American soldiers asked us about the specimens.'
Despite being sworn to secrecy, former members of Unit 731 have been driven by guilt to speak out about the crimes they were complicit in during the war.
Hideo Shimizu, now 95, was only 14 when he was drafted as a cadet to the city of Harbin in March 1945.
In 2015, 70 years after the war, innocent pictures of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren reminded him of the faces of the many victims he came across in the slaughterhouse.
The veteran realised that he had to break his silence for the sake of the next generation, and began delivering lectures about what he witnessed in his six months at the germ warfare prison.
When he arrived in Harbin, Shimizu expected he would be sent to a factory, but instead, he and five other boys from his village were packed off on a train to China to start work in Unit 731's laboratories.
He says he still has terrifying nightmares even now about the day in July 1945 when he was taken to a specimen room inside the auditorium on the second floor of a facility.
The room was lined with jars, he said, some as tall as an adult - each containing severed human limbs preserved in formalin.
He even saw the corpse of a pregnant woman and a fetus with hair visible from her flayed side.
'There were ones that had been sliced in two vertically, so you could see their organs,' Shimizu said.
'There were children; ten or twenty of them, perhaps more. I was dumbfounded. I thought: "How could they do this to a small child?"'
It was the first time Shimizu had seen corpses, and he couldn't stop shedding tears, while the person who took him on the tour remained silent.
'I think they took me there because they wanted to see my reaction to the sight of the logs. All I could think of was: "What will they make me do?"' he said.
Shimizu soon realised that he was being trained to carry out dissections himself.
Thankfully, the child soldier was saved by the course of the war - which would end abruptly weeks later with Japan's surrender.
Three days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Shimizu was called to the camp prison - morbidly dubbed the 'log cabin' - to bury the burnt bones of murdered prisoners in an effort to conceal the unit's war crimes.
Soviet forces invaded the former Manchuria in August, and he and other members of the unit retreated back to Japan.
The soldiers and technicians were even given a cyanide compound and ordered to take their own lives rather than be captured.
'So many "marutas" died, and the Japanese soldiers were also dissected. I often wonder why on earth Unit 731 had done so many evil things?' Shimizu said.
Over the years, the great-grandfather has paid the price for his honesty.
An architect and resident of Miyata village in Nagano Prefecture, Shimizu has been subjected to slander and abuse countless times over the past decade for speaking out.
On Japanese social media, people dub him 'senile old man' and 'elderly public nuisance'. Other meanspirited comments say: 'Old man, you are lying.'
Speaking to the Asahi Shimbun on the way back from a lecture, Shimizu appeared dejected and exhausted by the claims that he's a liar when it comes to exposing Unit 731.
'If you say something did not happen 100 times, it becomes as if it really never did. That is frightening,' he said.
'I am getting tired these days. This might be the last time,' he added, in reference to his public speaking.
But Shimizu isn't the only witness speaking out about the abominable events.
A former medical assistant at Unit 731, a farmer in his 70s who wanted to remain anonymous told the New York Times in 1995 about the first time he cut open a live man.
'The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down,' he said. 'But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming.
'I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped.
'This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.'
When one imperial army general inspected a unit, supposedly set up to support Japan's war effort, he shared his disgust at its activities in his memoir.
'It was said that it was for national defence purposes, but the experiments were performed with appalling brutality and the dead were burned in high-voltage electric furnaces, leaving no trace,' he wrote.
Nevertheless, widespread denial about the scale of the war crimes persists in Japan.
When former Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was asked in parliament earlier this year about Unit 731's actions, he said the means to verify the facts had been 'lost with history', Japanese media reported.
People show their tickets of the film 'Evil Unbound' at a movie theater in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada, September 18, 2025
Picture shows some of the facilities at the notorious germ test camp Unit 731
A town called Ping Fan, 15 miles south of the regional capital Harbin, was selected as the site for Unit 731. Picture shows: Ping Fan after it was blown up by the Japanese
Hideo Shimizu, now a great-grandfather, has revealed the horrors that he saw as a member of Unit 731
Hideo Shimizu, centre, in 1945 when he was a teenage cadet who had just been recruited to Unit 731
Over the summer, Tokyo called on Beijing to ensure the safety of Japanese nationals in China after reports of increased violence between the nationalities.
It came as Taiwan's United Daily News reported that a Japanese woman and her child were attacked in a Suzhou underground station on July 31.
But the apparent spike in violence goes both ways. The Chinese embassy in Japan reported on July 31 that two Chinese men were seriously injured in an assault by four unidentified men in Tokyo.
The incidents arrive at a time where both countries are having to confront the darkest chapter in their shared history - as wartime films such as 'Evil Unbound' and 'Dead to Rights' plunge unresolved atrocities into the spotlight.
The winter has also seen Beijing and Tokyo engage in an increasingly tense war of words over Taiwan, escalated when Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said a Chinese attack on the self-governed country could create a 'survival-threatening situation' for Japan.
If such a situation arose, Japan's self-defence forces could be activated to respond to the threat.
As the year comes to an end, military tensions between China and Japan have reached the highest level in more than a decade, while civilians reckon with the painful scars of the past that still cause tension today.