Shortly before and during the Second World War, Japanese doctors and medical researchers conducted large-scale human experiments in occupied China that were at least as gruesome as those conducted by Nazi doctors. Japan never officially acknowledged the occurrence of the experiments, never tried any of the perpetrators, and never provided compensation to the victims or issued an apology. Building on work by Jing-Bao Nie, this article argues that the U.S. government is heavily complicit in this grave injustice, and should respond (...) in an appropriate way in order to reduce this complicity, as well as to avoid complicity in future unethical medical experiments. It also calls on other U.S. institutions, in particular the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, to urge the government to respond, or to at least inform the public and initiate a debate about this dark page of American and Japanese history. (shrink)

In 1945–46, representatives of the U.S. government made similar discoveries in both Germany and Japan, unearthing evidence of unethical experiments on human beings that could be viewed as war crimes. The outcomes in the two defeated nations, however, were strikingly different. In Germany, the United States, influenced by the Canadian physician John Thompson, played a key role in bringing Nazi physicians to trial and publicizing their misdeeds. In Japan, the United States played an equally key role in concealing information about (...) the biological warfare experiments and in securing immunity from prosecution for the perpetrators. The greater force of appeals to national security and wartime exigency help to explain these different outcomes. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932–1945 and the American Cover‐Up. By Sheldon H. Harris.

To monopolize the scientific data gained by Japanese physicians and researchers from vivisections and other barbarous experiments performed on living humans in biological warfare programs such as Unit 731, immediately after the war the United States government secretly granted those involved immunity from war crimes prosecution, withdrew vital information from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and publicly denounced otherwise irrefutable evidence from other sources such as the Russian Khabarovsk trial. Acting in “the national interest” and for the (...) security of the US, authorities in the US tramped justice and morality, and engaged in what the English common law tradition clearly defines as “complicity after the fact.” To repair this historical injustice, the US government should issue an official apology and offer appropriate compensation for having covered up Japanese medical war crimes for six decades. To help prevent similar acts of aiding principal offender in the future, international declarations or codes of human rights and medical ethics should include a clause banning any kind of complicity in any unethical medicine—whether before or after the fact—by any state or group for whatever reasons. (shrink)