Manchukuo was a puppet state of the Empire of Japan in Northeast China that existed from 1932 until its dissolution in 1945. It was ostensibly founded as a republic, its territory consisting of the lands seized in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; it was later declared to be a constitutional monarchy in 1934, though very little changed in the actual functioning of government. Manchukuo received limited diplomatic recognition, mostly from states aligned with the Axis powers, with its existence widely seen as illegitimate.
Unit 731, short for Manchu Detachment 731 and also known as the Kamo Detachment and the Ishii Unit, was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in lethal human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. Estimates vary as to how many were killed. Between 1936 and 1945, roughly 14,000 victims were murdered in Unit 731. It is estimated that at least 300,000 individuals have died due to infectious illnesses caused by the activities of Unit 731 and its affiliated research facilities. It was based in the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and had active branch offices throughout China and Southeast Asia.
The Mukden incident was a false flag event staged by Japanese military personnel as a pretext for the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
General Seishirō Itagaki was a Japanese military officer and politician who served as a general in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II and War Minister from 1938 to 1939.
Baron Sadao Araki was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army before and during World War II. As one of the principal nationalist right-wing political theorists in the Empire of Japan, he was regarded as the leader of the radical faction within the politicized Imperial Japanese Army and served as Minister of War under Prime Minister Inukai. He later served as Minister of Education during the Konoe and Hiranuma administrations.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo Trial and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, was a military trial convened on 29 April 1946 to try leaders of the Empire of Japan for their crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity, leading up to and during the Second World War. The IMTFE was modeled after the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, Germany, which prosecuted the leaders of Nazi Germany for their war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity.
Kenji Doihara was a Japanese army officer. As a general in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, he was instrumental in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
Otozō Yamada was a career officer, convicted war criminal and general in the Imperial Japanese Army, serving from the Russo-Japanese War to the end of World War II.
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria, formally known as the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation or simply the Manchurian Operation and sometimes Operation August Storm, began on 9 August 1945 with the Soviet invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, which was situated in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. It was the largest campaign of the 1945 Soviet–Japanese War, which resumed hostilities between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Empire of Japan after almost six years of peace.
Unit 100 was an Imperial Japanese Army facility called the Kwantung Army Warhorse Disease Prevention Shop that focused on the development of biological weapons during World War II. It was operated by the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police. Its headquarters was located in Mokotan, Manchukuo, a village just south of the city of Changchun. It had branches in Dairen and Hailar. The Hailar branch was later transferred to Foshan. Between 600 and 800 people worked at Unit 100.
Zhongma Fortress — also Zhong Ma Prison Camp or Unit Tōgō — was a prison camp where the Japanese Kwantung Army carried out covert biological warfare research on human test subjects. Built in Beiyinhe, outside of Harbin, Manchukuo during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the camp served as a center for human subject experimentation and could hold up to 1,000 prisoners at any given time. In 1937 the prison camp was destroyed and testing operations were transferred to Pingfang under Unit 731.
The Khabarovsk war crimes trials were the Soviet hearings of twelve Japanese Kwantung Army officers and medical staff charged with the manufacture and use of biological weapons, and human experimentation, during World War II. The war crimes trials were held between 25 and 31 December 1949 in the Soviet industrial city of Khabarovsk (Хабаровск), the largest in the Russian Far East.
Surgeon General Shirō Ishii was a Japanese microbiologist and army medical officer, who served as the director of Unit 731, a biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army. Ishii led the development and application of biological weapons at Unit 731 in Manchukuo during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945, including the bubonic plague attacks at Chinese cities of Changde and Ningbo, and planned the Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night biological attack against the United States. Emperor Showa rewarded him with a special service medal for his work.
Naoki Hoshino was a bureaucrat and politician who served as Chief Cabinet Secretary under Prime Minister Hideki Tojo from 1941 to 1944. He was an official in the Ministry of Finance during the Taishō and early Shōwa period, and a senior official in the Empire of Manchukuo.
The All-Russian Fascist Party (VFP), and from 1937 onwards the Russian Fascist Union, was a minor Russian émigré movement that was based in Manchukuo during the 1930s and 1940s.
The East Asia Development Board, or Kōain (興亜院), was a cabinet level agency in the Empire of Japan that operated between 1938 and 1942. It was created on 18 November 1938 under the first Konoe administration to coordinate the government's China policy. It was initially designed to sponsor industrial and commercial development in China to boost support for Japanese rule in occupied territories. However, the agency was quickly usurped by the Imperial Japanese Army and became a tool for forced labour and enslavement in mines and war industries. It was absorbed into the Ministry of Greater East Asia in 1942.
The Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department was a department of the Imperial Japanese Army from 1936 to the dissolution of the Army in 1945. While its public mission was to prevent the spread of disease and monitor water supply, several field armies also assigned units the mission of manufacturing biological weapons. Many units also performed unethical human experimentation, such as Unit 731, in which thousands of prisoners of war and civilians were tortured to death over the course of years.
Allegations that the United States military used biological weapons in the Korean War were raised by the governments of the People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. The claims were first raised in 1951. The story was covered by the worldwide press and led to a highly publicized international investigation in 1952. Secretary of State Dean Acheson and other American and allied government officials denounced the allegations as a hoax. Subsequent scholars are split about the truth of the claims.
The Kwantung Army was a general army of the Imperial Japanese Army from 1919 to 1945.
The occupying United States government undertook the selective cover-up of some Japanese war crimes after the End of World War II in Asia, granting political immunity to military personnel who had engaged in human experimentation and other crimes against humanity, predominantly in mainland China. The pardon of Japanese war criminals, among whom were Unit 731's commanding officers General Shiro Ishii and General Masaji Kitano, was overseen by General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in September 1945. While a series of war tribunals and trials was organized, many of the high-ranking officials and doctors who devised and respectively performed the experiments were pardoned and never brought to justice due to the US government both classifying incriminating evidence, as well as blocking the prosecution access to key witnesses. As many as 12,000 people, most of them Chinese, died in Unit 731 alone and many more died in other facilities, such as Unit 100 and in field experiments throughout Manchuria.
