TOKYO, Aug. 17 (Xinhua) -- A Japanese scholar disclosed new research findings to Xinhua on Monday concerning brutal human experiments carried out by the Japanese military during its war of aggression against China.
The research by Seiya Matsuno, a historian and researcher at the International Peace Research Institute of Meiji Gakuin University, shows that army surgeons from the Imperial Japanese Army Medical School conducted wartime human experiments on Japanese soldiers hospitalized for mental illnesses, deliberately infecting them with malaria.
Matsuno said the practice reflects the appalling view within the Japanese Army Surgeon Corps of treating human beings as "research material," an inhuman attitude also evident in the human experiments conducted by Unit 731.
Matsuno found the relevant records in a paper published in the journal of the Japanese Army Surgeon Corps.
According to the paper, the experiment was conducted in 1940 at Konodai army hospital in Japan's Chiba Prefecture, with the stated aim of preventing the domestic spread of malaria.
During the experiment, "researchers" had mosquitoes feed on the blood of soldiers who had contracted malaria on the battlefield in China, and then let the mosquitoes bite ten Japanese soldiers hospitalized for mental illnesses to observe whether they would become infected. In the end, several of the ten fell ill, developing symptoms including fevers exceeding 40 degrees Celsius, headaches, body aches, and loss of appetite.
The paper also showed that Shiro Ishii, a core member of the Japanese Kwantung Army Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department, or the notorious Unit 731, was involved in directing the experiment.
Matsuno said that the experiment had serious ethical problems. Not only did the Japanese Army Surgeon Corps treat human beings merely as "research material" and objects, he said, but the subjects were patients with mental illnesses who might not have been able to properly understand the nature of the experiment or the risks involved.
The experiment could therefore, in effect, be regarded as a coercive human experiment, Matsuno added. ■