Doctor Admits Human Experiments in Philippines

[Mulboyne]

[floatr][/floatr]Mainichi: Japanese wartime medic admits experimenting on live victims in Philippines
An 84-year-old former high-ranking Japanese military medic has revealed that he vivisected the bodies of living people on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines with a military doctor during World War II. Akira Makino, 84, a resident of Hirakata, Osaka Prefecture, said he cut up living bodies toward the end of World War II as part of human experiments. He is preparing to speak on his wartime experiences in the near future. The military doctor is believed to have performed the human experiments at his own discretion. It is already known that Unit 731, a secret medical experimentation unit of the former Imperial Japanese Army, performed vivisections on Chinese in Manchuria, now part of northern China, but Makino's testimony is the first from an expert relating to vivisections in the Philippines...more...

[james]

said he cut up living bodies toward the end of World War II

otherwise known as "people".

[IkemenTommy]

He is preparing to speak on his wartime experiences in the near future.

Something tells me that he will have some kind of mysterious death before any of this is ever happening..

[Mulboyne]

IHT: Japan's navy conducted medical experiments on Filipinos during war

The Japanese navy conducted surgical training on Filipinos, including women and children, during World War II and then killed them, a repentant medic who said he took part was quoted as saying Saturday. Akira Makino, 84, a former navy medic stationed on Mindanao island in the Philippines during the war, told Kyodo News agency that about 30 people were operated on as part of medical training before being strangled to death between December 1944 and February 1945. Operations performed on the victims included severing legs and arms and abdominal surgery, in some cases after their faces were covered with a cloth and sprayed with ether, Kyodo quoted Makino as saying. The bodies of the 30 Filipinos were later buried, he said...more...

[emperor]

same aul story (via Digg)

February 25, 2007
Dissect them alive: order not to be disobeyed

[size=75] Richard Lloyd Parry in Hirakata, Japan [/SIZE]

For 62 years, Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he’d done, but to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he had experience such misery during the Second World War?
He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children, and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team. Last year, at the age of 83, he embarked on a gruelling pilgrimage to 88 Buddhist temples in Japan - after number 40 he collapsed from heat exhaustion, having permanently injured his knees. “My wife didn’t like me going back to the Philippines, she called me ’war crazy’,” said Mr Makino, a frailold man who lives alone in Hirakata near Osaka. “But she let me go anyway. Right up until she died three years ago, I never told her. But over time I think she realised.” Only in the twilight of his life, has Mr Makino begun to talk about the secret which he had carried.
In 1944, as a medical auxiliary in the Japanese Imperial Navy, he was stationed in the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. There he was party to one of the most notorious and poorly chronicled cruelties of the Japanese war effort - the medical dissection and murder of living prisoners of war.
Over the course of four months before the defeat of the Japanese forces in March 1945, Mr Makino cut open the bodies of ten Filipino prisoners, including two teenage girls. He amputated their limbs, and cut up and removed their healthy livers, kidneys, wombs and still beating hearts for no better reason than to improve his knowledge of anatomy.
“It was educational,” he said. “Even today when I go to see doctors, they are impressed by my knowledge of the human body. But if I’m really honest, the reason we did it was to take revenge on these people who were spying for the Americans. Now, of course I feel terrible about the cruel thing that I did, and I think of it so often. But at the time what I felt for these people was closer to hatred than to pity.” There have been other accounts of medical vivisection, most notoriously by Unit 731, a top secret arm of the Imperial Army which killed thousands of Chinese and Russian prisoners in Manchuria in the name of scientific research. But Mr Makino’s is the first such testimony to have emerged from the Philippines - and from the Navy, which was regarded as the less cruel and fanatical of the Imperial armed forces.
Apart from the extraordinary climax of his wartime story, Mr Makino comes across as typical of Japanese of his generation - a polite, well meaning man who lacked the immense courage and daring which would have been needed to stand up to the Imperial war machine. He was born in 1922 and grew in the port city of Kobe, where he joined the Navy in 1940. After training as a medical corpsman, he found himself sailing to and fro across East Asia in the mighty Yamato, the biggest battleship ever created. By 1942, though, the Imperial forces were on the defensive and even to sailors such as Mr Makino, defeat seemed inevitable.
“New soldiers started arriving, and they were younger and younger, 15 or 16 years old,” he remembers. “We said, ’Where are you guns?’, and they replied, ’We have no guns - but we have bamboo spears.’ It was then I knew that we had already lost the war.” It was in such an atmosphere that he found himself in Zamboanga, a Muslim town in the far south-west of the Philippines.
The local population were the Moro people, an assortment of jungle tribes legendary as ferocious head hunters. The occupying Japanese feared and hated them; as the US forces drew closer, they arrested many of them as “spies”, and threw them into a hellish pit where they were left to rot. “I don’t know whether they really were spies or not,” said Mr Makino. “All that was needed was for someone to say that they were. We knew that we’d lost the war. Our psychological state was very strange by then. In those conditions, we could do anything, absolutely anything.” It began with a practice which has been described by a number of former Japanese soldiers - the “testing” of traditional Japanese swords on live prisoners. “There were university graduates who had no idea how to fight, but who were officers because of their education,” Mr Makino says. “They carried swords, but never used them. They’d say, ’Bring the POWs - we will see how sharp these swords are!’ So they tied up the prisoners and chopped their heads off. But the swords were so rusty, they couldn’t do it cleanly.”
One day towards the end of 1944, Mr Makino was summoned by his commanding officer, a navy doctor whom, even now, he declines to name. “I was his number two, and he told me that if anything happened to him, I had to take over from him. He told me to come and see a vivisection.
“The first time it was one prisoner, a middle aged man. He’d already given up - there was no struggle. He was tied to the bed and anaesthetised with ether, so that he was completely unconscious. The Lieutenant showed me what to do. He cut him open, and pointed out, ’Here’s the liver, here’s the kidneys, here’s the heart.’ The heart was still beating, then he cut the heart open and showed me the inside. That was when he died.” “I didn’t want to do it, but it was an order, you see. At that time, if a commander gave you an order it was understood that it was the order of the Emperor, and the Emperor was a god. I had no choice - if I had disobeyed, I would have been killed.” The “operation” took about an hour; when it was over the body was sewn up and thrown into a hole in the earth. Eight more vivisections followed, Mr Makino said, up to three hours long. “Over the course of time, I got used to it,” he said. “We removed some of the organs, and amputated legs and arms. Two of the victims were women, young women, 18 or 19 years old. I hesitate to say it, but we opened up their wombs to show the younger soldiers. They knew very little about women - it was sex education.
“I admired the lieutenant, and I was flattered that he asked me to do this because he really trusted me. I felt truly honoured. But now I know I was used.” When the Americans landed in force in March 1945, the Japanese scattered into the jungle. Mr Makino spent seven months there, until well after the Japanese surrender, living like an animal off cats, snakes, lizards and licking water off leaves, utterly alone. A photograph take of him after his rescue by locals shows a living skeleton. But as soon as he had returned to Japan, the feelings of remorse began.
He married, had two sons, worked in a hospital and became a salaryman for a construction company. And whenever he could he returned to Zamboanga. He published a pamphlet about his experiences and spoke in schools about the horrors of war. But he never spoke of the experiments, until October when he was being interviewed by a Japanese newspaper. “It slipped out,” he said. “But now I have talked about it, I must not stop.” Apart from a few local papers, a second interview on the news agency, Kyodo, was largely ignored by the Japanese media, an indication perhaps of the reluctance to air the subject of wartime atrocities. “No one else who knew about it survived, and it is a miracle that I am alive,” said Mr Makino. “I have to talk about it, to tell the story to children who know nothing about such things. It brings me peace to a certain extent, but not a complete peace. I was under orders, you see. But I know that I did a terrible thing.”

[Behan]

I remember reading that Unit 731 referred to their victims as maruta, 'logs', which perhaps de-humanized them making it easier than calling them 'people'.

[Buraku]

I admire this old guy for speaking out, while cowardly xenophobic cunts like Ishihara bang the war drums

[emperor]

[size=-1]Although they say:

Those Who Forget History Are Doomed to Repeat It

I'm doubtful we'll have another conflict during the next few decades, during which doctors will feel compelled to perform live vivisections and inject gasoline into wombs... but I could be wrong... heck, they might even find the cure for AIDS that way
[/size]

[Mulboyne]

AFP: Japanese veteran haunted by WWII surgical killings

More than 60 years had passed, but Akira Makino still suffered nightmares about Filipino hostages and the injections that rendered them unconscious. Then there was the one about the surgical knife gouging a human liver. Every time he woke up to the flashbacks of horrific killing scenes, he shut his eyes tight and tried to turn his mind away from something he no longer wanted to think about. But Makino, 84, also felt he had to speak out about his wartime experiences to as many people as possible during the final years of his life. "These were nothing but living-body experiments," Makino said as he sat on a bench wearing just his pajamas at a hospital in the western Japanese city of Osaka, making some of his last comments before he died earlier this year. "My captain combat-surgeon often showed us human intestines, and said this was the liver and that was that and so on," he said. "He did that to train us. The captain said if he died, we would have to take up a scalpel to conduct the operations instead of him."

Makino, a low-ranked medic deployed to a Philippine island during the final years of World War II, began making his striking statements on Japanese war atrocities in public just last year. He was regarded as the first former Japanese soldier to have been stationed in the Philippines to speak of vivisections on hostages and his remarks caused some controversy as historical memory remains a point of simmering friction between Japan and the countries it invaded. Nationalist Internet sites launched a campaign branding Makino a liar. Makino said what he experienced was not systematic atrocity, but rather a glimpse of soldiers' desperation during the disorganised, last-ditch struggle of a nation on the verge of defeat.

It was one year before Japan's surrender when Makino landed on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao in August 1944. Soon after arriving at the Japanese military base at Zamboanga on the western tip of Mindanao, Makino found himself and his unit cut off from headquarters, with the situation growing worse by the day. They received no military supplies or orders, let alone medical packages. The main enemy were the guerrilla bands formed by local Muslim Moros, who constantly threatened their station, he said. "We were told the Moros were such cruel people that they attacked enemies with spears, and we actually rescued some people assaulted by them," Makino said. "I was told many times I should not walk in the palm tree jungle after dark."

Naturally, he said, almost all the hostages they captured were Moros. "We were supposed to keep them alive in captivity, but it was no problem if we 'disposed' of them, in the beheadings the Japanese have become infamous for." He remembered at least 50 hostages being killed, "including those who got this," he said, moving his hand to imitate a sword cutting off a head. The frail old man recalled that many others were kept alive as human guinea pigs for his superior combat doctor, who wanted to show young medics like himself how to conduct surgical operations. "We first anesthetised them -- we usually used injections or oxygen gas," he said. "Then they passed out in a few seconds." The combat doctor would tell him to watch as he sliced open a hostage's stomach, a scene that Makino says made him so ill he couldn't eat or drink for days afterwards.

But Makino said he eventually became accustomed to what he had to do. "I was desperate," he said. "I didn't want to do anything like that if possible. But I had to follow the orders of my superior as a military man, otherwise I'd have been beaten up." He could not put a definitive number on how many of the 50 people the unit killed were vivisected or how many of the operations he took part in. He did say he could never forget those days on the tropical island and even six decades later he could barely talk about his experiences without breaking down. As he talked about his experiences and memories with AFP, he lowered his eyes and said he felt the most profound guilt over the way the bodies were handled afterwards.

The Japanese made Moros dig holes in the ground, he said, and then they hurled in the bodies with the stomachs still open. "The mud got in all over the human stomach. My captain said there was no need to close the wounds because that would just be a waste of suture thread." Makino said his unit in the Philippines did not have any organised plan and that it did not test plague germs. "It was a one-off thing," Makino said. "We didn't take data or anything."

Another veteran, one of only a handful surviving from the Philippine battlefield, said the final days of the war were so desperate they did whatever they thought necessary just to survive. Yoshihiko Terashima, 86, a former naval chief commander, said he did not commit any living-body experiments himself but added: "That could have easily happened." "It must have been natural for military doctors to come up with the idea of using whatever they had for tryouts in such destitute situations," he told AFP in a separate interview. "They had no medicine and no supplies, so then of course they would have had to come up with ways with whatever they had. And they must have done the same thing to injured Japanese soldiers as well," he said. He contrasted the situation in the Philippines with that in northeastern China, then known as Manchuria. "There (in Manchuria) Japan was winning the war. During the time of Makino (in the Philippines) we were losing it."

The Americans landed on the Philippines' main Luzon island in January 1945 and within six months declared victory. An estimated 218,000 Japanese soldiers were killed in the battles on Luzon island alone. Like many Japanese soldiers, Makino and Terashima each fled into the jungles. At his home in a Tokyo suburb, with cabinets full of war documents and a rolled-up map of the world lying on the floor, Terashima recalled the destitute conditions that he face while fleeing from US attacks. "When you holed up in a cave at night, you see huge rats crawling up on the faces of dead bodies, eating the eyeballs," Terashima said in a firm voice. "So we took an iron helmet to catch them and ate them. "Those dying just lay on the ground, living a few days by eating the maggots that were infesting their own faces."

In later years, both Makino and Terashima repeatedly returned separately to their former battlefields to collect the remains of Japanese soldiers. Makino travelled back and forth between Japan and the Philippines more than 10 times, taking everyday supplies like rice, pencils and clothes to needy residents of Mindanao. "I've done it out of a quest for redemption," Makino said. Makino said the past haunted him for years, so much so that he hesitated to marry. "I would tell people that I had reasons for not being able to marry."

It took him 10 years to make up his mind to marry a friend's sister, but said he could not talk to her, or anybody, about the surgical killings committed by his unit in the Philipppines. "It was cruel, too cruel to talk about it to a woman," he said. "My wife might have thought I was such a cruel person. That's what was in my mind. "While she was with me, I just didn't want her to know about it," said Makino, who kept a monochrome photo of her on his bedside at the hospital where he died in May. Makino said her death more than three years earlier freed him to talk publicly about the experiences that haunted him. "You have to talk when you know you have done something guilty," he said. "We lost the war because we deserved it," Makino said with bitterness. "We didn't have enough soldiers, enough arms nor enough bullets. We didn't have enough of anything."