Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 77 - Unit 731

Episode Date: November 4, 2019

*******TRIGGER WARNING******** Everything. Seriously everything. It is terrible. On this episode Joe and Rich discuss one of the greatest crimes in human history: Japan's answer to Nazi Germany's terrifying medical experiments. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Follow us on twitter @lions_by Sources: Felton, Mark. The Devil's Doctors: Japanese Human Experiments on Allied Prisoners of War. Harris, Sheldon. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare and the American Cover up.

Hey everybody, welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast and our second Halloween special with me is Rich. She sounds very excited. She has no idea what I'm talking about today, but she knows it's going to be terrible because I laid a special set of ground rules. So first off, for everybody out there who might be sensitive to some subjects,

I'm going to go ahead and put a trigger warning on this episode for literally every subject ever. If any kind of trauma bothers you, do not listen to this episode for literally every subject ever. If any kind of trauma bothers you, do not listen to this episode. Secondly, I have given Rich a certain set of rules. At any point,

she can tap out and I'll read her an interesting animal fact of which I have mined from a website known as Mental Floss. Mental Floss? Yeah. Which sounds like a way somebody would be murdered. But I don't know if any of these

are true. They're not vetted nor are they sourced. But I will read them. I get it because it's like cleaning out in between your brain instead of in between your teeth. Like I said, a way that somebody would be murdered. You shouldn't have to clean your brain out.

Don't do it. That's how you die. It's like, I can't even think of a word right now. So before we get into today's topic, we thought we'd start with our worst Halloween story that we can think of about each other. I'll let you go first. Okay. Okay, so years ago, probably like nine years ago, I would say, I just started dating this

guy very, very secretly because his best friend kind of had a crush on me. So we weren't really telling anybody just yet because we didn't know what it was. And he had a Halloween party at his house. Of course, I was at that Halloween party. And so was his best friend. And I can't quite remember how, but the friend found out that we were dating and started walking around the house screaming slut whore you know all the great words that we love to call women um yeah guys suck we're all we're all like we're all just bad yeah so finally ended up in the front yard and he was screaming

though like just straight at me um and i got sick of it and he was screaming though, like just straight at me. Um, and I got sick of it and just started wailing on him, just started hitting him in the face and the back of the head, like whatever I could get to pretty much. That is what you should do when somebody calls you that. I mean, alcohol is a part of this for sure. Um, but, but yeah, so, you know, just started kind of going to town and then he stood up to push me off of him and somebody a bystander

who saw him stand up and push me off of him thought that he had hit me and tackled him into the fence beforehand was this bystander wearing glasses and then after he tackled him was he no longer wearing glasses I'm asking if you view Superman

it is Halloween after all no and was he no longer wearing glasses? I'm asking if you view Superman. It is Halloween after all. No, but yeah, so that was my fun drama-filled Halloween night. Lovely. I think mine goes back, mine definitely goes back way further than that. I think it was six or seven. Too young to be in a haunted house i'll say um and my dad took uh the kids uh out to a haunted house there's three of us i'm the

youngest and it was it was it was a pretty extensive haunted house now granted as i have aged this as i tell the story the haunted house gets bigger and scarier and there's fucking zombies and dragons and shit but uh i remember it being pretty big uh but when you're six years old every haunted house is giant and terrifying uh and you know i didn't want to go in because i was i was a huge wuss when i was a kid everything terrified me um i like I hated everything scary. I hated horror movies. I just didn't like any of it.

And I didn't want to go, but he dragged me in and he was like, just hold onto my hand or whatever. And I immediately got separated by everybody in there. So I'm stumbling through this dark and terrifying haunted house by myself. And I find my way out by following the crowd and I have no idea what's

happening and i ran into the back leg of um a guy that's supposed to be like he had like a jason mask on but he had a chainsaw which is weird because i don't think jason ever used a chainsaw and he's revving it and revving and you know there's no chain on it just it's just the noise and he turned around and put that motherfucker in my face and just started revving it and revving it and i peed myself fun in the kasabian house the the like last time because i was always a big big pansy when it came to anything scary like i did not like scary movies growing up i did not like haunted houses and i think the one time that I did go through a haunted house, it was like a sea world haunted house or something. And I was small enough.

I was small enough to be, uh, to sit on my uncle Steve's shoulders. And that is what I did throughout the whole thing. I sat on his shoulders and hid my face in his hair. So, uh, and my,

my hatred for haunted houses continues. Cause, um because when I went to Tampa Bay for vacation years and years ago, there was like the Hollow Weekend or whatever at Universal Studios. They do that thing. It's probably the wrong name, but they turn the whole thing into a haunted house. And every ride is a haunted ride attraction. And I went into it. And now, mind you, this is mid-tour leave from Afghanistan. I'm in my mid-20s. I'm like 6'3", 250 pounds. And I'm covering my eyes and rushing through the fucking place. I fucking hate those places, man. So we started today by drinking sake.

And that's because this story takes us to Japan. Now, before we get started, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say almost everyone, or hopefully almost everyone, has heard of the horrific crimes of the Nazi medical experiments conducted at Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II. Those are all pretty burned into the public consciousness. These experiments that were conducted by Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele and his staff are rightfully burned into human history as well. Yeah, except for all of the Holocaust deniers and stuff. Where did the six million go, Rich?

Where did it go? Yeah, actually, some of those people ended up in our podcast twitter feed uh yesterday oh fun yeah uh i posted an article about a 93 year old man uh in germany being prosecuted for um being a a death camp guard and i said something along the lines of justice is eternal motherfucker and they were just posting uh i i i they weren't coming out and saying outright that like where the six million go i didn't see any six million bodies which is a really bad um tagline that they use but they were posting really weird like uh one world government conspiracy theory memes so i was bored as i normally am and i and i went back into their timeline, and they're retweeting well-known Holocaust deniers.

Like, ah, circle makes a square. Yeah. But I mean, we have all kind of, everybody with a functioning brain has accepted them as one of the greatest sins in human history. And I think that's correct in saying, I don't think it's much of a stretch. But what if I told you that there is a story that is arguably much worse,

that most people have never heard of? What? We don't know a major part of human history? Now- I mean, that's definitely factual with me. I probably don't know a lot of this. Now, most of the people involved in the grotesque experiments on europe's jewish population did not get away with their crimes many of them were captured put on trial and strung up like the pieces of human shit that they are while others killed themselves or ran to south america and i know what you're thinking the nazis ran to south america kind of totally did get away with it um but for people like joseph mengele who did skip around south america life was largely terrible he was poor most the time constantly running for his life and at one

came one point came within hours of being captured by the israeli massad he eventually devolved into substance abuse paranoia and constantly worried about jewish commandos whisking him away to tel aviv to string him up like his poker buddy k Klaus Barbie. Being near beaches and eating good South American food is still too good for him. Oh, I agree. I mean, he eventually stroked out or had a heart attack while he was out swimming and he died. But I'm not going to make some bullshit excuse

that running for your life for a few decades and constantly looking over your shoulder is a fate worse than death because it isn't. He got to, no matter how bad his life was, he to drink he fucked he had a good time at one point he was happy when he absolutely should not have been um but at least we can all be a little happy that he kind of had a shitty life until he died like if we're going to take a small victory yeah i cannot say any of that for this group of of monsters we about to talk about. This brings us to Japan at the end of World War I. Japan saw the devastating usage of poison gas by both the Germans at the Battle

of Ypres, where thousands of soldiers died from getting gassed and wounded. It was all pretty bad. They decided that their further experimentation would be necessary so they could develop their own gas and nerve programs for the future. They wanted to keep up with the Western powers, which at the time they were allied with. Fast forward to 1930s, and Japan is once again raring to get into the gas game. This time wanting to expand into biological warfare, despite the fact that biological warfare had been outlawed in 1925, and they were a signatory to that outlaw. Now, it's going to be kind of a normal tract here that we talk about all the time, where world powers will sign the Geneva Conventions and just openly violate them left and right.

Same thing with this. That is when a Surgeon General of the Japanese Army, Shiro Ishii, went on a two-year-long study abroad. When he came back, he demanded that Japan begin to try to catch up with the General of the Japanese Army, Shiro Ishii, went on a two-year-long study abroad. When he came back, he demanded that Japan begin to try to catch up with the rest of the world as Western powers were developing their own programs, leaving Japan behind. Now, in a strange form of inter-episode connectivity here,

Ishii was considered a protege of Sadato Araki, this insane fascist who came up with the idea of kamikaze suicide attacks. So, yeah, our episodes connect in the worst way possible. You know, I have had that episode in my queue to listen to, and I have not listened to it yet. The kamikaze one, I mean. Yeah, you're not missing

much. Ishii was eventually put in charge of the Army Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory in 1930. Ishii's original mission was to research and attempt to eliminate various illnesses and diseases that spread through an army in the field. And ever since the Japanese Kwantung Army invaded Manchuria in 1932, Japan certainly

had a lot of those. For people who are unaware, diseases, waterborne illnesses, foodborne illnesses, and the like kill far more soldiers in every war in human history than combat. So it would make sense that the Japanese army had a very specific unit to attempt to stop that from happening. That was until Ishii just said

fuck it and began his own poison gas experiments at the Zhangma Fortress near Harbin, China. Ishii and the dean of the Tokyo Medical College, Koizumi Chiyokaki, had eventually been conducting preliminary experimentations on animals.

Not on how to prevent epidemics, but how to spread them, and they had quite a bit of success. That's not exactly what they were supposed to be doing. Yeah, sounds like the opposite of what they were supposed to be doing. Now, there is some argument here if this is some freelance shit or it had the

green light from the Japanese government. It's a very good chance that they had a green light from the Japanese government and the emperor just wasn't quite involved yet because it's really small scale. But everybody is hands off with that whole thing. For a good reason. by the end of the war

they tried to deviate as much blame away from the emperor as they could so they can keep him in power as something for the Japanese nation to build back up around by the American occupying forces so it's a very good chance that he was much more involved than he actually was

that history books say he was. Whoops. Now there's some debate whether they are legit or not, like I was saying. But after he and Koizumi's animal experimentations were presented to Ishi's friend Araki, who happened to be the minister of education

for Japan, he just so happened to be sent to Zhangma Fortress, a prison camp that held around a thousand people, with Ishii himself saying of Manchuria, quote, this is perfect. Test subjects can be plucked from the streets like rats. Is this just like average prisoners, like people who broke laws and got imprisoned? got imprisoned or well it depends on what your definition of a law is um because at the time you know nazi germany gets a lot of flack for being incredibly uh well rightfully so for being incredibly repressive um and just awful and they deserve it um but a lot of people kind of don't know how incredibly oppressive the japanese government was during World War II. They were just as much, if not more, fascist than Nazi Germany. They had secret police called the Kempietai

that would just disappear people off the streets for virtually any political dissent, stuff like that. And those were a lot of the prisoners that would show up there. Some of them probably did break the law, but some of them were guilty of being Manchurian. So, yeah. How fucking dare they?

Yeah. How dare you live in this land that you have lived in for generations before we showed up? You're a fucking monster. Sounds familiar. Yeah. Now, once in charge of the prison at Zhangma, Yixi began to plan his experiments. Now, because he wanted to see prison at Zhangma, Ishii began to plan his experiments. Now, because he wanted to see what would spread through a generally healthy population,

he couldn't use half-starved, mostly dead prisoners that generally resided within the Japanese prison camps. Instead, he began a strict regimen of force-feeding to get them back to their normal health. This included several meals a day of however much they could eat, plus alcohol, because they wanted to be normal like he'd give them as much sake and food that they wanted um he they and he let them exercise he wanted them to be as close to a representative population of say

a major city as he could make them okay so they so they're the control group. Well, he did that to all of them because being able to kill half-dead weak concentration camp survivors is not hard. Right. It doesn't even take a strong nerve agent to do that. He's trying to kill hypothetically citizens

of normal healthy, or entire cities of normal healthy people or large army formations, which are going to be generally more fit than the, than the normal population. Did they have a specific target in mind at this point or just like, Hey, just in case,

uh, this is mostly just experimentation, but it's definitely going to be used, uh, in, in a war capacity. Um, now this is before the Pearl Harbor attacks.

So they don't think that they're going to be fighting America quite yet. But in general, they want a weapon stockpile that is enough to kill half the planet because there's a lot of stuff in there. Now, once they were nursed back to health, the prisoners are strapped to a bed and slowly bled out over several days, with notes being taken every hour to record their deteriorating condition. Others were starved to death or deprived of water until they died of thirst. Still, others were injected with the plague and then vivisected.

What does that mean? Oh yeah, I was about to say that, if you're not familiar with vivisection. Who? Who? Somebody tweet right now. Who the fuck is familiar with vivisection? Welcome to the wonderful world of a history degree. Now, vivosection is a lot like an autopsy, but the people aren't dead yet.

It's not good. Hey, hey, hey. Animal fact. Animal fact. You're tapping out. Okay. So, number one, a trained pigeon can tell the difference between the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet.

Well, that is lovely. You guys just call them flying rats. I wonder what the special education is. We have to send this bird to art school. I kind of want a bird. They're so smart. Yeah, but they're loud and they poop everywhere. It's like me, but with feathers.

There's upsides and downsides, youides you know you know to you and the birds so uh the particular um procedure that shiro ishi and his men would would carry out uh for vivisection is people would be strapped down with no anesthetic whatsoever and then given an autopsy. There's numerous firsthand accounts of aides and medics that survived that said that people were screaming and thrashing and they know that they survived much longer than everybody thought they would. Like how many organs have to be like, are they removing organs? Kind of, yeah. Well, what they're trying to do is, so they've been bleeding them out effectively, just seeing what kind of stresses they can put on the human body.

And they would then remove organs to see how they would deteriorate and how organ death would occur and how it looked. And it's all completely pointless because this is a stupid experiment. I think the cruelty is the point. Well, yeah. The life expectancy for anybody who entered the camp was one month. If they survived any longer, they would simply be shot when they outlived their usefulness. What?

Yep. Well, how does prison work in Japan? Well, this isn't like a prison prison. This is Zhangma Fortress. Now, granted, the Japanese prison system has their own set of problems, and I'm sure in the fucking 30s it was god-awful, but this wasn't like a normal prison.

This was a concentration camp for the most part. I mean, it wasn't a concentration camp. It was most obviously a death camp. People did not leave this motherfucker alive. If you're curious just how detached someone has to be in order to conduct these kind of experiments, the prisoners in the camp were not called inmate, prisoner, or anything like that. Instead, they were called Maruta, which is Japanese for wood. Wood?

That's the best insult they can come up with? No, because they were as useless as logs. When an experiment was conducted and people died, they would then be asked, how many logs fell today? And then they actually spun this into a cover story that this was actually just a timber camp. A what? A timber camp. That's not funny, but... Oh, you Shiroishi, you're clever.

Just like the serious amount of detachment there. Oh, yeah, yeah. Even in all their notes, names aren't used, inmate, prisoner, none of that. It's just Maruta. Do you think that's the equivalent of like of like calling enemies like

by derogatory terms so you can dehumanize them and stuff for the people that are actually working at the at the camp yeah definitely um if you don't treat them like people you don't even know their names you're much less likely to be upset about anything that you're doing because clearly i'm not a bad person i wouldn't hurt

people right as i do conduct a living on topsy yeah less likely to be upset about anything that you're doing. Because clearly, I'm not a bad person. I wouldn't hurt people. Right. As I conduct a living autopsy. Yeah. Now, this operation continued for a few years before these logs of wood staged an uprising against serial camp overseers. A prisoner overpowered a guard, grabbed a gun and some keys,

and freed about 40 other people. While not everyone managed to escape the death camp, many did. Some of them, however, died from exposure in the elements or were shot by the camp guards. Some did, however, make a clean break. At least 12 of them survived and ran to various Chinese authorities from both the nationalist government and the communist insurgent group led by Mao Zedong. Now, because this is in the middle of the the Chinese civil war as well now if you're thinking about like oh haha we'll finally get the the Japanese for all the awful things that they did one it's not even that bad yet and uh two nobody did shit with this information Ishii knowing word is about to get out as top

secret experiment experimentation camp began to clean house. Zhang was blown up and the remaining prisoners were all killed. Now, Ishii worried about the publicity coming like this guy is doing awful shit and you remember this is before Japan is fighting in World War II. This is the Sino-Japanese

War. So, nobody really cares yet. Mostly due to racism but yeah uh like his worries were completely unfounded because neither the nationalists nor the communists did jack shit with the information that was brought against them so fuck both of you guys i guess so he just massacred all those people for really no reason well i mean that's the crux this entire episode i mean but like not even for his own twisted purposes yeah i mean he didn't even get to experiment on the whole camp was a wash and what's more shocking is um now the the nationalists and the communists were fighting each other but they were both fighting the japanese and there's a weird alliance that

kind of worked out where they both fight the Japanese and kind of lay off one another, but it's shocking that neither one of them really wanted the PR coup of being like, look what these guys are doing, and both of them were just like, eh. Don't really give a shit. But with the destruction of Ishii's torture palace, only meant bigger things in the future of human

suffering. In 1936, Ishii received a decree from Emperor Hirohito himself to not only go back to work for the purpose of experimentations, but to expand the scope and size of his unit, which is now known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the

Kwantung Army, also known as what is now famously known as Unit 731. Again, I think he really took that in the opposite direction of what it was intended for. It's a great cover. We're not committing war crimes. We're the water purification

guys. So I'm taking a side here. I think the Emperor knew. The Emperor definitely knew. Emperor Hirohito knew about a lot. I mean, Japanese government during World War II is it's a lot like studying Syrian or Lebanese Civil War

looking too hard into it it's like staring into a madness rune there's so many different factions though all of them strangely loyal to the emperor and the amount of power that the emperor had is really fucking questionable it's really weird.

I read an entire book on it once, and I still don't understand it. But he knew a lot more than people think he did. I mean, he signed a lot of shit that directly led to war crimes. A lot of the stuff that happened in China, unit 731, Pearl Harbor, shit like that. I mean, but yeah, he got to live very, I think he lived to like the fucking 80s. Maybe he just had one of those like stamp signature things and somebody else was signing all that crap. I mean, historically, and I might be kind of wrong, but I'm going to say it anyway, is like the Japanese emperor has a high place in Japanese society,

but not such a high place in Japanese government. That's how most like those types of governments work, right? Like emperors, kings, queens. Oh, modern day, sure. There's the constitutional monarchies are, I mean, the UK.

I mean, there's a lot of countries that have constitutional monarchies, i mean the uk i mean there's a lot of countries that have constitutional monarchies but that's not what japan was um like even during a monarchy was the word i was looking for yeah i mean even during like the meiji restoration um there's a lot of players behind the scenes that both wanted to um inflate the emperor's power and take it away but nobody was like we don't need an emperor. It was just differing shades of imperial power. He was a figurehead. Some people didn't want him to be a figurehead because

he was considered a not exactly a god, but a physical representation of a deity on earth. Oh, right. The minister of education, Sadowaraki, is the one that put that into Japanese schools.

And he was a hardline fascist, an absolute monarchist. To the extent even other fascists in Japanese government were like, whoa. So, yeah. I mean, there was like coups and counter coups in between the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy, both of them trying to influence their own version of imperial government but none of them were like trying to depose the emperor it's fucking weird it's really interesting it's like game of thrones but

dumber now um this new unit 731 would build a purpose-built compound in northeastern china that would expand their capabilities several times over than the old Zhangma Fortress. The compound would eventually grow to include 150 different buildings that covered six square kilometers, include 3,000 staff, of which 500 were actual no-shit doctors. Not only would their experiments on people expand, so would their experience on how to spread horrible epidemics on the unwitting Chinese population. Now, from Ishii's experiments in Jogma, he already knew that he how he could kill a lot of people directly by like injecting them with bubonic plague, which is like a lot of what he did. Right. Plague is always a good way to go.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, it's not. It sounds awful but uh he wanted to make super plague effectively like the video game uh on your cell phone i think it's called epidemic where you make your own plague and or plague ink i don't know but yeah you try to wipe out the earth he wanted to make his own version of the plague. This all just seems so risky. Like, putting aside the fact that they're, you know, torturing and experimenting on humans.

Like, if you put yourself in the mind of, like, of an absolutely insane psychopath, like, even you'd be like, hmm, maybe killing the world was a bad idea. Not even that. Like, even in the most controlled environment, like, you're giving people a highly contagious disease like what if that passes to you and then you pass it to like people that you don't intend to kill that's the one part that never really got me is like i get anthrax i get

mustard gas stuff like that because like you spray that on a battlefield and then you just kind of fuck off and wait for people to die. But when you unleash super bubonic plague onto say the Chinese countryside, which is what he's going to do. It's like, haha, it worked. Oh no, it's coming back. It's like they didn't read their own history books when the

plague wiped out half the goddamn planet a couple hundred years ago. Now, he didn't exactly have high technology when it came to creating this new super plague. Instead, he would inject the plague, the regular disease, into people and then harvest their blood as they died,

which would then be used to infect other people. Only the blood of the most sick and weak would be used. So the faster you deteriorated and the more symptoms you showed, you'd be bled out while you're still alive. So what are some of the symptoms of the bubonic plague? A lot of it's flu-like

and then you get these huge, I think they're called bubles. They look kind of like fucking tumors in like your armpits and like the crux of your knees. And like you bleed out of your orifices, your insides begin to slough off and die. Ugh.

Yeah. All right, animal fact, please. All right, animal fact number two. The peacock mantis shrimp, which is something I was not aware of existed, can throw a punch at 50 miles an hour, accelerating quicker than a.22 caliber bullet. Do you have a picture of this thing?

Yeah, it looks kind of like a shrimp while they superimpose boxing gloves on it yeah yeah sounds all right um now uh so yeah if you were one of the the people that got the sickest the fastest uh he wouldn't even wait for you to die. He would bleed you out literally into buckets like a slaughterhouse. And there's firsthand accounts of like he wanted all the blood he could get. So they dress people like wild animals, hanging them upside down. And when that wasn't enough, they would have an aide jump up and down on them to squirt it like they were a toothpaste like a toothpaste

tube yeah imagine being so what's your job around here I don't want to talk about it I jump up and down the bodies because I'm fat I'm just like I shouldn't be but I'm picturing this'm just like, I shouldn't be,

but I'm picturing this in like a super like dark comedy type scenario. It's like Japanese medical aid slipping on puddles of blood.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That is she. It's not funny, guys. My brain is just really fucked right now. No, I broke your brain on the show.

On the discord earlier, someone was like, I can't believe you guys haven't broken rich yet. And I said, the Halloween episode will break rich. Here it is. I was right. Now, so he got his super plague blood. Now, he did this through multiple people. So he'd have his cultivated bubonic plague strain.

Say he'd inject it into me, I would die. Or I'd get viciously sick, I would get squeezed out like a toothpaste tube into a tub. And then he'd take my blood and he would inject you with it, spreading my- I'm sorry, I can't. Now I'm just picturing the little toothpaste squeezy thing. Yep, yep.

You would dash to the end of the tube and squeeze forward. It's like Go-Grit, but the plague. Everybody picture this with me. It's like Go-Grit, but the plague. And so then he'd inject my blood into you. You'd get really sick. Well, he'd inject my blood into several people. And whoever was the sickest one of that group,

then you'd get the toothpaste tube treatment. And then your blood would go on to infect 100 other people and so on and so forth until he had a fucking super super plague i don't know how many times he did this but it was tons of times but he had to come up with an effective way to deliver this plague now if anybody remembers their medieval history and i'm sure rich does um the plague was not spread by rats it was spread by fleas and he figured why not we'll just do that because he's just trying to recreate the fucking apocalypse like shiro ishii's the closest thing humanity's ever had to a fucking super villain so you're gonna control fleas oh

what if i told you he turned them into bombs? We'll get to that. Now, included in the compound was 4,500 specialized containers for breeding and keeping a population of fleas that numbered somewhere in the hundreds of millions. First and only ever flea breeding project. Hey, don't you malign the flea breeder hobbyists. No, no, that's not a thing. That's not a thing. I don't know. From there, he would infect them all with plague blood that he had been creating. And by infect them, I mean he would put it in like a mister and spray it onto them like a horrible garden.

Why wouldn't he just let them suck the blood of the people who had the plague? Because he was too busy killing them. Right. But I don't know. I wouldn't he just let them suck the blood of the people who had the plague? Because he was too busy killing them. I don't know. I can't begin to understand this guy's thought process. It worked. That's the thing. I think it was like, well, obviously they're not going to absorb the flea. The fleas aren't going to absorb

the plague by getting soaked in blood, but they're going to drink it once it's sprayed on them. Right. And it worked. So if it's dumb and it works i mean it's still evil but it's not dumb how did he stop the fleece from coming back and getting on him ah we'll talk about that uh now how he contained them uh they were specially built uh containers that were used for so they came in virtually no human contact. And the people who had to deal with it had to wear like special suits. But that didn't stop from like literally hundreds of cases of workers dying.

I would imagine. I imagine this was like the second most dangerous posting you can have in the Japanese military outside the Pacific Islands fighting the United States. Now, when the workers got really sick, did they get squeezed out like toothpaste tubes too? No, their bodies got cremated. Well, that just seems like a waste of a good-plagued body. You would think that, but it's uncontrolled.

I mean, as insane as this whole thing is, This whole thing seems out of control, Joe. But that's what makes it so evil. Shiro Ishii was a fucking super villain all of all of this was controlled to the the finest detail when someone there is an aberration he had to kill it immediately so like if it wasn't a body that he purposely tracked and purposely infected it had to go also it's like if you want to stop an outbreak, because like plague bodies can spread plague. So you got to burn those motherfuckers.

Yeah. And after he got the blood out of the bodies, that's where the rest of the bodies went to, is they immediately get incinerated. So did the workers like not go home? Did they like live at the place? Well, I mean, they weren't in Japan. They were thousands of miles away in China. So they were there for the long haul.

Yeah. It's not like there was leave. No. The Japanese military is fucking brutal. So I've been reading a few firsthand accounts of IJA and IGN soldiers, and there's not a lot of them. But the general consensus is life was bad and leave never got approved. Life was really bad today had to squeeze out this guy's blood

from his plague I had a long hard day like on the call home to your family what'd you do today how was your day let's talk about you it took seven jumps guys my friend Bill went into the flea tank and then I had to burn his corpse

now you obviously can't just like i don't know set a shop vac vacuum into reverse and fire plague fleas at people you had to think of a delivery system to just to fully round out your super villain-esque repertoire i mean it would probably just kill everybody in the compound, which I support. They should all probably die. But Ishii had to find a way to weaponize fleas, which had never really been done before. Okay. So...

All right. She's doing spirit hands right now. Very excited, which is weird. Because I just flashed back to the Emperor's New Groove where Yzma, the evil person, the villain in Emperor's New Groove, her entire plan was to turn Kuzco into a flea and then put the flea into the box and put the box into another box and ship it to herself

so she could smash it with the hammer. That's what this reminds me of. That's how this idea sounds right now. So what you're saying is he killed hundreds of thousands of chinese people once he was a flea that's real bold for a disney movie so ishi dug into his uh big bag of evil tricks to figure out how to weaponize fleas so he built a bomb uh now obviously you can't explode a bomb weaponize fleas. So he built a bomb. Now, obviously, you can't explode a bomb full of fleas. You'll kill the fleas and your whole experiment will be pointless.

So he built it out of ceramics, pumped it full of oxygen, and then filled it with plague fleas. Each one would contain between 30,000 and 100,000 fleas. That's too many fleas. That's a lot of fucking fleas. I want to know who counted. Because I went to know who counted. Because like

I went through like three different sources. I used three different sources for this one. It was a really good book called The Doctor of Death. But like all of them cite this 30,000 number. Who fucking counted? That's like when you have those like flea circuses and you train them and stuff. You're like, okay, now jump into

the box. Yeah, this whole thing happened because Shiro Ishii's dad was a real prick and didn't let him have a flea farm or a flea circus. He's like, I'll fucking show you, dad. Fucking murder flea circus. Murder circus.

Now, these bombs would eventually be dropped on Chinese population centers causing casualties in the tens of thousands and causing plague to sweep through the country and kill hundreds of thousands. In one case, I mean, this is why biological warfare is so awful. I mean, obviously,

I don't really need to explain why it's awful, but this is why. In case anybody's ever read The Stand, and you've already read 1,400 pages of this exact story, a man who was infected by the flea bomb that hit the city of Shuzhou ran from home because he was in the middle of a bombing. He said, well, I'll just go move with my family in Yiwi. So he spread the plague even further. That one patient, Zero, killed half that city.

And that's why biological warfare is fucking horrible. So this actually got released onto the public? Oh, yeah. Holy shit. I thought we were just talking about experimenting today. That's what it was. That's what they saw it as. They didn't see themselves.

I mean, now they wanted to terror bomb the Chinese public, which they did all the time, into submission. So they wouldn't have to fight a three-sided war. But this is also an experiment for much more widespread usage. Now, if you know enough, you know that I'm not going to caveat this entire episode with, and then American forces got plague bombed on Guadalcanal because they never finished their experiments. Also because they were kind of worried that if we plague bombed or gassed them, we would do the same thing in return. There's kind of an unwritten agreement in World War

II. If you don't use chemical weapons, we won't use chemical weapons. But if you use them first, we'll use them too. Which is the same reason why the Nazis only used chemical weapons on their own people. Everybody had tons of chemical and biological warfare weapons in World War II and just nobody used them. Except the Japanese.

Yeah. Animal fact. Animal fact. Studies have shown that wild chimps in Guinea drink fermented palm sap, which contains about 3% alcohol by volume. Volume. That's what I said. But it'd be cool if they had volume too.

They could relax. Don't make fun of my Michigan accent. So yeah, every time you see a monkey just think about him being shit-faced. Maybe wearing a top hat.

Ishii also created thousands of pounds of anthrax in a compound and spread it throughout the Zhejiang countryside killing about 10,000 people in any given month.

The list of horrifying diseases that Yixing unleashed upon China is long and the most widespread use of biological warfare in human history. No one's entirely sure how many people a Japanese army killed throughout their widespread use of weaponized diseases, but the number is easily greater than half

a million people. What is more terrifying than that is what the labs were doing when uncovered by advancing Soviet forces, and their records were found. Now, I'm not going to say this is worse than plague bombing. I know I wrote that, but like, I'll let you be the judge. It quickly became clear what Ishii was doing to the Chinese was not what could be considered actual biological offensive weapons. It was an experiment. He had only ever unleashed a very small amount of Unit 731's biological capabilities. If Japan had wanted to, they could have killed the entire human race. But German gas warfare, not the only thing Ishii did inside the compound of Unit 731. He also went full Mengele and began conducting more experiments on people.

Now, if you're wondering, just where the hell did he get thousands of people to experiment on, the Japanese army round up thousands of people for the sole use of giving them to Unit 731. Just like rounding them up on the streets? Yeah, yep. What the fuck?

In many cases, several of these experiments were conducted on prisoners of war in one instance a unit 731 medic named takio wano remarked that he saw a six foot tall white man who he thought might be russian pickled in a giant jar of formaldehyde and left sitting in the corner of a doctor's office strangely the japanese only seem to only really want to do that to white people as the war went on there was numerous accounts of white pows being split in half lengthwise and stuffed inside human-sized jars uh of pickling equipment or formaldehyde to be displayed wherever chinese prisoners were generally discarded as an incinerator where the fuck do you get a human-sized

jar i'm going to assume they had it purposeful built. So yeah, they would do weird display stuff to a lot of Russians fell in the Japanese hands. And they'd do weird shit to them while the Chinese bodies would just be discarded in an incinerator. Like, yeah, we don't need those. It was really strange. Um, in another case,

a truckload of 40 Russian POWs came in and someone decided they weren't needed for any more experiments. Like, man, we got enough people get rid of them. So they were told that an epidemic had broke out in the region, which to be fair, it was probably true because they caused it.

Uh, and they need to line up for an inoculation against it. So they didn't die. As they lined up, the medic giving the injection rubbed the site with an alcoholic swab before injecting them, with potassium cyanide killing them in seconds. Oh, what the fuck? Of the thousands who died at the hands of Unit 731, a full 30% were captured Soviet soldiers, while still another 200 American and British soldiers shared the same fate.

They would be the lucky ones. One Japanese doctor named Yoshimura Hiyasato took a keen interest in hypothermia. So, he would take a prisoner and force various limbs into vats of ice water and hold them in place until they were covered with a sheet of ice.

According to a New York Times article, the limbs were so frozen that when the doctor hit them with a stick and made them sound like he'd bounce it off wood, he then hit them with a hammer to see if they shattered, like a cartoon. Did they? No.

That doesn't happen to limbs, and he should have known that he was a fucking doctor. I figured, like, bones, though. Well, I mean, it could have broke the limb, but your skin won't shatter like that. Right, right, right. I just figured, like, if your bone gets frozen and then got hit, like, would it shatter? It might just kind of sink.

I don't know. You'd have to ask Hiyasato. He probably still lives in Japan. Once frozen, Hiyasato would try different techniques to rewarm the limb that he had just frozen. This included things like dumping boiling water onto them, leaving them next to a fire, or just letting themselves thaw out. None of that worked,

and he only succeeded in causing horrible, excruciating pain and death. That sounds so fucking painful. Yeah, and I should go without saying that all this is without anesthetic. Then there were the weapons tests. Japanese soldiers would force a large group of prisoners into a firing range where they'd be shot to

shit by soldiers with various weapons to see how much damage they did, which they probably should have known because they were in the middle of a war. They did the same thing with things like bayonets, swords, and knives, weapons that had been used for literally hundreds of years and had plenty of case study

behind them. The weapons tested also include flamethrowers, nerve agent, and blister agents. So, the blister agents are just awful. It causes horrible, excruciating pain. You probably won't even die from it. Blinds you, covers you in horrible, painful blisters,

and they just be left out there to roll around in pain. People were strapped into large centrifuges and spun at painful blisters, and they'd just be left out there to roll around in pain. Nice. Yeah. People were strapped into large centrifuges and spun at higher and higher rates of speed until they died. It normally happened around 15 Gs. In other cases, people were put in high-pressure chambers until they simply exploded.

Yeah. I can see kind of the testing behind that if you squint hard enough because they're building planes and they're built and you know they have high dreams of jets and shit so they want to test what uh that kind of force would do to a human body but at the same time i think they probably already kind of knew that's a pretty hard squint joe yeah yeah they're exposed to x-rays in greater and greater amounts until they are sterilized or burned to death.

Heavy objects like stones, crates, and ammo were dropped onto limbs to observe crush injuries. And then when they were stricken with broken legs, they would only be given seawater to drink. Which everybody has known since, like, we first put boats in the water not to fucking do. They already knew what was going to happen. Yeah. Okay. Animal facts. Animal facts Okay. Animal fact. Animal facts!

Let's see. The capuchin monkeys, you know the one from Friends? Yeah. They pee on their hands to wash their feet. Gross. Yeah. Just trying to make sure it doesn't get athlete's foot. I mean, that's not a cute animal fact. That's kind of a gross one. I just said animal fact. Earlier, I was told cute animal fact. I's kind of a gross one. I just said animal fact. Earlier

I was told cute animal fact. I lied. You always do. It's beginning to become a theme. And then there were the syphilis experiments. As various venereal diseases had long been the scourge and bane of every military since the dawn of

organized time, the Japanese army wanted to figure out the best way to treat these maladies. They did so in the most nightmarish way possible. Rather than just find... Bring it off. Honestly, that's better. So, rather

than just find prisoners with the disease, you can kind of feel like this is going. They would seek out syphilitic male prisoners from the population and force them to rape the rest of the prison population.

Oh, what the fuck? Yeah. If the disease did not take hold, they would simply do it again. And that would not be the only time Ishii forced prisoners to victimize each other.

Female prisoners were forcefully impregnated by other inmates and sometimes the guards. For what? You'll find out. I don't want to. It gets worse.

No, thank you. They then would be inflicted with as many experiments as they could, pretty much all the ones that we just talked about, including both weapons and nerve agent type experiments. Then the fetus would be cut out and studied to see how it had been affected by the tortures of their mother. Jesus Christ. Again, none of these experiments were fucking necessary at all. You think?

Yeah. Just a stretch. I think he went a little overboard. Just a scoach. Just a hair. A scoach. A hair overboard. Someone just need to take Ishii aside and be like,

Shiro, no. No, no. No, sir. Yeah, just a quick tap on the nose with the newspaper roll. That does it. That would probably straighten him right out. Thankfully for all of humankind, the Japanese government surrendered August 15th, 1945,

finally bringing Unit 731 to an end. Ishii saw the writing on the wall and ordered the compound to be destroyed again, yeah, this is kind of a thing with him including their records tools, and the remaining prisoners and as one giant final fuck you to humanity, Ishii

released tens of millions of plague infested rats into the Chinese countryside over the next three years, at least 50,000 people died from the plague in those areas. Holy shit. How is this not something that we learn about? You'll find out.

Oh, good. This gets worse. I'm going to let you mull that around why the U.S. wouldn't want to teach people about this. By the time it finally came to an end, at least 10,000 people had been killed by experimentations within the compound itself, hundreds of which were provided

by the Japanese secret police every year. Many of them were simply political dissidents. And then the scientists, the doctors, their aides, all just went back to Japan. They slipped back into civilian life as if they had not just been mass-murdering psychopaths. As for Ishii, he knew he'd be facing the hangman's noose and faked his own death.

He went into hiding in Japan with no real exit strategy, unlike Mengele, Ishii was eventually found in 1946. Now, even though the Japanese government had attempted to keep Unit 731 a secret, the U.S. General Douglas MacArthur already knew who Ishii was. You see, even though only a year had passed since the end of World War II, the U.S. and the USSR were already at each other's throats in the early phases of the Cold War. The U.S. would do anything for a leg up over their communist enemies. And so in 1946, MacArthur granted immunity to every scientist who had taken part in the experience in exchange for everything they knew regarding German warfare.

In an internal War Department memorandum dated June 23rd, the day before my birthday, 1947, he wrote, It is believed that the USSR possesses only a small portion of the technical information, and since any war crimes

action would completely reveal such data to all nations, it is felt necessary that such publicity must be avoided in the interest of defense and security to the U.S. It is believed that the war crimes prosecution of General Ishii and his associates would serve to stop the

flow of much-needed information to the technical and scientific nature to our forces. And since freedom and their lives was apparently not good enough of a plea bargain, Ishii was given a large salary paid by the U.S. government that would continue until his death. No. You're fucking with me right now. Nope. You're not. That's not. They flew him to Fort Detrick, Maryland to assist the U.S.'s own germ experimentations on animals up until 1948. Now, I'm not saying these two are connected, but the U.S. later conducted the Tuskegee syphilis experiments,

where they allowed black men to come into a clinic to get free treatment for syphilis. They were told they were getting treatment. Instead, what they were doing were being charted as they died as treatment was not given to them. But they were told they were getting treatment. This went on until I believe the 70s. Fuck. Animal fact. What the fuck?

I'm not saying the two are connected. I want this one to be cute. Only the males are called peacocks. The females are called peahens. I'll give you another one. Baby elephants suck their trunks for comfort. Always, always baby elephant facts. Always.

They suck their trunks for comfort. I feel always baby elephant facts. Always. Yep. They suck their trunks for comfort. I feel happy now. Much like Marilyn Manson. What? The U.S. and its allies did its best to keep these war crimes out of the public eye because they literally had just

turned some of them into government employees. They largely succeeded with information only coming out in the 1980s, long after most of the doctors were dead. As for Shiro Ishii, he spent the rest of his life living in the outskirts of Tokyo, living on a fat government paycheck, where veterans of Unit 731 were all gathered together

for barbecues and drinks at regular occasion, the bill of which would be given to the U.S. government. Shiro Ishii died at the age of 67 from laryngeal cancer in Shinjuku. His funeral was chaired by none other than the second in command of Unit 731, Masiji Kitano,

who had also been a government employee of the United States government. I hate history now. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. I was blissfully ignorant of all of this history before you kept fucking inviting me here. I will say there's probably

one group of people more poisoned than the United States by this, and that's Japan. As for the rest of the Unit 731 doctors, many of them ended up as important university faculty across the country. One ended up becoming the governor of Tokyo.

Another was a president of the Japanese Medical Association. The man in charge of the vivisection program, Yoshishiki Murata, became the director of the Kyoto University Medical School. Yeah. Dude. Yeah. Japan, what the fuck? Everybody, what the fuck?

Everybody. There the fuck? Everybody. There is thousands of Japanese doctors in the country today that were educated by people who literally did vivisection on concentration camp victims. I don't know how many of those people fucking practice in the US now, but probably more than 100. Also, the governor of Tokyo. What the fuck? I can't with this shit i mean see what you will but our war criminals they are very very rarely put into public office oh eddie gallagher's gonna run for president isn't he

eddie gallagher baronron Trump 2024. It's going to happen. Now, this never really... They've made movies about Nazi death camps more than I can count. There's books. There's a hundred other things. Only one real movie was made about this. It was The Men Behind the Sun. And it was pretty much an exploitation film slash snuff film. That just means they were probably being accurate. But also, it had an NC-17 rating and never really went anywhere uh it broke the law in multiple occasions

because i think that the the director or the writer maybe i'm giving too much credit here read too much into this and just lost his fucking mind uh because it included actual autopsy footage of a small child and there's a scene where they cover a live cat in honey and throw it into a room full of starved rats and videotape the aftermath. What? Yeah, that's a movie. It's on Netflix, I think. No. Yeah, it's at least on Amazon Prime.

I've seen it before. Yeah, it's called The Men Behind the Sun. Don't watch it. It's terrible. There's a reason why everybody likes to pretend it doesn't exist and that's our episode what the fuck i'm pretty sure last time i said fucking bears and puppies joe uh we had a bear and puppy episode rich you were there yeah that's all i want to be invited back for. I'll give you one more animal fact, just so you can picture this in your head. Consider this a mental bleach. There's once a type of crocodile that could gallop.

Cool. Now we're going to go to our question from the Legion, which is directed specifically at Rich. You've gotten two questions now. I haven't gotten a single one directed at me. I don't believe you. I haven't. Nick has gotten like four.

Nick's an interesting guy. I must be really, really boring. He's an enigma. I'm the guy that talks about vivisection and everybody gets fun questions. I have feelings, y'all. So the question today is, which one of Mark Wahlberg's films is your most favorite? And I don't remember when you talked about Mark Wahlberg to let people know about this.

I don't either. But he is adorable. So, oh, I think I remember mentioning his Calvin Klein ad which was definitely on my on my like little pen board when I was in high school wow when would that have came up I don't know I don't know I'm usually drunk when I do these yeah you're disastrously sober for this one yeah this one you should be at least three times above the legal limit. So what is your favorite Mark Wahlberg film? Okay, so the movie where I first fell in love with Mark Wahlberg was Fear, which I know that probably says a lot about me

because he's like stalkery and abusing and like tries to kill her whole family. And he has that horrible Boston accent. But he's so adorable. You know, all that shit aside, the Boston accent's way worse. I actually used to love his Boston accent. It was just so attractive to me. Somewhere in Boston,

there's like 20 guys that are called Sully that are really excited to hear that. But other amazing Mark Wahlberg movie that I love, Renaissancenaissance man for sure i think my favorite mark walberg film is um not really but i'm gonna say the happening i've actually never seen that it's so bad i've heard that it's fucking terrible like did you come here to kill me and mark Mark Wahlberg's like what? No. And then people just start killing themselves. Yeah we were

talking about that the other day because somebody was saying they were going to lay down in front of a lawnmower like on The Happening at work because that's what we do at work. It's talk about how best to kill ourselves. You know the army's interesting in that it's the only place where you can go to a large group

of employees and all of them will vividly tell you how they're thinking about maiming or killing themselves to get out of work. Either maiming themselves to get convalescent leave or just straight up killing themselves. Army strong. Oh, sorry, sorry. What's your

warrior? That's their new one. What? Did you catch that? No, I did not. sorry. What's your warrior? That's their new one. What? Did you catch that? No, I did not. Yep. What's your warrior? Yep. That's not even a fucking phrase. Who came up with that?

I'm glad I could make you so upset to close out this happy episode that we had. Now, thank you everybody for tuning in to this horrible, disastrous second Halloween special. If you think what we do is worth a dollar, and why would you now? Don't do it, guys. At this point, like 20 people should cancel their subscriptions.

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Which is fucking mind-blowing. Yeah, thank you for that. Thank you for all your views, your kind words. Thanks for all the shout-outs. Thank you for your questions from the Legion. Those are always really entertaining to round out that horribly dark episode. Until next time. Bye.