History of Japanese Biological Weapons
4
gallery
2020-01-09T12:00:51-05:00
An about biological warfare in Korea and China and the effects of the patriotic hygiene movement published by the Việt Minh shows the imagined political geography of imperialist and non-imperialist nations and their relationship to invasion. This pamphlet drew on information obtained at the end of 1952 and the beginning of 1953 in China and reflected similar themes to those on Chinese propaganda posters. It was also one of the ways that medical doctors and cadre, including Tôn Thất Tùng, sought to popularize knowledge about environmental warfare.
Even though the Việt Minh quietly shelved their charges of germ warfare against the French, this pamphlet offers insights into the fears of biological warfare circulating among intellectuals and elites, if not the broader populace.
The Việt Minh pamphlet begins by presenting the Chinese and North Korean accusations of US germ warfare. It next presents the well-document biological weapons program developed by the Japanese military, including Units 731 and 1000. This history is key to the charges of US germ warfare as it connects a proven case of germ warfare with an unproven instance of germ warfare. As the next set of images shows, the US military let those responsible for the Japanese biological warfare program go in exchange for the information that they had gathered from their experiments, including on Chinese and Soviet soldiers. This gathering of information, in combination with the US's own research in biological weapons before and during World War II, provided two circumstantial pieces of evidence for the US use of these weapons in the Korean war. Finally, imperialism served as an overarching logic linking Japan and the US. From the perspective of many in Vietnam, including the leaders of the Việt Minh, it seemed obvious that imperialist nations would use biological weapons if they were available.
For a set of documents from the Soviet Union that details their realization that the specific evidence for US germ warfare in North Korea and Northeast China was weak and had possibly been fabricated, see the Woodrow Wilson website. Note that the first note from a Soviet official concerning fabricated evidence came in April 1953, over a year of the first charges of germ warfare. It is possible then that the coverup took place once the researchers involved realized that the charges that originally seemed true, and in any case eminently believable, turned out to be false.
