Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, June 1, 1995                   TAG: 9506010060
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: THOMAS EASTON THE BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE: FUKUOKA, JAPAN                                LENGTH: Long

FEW AWARE OF GRUESOME EXPERIMENTS ON U.S.

``I could never again wear a white smock,'' says Dr. Toshio Tono, dressed in a white running jacket at his hospital and recalling events of 50 years ago. ``It's because the prisoners thought that we were doctors, since they could see the white smocks, that they didn't struggle. They never dreamed they would be dissected.''

The prisoners were eight American airmen, knocked out of the sky over southern Japan during the waning months of World War II, and then torn apart organ by organ while they were still alive.

What occurred 50 years ago this month at the anatomy department of Kyushu University has largely been forgotten in Japan and is virtually unknown in the United States. American prisoners of war were subjected to horrific medical experiments. All of the prisoners died. Most of the physicians and assistants then did their best to hide the evidence of what they had done.

Fukuoka is midway between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are planning elaborate ceremonies to mark the devastation caused by the United States' dropping the first atomic bombs. But neither Fukuoka nor the university plans to mark its own moment of infamy.

The gruesome experiments performed at the university were variations on research programs Japan conducted in territories it occupied during the war. In the most notorious of these efforts, the Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731 killed thousands of Chinese and Russians held prisoner in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, in experiments to develop chemical and biological weapons.

Ken Yuasa, now a frail, 70-year-old physician in Tokyo, belonged to a military company stationed just south of Unit 731's base at Harbin, Manchuria. He recalls joining other doctors to watch as a prisoner was shot in the stomach, to give Japanese surgeons practice at extracting bullets.

While the victim was still alive, the doctors also practiced amputations.

``It wasn't just my experience,'' Yuasa says. ``It was done everywhere.''

Kyushu University stands out as the only site where Americans were incontrovertibly used in dissections and the only known site where experiments were done in Japan.

On May 5, 1945, an American B-29 bomber was flying with a dozen other aircraft after bombing Tachiarai Air Base in southwestern Japan and beginning the return flight to the island fortress of Guam.

Kinzou Kasuya, a 19-year-old Japanese pilot flying one of the Japanese fighters in pursuit of the Americans, rammed his aircraft into the fuselage of the B-29, destroying both planes.

No one knows for certain how many Americans were in the B-29; its crew had been hastily assembled on Guam. But villagers in Japan who witnessed the collision in the air saw about a dozen parachutes blossom.

One of the Americans died when the cords of his parachute were severed by another Japanese plane. A second was alive when he reached the ground. He shot all but his last bullet at the villagers coming toward him, then used the last on himself.

Two others were quickly stabbed or shot to death.

At least nine were taken into custody.

The local authorities assumed that the most knowledgeable was the captain, Marvin S. Watkins. He was sent to Tokyo for interrogation, where he would be tortured but would nonetheless survive the war.

Every available account asserts that a military physician and a colonel in a local regiment were the two key figures in what happened next. What happened cannot be easily explained. Perhaps caring for the Americans was an impossible burden, especially because some were injured. Perhaps food was scarce.

Whatever the reason, the colonel and doctor decided to make the prisoners available for medical experiments, and Kyushu University became a willing participant.

The Japanese wanted to learn whether a patient could survive the partial loss of his liver. They wanted to learn if epilepsy could be controlled by removing part of the brain. According to U.S. military records, physicians also operated on the prisoners' stomachs and necks.

All the Americans died.

``There was no debate among the doctors about whether to do the operations - that is what made it so strange,'' Tono says.

The remains of the soldiers were at first preserved in formaldehyde so they could be studied by anatomy students. There were second thoughts when Japan surrendered to the United States in August 1945.

Some of the people involved began to worry about the consequences of having performed the experiments. The body parts were disposed of, records destroyed and stories concocted to mask what had been done.

Japanese authorities claimed that some of the American POWs had been sent to Hiroshima and vanished in the atomic bomb blast, that the others had been in a plane crash on the way to Tokyo. False graves were dug and filled with a jumble of bones.

Word of the experiments eventually leaked out.

Thirty people were brought to trial by an Allied war crimes tribunal in Yokohama, Japan, on March 11, 1948. Charges included vivisection, wrongful removal of body parts and cannibalism - based on reports that the experimenters had eaten the livers of the Americans.

Of the 30 defendants, 23 were found guilty of various charges. (For lack of proof, the charges of cannibalism had been dismissed.) Five of the guilty were sentenced to death, four to life imprisonment. The other 14 were sentenced to shorter terms.

But the attitude of the American occupation forces began to change - largely because of the start of the Korean War in June 1950. The United States had less interest in punishing Japan, an enemy-turned-ally.

In September 1950, U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, as supreme commander for Allied Forces, reduced most of the sentences. By 1958, all those convicted were free. None of the death sentences was carried out.

The victims are honored collectively each May 5 at the sites where the B-29 and the Japanese fighter crashed.

A second, quieter ceremony was held at the monument to Kasuya. A Buddhist monk went from there into the hills to honor the Americans who died before they ever reached Kyushu University.

He said a prayer at each of three stones, marking where three of the Americans are known to have died. Finally, at dusk, he climbed a steep hill to where another flier had been seen to descend from the sky.

In darkness, he said a prayer for the last of the dead.

|By THOMAS EASTON| |THE BALTIMORE SUN|

FUKUOKA, Japan - ``I could never again wear a white smock,'' says Dr. Toshio Tono, dressed in a white running jacket at his hospital and recalling events of 50 years ago. ``It's because the prisoners thought that we were doctors, since they could see the white smocks, that they didn't struggle. They never dreamed they would be dissected.''

The prisoners were eight American airmen, knocked out of the sky over southern Japan during the waning months of World War II, and then torn apart organ by organ while they were still alive.

What occurred 50 years ago this month at the anatomy department of Kyushu University has largely been forgotten in Japan and is virtually unknown in the United States. American prisoners of war were subjected to horrific medical experiments. All of the prisoners died. Most of the physicians and assistants then did their best to hide the evidence of what they had done.

Fukuoka is midway between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are planning elaborate ceremonies to mark the devastation caused by the United States' dropping the first atomic bombs. But neither Fukuoka nor the university plans to mark its own moment of infamy.

The gruesome experiments performed at the university were variations on research programs Japan conducted in territories it occupied during the war. In the most notorious of these efforts, the Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731 killed thousands of Chinese and Russians held prisoner in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, in experiments to develop chemical and biological weapons.

Ken Yuasa, now a frail, 70-year-old physician in Tokyo, belonged to a military company stationed just south of Unit 731's base at Harbin, Manchuria. He recalls joining other doctors to watch as a prisoner was shot in the stomach, to give Japanese surgeons practice at extracting bullets.

While the victim was still alive, the doctors also practiced amputations.

``It wasn't just my experience,'' Yuasa says. ``It was done everywhere.''

Kyushu University stands out as the only site where Americans were incontrovertibly used in dissections and the only known site where experiments were done in Japan.

On May 5, 1945, an American B-29 bomber was flying with a dozen other aircraft after bombing Tachiarai Air Base in southwestern Japan and beginning the return flight to the island fortress of Guam.

Kinzou Kasuya, a 19-year-old Japanese pilot flying one of the Japanese fighters in pursuit of the Americans, rammed his aircraft into the fuselage of the B-29, destroying both planes.

No one knows for certain how many Americans were in the B-29; its crew had been hastily assembled on Guam. But villagers in Japan who witnessed the collision in the air saw about a dozen parachutes blossom.

One of the Americans died when the cords of his parachute were severed by another Japanese plane. A second was alive when he reached the ground. He shot all but his last bullet at the villagers coming toward him, then used the last on himself.

Two others were quickly stabbed or shot to death.

At least nine were taken into custody.

Some of the captives were beaten in retaliation for what Japanese soldiers considered brutal B-29 air raids.

The local authorities assumed that the most knowledgeable was the captain, Marvin S. Watkins. He was sent to Tokyo for interrogation, where he would be tortured but would nonetheless survive the war.

Every available account asserts that a military physician and a colonel in a local regiment were the two key figures in what happened next. What happened cannot be easily explained. Perhaps caring for the Americans was an impossible burden, especially because some were injured. Perhaps food was scarce.

Whatever the reason, the colonel and doctor decided to make the prisoners available for medical experiments, and Kyushu University became a willing participant.

The Japanese wanted to learn whether a patient could survive the partial loss of his liver. They wanted to learn if epilepsy could be controlled by removing part of the brain. According to U.S. military records, physicians also operated on the prisoners' stomachs and necks.

There were intravenous injections of sea water to determine if it could be a substitute for sterile saline solution, used to increase blood volume in the wounded or those in shock.

All the Americans died.

``There was no debate among the doctors about whether to do the operations - that is what made it so strange,'' Tono says.

The remains of the soldiers were at first preserved in formaldehyde so they could be studied by anatomy students. There were second thoughts when Japan surrendered to the United States in August 1945.

Some of the people involved began to worry about the consequences of having performed the experiments. The body parts were disposed of, records destroyed and stories concocted to mask what had been done.

Japanese authorities claimed that some of the American POWs had been sent to Hiroshima and vanished in the atomic bomb blast, that the others had been in a plane crash on the way to Tokyo. False graves were dug and filled with a jumble of bones.

Word of the experiments eventually leaked out.

Thirty people were brought to trial by an Allied war crimes tribunal in Yokohama, Japan, on March 11, 1948. Charges included vivisection, wrongful removal of body parts and cannibalism - based on reports that the experimenters had eaten the livers of the Americans.

Of the 30 defendants, 23 were found guilty of various charges. (For lack of proof, the charges of cannibalism had been dismissed.) Five of the guilty were sentenced to death, four to life imprisonment. The other 14 were sentenced to shorter terms.

But the attitude of the American occupation forces began to change - largely because of the start of the Korean War in June 1950. The United States had less interest in punishing Japan, an enemy-turned-ally.

In September 1950, U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, as supreme commander for Allied Forces, reduced most of the sentences. By 1958, all those convicted were free. None of the death sentences was carried out.

The victims are honored collectively each May 5 at the sites where the B-29 and the Japanese fighter crashed.

A second, quieter ceremony was held at the monument to Kasuya. A Buddhist monk went from there into the hills to honor the Americans who died before they ever reached Kyushu University.

He said a prayer at each of three stones, marking where three of the Americans are known to have died. Finally, at dusk, he climbed a steep hill to where another flier had been seen to descend from the sky.

In darkness, he said a prayer for the last of the dead.