The new film Evil Unbound tells the story of Unit 731 and Japanese biowarfare in China. How the mass murderers escaped justice with U.S. support after World War II offers lessons even today.
People enter a movie theater to attend the Los Angeles premiere of the film "Evil Unbound" in Los Angeles, the United States, Sept. 18, 2025.
On May 18, the highly-anticipated film Evil Unbound on the notorious Japanese germ-warfare unit, hit the Chinese cinemas. The screening was purposely set for 9:18 AM to highlight the “September 18 Incident,” marking the onset of the Japanese military invasion of China in 1931.
Evil Unbound (2025) directed by Zhao Linshan (Source: Movie poster)
The movie grossed over $14 million in presale box office and topped the most-anticipated movies list, with over 4 million people expressing interest in watching it. It is directed by Zhao Linshan who hopes “to save history from oblivion" and "open the wound for healing.”
Unit 731 is the codename for the covert Japanese military medical unit, which was responsible for bacterial warfare and human experiments in 1932-45. The brutal experimentation caused the direct deaths of thousands of Chinese, Korean, Soviet, and Western prisoners of war. The tests were executed in Harbin, Northeast China, where Imperial Japan established the world’s largest biowarfare base in 1936.
These crimes against humanity were systematically and purposely covered and the criminals rewarded by the United States. The lessons reverberate from Auschwitz to Gaza today, as I show in The Obliteration Doctrine.
Why war criminals were excluded from the Tokyo Trial
Between 1946 and 1948, the Nuremberg Trials, which prosecuted some high-level Nazi war criminals, were followed by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, or the Tokyo Trial. Building on the Nuremberg Charter, 28 high-ranking Japanese military and political leaders were tried by the court. They were charged with 55 separate counts, including waging wars of aggression, murder, and various war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Emulating the dark pattern set in Nuremberg, none of the leaders of Imperial Japan were charged for genocidal atrocities, despite their racist Yamato doctrine and Japanese war crimes in East and Southeast Asia.
Moreover, evidence that would have incriminated Emperor Hirohito and his family was excluded from the Tribunal.
In this insulation, a key role belonged to General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan. He believed the U.S. needed Hirohito for stability in Japan and to move from the occupation policy to reconstruction and remilitarization, to support U.S. Cold War goals in Asia.
General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito at their first meeting, at the U.S. Embassy, Tokyo, September 27, 1945 (Source: Wikimedia)
In Imperial Japan, Nobusuke Kishi, who later became Prime Minister, had used emergency laws to enslave 1.5 million Chinese in the Japanese puppet state Manchuko, wartime Manchuria. Instead of being sentenced as a Class A war criminal, U.S. occupation authorities did not charge, try Kishi, the maternal grandfather of the subsequent PM, Shinzo Abe. Instead, he was released and became, with overt and covert U.S. support, the subsequent PM. Consolidating Japanese conservatives, he was instrumental in forming the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japan’s dominant party.
Intriguingly, the key members of the Japanese biowarfare efforts, too, were absent from the Tokyo Trial. Thanks to U.S. interventions, the Tokyo Trials did not charge the military leaders behind human experiments.
Unit 731’s death camps and Ishii’s immunity deal
Between 1937 and 1945, Unit 731 and its clones engaged in lethal experimentation cooperating with the Nazis. The crimes of the unit were reminiscent of those in the Nazi camps by the infamous SS officer Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death.”
In Japanese human experiments, the Chinese victims were routinely dehumanized and internally referred to as “logs.” Dehumanization fostered brutality.
What united the experiments in Auschwitz and Unit 731 was a presumably scientific interest in what was racially desirable and utter disregard of those seen as racially undesirable. But the death factories of General Shirō Ishii went further. The experiments included disease injections, controlled dehydration, biological weapons testing, hypobaric pressure chamber testing, vivisection, organ harvesting, and amputation, and standard weapons testing.
In Harbin, China, Unit 731 murdered an estimated 14,000 victims featuring kidnapped Chinese males, women, children and babies born from the staff’s rapes. Up to 300,000 individuals died due to infectious illnesses caused by the unit and its affiliated research facilities. Yet, General Shirō Ishii, director of Unit 731, was never prosecuted for war crimes or crimes against humanity.
General Shirō Ishii as a lieutenant colonel and after the war (Source: Wikimedia)
Responsibility for the germ-warfare program extended to Japan’s government leaders and many respected scientists who escaped indictment. U.S. military intelligence insinuated itself into the Tokyo Trial by blocking prosecution's access to witnesses and classifying incriminating documents.
Washington decision-makers, supported by General MacArthur, hoped to acquire Japan’s biological warfare expertise to gain an advantage over the Soviet Union.
The moral of the story is that most genocidists escape justice. When Israeli Mossad’s legendary head Isser Harel had his team hijack Eichmann from Argentina, they almost got Mengele, as he told me in Tel Aviv in the mid-1970s. After World War II, Mengele lived happily hiding in São Paulo until his death in 1986. General Shirō Ishii could have been sentenced along with his superiors. Instead, he was given immunity by General MacArthur.
Justice was systematically obstructed by the U.S. military and the CIA.
Absolution was not the exception, but the rule. Take, for instance, Yoshimura Hisato, who ran the brutal frostbite experiments including forced mutilation without sedatives. He served later as President of Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine and in 1978 was awarded for pioneering work in “environmental adaptation science” by Emperor Hirohito.
In Japan, witnesses who tried to speak in public about their experiences in Unit 731 were long not only discredited but threatened into silence by ultranationalists. In the West, charges of Japan’s large-scale human experimentation during World War II were rejected largely as “Communist propaganda” until the 1980s.
Bioweapons against adversaries, allies - and fellow-citizens
Both the U.S. and Soviet Union garnered data from the Japanese biowarfare units after the war. After collaboration, the Soviets sentenced the Japanese to Siberian labor camps for 2-25 years, whereas those captured by the U.S. were secretly given immunity.
The infamous Shirō Ishii was hired by the U.S. government to lecture at Fort Detrick on bioweapons and the Unit 731’s “findings.” During the Korean War, he was also among the Japanese war criminals sent to Korea to participate in the U.S. Army’s alleged biological warfare activities.
Instead of death sentences, the U.S. covered up the human experimentations, granted stipends to the perpetrators and coopted bioweapon knowledge. The lethal knowledge was used in biological and chemical weapons; in the Korean War against China, in the Cold War against the Soviets.
But it wasn’t just U.S. adversaries that would have to suffer from what the Pentagon, the CIA and Fort Detrick learned from Japanese war criminals. Ultimately, U.S. soldiers and American citizens would be targeted, too.
Japanese biowarfare specialists were deployed against U.S. enemies but tested on ordinary Americans. These tests exposed humans to chemical and biological weapons, human radiation experiments, injections of toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation and torture, and tests which involved mind-altering substances.
Reflecting America’s long interest in eugenics and segregation, many tests were performed not just on children, but on the sick, and mentally disabled, while a disproportionate share of the subjects were poor, racial minorities, and prisoners. The experiments included Project MK Ultra, a CIA human experimentation program to develop drugs for interrogation and forced confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. By 2008, tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel and civilians had been exposed to biological and chemical substances through the Pentagon’s tests.
If we ignore these historical trajectories, we are likely to repeat them in the future. When evil is rewarded, moral collapse is just a matter of time.
