Hiroshima - Atomic Victims as Human Guinea Pigs (criminal Japan’s National Institute of Health (JNIH) Prof. Shingo Shibata 1996).pdf - c_anarchy_politics_history - yoshinn

Preface : This paper was originally published in the academic journal Seisen Review , No. 4, 1996,

Seisen College, Hikone City, Japan. As it sheds a new light on one of many hidden criminal

misdeeds committed by the Japan’s National Institute of Health (JNIH), I publish it on this web

page.

THE ATOMIC VICTIMS AS HUMAN GUINEA PIGS:

The cooperation of the Japan's NIH with the US ABCC

in infringement of human rights of atomic victims

Shingo Shibata

Professor Emeritus at Hiroshima University

Professor of sociology and human rights theory at Seisen College

In connection with the Smithsonian flap, the United States Senate Resolution 257 was passed on

22 September 1994. It reads: “..The role of the Enola Gay during World War II was momentous in

helping to bring World War II to a mercy end, which resulted in saving the lives of Americans and

Japanese .” (emphasis added) Furthermore, on the occasion of the 50 th anniversary of the atomic

bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was repeatedly contended that President Truman was right

when he ordered the use of the atomic bombs because thereby numberless lives of not only

American soldiers but also Japanese were saved. But such an argument has been proved groundless

by some leading researchers. (Blackett, 1949; Alperovitz, 1965, 1985 and 1995; Tachibana, 1979)

What aim did the U.S. government have in carrying out the atomic bombing?

Firstly, by demonstrating the enormous destructive power of the atomic bomb, it wanted to

establish U.S. hegemony over the world after World War II.

Secondly, it aimed to make mass experiments of the uranium bomb on Hiroshima and the

plutonium bomb on Nagasaki to test numberless humans as guinea pigs and thereby to obtain data

on their effects in order to make use of them for further development of nuclear weaponry.

In this paper I am going to demonstrate my conception of the atomic bombing as being human

experimentation.

I. FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE VICTIMS

What did U.S. Military Forces do after the Atomic Bombing?

First of all, I would like to examine the post-bombing policy of the U.S. Forces.

The first order of the U.S. Forces immediately after the occupation was to ban all publication of

reports concerning the genocide and destruction caused by the atomic bombs. Thus they wanted to

monopolize all information on the bombing. Until the end of the occupation on 28 April 1952,

Japanese journalists, writers, cameramen, novelists and scientists were prohibited from reporting on

the real situations of the atomic destruction. If they dared to do so, they were threatened with trial

before the military tribunals of the Occupation Forces. Many books, including novels, poems and

accounts of the events, were censored and often confiscated by American authorities. (Braw, 1986;

Horiba, 1995a and 1995b) As a result, the urgent necessity to give medical and other social aid to the

atomic victims (the “Hibakusha” in Japanese) was not reported even among Japanese.

Their second step was to prohibit all doctors in Japan from communicating and exchanging, even

among themselves, the records of clinical experience and research on the Hibakusha. At that time

they, especially in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, tried to do their best to find ways to cure the unheard-of

terrible burns and internal disorders caused by atomic heat and radiation. The U.S. Forces further

confiscated the samples of burnt or keloid skins, internal organs and blood and the clinical records of

the dead and living Hibakusha. (Committee, 1981)

Their third step was to force the Japanese government to refuse any medical aid offered by the

International Red Cross.

If a laboratory animal were cured, it would be utterly useless from the standpoint of medical

scientific observers. Maybe it was by the same reasoning that the U.S. authorities did their utmost to

prevent any medical treatment given to the Hibakusha. “As far as medical aid is concerned, the less

the better” was their policy.

Their fourth step was to establish the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) as two

institutions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the purpose of observing, not curing, of the hibakusha.

Thus, almost all Hibakusha have been treated as if they were only human guinea pigs. Suppose that

an assailant continues only to observe a wounded victim for many years after an assault. There is no

doubt that such observance itself is nothing but an infringement on human rights.

What did the Japanese Government do to aid the Hibakusha?

I am ashamed to say that the Japanese government did nothing to help the Hibakusha either.

Firstly, its bureaucrats did their utmost to cooperate with the above policy of the U.S. Army

toward the Hibakusha. Only two months after the atomic bombing they dissolved the governmental

hospitals in charge of medical treatment of the Hibakusha in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a result,

many Hibakusha were left on the streets of the devastated cities without any medical treatment,

compounding the many difficult post-war economic and social conditions they had to contend with.

Secondly, by orders of the General Head Quarters (GHQ) of the U.S. Occupation

Forces, on 21 May 1947, the Japanese National Institute of Health (JNIH, YOKEN in Japanese

abbreviation) was founded with half of the staff of the Institute of Infectious Diseases (IID) attached

to the University of Tokyo.

During the period of the Japanese invasion of China from 1931 to 1945, the IID had fully

cooperated with the notorious Unit 731, that is, the Army unit for bacteriological warfare. (Williams

& Wallace, 1989; Harris, 1994) Most of the staff of the JNIH transferred from the University of

Tokyo to the Health and Welfare Ministry were medical scientists who had intimately cooperated

with the network of Unit 731 in China and Singapore as well as the Laboratory for Infectious

Disease Control (LIDC) attached to the Imperial Army's Medical College. The LIDC in Toyama,

Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, was the headquarters for the network of the bacteriological warfare program

and its institutions, including most of the medical schools of many universities.

The officially declared aims of the JNIH were to make research on pathogens and vaccines and

also to screen the safety of biological products (vaccines, blood products and antibiotics), and

thereby to contribute toward preventive medicine and public health under the control of the GHQ.

However, there were two hidden objectives of the JNIH. The first was to cooperate with the ABCC.

The second was to continue, under the guidance and control of the U.S. Army 406th Medical

Laboratory, 1 some uncompleted studies of biological warfare program as schemed up by Unit 731.

(Shibata, 1989 and 1990)

As for the first hidden objective, only 13 days after the establishment of the JNIH the GHQ

asked it to help the ABCC. Dr. Saburo Kojima, then the first Vice-Director and later the second

Director of the JNIH, in his commemorative essay, “Memories on the Past Ten Years of the JNIH,”

looking back on its initial stage of cooperation with the ABCC, wrote, “We, the intelligent scientists

had equally thought that we must not miss this golden opportunity ” 2 to record the medical effects of

the A-bomb on humans. He was reportedly one of the leading medical scientists who committed

vivisection on Chinese prisoners as human guinea pigs in the network of Unit 731 in China. 3 As such

a scientist, very positively appreciating the proposal of the GHQ, he never showed humanistic

sentiments towards the Hibakusha, still less a counter-proposal for medical treatment of them. He

only betrayed such cold-blooded and calculating words as is cited above.

It is clearly reported in the 1948 Annual Report of the JNIH how eagerly and positively the staff

of the JNIH, following the directive of the ABCC, drafted and submitted the “Atomic Bomb

Casualty Research Program” to the GHQ. 4 At that time the JNIH branches were set up in the same

rooms of the ABCC buildings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The directors of the Hiroshima and

Nagasaki Branches of the JNIH served the vice-directors of the ABCC in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Some of the directors of the ABCC were American high ranking military officers (e.g. colonels).

The JNIH staff intimately helped and cooperated with the staff of the ABCC as a de facto branch

of the U.S. Military Forces to check up on conditions of the Hibakusha and doing follow-up research.

The staff of the ABCC-JNIH went around threatening the Hibakusha that they would be on trial

before the military tribunal of the U.S. Forces if they would not cooperate. With such threats they

took the Hibakusha to the ABCC buildings and took off their clothes to photograph them in the nude,

took x-rays, collected blood samples, so they could record the relationship between the quantity of

radiation and the after-effects of the atomic bomb. (Hiroshima City Council against A and H Bombs,

1966; Chugoku Shimbun, 1995)

They did not respect the human dignity of the Hibakusha. They treated them as human guinea

pigs and recorded them as “samples.” When the Hibakusha died, the ABCC-JNIH staff put pressure

on the bereaved to consent to autopsies, and their inner organs, burnt skins and other parts were

dissected and taken away.

In such cold and inhumane sentiments, Dr. Keizo Nakamura, the third Director of the JNIH,

proudly wrote that the ABCC could not have attained their objective without the cooperation of the

JNIH. 5

The information thus collected about the atomic mass experiment on humans was never made

public in Japan. It was secretly reported to the U.S. Department of Defense, the Atomic Energy

Commission (later the Department of Energy) and other military institutions to be utilized for the

improvement of nuclear weapons and reactors.

The post-war Responsibilities of the Japanese Government and the JNIH in Violation of Human

Rights of the Hibakusha

Some may excuse the Japanese government and the JNIH under the pretext that they were only

forced by the authoritarian power of the GHQ. But this was not the case, because the positive

cooperation of the JNIH with the ABCC continued for 28 years from 1947 through to 1975. In 1975

the ABCC had to reorganize itself, and the JNIH was also forced to divorce itself from the former in

the face of increasing denunciation on the part of the Hibakusha and the Japanese people. The

ABCC was reorganized and renamed the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), funded by

both U.S. and Japanese governments. Of course, their character and tasks are almost the same. Their

main operations have been and are the follow-up research on the Hibakusha and the renewed

cooperation with U.S. military institutions and the nuclear industry.

Thus the physical sufferings and mental agony of the Hibakusha were and have been aggravated

by the post-war policy of the U.S. and Japanese governments toward them.

Of course, the Japanese government is to blame for its aggressive wars against Asian countries

and then the first-strike on Pearl Harbor. 6 However, this doesn't justify the U.S. atomic bombing. The

nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be denounced as the unheard-of cruel

genocide and destruction that it was, as well as a most serious violation of international law. (NHK,

1977; Committee, 1981) The further misery of the Hibakusha has also been aggravated by the nature

of the atomic bombing being a massive test on innocent men and women, young and old.

Someone may still try to justify the atomic bombing on the pretext that it saved a number of lives.

Even if true, such a pretext could never justify the fact that the U.S. government, supported by the

Japanese government, has done so much to leave the Hibakusha abandoned, uncared-for and

uncured after the end of the war. If the above pretext had been true, why didn’t it do the best to give

medical and other social aid to victims produced by an act of “mercy”? Its post-bombing and

post-war policies themselves have demonstrated what so-called “mercy” of the atomic bombing was

in reality.

For over fifty years since the bombing, both governments have arrogantly continued to treat and

alienate the Hibakusha as human guinea pigs. It is evident that such a political attitude itself

deprived them of the feeling of human dignity. If the Japanese government had resisted the U.S.

government policy of neglecting the Hibak usha and had done their best to provide them with

medical and other social aid immediately after the bombing, the life span of the dead Hibakusha

would have been much longer. Their will to live would not have diminished.

The Japanese government and the JNIH should feel deeply responsible in this respect. Why don't

the prime ministers and the directors of the JNIH apologize for their negligence toward the

Hibakusha? Why don't they try, in this way, to restore the feeling of human dignity which for almost

a half century they have denied these people?

As a professor of Hiroshima University, I have for many years been involved in the sociological,

philosophical and ethical study of the agony of the Hibakusha. In this chapter as a result of my

research, I tried to shed new light on one of the most important, but hitherto overlooked, aspects of

the atomic bombing and the sufferings of the Hibakusha.

As explained, there is no doubt that the Japanese government is responsible for its post-war

policy of negligence toward the Hibakusha as well as its violation of their human rights. If the

government feels responsible for them, there must be no objection to legislation providing state

compensation for the Hibakusha.

II. FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE U.S. FORCES AND THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

SCIENTISTS

In the previous chapter, I submitted my thesis mainly on the basis of the analysis of the

post-bombing and post-war policy of the U.S. government toward Hibakusha, especially the

No-Treatment policy of the ABCC-JNIH.

As for the pre-bombing policy of the U.S. government, I don't think that all the principle

characters at that time, including Truman, had a conscious intention to use the A-bombs as a means

of experimenting on humans from military and scientific viewpoints.

However, I am convinced there were surely some leading people who, with the cool eyes of an

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