U.S. Complicity in Japan’s Wartime Atrocities
U.S. Complicity and Japan’s Atrocities: How to Respond? Boris Yudin, Russian Academy of Sciences, Humanitarian Expertise and Bioethics
Katrien Devolder in her article (2015) discusses cruel experiments on humans that were carried out by Japanese military and medical researchers during World War II and reminds us about the two proposals previously advanced by Jing-Bao Nie (Nie 2004). After thorough logical and ethical scrutiny, Devolder supports both of these proposals. One of them is addressed to the U.S. authorities, and the other to the international research community. To my understanding, both of these analyses deserve special discussions and, possibly, practical actions. In what follows, I shall be able to consider only a small part of the relevant questions. First I want to make some remarks with relation to the expository, factual chapter of the article. Some published data and estimations about the scale and efficacy of development and use of biological warfare by the Japanese military are based on evidence that was presented at the Khabarovsk Trial carried out by the Soviet authorities in December 1949. There are contradictory positions in literature about the trial: Some authors see it as nothing more than Communist propaganda. Their opponents, however, including Nie and Devolder, admitted that materials from the trial that were published in the Soviet Union (Khabarovsk, 1950), despite a significant taint of propaganda, contain a lot of important and trustworthy information. Sharing in general this position, I nevertheless cannot agree with an uncritical perception of every accusation of the Japanese defendants at the trial (see also Yudin 2010). For instance, Devolder writes that “Soviet . . . villages and cities were exposed to infectious agents.” In Russian publications of the trial’s materials, this information was mentioned only in passing within a preliminary investigative text. During the trial, this information did not appear in either the interrogations or in the court’s sentence. It was impossible for such conspicuous facts to disappear during the trial in case some evidence, however unreliable, did exist! More than that, I have not found at all any reference to such events in the Soviet and Russian sources. Devolder extensively uses the analogy between the case of Japanese medical atrocities and their cover-up by the United States, on one side, and the experiments on humans carried out by U.S. researchers in Guatemala in 1946–1948. I agree with her that this analogy can be useful in discerning similar as well as specific traits of both cases. It is interesting also to note the structural conformity of
approaches adopted by the U.S. authorities in dealing with the Guatemala case, on one side, and proposals advanced by Nie, on another side. In 2004, much earlier than Guatemala case became an issue of debates, investigations and political decisions, Nie wrote that actions against Japanese medical atrocities should be performed at two distinct levels, that is, the level of (international) scientific community and the level of the U.S. national authorities. In the case of Guatemala we can discern two similar levels of reaction. President Obama asked the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, first, to convene “a thorough review of human subject protection to determine if Federal regulations and international standards adequately guard the health and well-being of participants in scientific studies” and second, to “oversee a thorough fact-finding investigation into the specifics of the U.S. Public Health Service Sexually Transmitted Diseases Inoculation Study” (“Ethically Impossible” 2011, vi). The first of these two requests, which refers to protection of research participants by contemporary standards and regulations, structurally corresponds to Nie’s proposal on a document that would ban “any attempt by any state or group, for whatever reasons, to be accessory to unethical medicine” (Nie 2004, 30). I agree with Nie’s reasoning that the most suitable agency for implementing this task is the international research community. In particular, my personal experience from participating on the International Research Panel that was appointed for studying the Guatemala case shows me that involvement of experts representing different regions of the globe is a necessary condition for mediating consensus from all parts of international community. I do not fully agree, however, with Nie’s statement that the mere addition of a corresponding clause to existing declarations or codes would give us a satisfactory decision of the task. Such decisions can only be achieved as the last step of a rather complex process that would include such stages as awareness by the international community of significance the problem, assessment of its acuteness and scale, and discernment of different potential decisions. It is very possible that on the way to desired result we shall find out different pitfalls. Nevertheless, the very process of decision making, including discussions and deliberations inside the international community, would have essential value as such, independently of its end results.
Address correspondence to Boris Yudin, Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Humanitarian Expertise and Bioethics, Volkonka, 14, Moscow, 117393, Russian Federation. E-mail: [email protected]
June, Volume 15, Number 6, 2015
ajob 55
The American Journal of Bioethics
One of possible pitfalls that in different aspects is examined by Devolder (2015) is related to the concept of complicity. Both authors discuss complicity mainly with regard to actions (or omissions) of the U.S. authorities; that means that it refers only to the first of the two proposals advanced by Nie. As Devolder convincingly shows, the concept of complicity turned out to be rather poorly determined. But is it correct to limit ourselves to consider activities only at the infrastructure level of the U.S. government? Why we do not take into account the actions of individual U.S. researchers in Fort Detrick who not only knew about Japanese data obtained in the course of these awful experiments but supposedly relied on them for their own experiments? And what about those who participated in similar activities in the Soviet Union? For decades, these issues were discussed in rather hot debates about whether it was moral to use data received by Nazi biologists and physicians in the course of their inhuman experiments carried out on prisoners of concentration camps (see, e.g., Pozos 2003). We can go even further: More than 100 years ago the Russian physicianwriter Vikenty Veresaeff wrote, referring to venerologists, that “crime stains every step made by their science” (Veresaeff 1904, 104). It is clear from his book that Veresaeff criticizes the ethical basis not only of venerological but of medical experiments on humans in general. Generally speaking, every researcher in the field of biomedical sciences could be accused of complicity in previous unethical if not criminal (from our current point of view) research. Thus, the scientific community needs to delineate borders of ethically approved research. And such delineation is not a single act; these borders are determined and redetermined—after serious changes in our understanding of goals, risks, methods etc. of research—in the course of discussions inside the community. Retrospective analysis of previous research practices is one of the essential constituents of these discussions. Now we can turn to the role of U.S. political authorities who, according to Nie, are obliged to issue a formal apology with condemnations of “the Japanese war crimes including those associated with BW activities and human experimentation” (Nie 2004, 28). He also proposes specific actions for the U.S. government to formulate in elaboration of its official apology. The first step would be establishing of ad hoc committee to investigate the cover-up and to explore possible recommendations. The committee should include experts representing not only the United States, but all other concerned countries: China, Japan, Russia, Singapore, Korea, and the United Nations (Nie 2004, 30). It seems self-evident that such a committee, if it were to be established, would be not so much a scientific but
56 ajob
rather a political, military, and legal entity. As in the case with elaboration of new ethical norm by international scientific community, activities of the committee would have significant sense not only for preparation of a political statement, but maybe, first and foremost, for creation of procedures, rules, and norms that allow for carrying out meaningful talks on various controversial issues. Development of contemporary science and technologies generates a wide spectrum of ethical issues. Each of these issues can become a focus of intense debate not just inside the scientific community but also by the concerned general public as well. Sometimes in the course of these debates new satisfactory decisions of acute ethical problems are illuminated. Maybe such successful results are not typical; nevertheless, today’s field of scientific and technological development became a sphere in which various means of systematic ethical analysis are elaborated and upgraded. Thus, it seems reasonable to try to use these analytical instruments in deliberations on a wider range of not just scientific and medical but social and political problems as well. &
REFERENCES Devolder, K. 2015. U.S. complicity and Japan’s wartime medical atrocities: Time for a response. American Journal of Bioethics 15(6): 40–49. “Ethically Impossible.” 2011. STD Research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. Washington, DC: Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, September. Khabarovsk Trial Materials. 1950. Materials relating to the trial of former servicemen of the Japanese army charged with manufacturing and employing bacteriological weapons. Moscow, Russia: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Nie, J. B. 2004. The United States cover-up of Japanese wartime medical atrocities: Complicity committed in the national interest and two proposals for contemporary action. American Journal of Bioethics 6(3): 21–33. Pozos, R. D. 2003. Nazi hypothermia research: Should the data be used? In Military medical ethics, vol. 2, ed. T. E. Beam and L. Sparacino, 437–461. Washington, DC: Borden Institute. Veresaeff, V. 1904. The confession of a physician. New York, NY: Frederick A. Stokes Company. Yudin, B. G. 2010. Research on humans at the Khabarovsk war crimes trial. In Japan’s wartime medical atrocities: Comparative inquiries in science, history, and ethics, ed. J. B. Nie, N. Guo, M. Selden, and A. Kleinman, 59–78. Oxon, UK: Routledge.
June, Volume 15, Number 6, 2015
Copyright of American Journal of Bioethics is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
U.S. Complicity and Japan’s Atrocities: How to Respond? Boris Yudin, Russian Academy of Sciences, Humanitarian Expertise and Bioethics
Katrien Devolder in her article (2015) discusses cruel experiments on humans that were carried out by Japanese military and medical researchers during World War II and reminds us about the two proposals previously advanced by Jing-Bao Nie (Nie 2004). After thorough logical and ethical scrutiny, Devolder supports both of these proposals. One of them is addressed to the U.S. authorities, and the other to the international research community. To my understanding, both of these analyses deserve special discussions and, possibly, practical actions. In what follows, I shall be able to consider only a small part of the relevant questions. First I want to make some remarks with relation to the expository, factual chapter of the article. Some published data and estimations about the scale and efficacy of development and use of biological warfare by the Japanese military are based on evidence that was presented at the Khabarovsk Trial carried out by the Soviet authorities in December 1949. There are contradictory positions in literature about the trial: Some authors see it as nothing more than Communist propaganda. Their opponents, however, including Nie and Devolder, admitted that materials from the trial that were published in the Soviet Union (Khabarovsk, 1950), despite a significant taint of propaganda, contain a lot of important and trustworthy information. Sharing in general this position, I nevertheless cannot agree with an uncritical perception of every accusation of the Japanese defendants at the trial (see also Yudin 2010). For instance, Devolder writes that “Soviet . . . villages and cities were exposed to infectious agents.” In Russian publications of the trial’s materials, this information was mentioned only in passing within a preliminary investigative text. During the trial, this information did not appear in either the interrogations or in the court’s sentence. It was impossible for such conspicuous facts to disappear during the trial in case some evidence, however unreliable, did exist! More than that, I have not found at all any reference to such events in the Soviet and Russian sources. Devolder extensively uses the analogy between the case of Japanese medical atrocities and their cover-up by the United States, on one side, and the experiments on humans carried out by U.S. researchers in Guatemala in 1946–1948. I agree with her that this analogy can be useful in discerning similar as well as specific traits of both cases. It is interesting also to note the structural conformity of
approaches adopted by the U.S. authorities in dealing with the Guatemala case, on one side, and proposals advanced by Nie, on another side. In 2004, much earlier than Guatemala case became an issue of debates, investigations and political decisions, Nie wrote that actions against Japanese medical atrocities should be performed at two distinct levels, that is, the level of (international) scientific community and the level of the U.S. national authorities. In the case of Guatemala we can discern two similar levels of reaction. President Obama asked the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, first, to convene “a thorough review of human subject protection to determine if Federal regulations and international standards adequately guard the health and well-being of participants in scientific studies” and second, to “oversee a thorough fact-finding investigation into the specifics of the U.S. Public Health Service Sexually Transmitted Diseases Inoculation Study” (“Ethically Impossible” 2011, vi). The first of these two requests, which refers to protection of research participants by contemporary standards and regulations, structurally corresponds to Nie’s proposal on a document that would ban “any attempt by any state or group, for whatever reasons, to be accessory to unethical medicine” (Nie 2004, 30). I agree with Nie’s reasoning that the most suitable agency for implementing this task is the international research community. In particular, my personal experience from participating on the International Research Panel that was appointed for studying the Guatemala case shows me that involvement of experts representing different regions of the globe is a necessary condition for mediating consensus from all parts of international community. I do not fully agree, however, with Nie’s statement that the mere addition of a corresponding clause to existing declarations or codes would give us a satisfactory decision of the task. Such decisions can only be achieved as the last step of a rather complex process that would include such stages as awareness by the international community of significance the problem, assessment of its acuteness and scale, and discernment of different potential decisions. It is very possible that on the way to desired result we shall find out different pitfalls. Nevertheless, the very process of decision making, including discussions and deliberations inside the international community, would have essential value as such, independently of its end results.
Address correspondence to Boris Yudin, Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Humanitarian Expertise and Bioethics, Volkonka, 14, Moscow, 117393, Russian Federation. E-mail: [email protected]
June, Volume 15, Number 6, 2015
ajob 55
The American Journal of Bioethics
One of possible pitfalls that in different aspects is examined by Devolder (2015) is related to the concept of complicity. Both authors discuss complicity mainly with regard to actions (or omissions) of the U.S. authorities; that means that it refers only to the first of the two proposals advanced by Nie. As Devolder convincingly shows, the concept of complicity turned out to be rather poorly determined. But is it correct to limit ourselves to consider activities only at the infrastructure level of the U.S. government? Why we do not take into account the actions of individual U.S. researchers in Fort Detrick who not only knew about Japanese data obtained in the course of these awful experiments but supposedly relied on them for their own experiments? And what about those who participated in similar activities in the Soviet Union? For decades, these issues were discussed in rather hot debates about whether it was moral to use data received by Nazi biologists and physicians in the course of their inhuman experiments carried out on prisoners of concentration camps (see, e.g., Pozos 2003). We can go even further: More than 100 years ago the Russian physicianwriter Vikenty Veresaeff wrote, referring to venerologists, that “crime stains every step made by their science” (Veresaeff 1904, 104). It is clear from his book that Veresaeff criticizes the ethical basis not only of venerological but of medical experiments on humans in general. Generally speaking, every researcher in the field of biomedical sciences could be accused of complicity in previous unethical if not criminal (from our current point of view) research. Thus, the scientific community needs to delineate borders of ethically approved research. And such delineation is not a single act; these borders are determined and redetermined—after serious changes in our understanding of goals, risks, methods etc. of research—in the course of discussions inside the community. Retrospective analysis of previous research practices is one of the essential constituents of these discussions. Now we can turn to the role of U.S. political authorities who, according to Nie, are obliged to issue a formal apology with condemnations of “the Japanese war crimes including those associated with BW activities and human experimentation” (Nie 2004, 28). He also proposes specific actions for the U.S. government to formulate in elaboration of its official apology. The first step would be establishing of ad hoc committee to investigate the cover-up and to explore possible recommendations. The committee should include experts representing not only the United States, but all other concerned countries: China, Japan, Russia, Singapore, Korea, and the United Nations (Nie 2004, 30). It seems self-evident that such a committee, if it were to be established, would be not so much a scientific but
56 ajob
rather a political, military, and legal entity. As in the case with elaboration of new ethical norm by international scientific community, activities of the committee would have significant sense not only for preparation of a political statement, but maybe, first and foremost, for creation of procedures, rules, and norms that allow for carrying out meaningful talks on various controversial issues. Development of contemporary science and technologies generates a wide spectrum of ethical issues. Each of these issues can become a focus of intense debate not just inside the scientific community but also by the concerned general public as well. Sometimes in the course of these debates new satisfactory decisions of acute ethical problems are illuminated. Maybe such successful results are not typical; nevertheless, today’s field of scientific and technological development became a sphere in which various means of systematic ethical analysis are elaborated and upgraded. Thus, it seems reasonable to try to use these analytical instruments in deliberations on a wider range of not just scientific and medical but social and political problems as well. &
REFERENCES Devolder, K. 2015. U.S. complicity and Japan’s wartime medical atrocities: Time for a response. American Journal of Bioethics 15(6): 40–49. “Ethically Impossible.” 2011. STD Research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. Washington, DC: Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, September. Khabarovsk Trial Materials. 1950. Materials relating to the trial of former servicemen of the Japanese army charged with manufacturing and employing bacteriological weapons. Moscow, Russia: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Nie, J. B. 2004. The United States cover-up of Japanese wartime medical atrocities: Complicity committed in the national interest and two proposals for contemporary action. American Journal of Bioethics 6(3): 21–33. Pozos, R. D. 2003. Nazi hypothermia research: Should the data be used? In Military medical ethics, vol. 2, ed. T. E. Beam and L. Sparacino, 437–461. Washington, DC: Borden Institute. Veresaeff, V. 1904. The confession of a physician. New York, NY: Frederick A. Stokes Company. Yudin, B. G. 2010. Research on humans at the Khabarovsk war crimes trial. In Japan’s wartime medical atrocities: Comparative inquiries in science, history, and ethics, ed. J. B. Nie, N. Guo, M. Selden, and A. Kleinman, 59–78. Oxon, UK: Routledge.
June, Volume 15, Number 6, 2015
Copyright of American Journal of Bioethics is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
