Page 56 - Unit 731

The telegram proved that the US had already obtained the desired information and scientific data on biological warfare, the goal of the four-year
investigation. This was an order given to MacArthur, and could be seen as a final agreement on ‘plans and information from Shirō Ishii and his higher
authorities may be collected by exempting them from trial in written form’.
Ishii requested exemption from trial, and the US believed this would have a huge impact on US foreign affairs and government. So the headquarters
sent a tactful reply to MacArthur. After the US gained information from Ishii and his members, they were free from trial. This telegram is the last
confirmation document between Shirō Ishii and the US.

Conclusion
The US and Unit 731 secretly sealed a deal that ignored and covered-up war crimes of unethical human experimentation and biological warfare. As
Sheldon H. Harris wrote in Factories of Death: ‘State, in effect, would go along with the Ishii arrangement, so long as nothing potentially embarrassing to
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the United States [i.e., the revelation that immunity was being accorded war criminals] was documented’. The US cover-up allowed Shirō Ishii and
members of his division to escape the Tokyo Trial, which directly affected the fairness and authority of the Trials. This is grossly unfair to the Chinese,
American, Russian, and Korean families whose family members suffered in human experimentation.
Regarding this cover-up, Sanders, involved in the interrogations conducted in Japan, stated:
The deal was a mistake. But when I made such a suggestion, I did not know that they used live human beings as objects in experiments. When I knew they were making anthrax bombs, there was still
time to accuse the Japanese in the Tokyo Trials. 33
While the US forces planned to keep information on biological warfare to themselves, the Soviet Union also actively attempted to collect it. In 1946, it
secretly interrogated former Unit 731 members Kawashima Kiyoshi (川島清) and Tomio Kawakawa (柄澤十三夫).
The issue of Japanese biological warfare became a tug-of-war with the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, and the US finally took the lead in
the Tokyo Trials in order to continue to conceal the matter of Japanese biological warfare and human experimentation, ignoring the rights of people in
China and the Soviet Union.
Persistent Soviet requests to interrogate Japanese war criminals on this topic failed to get a reply from the US, so such interrogation did not take place.
The Soviet Union lacked the power to dictate this compared to the US, and this issue did not affect the result of the Tokyo Trials, whose consequences
continue today.
The Soviet Union sent twelve Japanese war criminals in biological warfare to Khabarovsk Krai, a far eastern district of Russia.
The content of the trial was published in Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and
Employing Bacteriological Weapons. This publication is translated into Chinese, English, German, Japanese, Korean, and other languages. Reviewing the
Soviet Union’s trial of Japanese war criminals helps understand the hidden information regarding the covert deals between the US and Japan.