Unit 731: Historical Films, Exploitation and the Denial of History
“As war films go, the Americans are only interested in what happened to them[…]"
— Tun-Fei Mou
One problem with violent imagery in cinema is that honest brutality is often mistaken for sensationalism. When Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange was released in 1971, Pauline Kael lamented its brutality and mistook its use of violence as showmanship rather than media satire. Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs is still misunderstood as some sort of neofascist, reactionary statement— Roger Ebert called it a fantasy about rape and violence. Kael called it fascist art— in a positive review— despite its earnestly broadcasted reflections on the social structures of mankind, its relation to the sexes, and its brutally honest, stark depiction of violence as nauseating, ugly and vile.
American audience and some film critics seem to have an aversion to honest portrayals of violence, favoring instead the overindulgences of violent behavior as expressed in bloody action films that erode reality. Why else did John Wayne indignantly remark that Peckinpah's uproariously violent The Wild Bunch “destroyed the myth of the Old West?” Films that show violence in its bare, real, and sometimes historically accurate form are misunderstood far too often. But heretofore, the examples I have used have been American perceptions toward American films. Many films suffer from this problem when viewed by Americans, but there is a greater misunderstanding that has to do with cultural identity and world history. There is something more profound, that— ironically— the United States has participated in, albeit in a far more insidious way than its movie-going citizens' semiotic illiteracy would suggest.
With this background in mind, one will still gaze in awe of the pitfalls that have befallen Tun-Fei Mou. Perhaps no other film has been as misunderstood as his The Men Behind the Sun, concerning the atrocities committed by the Japanese imperial army unit 731 on Chinese and Soviet Russian prisoners. It has been slandered as an exploitation film, despite its historical significance and accuracy. This, however, is no mere media complaint.
Too often does film criticism fall into the chasm of triviality, an activity for dilettantes with too much time on their hands. An honest exploration of The Men Behind the Sun and other films by T.F. Mou serves as an emphatic counterexample to this supposed rule. After all, if we regard films only as entertainment, not backed up by any bouillon of reality, why study film at all as an academic endeavor? Of course, Mou has directed many films that may be regarded as low art or exploitation. The Men Behind the Sun and Black Sun: The Rape of Nanking are examples of films that may not be slandered as such.
The Men Behind the Sun and other films by T.F. Mou are examples of extraordinary attempts at recreating actual events that few would like to acknowledge as historical fact. That they are regarded as exploitation films, low art or snuff films is a travesty. That they are regarded as such is not simply because the events portrayed are completely repulsive to watch or even cognate however. The slandering of Mou, especially of his The Men Behind the Sun is something that has far ranging socio-political concerns.
Hidden Truths and Bare Marginalization
Supposedly, the Japanese government has contained people from the Unit 731 in its ranks for quite some time. Furthermore, respected university professors and government officials refuse to acknowledge the existence of the unit, or even other well-documented, verifiable Japanese atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking.
One wonders if the moniker “exploitation film” has pervaded this film's reception because it is so graphically violent in replicating bizarre experiments— including cultivating the bubonic plague, administering cold water to limbs in a frozen environment, then flaying the flesh off with boiling water afterward— or if it is because it is looked upon by some portion of Japanese society as an uncomfortable reminder of the nation’s past.
The 2003 DVD release of the film— the only US release to date, after it was widely— and undeservedly— regarded as a cult film and/or a snuff film— is emblazoned with the nauseatingly marketable phrase “in the tradition of Faces of Death,” placing it in a pantheon of films designed to titilate. It deserves better. Mou has been slandered in other, subtler ways, on a larger scale, as he has been placed in a cultural vacuum with other exploitation directors. So much so, that he was once incorrectly credited on Netflix as Godfrey Ho, the director of several exploitation films, including the “sequels” to Sun. That Mou's magnificent, if astonishingly bleak Black Sun: The Rape of Nanking is listed as Men Behind the Sun 4 as an alternate title is yet another insult— as though the film is but another in a series of snuff films found in the dusty back bin of an underground record store.
Interviews with the director at least suggest sincerity when he says that he never intended to make an exploitation film, but rather a historical film. The cooperation of the parents of a boy killed in an accident to provide his cadaver speaks volumes in and of itself. His corpse was used for a real autopsy performed during the film Once the parents learned that the boy would be autopsied for a film that detailed the gruesome experiments performed by the Japanese military, they put their whole support behind the film.
Tun Fei-Mou
In the book Dark Medicine, which chronicles some of the greatest misuses of science in history, the Unit 731 atrocities are reviewed in a few articles, placed alongside the experiments of Joseph Mengele. In the book, and in many more sources like Unit 731 Testimony, and dozens of peer-reviewed articles, there is a clear path to physical evidence found by Japanese scientist Hajime Sakura.
In 1989, skulls and other bone fragments were discovered under Tokyo University by Sakura. Interestingly enough, The Men Behind the Sun was released the same year, and exposed to the worst legacy imaginable for its content. At first, the Japanese government decided to investigate as they would any other crime, but the police decided that the evidence that the bones were less than 100 years old— but more than 40 years old— was inadmissible. Of course, such a finding was hogwash.
Mou and others— descendants of the victims of Unit 731— can attest to the fact that these bones belong to their dead relatives, and perhaps victims of the plague who weren't even subject to the experiments. After all, 30,000 died in Manchuria as the plague bacteria went airborne. Why wouldn't local Japanese have contracted the plague and died as well? There is evidence to suggest that's precisely what happened.
Science, Religion and the Plague
But another other intriguing portion of this is the bubonic plague itself, and its application to these events. This may also explain why this insane use of science run amok has contributed to an anti-scientific outlook that pervades American society— despite the fact that these crimes were allowed to go unpunished for strategic purposes by this very government.
One reason for this may be the idea that science, technological progress and other rational sets of the modern mind have come into conflict with religious and/or dualist sensibilities in recent years. There is always the distrust of the cold progress of science, in that it is viewed as amoral, and concerned only with achieving results, regardless of the effect of those results on human beings.
Unit 731 is one of the rare cases in which such a criticism is actually valid, in which science played a role in determining that certain people would be killed because they were “not human,” in which bioethics, or ethics of any kind were simply not taken into account. In some ways, the atrocities seem to confirm anti-scientific bias (including, ironically a bias that has roots in Medieval Europe with the spread of the bubonic plague). But this is equally atrocious, serving as an excuse for scientific ignorance that would exacerbate the effects of the plague in its hey day. So, science's legacy is of course ambiguous. On the one hand, it led to the worst atrocities imaginable. On the other, in its absence, more deaths were incurred.
As stated in the literature surrounding the medieval plague virus' ravaging of Europe— “The best and most efficacious preventative means was the fear of God.” This was in reference to stopping the plague virus, in which medieval medical practitioners warned against the proliferations of apothecaries and earlier methods of Greek science. It is thought that this very call to religion and rejection of— admittedly primitive— science increased the effects of the plague throughout Europe.
It is possible that these dreadful experiments— like those of Joseph Mengele— have resurrected a sort of anti-science perspective, in which science is perceived as though all ethical considerations are discarded in pursuit of scientific discovery. But if not for the deeply engrained, long-held and largely religiously inspired anti-Semitism in Germany— and Europe overall— it is unlikely that such unburdened scientific experiments would have been performed.
Similarly, it is not entirely implausible that there is a cultural explanation for some of the Unit 731 experiments. Given the plague's origin in China, it is not entirely implausible that the Japanese were inflicting some sort of cultural retribution for the spreading of the disease on the Chinese. This would simultaneously expand the Japanese empire and create diseased masses among their enemies. This would have the benefit of killing off thousands— as later occurred when contagions were accidentally released after the camp was destroyed— as well as condemning the Chinese as disease-ridden mongrel throngs, a common tactic of propaganda. Hasn’t one of the most commonly uttered falsehoods spouted by Holocaust revisionists— or more accurately, deniers— been that the Jews died of diseases in the camps— that they were naturally predisposed to them?
It is clear that discourses other than the conflict of religion and science played a role in Japanese atrocities.
Saving The Slaughtered From Themselves
An intense spiritual imperialism seems to have pervaded the Japanese as well— in that they wished to return the Chinese to a clean slate based on their elder Buddhist and Taoist philosophers. Those who were experimented on were too far gone to Western influence, and “saved from themselves.” It is not as though the Japanese scientists acted in a vacuum independent of Emperor Hirohito, though Shiro Ishii continued to maintain that the Emperor was ignorant of these sordid affairs.
Additionally, through mendacious “philanthropic” practices, including typhoid cakes— which would be masked as gifts for the undernourished— the Japanese doctors masked their intent with a veil of kindness. This can be extrapolated to most of their approach, in which they paternalistically suggested that they were to save China from itself and the influence of the Western white man, through the slaughter of those who were “too far gone.” It would be simply an error to attribute any of these events to scientific materialism.
Something far more terrifying has taken root than ignorance of science itself, and that is a deadly historical amnesia that does not end with the atrocities mentioned. Supposedly, Japanese youth are not taught very much about World War II, and the nationalist parties exert tremendous influence over the country, preventing it from actually understanding its past, whitewashing aspects of World War II, and in general creating an aura of ignorance around the entire affair.
Insidious, Rosy-Eyed Nationalism
Unlike England— whose British Nationalist Party is unanimously opposed by all other major parties— and Germany— whose public and government suppress nationalist parties almost instinctively and neurotically— Japan has had a swelling of nationalist fervor that dwells underneath its “Westernized” exterior, if only to the extent that the Nationalists are part of the mainstream in the country. This does not suggest that the country as a whole is inclined toward nationalism, but it is troubling. After all, Yukio Mishima— one of Japan's great postwar writers— met his end unsuccessfully attempting to overthrow the government and re-instate the old Imperial system. Events like these— coupled with cultural amnesia, mixed with a distorted sense of history— disturb the thoughtful outsider.
If one has paid attention to United States’ politics over the last decade, it is impossible to ignore that much has been made— and much fervor has been raised— over Texas' revised American history textbooks and Florida’s increasingly reactionary school curriculum, both of which downplay important historical events and write out of history people who do not fit a certain idealized, sanitized— and ultimately false— vision of America. Repugnant as it is, this troubling phenomenon may serve as a useful lens through which to view a similar “cleansing” of inconveniently harrowing historical facts, which has been occurring in Japan for nearly a century and provides a glimpse into how the broader far right— reactionaries, radical traditionalists, fascists and ultranationalists— wield influence globally, through actively occluding and ultimately attempting to erase evidence of their crimes.
The extent to which the historical facts of Unit 731 and other Japanese atrocities during WWII were obfuscated are nothing if not insidious. Since it appears as though an honest representation of violence strikes many as “exploitation,” it is not surprising then that a re-defining of terms to make such acts sound more innocuous— is the method by which textbook censors sought to rewrite history. In a display of nationalist disregard for truth— thinly disguised as a parody of political correctness— censors replaced the word “shinryaku”— invasion— with the word “shin'nyu”— intrusion— with regard to Japan's actions in China and Manchuria. Protests were held, and external pressure forced the Japanese government to make concessions, and since then “the Ministry of Education loosened to some extent the grip on the content of history textbooks, and now we are free to use the word shinryaku about Japan's past activities.” This is all well and good, but here is where we come back to T.F. Mou's film.
A lawsuit was filed by a prominent historian, Saburo Ineaga, against the Ministry of Education. The ministry insisted that there were “no sufficient academic works which justified the inclusion of the description about the Unit 731.” Furthermore, even if this were the case, any academic works which somehow discredited Japan as an Imperial power, or spoke honestly about Japanese atrocities would be at least somewhat altered, and therefore already determined what would not be used not due to its academic integrity or historical accuracy, but how it painted the blood-red sun.
Since they were able to define what constituted “sufficient academic works” at their leisure, this is hardly surprising. According to an article in Economic and Political Weekly, “at the time of the censorship of his textbook, Ienaga had to delete the part about the Unit 731.” Subsequently, Ineaga and other historians were able to write about Unit 731, but the trend toward historical ignorance is nonetheless disturbing.
Dirty Secrets and Unlikely Heroes
Some documentaries have done an excellent job of portraying the events in question, and their political and social consequences. Japan's Dirty Secret by Journeyman Pictures is one of these documentaries that does an excellent job of portraying the events as they were almost without sensationalism, a good omen if we are to try to uncover the truth of the matter without making barbarians out of the scientists. But the title still retains the attention-grabbing, tabloid line that makes for good entertainment, rather than legitimate historical examination. When put on film, it seems that these events are more fodder for pop culture grist. This may have contributed in some measure to denialism.
But the efforts of Chinese activist Xuan Chian— as well as the former Japanese Youth Corps member Yoshio Shinosuka— have led to the expose of these crimes to mainstream knowledge, but outside of popular culture and outraged relatives of the slain, and a few survivors, this tragedy appears to have gone mostly unnoticed by Americans— eclipsed by Pearl Harbor and the Battle for Midway.Chien has been at the forefront of this movement, able to elicit confessions from other members of Unit 731. Though notably, the contrite consist solely of members of the Youth Corps. Yoshio Shinozuka, a Youth Corps member, was forced to serve under his superiors and lug bodies to fire pits— where the “maruta” were dismembered and burned when their purpose had been served. These prisoners, called “maruta,” after the Japanese word for firewood, were whittled down physically, mentally, and etymologically into logs. Youth laborers stacked the body parts like firewood. Shinozuka has been praised for publicly apologizing for his crimes, and regarded— ironically enough— as a hero in China and Manchuria. But he is a pariah in Japan.
Other members of Unit 731 consider Shinozuka a traitor to his country, including the doll-eyed Toshimi Mizobuchi. Of course, Mizobuchi, who organizes the Unit's annual reunion, was one of the supervisors of the youth corps, who seem to continually be unrepentant. He maintains that the prisoners were criminals sentenced to death. They simply were making the best use of condemned men, women, and children. “I am proud of what we did,” he states, with an enthusiasm that is troubling.
Another shameful piece of this puzzle is the complicity of the American government in covering up these events. While the Japanese cultural amnesia is troubling, to a conscientious American, the active suppression of these facts in order to secure United States military supremacy during the Cold War is much harder to swallow.
American Involvement and Ignorance
A harrowing example of this historical denialism is the fact that these experiments were used in order to use chemical weapons in the Korean war. These weapons, spreading the bubonic plague virus throughout the Asian continent. The virus went airborne, funding its way to rural communities and villages, eventually killing over 30,000 Chinese.
The cultivation of the bubonic plague lead to the spreading of the virus throughout Manchuria and China— its point of origin— before it ravaged Europe in spurts from the 13th through the 15th centuries. While it is not explicitly stated, the silence of the West to such a catastrophe may be due to its ignorance of this fact. History places the plague in the Middle Ages, but popular imagination places it solely there, and in Europe alone. This odd Euro-Western centric vision of the plague is doubly disturbing when one looks at the plans that Ishii had to unleash the virus on American soil. Ishii planned to use fleas against the United States. His plan might have succeeded if one of the ships set to deploy balloons carrying his porcelain bombs meant to unleash the bacteria had not been sunk by an American submarine.
Had the plague reached the United States, one wonders how much damage it would have inflicted, but it is doubtful that Unit 731 would have been kept such a secret had there been any significant American casualties from these experiments. However, there were some minor American casualties. Despite the fact that the plague was not dispersed using these balloon bombs, the fact that the balloon weapons were used against the United States is troubling. During a church service in Oregon, one exploded, injuring a pastor and killing Eliese Mitchell, an expectant mother of eight months. Yet, it seems to have been overshadowed due to its relatively infinitesimal significance in the scope of the war.
Still, The Japanese did attempt to bomb the United States using these balloons, possibly eventually using biochemical weapons. One would think that such an occurrence would lend credence to an investigation into these technologies. Instead, the historically inclined remember only Pearl Harbor, in which the causalities were mostly military and not civilian.
It is not as though this is merely an issue of American, Chinese, Japanese and Russian/Soviet relations. Historically, these experiments have much wider and far-reaching consequences. In Ishii's compound, despite his efforts to destroy the evidence of his unit's gruesome experiments, 400 kilos of the plague virus were discovered, enough to kill the entire population of the planet if released.
This information was only gradually revealed after years of secrecy. In The Men Behind the Sun, a cavalcade of British and American figures are present, though never shown or mentioned— but these men show why this film has been so slandered in the same way that they have been. People who have attempted to shed light on the story— including British and American soldiers, journalists, and others— had either been censored, censured, or completely forgotten. In highlighting the camp from within, Mou shows what Americans might have been willing to ignore— but lurking behind his film are people seemingly more important to the United States' involvement in the Sino-Japanese conflict in World War II. That even they seem to be missing from most people's historical consciousness is especially disconcerting.Murray Sanders, John Powell and the United States
Murray Sanders was a young British soldier-scientist, who no doubt inspired British writer Peter Williams to investigate the camps in Japan, and their scientific consequences. He was enlisted to determine the most appropriate means for constructing biological weapons as well as discovering how far enemy scientists had carried their experiments.
John Powell, Jr. was a newspaper man who unearthed data from the Freedom of Information Act, years after he was censured and tried for sedition for publishing a 1952 article detailing the use of biological warfare in the Korean War— using the biological research results gleaned from the experiments at Unit 731. The son of an American soldier / journalist who started the China Weekly, he took over his father's publication, and became well known to the Eisenhower administration as a rabble rouser— though he merely was an honest journalist— and was almost tried for treason. When he was able to glean that information in 1977, he eventually published an article in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1981, detailing his findings, vindicated despite his earlier setbacks.
But the most shocking part of this whole debacle of the American conscience, is that American soldiers were imprisoned in some of these camps as well. While they did not suffer the same fate as those at the camp in Manchuria under 731 directly, they did suffer from biomedical experiments in Mukden.
“1,243 days of my life are a void in the official medical records.”
So said Frank James, a veteran who contracted various diseases at the hands of the Japanese. The Army VA however, maintained a that no medical evidence of biological warfare was inflicted on American POWS. This was at Mukden, another camp set up by the Japanese, in which British and American POWS were subjected to insane experiments. As James remembers, three hundred or so bodies would be tagged for burial, surrounded by Japanese doctors.
Accusations
Despite this plentiful cache of historical evidence, to support The Men Behind the Sun, there are still a great many charges leveled at T.F. Mou, spanning beyond his undeserved reputation as a splatter-film hack. A Taiwan native, Mou has been condemned as a Chinese propagandist. There is a kernel of truth to this accusation, as he did make Chinese propaganda films while in film school. But it is disingenuous to suggest that a film based on atrocities that are confirmed by previously suppressed historical records is propaganda. The producer of the film invested a great deal of money in the film in order to promote awareness of the atrocities, so the bias is noted— but propaganda it is not. That one who makes art to tell the truth is a propagandist is an accusation oft lofted by those who wish to suppress the truth.
Mou went so far as to screen the film at Tokyo University, inviting old members of the unit to speak— the Youth Corps— without whose testimony the horrible events of Unit 731 ever even saw the light of day. In order to maintain accuracy, the director cast young Korean actors— whose facial features were thought to resemble those of Japanese children at the time— and taught them Japanese, which he speaks competently. Why would a director whose sole purpose would be to exploit sex and violence be so tenacious as to maintain this level of respectability? As Mou says in his most well known interview, “Men Behind the Sun is not exploitation...” He goes on to say that if he had wanted to make a splatter film, he could have made it more shocking than it is. More shocking, as in more violent, but Mou is far too modest. His film is shocking, but in the best possible terms, in the way that makes such terrible events known to those who would have otherwise not known them due to miseducation, or willful ignorance.
The chief irony in this, which contributes to the slandering of Mou and his historical film, is that Unit 731 has seeped into the public consciousness in the same way that fringe conspiracy theories have, and thus many websites that are cited in academic papers have the look and feel of Holocaust denial sites— the chief characteristics of which are that they are shoddily put up, without a modicum of respectability or historical accuracy. Sadly, these sites highlighting the atrocities of Unit 731 are respectable and accurate. It is a tragedy, and a cruel joke to historical understanding that the public uncovering and assertion of actual atrocities has come to mean the same thing as denying real ones in another context.
Prominent and respectable professors in Japan have rejected the historicity of Unit 731 or even of the Nanking Massacre, a position not unlike that of Holocaust revisionist/denier Ernst Zundel— who argues that the Holocaust is hate propaganda created by Zionist Jews, directed against Germany and people of German descent. Because of this strange paradigm, in which people craft a narrative of respectability to support outrageous claims, and those with the truth on their side fall victim to their own lack of presentational aplomb, filmmakers like Mou have had to resort to heavy-handedness which some have misinterpreted as gratuitousness. Perhaps more so than Men Behind the Sun has Black Sun: The Rape of Nanking become a prime example.
Black Sun
Mou's Black Sun: The Rape of Nanking is essentially a series of quasi-fictionalized re-enactments, with occasional interruptions of actual documentary footage. This would ordinarily seem uncouth, but— considering the implications of the historical content— it is forgivable. Too often is art-for-arts sake privileged over truth-telling when such facts are denied by people who should know better. It is a shame that this film had to resort to such heavy-handedness, but with the director slandered as an exploitation filmmaker, and with many historically accurate scenes— through a lens of horror— in which the heads of many Chinese are put atop the very temples they worshipped under.
The Chinese victims are beheaded in a perverse ceremonial competition among Japanese soldiers to see how many Chinese each Imperial officer can slay by the sword. Each figure is given a subtitle of how many Chinese perished. The numbers are in the hundreds for each soldier. Chinese Buddhists are granted their Nirvana via gunshot— taken one by one— until a final act of defiance by the priest of the temple, and then he too is killed. In killing them, as evidenced by the dialogue among the ranks, they grant them the Nirvana their grandfathers promised, by death, “saving” them from the “corrupting” influence of the British and Soviet Russians. Supposedly, the Japanese wished to free the Chinese from the “curse of the white man,” in order to restore China to its original end and purpose as part of the Chinese Empire. The Imperial officers allegedly claimed inspiration from the ancient Chinese master of culture and philosophy— such as Confucius— and thus enacted these purportedly “empathetic” killings in order to justify these infamously heinous war crimes.
Other Representations… and Vindications
A Russian film has been inspired by Unit 731 as well. Philosophy of a Knife is an avant-grade documentary by Andrey Iskanov that explores the Soviet / Russian casualties to a greater degree and portrays the violence in a disturbing way. It too, is a great film, but the seriousness of the subject matter is almost demeaned by its artistic sensibilities. But this may be due to the circumstances of the historical facts largely being ignored by Japanese and American critics.
With this in mind, the main problem with discerning whether or not Mou— or Iskanov— are legitimate filmmakers lies in the historical detail. When this is uncovered, one will discover this is no problem, thanks to the Freedom of information Act and the tireless efforts of scholars like Hajime Sakura, Peter Williams, et al. among others, despite the consensus to the contrary. When a historical consensus is reached with an amount of evidence that constitutes an embarrassment of riches and reaches the exact opposite conclusion— there is interpolation, misinterpretation and ignorance— whether willful or not.
In sum, it seems as though Mou has been the victim of erroneous identification due to his exploitation film past, as well as the aforementioned troubles in Japan with regard to its own history. Perhaps examining this will help determine how art reflects actual events, and how people perceive it in the film medium, and also not discard important explorations of these events through allegory or representation. Also, perhaps film critics will have a better sense of historical fact, instead of simply valuing a film with respect to its pleasure maximization or entertainment value.
