Word: manchuria
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...BRIGHT-EYED 14-YEAR-OLD, AKIRA OGASAWARA JOINED THE JAPANESE army, partly because the recruiters promised him a ride in an airplane. Instead of getting his flight, he was assigned to a secret medical unit that performed experiments on prisoners in Manchuria. Now 65 and a construction worker, he is still tormented by the memory of his two years with Unit 731 as it worked on developing a "germ bomb," which Tokyo hoped would help win World War II. "I myself did not put any prisoner under the knife," he tells a mostly middle-aged audience of about 50 people...
Until the early 1980s, few Japanese were eager to learn about events like Unit 731's activities in Manchuria, a region in northern China conquered and governed by the Japanese army from 1932 to 1945. Untold thousands of Russians, Koreans and Chinese suspected of anti-Japanese activities were brought to the ! Unit 731 base at Pinfang, near Harbin. Clinically referred to as maruta, or "logs," they were initially treated well since the experiments required healthy subjects. Eventually, however, some of the prisoners were infected with contagious diseases -- typhoid, tetanus, anthrax, syphilis -- or poisoned with mustard gas; others, stripped and tied...
Reading about the events before the Second World War, a few events have always puzzled me. Why, for instance, did Europe's most powerful nations allow Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia to stand unopposed? Up until that point, the new League of Nations had succeeded in ensuring that several conflicts did not explode...
Couldn't the great powers see that allowing aggression to stand would only lead to a wider war? Apparently not. Their rationale for inaction against Japan was that Manchuria was a disputed area anyway and that intervention was not practical. Britain and France were consumed by internal worries and not in the mood for a far-flung foreign adventure. When 1935 rolled around and Italy invaded Ethiopia, the League did have the backbone to impose sanctions. But they lacked the will to make sure they struck, and Italy swallowed up its catch...
...explosive force in the midst of this ferment was Japan's fractious Kwantung Army, originally sent to the Kwantung Peninsula just east of Beijing to protect Japanese rail and shipping interests in Manchuria. After ultranationalist Kwantung officers murdered the Chinese overlord of Manchuria, Tokyo installed a puppet regime in 1932 and proclaimed the independence of what it called Manchukuo. Despite calls for sanctions against Japan, outgoing President Herbert Hoover had no enthusiasm for a crisis, and the incoming President Roosevelt was preoccupied with the onrushing Great Depression...