Content warning: This post includes information and testimonies about torture, war crimes, and murder.

Summary
Author Hal Gold draws upon a wealth of sources to construct a portrait of the Imperial Japanese Army's most notorious medical unit, giving an overview of its history and detailing its most shocking activities. The book presents the words of former unit members themselves, taken from remarks they made at a traveling Unit 731 exhibition held in Japan in 1994-95. They recount vivid first-hand memories of what it was like to take part in horrific experiments on men, women and children, their motivations and reasons why they chose to speak about their actions all these years later.

Review
It doesn’t feel fair to give this book a rating, but wow. I had no idea about this horrifying piece of history before I read this book. The eyewitness and perpetrator accounts given in this book were some of the most disgusting stories I’ve read from human history (so I wouldn’t recommend this book lightly). However, I do think it’s so imperative that more people learn about the war crimes committed for the sake of “science”.

What I learned
Unit 731 was a secret research facility run by Japan in Manchukuo (now part of China). In this facility, they ran biochemical weapon research by experimenting on humans. It's hard to say the exact human cost due to destruction of evidence, but it's estimated that 200,000-300,000 people were murdered as a part of this program.

• Manchukuo was a puppet state of Japan in China that existed during WWII from 1932-1945. The land was occupied by Japan during its invasion of Manchuria.
  

• Victims were primarily Chinese, but there were also Russian and Korean victims as well. These victims were often civilians and included women and children (even children born within the unit as a result of rape). There were no survivors.

  “The Chinese had a saying about us, that Japan had a ‘three-way complete policy: burned completely, killed completely, and pillaged completely.’ Yet, when we were doing those things, we had no sense of guilt or of doing anything wrong. It was for the emperor-for the country!”
  

• The human experiments conducted on these victims was vast and included infecting prisoners with diseases, live vivisection (invasive surgeries that involved the removing of organs that often didn't invovle anesthesia), amputation, forced frostbite, forced STD infection, and more.

  “Some of the experiments had nothing to do with advancing the capability of germ warfare, or of medicine. There is such a thing as professional curiosity… What medical purpose would be served by performing and studying beheadings? None at all. That was just playing around. Professional people, too, like to play.
  

• As part of the experimentation of biochemical weapons, the unit also conducted experiments on civilians outside the unit by contaminating water supplies, food, and land. This contamination included releasing plague-invested fleas that they harvested and raised, anthrax, and typhoid.
  

• Most individuals invovled in these war crimes were never tried or punished (only 12 were) and it wasn't until 2002 that Japan acknowledged its role in them. This lack of punishment was largely due to the fact that the U.S. found the learnings from the experiments to be valuable, which ultimately led to the immunity for the perpetrators.