The Japanese bioweapons program was the brainchild of Gen. Shirō Ishii, who in the 1930s received backing at the highest levels to form a biological warfare unit known as Unit 731, deceptively designated the “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department” of the Kwantung Army deployed to China. Unit 731 established a massive 150-building complex in the Pingfang District of Harbin (then part of the puppet state of Manchuria), where it developed and tested its weapons on involuntary human subjects, around two-thirds of whom were Chinese, with most of the rest coming from the Soviet Union. Their subjects would later include a small number of Allied POWs, Koreans and Pacific islanders.
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Japan had already waged biological warfare in China.
Here s What You Need to Know: Plans to employ bioweapons cannot help but seem especially short-sighted given the indiscriminate and unpredictable nature of diseases.
During World War II, Japan infamously deployed biological weapons in attacks that infected and killed thousands of Chinese citizen. Less well known, however, is the fact that Japanese strategists also planned to deploy plague bombs against U.S. forces on at least four separate occasions each only narrowly averted by circumstance. The last such attack, known as Operations Cherry Blossoms at Night, envisioned bombing San Diego with plague-infected fleas.