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Dissect Them Alive
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From Times Online
February 25, 2007
Dissect them alive: order not to be disobeyed
Richard Lloyd Parry in Hirakata, Japan
For 62 years, Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he’d done, but to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he had experience such misery during the Second World War?
He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children, and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team. Last year, at the age of 83, he embarked on a gruelling pilgrimage to 88 Buddhist temples in Japan - after number 40 he collapsed from heat exhaustion, having permanently injured his knees. “My wife didn’t like me going back to thePhilippines, she called me ’war crazy’,” said Mr Makino, a frailold man who lives alone in Hirakata near Osaka. “But she let me go anyway. Right up until she died three years ago, I never told her. But over time I think she realised.” Only in the twilight of his life, has Mr Makino begun to talk about the secret which he had carried.
In 1944, as a medical auxiliary in the Japanese Imperial Navy, he was stationed in the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. There he was party to one of the most notorious and poorly chronicled cruelties of the Japanese war effort - the medical dissection and murder of living prisoners of war.
Over the course of four months before the defeat of the Japanese forces in March 1945, Mr Makino cut open the bodies of ten Filipino prisoners, including two teenage girls. He amputated their limbs, and cut up and removed their healthy livers, kidneys, wombs and still beating hearts for no better reason than to improve his knowledge of anatomy.
“It was educational,” he said. “Even today when I go to see doctors, they are impressed by my knowledge of the human body. But if I’m really honest, the reason we did it was to take revenge on these people who were spying for the Americans. Now, of course I feel terrible about the cruel thing that I did, and I think of it so often. But at the time what I felt for these people was closer to hatred than to pity.” There have been other accounts of medical vivisection, most notoriously by Unit 731, a top secret arm of the Imperial Army which killed thousands of Chinese and Russian prisoners in Manchuria in the name of scientific research. But Mr Makino’s is the first such testimony to have emerged from the Philippines - and from the Navy, which was regarded as the less cruel and fanatical of the Imperial armed forces.
Apart from the extraordinary climax of his wartime story, Mr Makino comes across as typical of Japanese of his generation - a polite, well meaning man who lacked the immense courage and daring which would have been needed to stand up to the Imperial war machine. He was born in 1922 and grew in the port city of Kobe, where he joined the Navy in 1940. After training as a medical corpsman, he found himself sailing to and fro across East Asia in the mighty Yamato, the biggest battleship ever created. By 1942, though, the Imperial forces were on the defensive and even to sailors such as Mr Makino, defeat seemed inevitable.
“New soldiers started arriving, and they were younger and younger, 15 or 16 years old,” he remembers. “We said, ’Where are you guns?’, and they replied, ’We have no guns - but we have bamboo spears.’ It was then I knew that we had already lost the war.” It was in such an atmosphere that he found himself in Zamboanga, a Muslim town in the far south-west of the Philippines.
Continued Dissect Them Alive, Page 2
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