# data[].attributes.body
In real life, we all face pressure and unfair situations.
To survive, we often have no choice but to give in.

At school, we play the “good student” to earn the teacher’s approval. At work, we act like the “perfect employee” to get rewards from the boss. In relationships, we pretend to be the “ideal partner” just to receive love and affection.

We wear mask after mask to fit into different roles.
And after a while, we forget who we really are.

Since childhood, we’ve been told: study hard to get a good job. Then we’re told: work hard to earn more money for a “better life.” Test after test, deadline after deadline—
everything feels planned out by someone else.

Sometimes I feel like a prisoner, being shuffled between schools, companies, families, and society.
I can be a good student, a good worker, a good family member, but I’m rarely allowed to be just myself.

That’s one big reason why I turned to art.
It’s my way to let out the pain, unfairness, and unspoken feelings I experience in real life. In my drawings, I imagine a version of myself that’s free and happy. In the world of art, I have the courage to say “I love you” to the girl I admire, the strength to fight back against oppression, and the freedom to explore ideas—even the ones society labels as “wrong.”

My art style changes a lot.
I don’t always name my works or write long descriptions,
because I believe art should be felt, not explained.
Everyone brings their own story, and so everyone sees something different. I hope people who view my work don’t just snap a quick photo and walk away. I want them to pause, feel, and maybe even get lost in the image. If you’re also tired of how the world looks from one point of view,
you’re welcome to step into my world—and maybe find a new way of seeing things.

# data[].attributes.body
Hi, I'm an illustrator with a strong interest in history, emotion, and storytelling through images. I mainly work with pen and ink, watercolor, and digital tools like Procreate and Photoshop. My art often explores dark and serious topics, such as war, human suffering, and inner struggles, combining realistic and surreal elements to express complex feelings. Through my work, I try to give voice to those who have been forgotten or silenced. At the same time, I also enjoy creating original characters and exploring themes like beauty, vulnerability, and resistance. Drawing helps me reflect on the world and communicate in ways words often can't. I hope my illustrations can touch people and make them stop and think-even if just for a moment.

# data[].attributes.body
Dark Art

Surrealism

Realism

Symbolism

Aesthetic Violence

Emotional Expression

Narrative Illustration

Fine Line Drawing

Watercolor Contrast

Historical Reflection

War and Trauma

Beauty and Beast

Death and Rebirth

Female Form

Pain and Memory

Silent Suffering

Pen and Ink

Fineliner

Watercolor

Digital Drawing (Procreate, Photoshop)

iPad Sketch

Traditional Techniques

Textured Brush

Mixed Media

Kim Jung Gi

Artgerm

Nico Delort

Zdzisław Beksiński

Marvel & DC

Hollywood Movies

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 The system may encounter bugs when exporting PDFs because this archive contains a lot of pages. I tried many times but the bug still exist. Please click on my Padlet link to view the full content. Thank you for your understanding.

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 The system may encounter bugs when exporting PDFs because this archive contains a lot of pages. I tried many times but the bug still exist. Please click on my Padlet link to view the full content. Thank you for your understanding.

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https://padlet.com/mliu03202111/liu-mingze-unit10-personal-archive-faor5h13llf7cpl0

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日行一善百日筑基功. (2024) '中国人

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日行一善百日筑基功. (2024) '中国人拍的731电影并不完全真实，真实情况比电影还要可怕的多' [Bilibili]. 30 Octuber. Available at: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1rCS5YCE94?vd_source=720b71901c7d117a4d4c6377adeb2651 (Accessed: 4 May 2025).

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laughgril. (2024) '日寇暴行铭记历史' [Bilibili]. 20 January. Available at: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1iK411a7bw?vd_source=720b71901c7d117a4d4c6377adeb2651 (Accessed: 4 May 2025).

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快乐的潇洒的人. (2024) '日军暴行（122）' [Bilibili]. 15 June. Available at: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1bH4y1w7nB?vd_source=720b71901c7d117a4d4c6377adeb2651 (Accessed: 4 May 2025).

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快乐的潇洒的人. (2024) '日军暴行（381）' [IBilibili]. 13 October. Available at: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1wJ2BYqE6g?vd_source=720b71901c7d117a4d4c6377adeb2651 (Accessed: 4 May 2025).

# data[].attributes.body
思维碰撞机. (2021) ' 武器杀人，文化诛心: 二战时日本如何洗脑被侵略国民众' [Bilibili]. 2 June. Available at: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1og41137o9?vd_source=720b71901c7d117a4d4c6377adeb2651 (Accessed: 4 May 2025).

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十厂长啊. (2024) '揭秘日本侵华真相

# data[].attributes.body
十厂长啊. (2024) '揭秘日本侵华真相，侵略只是表面' [Bilibili]. 20 June. Available at: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1rE4m1R71k?vd_source=720b71901c7d117a4d4c6377adeb2651 (Accessed: 4 May 2025).

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奇奇怪怪研究所i. (2023) '残忍！ 日军十次恐怖的大屠杀' [Bilibili]. 30 August. Available at: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Kj411m7m5?vd_source=720b71901c7d117a4d4c6377adeb2651 (Accessed: 4 May 2025).

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日军731部队的每一个实验都令人发指 (2021) Available at: 日军731部队的每一个实验都令人发指 (Accessed: 29 April 2025).

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日军731部队的每一个实验都令人发指

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在抗日战争时期，731部队伪装成一个水净化部队，但是它本质上是一个细菌工厂，目的是为了用活人实验炭疽病菌干粉，进而实行细菌战，甚至进行种族灭绝。 其中的项目负责人石井四郎最为得意的一项“成果”便是将宪兵警察逮捕的中国爱国人士当作实验的“木头…

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https://govt.chinadaily.com.cn/s/202502/13/WS67adc175498eec7e1f72f3c5/exhibition-hall-of-evidences-of-crime-committed-by-unit-731-of-the-japanese-imperial-army.html#:~:text=The%20Exhibition%20Hall%20of%20Evidence%20of%20Crime%20by,gallery%20and%20reconstructed%20displays%20of%20the%20old%20headquarters.

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Exhibition Hall of Evidences of Crime Committed by Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army
哈尔滨市侵华日军第七三一部队罪证陈列馆
Address: No 23 XinjiangDajie, Pingfang district, Harbin city, Heilongjiang province
Opening hours: General hours: 8:30 am - 6:00 pm (Closed on Mondays, except national holidays)
Last entry to the new exhibition hall: 5:00 pm
Last entry to the old headquarters site: 5:30 pm
Admission: Free
Tel: 0451- 51685222 / 0451- 51747773

The Exhibition Hall of Evidence of Crime by Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army is a historical site museum located in Harbin city. It focuses on the original remains of Unit 731, supplemented by exhibitions in a modern gallery and reconstructed displays of the old headquarters.

Outside view of the Exhibition Hall of Evidences of Crime Committed by Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army [Photo/IC]

Visitors can visit significant locations such as the old headquarters ruins, bacterial laboratories, special prison remains, underground animal breeding rooms, frostbite laboratories, boiler rooms, and gas chamber remains.

As the largest bacterial warfare site in the history of global warfare, the museum reveals the atrocities committed by the Japanese military during World War II. The exhibits detail the history of Japan's use of biological and chemical warfare, including human experimentation conducted by Unit 731, which led to the deaths of at least 3,000 test subjects and over 300,000 victims across China.

Documents introducing the Japanese Imperial Army's bacterial bomb on display at the museum [Photo/IC]

The museum aims to educate visitors about these dark chapters in history, encouraging reflection on war crimes, wartime responsibility, and the enduring impact of war. By preserving these historical truths, it seeks to inspire a commitment to human rights, peace, and global understanding.

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Exhibition Hall of Evidences of Crime Committed by Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army

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The Exhibition Hall of Evidence of Crime by Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army is a historical site museum located in Harbin city.

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https://youtu.be/jy7AEMBDyFM?si=D9QZqnQH1pmhcoPb

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What They Didn't Teach You About UNIT 731

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The Infographics Show. (2024) ' What They Didn't Teach You About UNIT 731 ' [Youtube]. 26 September. Available at: https://youtu.be/jy7AEMBDyFM?si=D9QZqnQH1pmhcoPb (Accessed: 26 April 2025).

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What They Didn't Teach You About UNIT 731

# data[].attributes.body
Simple History. (2022) ' The Military Went Too Far With These Disturbing Experiments ' [Youtube]. 10 Octuber. Available at: https://youtu.be/ov7UniDqWo0?si=rnG_ht_bV7Qg8V0E (Accessed: 26 April 2025).

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The Military Went Too Far With These Disturbing Experiments

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https://youtu.be/ov7UniDqWo0?si=rnG_ht_bV7Qg8V0E

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Military Went Too Far With These Disturbing Experiments

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https://youtu.be/XhKN5XciluY?si=2Zjr_n-Uy0B-1nnv

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Japan's Biological Terror! - The Horror of Unit 731 - WW2 Special

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https://youtu.be/-BpKixUKbU8?si=enMte5aw8SV3UgRn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Unspeakable Things That Happened In Unit 731

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https://youtu.be/0Pzq0URbL2M?si=asq6EBU4CzRBbSYl

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https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/japans-hellish-unit-731/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In conquered Manchuria, ghastly experiments were fiendishly conducted on human guinea pigs.

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https://allthatsinteresting.com/unit-731

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These six "experiments" by Unit 731 rank among some of the most horrifying war crimes ever committed - and they went virtually unpunished.

World War II devastated the lives of more than 100 million people around the world. And out of all the areas in which World War II was fought, none were active as long as what would come to be known as the Pacific Theater. In fact, Japan arguably started the war by attacking Manchuria in 1931, and it inarguably waged war with China by invading in 1937.

The disturbances and upheavals that these invasions caused shook China to its very foundations, triggered a civil war and a famine that probably killed more people than currently live in Canada and Australia combined, and lasted until the country's Soviet "liberation" in 1945.

And out of all the atrocities that Imperial Japan unleashed upon the Chinese people during this brutal occupation, probably none were as gratuitously hateful as the operations of Unit 731, the Japanese biological warfare unit that somehow plumbed new depths in what was already a genocidal war.

Despite innocent beginnings as a research and public health agency, Unit 731 eventually grew into an assembly line for weaponized diseases that, if fully deployed, could have killed everyone on Earth several times over. All this "progress" was, of course, built on the limitless suffering of human captives, who were held as test subjects and walking disease incubators until Unit 731 was shut down at the end of the war.

But before Unit 731 was broken up in 1945, it committed some of the most torturous human experiments in recorded history.

Unit 731 Experiments: Frostbite Testing

Yoshimura Hisato, a physiologist assigned to Unit 731, took a special interest in hypothermia. As part of Maruta's study in limb injuries, Hisato routinely submerged captives' limbs in a tub of water filled with ice and had them held until the arm or leg had frozen solid and a coat of ice had formed over the skin. According to one eyewitness account, the limbs made a sound like a plank of wood when struck with a cane.

Hisato then tried different methods for rapid rewarming of the frozen appendage. Sometimes he did this by dousing the limb with hot water, sometimes by holding it close to an open fire, and other times by leaving the subject untreated overnight to see how long it took for the person's own blood to thaw it out.

Vivisection Of Conscious Captives

Unit 731 started out as a research unit, investigating the effects of disease and injury on the fighting ability of an armed force. One element of the unit, called "Maruta," took this research a little further than the usual bounds of medical ethics by observing injuries and the course of disease on living patients.

At first, these patients were volunteers from the ranks of the army, but as the experiments reached the limits of what could be non-invasively observed, and as the supply of volunteers dried up, the unit turned to the study of Chinese POWs and civilian captives.

And as the concept of consent went out the window, so did the restraint of the researchers. It was around this time that Unit 731 began referring to confined research subjects as "logs," or "Maruta" in Japanese.

Study methods in these experiments were barbaric.

Vivisection, for example, is the practice of mutilating human bodies, without anesthesia, to study the operations of living systems. Thousands of men and women, mostly Chinese communist captives as well as children and elderly farmers, were infected with diseases such as cholera and the plague, then had their organs removed for examination before they died in order to study the effects of the disease without the decomposition that occurs after death.

Subjects had limbs amputated and reattached to the other side of the body, while others had their limbs crushed or frozen, or had the circulation cut off to observe the progress of gangrene.

Finally, when a prisoner's body was all used up, they would typically be shot or killed by lethal injection, though some may have been buried alive. None of the Chinese, Mongolian, Korean, or Russian captives assigned to Unit 731 survived their confinement.

Unit 731's Horrifying Weapons Tests

The effectiveness of various weapons was of obvious interest to the Japanese Army. To determine effectiveness, Unit 731 herded captives together on a firing range and blasted them from varying ranges by multiple Japanese weapons, such as the Nambu 8mm pistol, bolt-action rifles, machine guns, and grenades. Wound patterns and penetration depths were then compared on the bodies of the dead and dying inmates.

Bayonets, swords, and knives were also studied in this way, though the victims were usually bound for these tests. Flamethrowers were also tested, on both covered and exposed skin. In addition, gas chambers were set up at unit facilities and test subjects exposed to nerve gas and blister agents.

Heavy objects were dropped onto bound victims to study crush injuries, subjects were locked up and deprived of food and water to learn how long humans could survive without them, and victims were allowed to drink only sea water, or were given injections of mismatched human or animal blood to study transfusions and the clotting process.

Meanwhile, prolonged X-ray exposure sterilized and killed thousands of research participants, as well as inflicting horrible burns when the emitting plates were miscalibrated or held too close to the subjects' nipples, genitals, or faces.

And to study the effects of high G-forces on pilots and falling paratroopers, Unit 731 personnel loaded human beings into large centrifuges and spun them at higher and higher speeds until they lost consciousness and/or died, which usually happened around 10 to 15 G's, though young children showed a lower tolerance for acceleration forces.

Syphilis Experiments On Unit 731 Captives

Venereal disease has been the bane of organized militaries since ancient Egypt, and so it stands to reason that the Japanese military would take an interest in the symptoms and treatment of syphilis.

To learn what they needed to know, doctors assigned to Unit 731 infected victims with the disease and withheld treatment to observe the uninterrupted course of the illness. A contemporary treatment, a primitive chemotherapy agent called Salvarsan, was sometimes administered over a period of months to observe the side effects, however.

To ensure effective transmission of the disease, syphilitic male victims were ordered to rape both female and male fellow captives, who would then be monitored to observe the onset of the disease. If the first exposure failed to establish infection, more rapes would be arranged until it did.

Rape And Forced Pregnancy

Beyond just the syphilis experiments, rape became a common feature of Unit 731's experiments.

For example, female captives of childbearing age were sometimes forcibly impregnated so that weapon and trauma experiments could be done on them.

After being infected with various diseases, exposed to chemical weapons, or suffering crush injuries, bullet wounds, and shrapnel injuries, the pregnant subjects were opened up and the effects on the fetuses studied.

The idea seems to have been to translate the teams' findings into civilian medicine, but if Unit 731's researchers ever published these results, the papers seem not to have survived the war years.

Germ Warfare On Chinese Civilians

The totality of Unit 731's research was in support of their larger mission, which by 1939 was to develop horrific weapons of mass destruction for use against the Chinese population, and presumably American and Soviet forces, if the time ever came.

To this end, Unit 731 cycled through tens of thousands of captives at several facilities across Manchuria, which had been occupied by imperial forces for years. Inmates of these facilities were infected with several of the most lethal pathogens known to science, such as Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic and pneumonic plague, and typhus, which the Japanese hoped would spread from person to person after being deployed and depopulate disputed areas.

To breed the most lethal strains possible, doctors monitored patients for rapid onset of symptoms and quick progression. Victims who pulled through were shot, but those who got sickest fastest were bled to death on a mortuary table, and their blood was used to transfect other captives, the sickest of whom would themselves be bled to transfer the most virulent strain to yet another generation.

One member of Unit 731 later recalled that very sick and unresisting captives would be laid out on the slab so a line could be inserted into their carotid artery. When most of the blood had been siphoned off and the heart was too weak to pump anymore, an officer in leather boots climbed onto the table and jumped on the victim's chest with enough force to crush the ribcage, whereupon another dollop of blood would spurt into the container.

When the plague bacillus had been bred to what was felt to be a sufficiently lethal caliber, the last generation of victims to be infected were exposed to huge numbers of fleas, Y. pestis' preferred vector of contagion. The fleas were then packed in dust and sealed inside clay bomb casings.

On October 4, 1940, Japanese bombers deployed these casings, each loaded with 30,000 fleas that had each sucked blood from a dying prisoner, over the Chinese village of Quzhou. Witnesses to the raid recall a fine reddish dust settling on surfaces all over town, followed by a rash of painful flea bites that afflicted nearly everyone.

From contemporary accounts, it is known that more than 2,000 civilians died of plague following this attack, and that another 1,000 or so died in nearby Yiwu after the plague was carried there by sick railway workers. Other attacks, using anthrax, killed approximately 6,000 more people in the area.

A few years later, as the war was nearing its end, Japan likewise planned to bomb America with plague-ridden fleas, but never got the chance. In August 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had both been bombed, the Soviet Army had invaded Manchuria and utterly annihilated the Japanese Army, and the emperor read his infamous surrender declaration over the radio, Unit 731 was officially disbanded.

Its records were mostly burned, destroying any useful information the team had managed to generate in 13 years of research. Researchers mostly slipped back into civilian life in occupied Japan as if nothing had ever happened, many of them becoming prominent members of university faculty.

To this day, Japan has not apologized for, and China has not forgiven, the countless atrocities Japanese forces visited upon China between 1931 and 1945. As the last witnesses to this history grow old and die, it's possible that the matter will never be addressed again.
After this look at Unit 731, read up on some more of the worst war crimes ever committed as well as other Japanese war crimes from the World War II era. Then, have a look at four of the most evil science experiments ever performed and find out whether or not any of the highly disturbing Nazi research actually contributed anything to medical science.

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6 Horrifying Human "Experiments" That WWII Japan Got Away With

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World War II devastated the lives of more than 100 million people around the world. And out of all the areas in which World War II was fought, none were active as long as what would come to be known as the Pacific Theater.

# data[].attributes.body
World War Two. (2021) 'Japan's Biological Terror! - The Horror of Unit 731 - WW2 Special ' [Youtube]. 23 February. Available at: https://youtu.be/XhKN5XciluY?si=2Zjr_n-Uy0B-1nnv (Accessed: 26 April 2025).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Japan's Biological Terror! - The Horror of Unit 731 - WW2 Special

# data[].attributes.body
https://youtu.be/ZxHTxOyP_uE?si=NEew31Z3ANlv2FAp

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Harbin China - Unit 731 Museum Full Experience *Warning - Disturbing Content*

# data[].attributes.body
Jack in China. (2024) 'Harbin China - Unit 731 Museum Full Experience Warning - Disturbing Content' [Youtube]. 7 July. Available at: https://youtu.be/ZxHTxOyP_uE?si=3Zal6N5BVIAAN7e4 (Accessed: 26 April 2025).

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Harbin China - Unit 731 Museum Full Experience *Warning - Disturbing Content*

# data[].attributes.body
The Infographics Show. (2023) ' Insane Japanese Torture Methods Used During World War II - Unit 731 ' [Youtube]. 7 Octuber. Available at: https://youtu.be/K8GVHRMKOiM?si=8fk3qSaPaXWwFfxR (Accessed: 26 April 2025).

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Insane Japanese Torture Methods Used During World War II - Unit 731

# data[].attributes.body
https://youtu.be/K8GVHRMKOiM?si=8fk3qSaPaXWwFfxR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Insane Japanese Torture Methods Used During World War II - Unit 731

# data[].attributes.body
The Infographics Show. (2019) 'The Horrors of Unit 731' [Youtube]. 25 April. Available at: https://youtu.be/D4nPxik59oE?si=mAUQXCF9u4yVzpCt (Accessed: 26 April 2025).

# data[].attributes.body
A Day in History. (2023) ' The Unspeakable Things That Happened In Unit 731 ' [Youtube]. 16 March. Available at: https://youtu.be/-BpKixUKbU8?si=enMte5aw8SV3UgRnURL (Accessed: 26 April 2025).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Unspeakable Things That Happened In Unit 731

# data[].attributes.body
Fern. (2024) ' Inside Japan’s Secret Torture Lab ' [Youtube]. 30 September. Available at: https://youtu.be/0Pzq0URbL2M?si=asq6EBU4CzRBbSYl (Accessed: 26 April 2025).

# data[].attributes.body
Barrett, D. (2018 ) Japan’s Hellish Unit 731﻿ . Available at: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/japans-hellish-unit-731/ (Accessed: 26 April 2025).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In conquered Manchuria, ghastly experiments were fiendishly conducted on human guinea pigs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In conquered Manchuria, ghastly experiments were fiendishly conducted on human guinea pigs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
These six "experiments" by Unit 731 rank among some of the most horrifying war crimes ever committed - and they went virtually unpunished.

World War II devastated the lives of more than 100 million people around the world. And out of all the areas in which World War II was fought, none were active as long as what would come to be known as the Pacific Theater. In fact, Japan arguably started the war by attacking Manchuria in 1931, and it inarguably waged war with China by invading in 1937.

The disturbances and upheavals that these invasions caused shook China to its very foundations, triggered a civil war and a famine that probably killed more people than currently live in Canada and Australia combined, and lasted until the country's Soviet "liberation" in 1945.

And out of all the atrocities that Imperial Japan unleashed upon the Chinese people during this brutal occupation, probably none were as gratuitously hateful as the operations of Unit 731, the Japanese biological warfare unit that somehow plumbed new depths in what was already a genocidal war.

Despite innocent beginnings as a research and public health agency, Unit 731 eventually grew into an assembly line for weaponized diseases that, if fully deployed, could have killed everyone on Earth several times over. All this "progress" was, of course, built on the limitless suffering of human captives, who were held as test subjects and walking disease incubators until Unit 731 was shut down at the end of the war.

But before Unit 731 was broken up in 1945, it committed some of the most torturous human experiments in recorded history.

Unit 731 Experiments: Frostbite Testing

Yoshimura Hisato, a physiologist assigned to Unit 731, took a special interest in hypothermia. As part of Maruta's study in limb injuries, Hisato routinely submerged captives' limbs in a tub of water filled with ice and had them held until the arm or leg had frozen solid and a coat of ice had formed over the skin. According to one eyewitness account, the limbs made a sound like a plank of wood when struck with a cane.

Hisato then tried different methods for rapid rewarming of the frozen appendage. Sometimes he did this by dousing the limb with hot water, sometimes by holding it close to an open fire, and other times by leaving the subject untreated overnight to see how long it took for the person's own blood to thaw it out.

Vivisection Of Conscious Captives

Unit 731 started out as a research unit, investigating the effects of disease and injury on the fighting ability of an armed force. One element of the unit, called "Maruta," took this research a little further than the usual bounds of medical ethics by observing injuries and the course of disease on living patients.

At first, these patients were volunteers from the ranks of the army, but as the experiments reached the limits of what could be non-invasively observed, and as the supply of volunteers dried up, the unit turned to the study of Chinese POWs and civilian captives.

And as the concept of consent went out the window, so did the restraint of the researchers. It was around this time that Unit 731 began referring to confined research subjects as "logs," or "Maruta" in Japanese.

Study methods in these experiments were barbaric.

Vivisection, for example, is the practice of mutilating human bodies, without anesthesia, to study the operations of living systems. Thousands of men and women, mostly Chinese communist captives as well as children and elderly farmers, were infected with diseases such as cholera and the plague, then had their organs removed for examination before they died in order to study the effects of the disease without the decomposition that occurs after death.

Subjects had limbs amputated and reattached to the other side of the body, while others had their limbs crushed or frozen, or had the circulation cut off to observe the progress of gangrene.

Finally, when a prisoner's body was all used up, they would typically be shot or killed by lethal injection, though some may have been buried alive. None of the Chinese, Mongolian, Korean, or Russian captives assigned to Unit 731 survived their confinement.

Unit 731's Horrifying Weapons Tests

The effectiveness of various weapons was of obvious interest to the Japanese Army. To determine effectiveness, Unit 731 herded captives together on a firing range and blasted them from varying ranges by multiple Japanese weapons, such as the Nambu 8mm pistol, bolt-action rifles, machine guns, and grenades. Wound patterns and penetration depths were then compared on the bodies of the dead and dying inmates.

Bayonets, swords, and knives were also studied in this way, though the victims were usually bound for these tests. Flamethrowers were also tested, on both covered and exposed skin. In addition, gas chambers were set up at unit facilities and test subjects exposed to nerve gas and blister agents.

Heavy objects were dropped onto bound victims to study crush injuries, subjects were locked up and deprived of food and water to learn how long humans could survive without them, and victims were allowed to drink only sea water, or were given injections of mismatched human or animal blood to study transfusions and the clotting process.

Meanwhile, prolonged X-ray exposure sterilized and killed thousands of research participants, as well as inflicting horrible burns when the emitting plates were miscalibrated or held too close to the subjects' nipples, genitals, or faces.

And to study the effects of high G-forces on pilots and falling paratroopers, Unit 731 personnel loaded human beings into large centrifuges and spun them at higher and higher speeds until they lost consciousness and/or died, which usually happened around 10 to 15 G's, though young children showed a lower tolerance for acceleration forces.

Syphilis Experiments On Unit 731 Captives

Venereal disease has been the bane of organized militaries since ancient Egypt, and so it stands to reason that the Japanese military would take an interest in the symptoms and treatment of syphilis.

To learn what they needed to know, doctors assigned to Unit 731 infected victims with the disease and withheld treatment to observe the uninterrupted course of the illness. A contemporary treatment, a primitive chemotherapy agent called Salvarsan, was sometimes administered over a period of months to observe the side effects, however.

To ensure effective transmission of the disease, syphilitic male victims were ordered to rape both female and male fellow captives, who would then be monitored to observe the onset of the disease. If the first exposure failed to establish infection, more rapes would be arranged until it did.

Rape And Forced Pregnancy

Beyond just the syphilis experiments, rape became a common feature of Unit 731's experiments.

For example, female captives of childbearing age were sometimes forcibly impregnated so that weapon and trauma experiments could be done on them.

After being infected with various diseases, exposed to chemical weapons, or suffering crush injuries, bullet wounds, and shrapnel injuries, the pregnant subjects were opened up and the effects on the fetuses studied.

The idea seems to have been to translate the teams' findings into civilian medicine, but if Unit 731's researchers ever published these results, the papers seem not to have survived the war years.

Germ Warfare On Chinese Civilians

The totality of Unit 731's research was in support of their larger mission, which by 1939 was to develop horrific weapons of mass destruction for use against the Chinese population, and presumably American and Soviet forces, if the time ever came.

To this end, Unit 731 cycled through tens of thousands of captives at several facilities across Manchuria, which had been occupied by imperial forces for years. Inmates of these facilities were infected with several of the most lethal pathogens known to science, such as Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic and pneumonic plague, and typhus, which the Japanese hoped would spread from person to person after being deployed and depopulate disputed areas.

To breed the most lethal strains possible, doctors monitored patients for rapid onset of symptoms and quick progression. Victims who pulled through were shot, but those who got sickest fastest were bled to death on a mortuary table, and their blood was used to transfect other captives, the sickest of whom would themselves be bled to transfer the most virulent strain to yet another generation.

One member of Unit 731 later recalled that very sick and unresisting captives would be laid out on the slab so a line could be inserted into their carotid artery. When most of the blood had been siphoned off and the heart was too weak to pump anymore, an officer in leather boots climbed onto the table and jumped on the victim's chest with enough force to crush the ribcage, whereupon another dollop of blood would spurt into the container.

When the plague bacillus had been bred to what was felt to be a sufficiently lethal caliber, the last generation of victims to be infected were exposed to huge numbers of fleas, Y. pestis' preferred vector of contagion. The fleas were then packed in dust and sealed inside clay bomb casings.

On October 4, 1940, Japanese bombers deployed these casings, each loaded with 30,000 fleas that had each sucked blood from a dying prisoner, over the Chinese village of Quzhou. Witnesses to the raid recall a fine reddish dust settling on surfaces all over town, followed by a rash of painful flea bites that afflicted nearly everyone.

From contemporary accounts, it is known that more than 2,000 civilians died of plague following this attack, and that another 1,000 or so died in nearby Yiwu after the plague was carried there by sick railway workers. Other attacks, using anthrax, killed approximately 6,000 more people in the area.

A few years later, as the war was nearing its end, Japan likewise planned to bomb America with plague-ridden fleas, but never got the chance. In August 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had both been bombed, the Soviet Army had invaded Manchuria and utterly annihilated the Japanese Army, and the emperor read his infamous surrender declaration over the radio, Unit 731 was officially disbanded.

Its records were mostly burned, destroying any useful information the team had managed to generate in 13 years of research. Researchers mostly slipped back into civilian life in occupied Japan as if nothing had ever happened, many of them becoming prominent members of university faculty.

To this day, Japan has not apologized for, and China has not forgiven, the countless atrocities Japanese forces visited upon China between 1931 and 1945. As the last witnesses to this history grow old and die, it's possible that the matter will never be addressed again.
After this look at Unit 731, read up on some more of the worst war crimes ever committed as well as other Japanese war crimes from the World War II era. Then, have a look at four of the most evil science experiments ever performed and find out whether or not any of the highly disturbing Nazi research actually contributed anything to medical science.

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6 Horrifying Human "Experiments" That WWII Japan Got Away With

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World War II devastated the lives of more than 100 million people around the world. And out of all the areas in which World War II was fought, none were active as long as what would come to be known as the Pacific Theater.

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Photo Reference from The Exhibition Hall of Crime Evidence of Japanese Army Unit 731

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Photo Reference from The Exhibition Hall of Crime Evidence of Japanese Army Unit 731

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Photo Reference from The Exhibition Hall of Crime Evidence of Japanese Army Unit 731

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Photo Reference from The Exhibition Hall of Crime Evidence of Japanese Army Unit 731

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Stockton, R. (2024) Inside Unit 731, Japan’s Disturbing Human Experiments Program During World War II. Available at: https://allthatsinteresting.com/unit-731 (Accessed: 26 April 2025).

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These six "experiments" by Unit 731 rank among some of the most horrifying war crimes ever committed - and they went virtually unpunished.

World War II devastated the lives of more than 100 million people around the world. And out of all the areas in which World War II was fought, none were active as long as what would come to be known as the Pacific Theater. In fact, Japan arguably started the war by attacking Manchuria in 1931, and it inarguably waged war with China by invading in 1937.

The disturbances and upheavals that these invasions caused shook China to its very foundations, triggered a civil war and a famine that probably killed more people than currently live in Canada and Australia combined, and lasted until the country's Soviet "liberation" in 1945.

And out of all the atrocities that Imperial Japan unleashed upon the Chinese people during this brutal occupation, probably none were as gratuitously hateful as the operations of Unit 731, the Japanese biological warfare unit that somehow plumbed new depths in what was already a genocidal war.

Despite innocent beginnings as a research and public health agency, Unit 731 eventually grew into an assembly line for weaponized diseases that, if fully deployed, could have killed everyone on Earth several times over. All this "progress" was, of course, built on the limitless suffering of human captives, who were held as test subjects and walking disease incubators until Unit 731 was shut down at the end of the war.

But before Unit 731 was broken up in 1945, it committed some of the most torturous human experiments in recorded history.

Unit 731 Experiments: Frostbite Testing

Yoshimura Hisato, a physiologist assigned to Unit 731, took a special interest in hypothermia. As part of Maruta's study in limb injuries, Hisato routinely submerged captives' limbs in a tub of water filled with ice and had them held until the arm or leg had frozen solid and a coat of ice had formed over the skin. According to one eyewitness account, the limbs made a sound like a plank of wood when struck with a cane.

Hisato then tried different methods for rapid rewarming of the frozen appendage. Sometimes he did this by dousing the limb with hot water, sometimes by holding it close to an open fire, and other times by leaving the subject untreated overnight to see how long it took for the person's own blood to thaw it out.

Vivisection Of Conscious Captives

Unit 731 started out as a research unit, investigating the effects of disease and injury on the fighting ability of an armed force. One element of the unit, called "Maruta," took this research a little further than the usual bounds of medical ethics by observing injuries and the course of disease on living patients.

At first, these patients were volunteers from the ranks of the army, but as the experiments reached the limits of what could be non-invasively observed, and as the supply of volunteers dried up, the unit turned to the study of Chinese POWs and civilian captives.

And as the concept of consent went out the window, so did the restraint of the researchers. It was around this time that Unit 731 began referring to confined research subjects as "logs," or "Maruta" in Japanese.

Study methods in these experiments were barbaric.

Vivisection, for example, is the practice of mutilating human bodies, without anesthesia, to study the operations of living systems. Thousands of men and women, mostly Chinese communist captives as well as children and elderly farmers, were infected with diseases such as cholera and the plague, then had their organs removed for examination before they died in order to study the effects of the disease without the decomposition that occurs after death.

Subjects had limbs amputated and reattached to the other side of the body, while others had their limbs crushed or frozen, or had the circulation cut off to observe the progress of gangrene.

Finally, when a prisoner's body was all used up, they would typically be shot or killed by lethal injection, though some may have been buried alive. None of the Chinese, Mongolian, Korean, or Russian captives assigned to Unit 731 survived their confinement.

Unit 731's Horrifying Weapons Tests

The effectiveness of various weapons was of obvious interest to the Japanese Army. To determine effectiveness, Unit 731 herded captives together on a firing range and blasted them from varying ranges by multiple Japanese weapons, such as the Nambu 8mm pistol, bolt-action rifles, machine guns, and grenades. Wound patterns and penetration depths were then compared on the bodies of the dead and dying inmates.

Bayonets, swords, and knives were also studied in this way, though the victims were usually bound for these tests. Flamethrowers were also tested, on both covered and exposed skin. In addition, gas chambers were set up at unit facilities and test subjects exposed to nerve gas and blister agents.

Heavy objects were dropped onto bound victims to study crush injuries, subjects were locked up and deprived of food and water to learn how long humans could survive without them, and victims were allowed to drink only sea water, or were given injections of mismatched human or animal blood to study transfusions and the clotting process.

Meanwhile, prolonged X-ray exposure sterilized and killed thousands of research participants, as well as inflicting horrible burns when the emitting plates were miscalibrated or held too close to the subjects' nipples, genitals, or faces.

And to study the effects of high G-forces on pilots and falling paratroopers, Unit 731 personnel loaded human beings into large centrifuges and spun them at higher and higher speeds until they lost consciousness and/or died, which usually happened around 10 to 15 G's, though young children showed a lower tolerance for acceleration forces.

Syphilis Experiments On Unit 731 Captives

Venereal disease has been the bane of organized militaries since ancient Egypt, and so it stands to reason that the Japanese military would take an interest in the symptoms and treatment of syphilis.

To learn what they needed to know, doctors assigned to Unit 731 infected victims with the disease and withheld treatment to observe the uninterrupted course of the illness. A contemporary treatment, a primitive chemotherapy agent called Salvarsan, was sometimes administered over a period of months to observe the side effects, however.

To ensure effective transmission of the disease, syphilitic male victims were ordered to rape both female and male fellow captives, who would then be monitored to observe the onset of the disease. If the first exposure failed to establish infection, more rapes would be arranged until it did.

Rape And Forced Pregnancy

Beyond just the syphilis experiments, rape became a common feature of Unit 731's experiments.

For example, female captives of childbearing age were sometimes forcibly impregnated so that weapon and trauma experiments could be done on them.

After being infected with various diseases, exposed to chemical weapons, or suffering crush injuries, bullet wounds, and shrapnel injuries, the pregnant subjects were opened up and the effects on the fetuses studied.

The idea seems to have been to translate the teams' findings into civilian medicine, but if Unit 731's researchers ever published these results, the papers seem not to have survived the war years.

Germ Warfare On Chinese Civilians

The totality of Unit 731's research was in support of their larger mission, which by 1939 was to develop horrific weapons of mass destruction for use against the Chinese population, and presumably American and Soviet forces, if the time ever came.

To this end, Unit 731 cycled through tens of thousands of captives at several facilities across Manchuria, which had been occupied by imperial forces for years. Inmates of these facilities were infected with several of the most lethal pathogens known to science, such as Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic and pneumonic plague, and typhus, which the Japanese hoped would spread from person to person after being deployed and depopulate disputed areas.

To breed the most lethal strains possible, doctors monitored patients for rapid onset of symptoms and quick progression. Victims who pulled through were shot, but those who got sickest fastest were bled to death on a mortuary table, and their blood was used to transfect other captives, the sickest of whom would themselves be bled to transfer the most virulent strain to yet another generation.

One member of Unit 731 later recalled that very sick and unresisting captives would be laid out on the slab so a line could be inserted into their carotid artery. When most of the blood had been siphoned off and the heart was too weak to pump anymore, an officer in leather boots climbed onto the table and jumped on the victim's chest with enough force to crush the ribcage, whereupon another dollop of blood would spurt into the container.

When the plague bacillus had been bred to what was felt to be a sufficiently lethal caliber, the last generation of victims to be infected were exposed to huge numbers of fleas, Y. pestis' preferred vector of contagion. The fleas were then packed in dust and sealed inside clay bomb casings.

On October 4, 1940, Japanese bombers deployed these casings, each loaded with 30,000 fleas that had each sucked blood from a dying prisoner, over the Chinese village of Quzhou. Witnesses to the raid recall a fine reddish dust settling on surfaces all over town, followed by a rash of painful flea bites that afflicted nearly everyone.

From contemporary accounts, it is known that more than 2,000 civilians died of plague following this attack, and that another 1,000 or so died in nearby Yiwu after the plague was carried there by sick railway workers. Other attacks, using anthrax, killed approximately 6,000 more people in the area.

A few years later, as the war was nearing its end, Japan likewise planned to bomb America with plague-ridden fleas, but never got the chance. In August 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had both been bombed, the Soviet Army had invaded Manchuria and utterly annihilated the Japanese Army, and the emperor read his infamous surrender declaration over the radio, Unit 731 was officially disbanded.

Its records were mostly burned, destroying any useful information the team had managed to generate in 13 years of research. Researchers mostly slipped back into civilian life in occupied Japan as if nothing had ever happened, many of them becoming prominent members of university faculty.

To this day, Japan has not apologized for, and China has not forgiven, the countless atrocities Japanese forces visited upon China between 1931 and 1945. As the last witnesses to this history grow old and die, it's possible that the matter will never be addressed again.
After this look at Unit 731, read up on some more of the worst war crimes ever committed as well as other Japanese war crimes from the World War II era. Then, have a look at four of the most evil science experiments ever performed and find out whether or not any of the highly disturbing Nazi research actually contributed anything to medical science.

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6 Horrifying Human "Experiments" That WWII Japan Got Away With

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World War II devastated the lives of more than 100 million people around the world. And out of all the areas in which World War II was fought, none were active as long as what would come to be known as the Pacific Theater.

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Through this unit, I’ve not only improved my drawing skills, but also grown a lot in terms of expressing ideas, using symbolism, and thinking more deeply about history. While learning about the war crimes of Japan’s Unit 731 and the pain people went through during the Anti-Japanese War, I realized that as an artist, I have a responsibility to share these stories and emotions through my work.

I created a few black-and-white illustrations around themes like sacrifice, resistance, and the clash between care and destruction—such as The Orphaned and a quick sketch of deer fighting back against a lion. Even though I didn’t use color, I tried to let the emotions and tension come through clearly with just lines and composition. Choosing black and white helped me focus more on the feeling of the piece, without distractions.

I did face some challenges during the process. For example, how can I use animals to represent real historical events? How do I show both tragedy and dignity at the same time? These questions made me slow down and think more carefully about every detail. It also made me rethink what art really means to me.

What I’ve learned is that I don’t just want to make drawings that look good—I want them to say something. I hope that when people look at my art, they don’t just “see” it, but really feel it.

Looking back on this project, I’ve become more aware of how important a strong theme is, how useful symbolism can be, and how every artwork should have its own story to tell. This unit didn’t just help me improve my technical skills—it helped me understand what kind of artist I want to be, and what messages I want to share with the world.

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Media: iPad Procreate

Size: 4500x7500 pixels

This is a black and white sketch I drew using my iPad and Procreate. The image shows a tense and fierce battle: a group of deer surrounding a fierce lion. Even though the deer are much weaker than the lion, they fight back bravely without fear. Many of the deer have fallen during the fight—there are signs of struggle, sacrifice, and determination all over the scene. The lion is badly wounded too, with scars all over its body. Despite all the losses, the deer still refuse to back down and keep the lion surrounded, not letting it do more harm.

I made this piece while thinking about the terrible crimes committed by Japan’s Unit 731 during the war in China. The cruel experiments they carried out brought pain and death to countless innocent people, but also awakened a strong spirit of resistance. In the drawing, the deer stand for the people who seemed weak on the outside but fought back bravely. The lion stands for the brutal and merciless invaders. Deer aren’t fighters by nature, but they have each other, and they have courage. Even when facing a powerful enemy, they choose to stand their ground and fight.

With this drawing, I hope people can feel the strength of courage—the idea that even if you’re at a disadvantage, don’t give in; even if the cost is high, still fight to protect your home and your dignity. This piece is not only a way to speak out against the crimes of Unit 731, but also a tribute to everyone who stood up and resisted.

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Media: iPad Procreate

Size: 4500x7500 pixels

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Media: iPad Procreate

Size: 4500x7500 pixels

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Media: Photoshop

Size: 12000x7000 pixels

This is a digital artwork rendered in black-and-white linework, created using Photoshop. The scene depicts a bird’s nest at the moment a mother bird is struck and killed by an arrow as she returns home. The arrow pierces her body, yet she still tightly holds a worm in her beak—the food she brought back for her newly hatched chick. She dies in the nest, while the lone baby bird inside tilts its head upward in a sorrowful wail. Its tiny, featherless body trembles helplessly beside its mother’s corpse. Surrounding the nest is a crowd of moths, adding an ominous, unsettling atmosphere to the tragedy.

The inspiration for this piece comes from the crimes committed by Japan’s Unit 731 during World War II, particularly the cruel human experiments inflicted upon innocent civilians, especially infants and vulnerable groups. The nest symbolizes the beginning of life and the protection of a home, while the mother bird represents the nurturing force that is violently destroyed. The chick’s cry is not only an expression of grief over its mother's death but also a symbol of the silent screams of the innocent in history—those who never had a chance to see the world before being mercilessly extinguished.

The appearance of the moths symbolizes death, decay, and the wandering of restless souls, adding a surreal layer to the imagery. Through the use of stark, minimal black-and-white linework, I sought to heighten the emotional weight of the tragedy. The symbolic composition and imagery serve as both an accusation of the crimes committed by Unit 731 and a lament for its victims.

With The Orphaned, I hope viewers can feel the overwhelming helplessness, the suddenness of destruction, and the need to reflect on these dark fragments of history.

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Media: Oil painting on canvas

Size: 50x70cm

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Media: Oil painting on canvas

Size: 50x70cm

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Media: Oil painting on canvas

Size: 50x70cm

This is an animal portrait centered on a horse, rendered entirely in shades of blue, enveloping the scene in a deep, mournful atmosphere. The horse wears a sorrowful expression, eyes brimming with tears. Its lowered head and tightly closed mouth seem to silently convey endless pain and grief. The inspiration for this piece comes from the inhumane experiments carried out by Japan's Unit 731 during wartime, particularly the cruel persecution of vulnerable groups such as infants, women, and prisoners of war.

I chose the horse as a symbolic figure not only because it has represented loyalty, endurance, and sacrifice in Chinese traditional culture, but also because it has often appeared in war narratives as a silent witness. Though voiceless, it carries immense emotional weight. In this painting, the horse's sadness transcends species—it is an empathetic response to suffering, a gaze fixed on the scars of history.

Blue, the dominant color of the work, symbolizes calmness, mourning, and the quiet sorrow of remembrance. It flows like a cold current from historical memory—unobtrusive, yet impossible to ignore. The brushstrokes on the horse’s body are delicate; its fur undulates like waves, subtly trembling with emotional resonance. The background is intentionally simplified to highlight the horse’s expression and emotional presence, drawing the viewer’s attention to this silent mourning.

" Sorrow " is not a literal depiction of historical atrocities, but a symbolic expression. It commemorates, in a gentle yet resolute manner, the lives destroyed by the experiments of Unit 731. The horse stands not only as an emblem of individual grief but as a symbol of collective suffering.

Through this painting, I hope to awaken memory and respect for historical trauma, and offer a belated tribute and gentle attention to the victims who never had the chance to tell their stories.

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I use water color to finish the color part in this unit.