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A Plague of Vampires: Problems in the Legacy of Japanese Colonial Medicine and Science

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A Plague of Vampires: Problems in the Legacy of Japanese Colonial Medicine and Science A Plague of Vampires: Problems in the Legacy of Japanese Colonial Medicine and Science Ruth Rogaski Vanderbilt University work in progress: do not cite without permission of author This paper is an attempt to think through several obstacles I have encountered in my research on the history of the biological sciences in Manchuria. I began with the naïve hope that I could quickly sketch out an overview of the activities of Japanese scientists in this region during the first half of the twentieth century. Instead I encountered a bewildering research terrain. Many documents from this period no longer exist. Many essential archival documents do exist, but are kept inaccessible to researchers. And in China, any discussion about Japanese science is conducted within a matrix of memory, history, and rumor about the nefarious crimes of Japanese scientists. Within this cultural matrix, the Japanese scientist (or physician) is a personification of evil who experimented on humans, murdered Chinese resistance heroes, and created plagues that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Such is the power of these memories that no activity in the biological sciences during Japan’s formal fifty-year presence in Manchuria (1895-1945) is left untainted by association with the legacy of germ warfare atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese scientists of Unit 731 during the 1930s and 40s. My work on chronicling the history of biological research institutions in Manchuria has been sidelined while I contemplate the difficulties of interpreting the plague-drenched legacy of Japanese colonial science. The challenge of interpreting stories of evil associated with agents of colonial science and medicine has recently engrossed historians of Africa. Luise White, in her 2 path-breaking book, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, writes a history of how Africans expressed their understanding of colonial exploitation through the genre of fantastical stories about men who stole blood, the bazimamoto. Bazimamoto were associated with a variety of professions connected to the colonial state: firemen, policemen, game wardens, and doctors, all of whom drained the blood of Africans so that whites could make medicine from the blood. In presenting these vampire stories, White does not seek to expose how Africans misunderstood Western medicine. Instead, she insists that she takes the stories "at face value," as descriptions of "the aggressive carelessness of colonial extractions."1 White demonstrates how the repetition of formulaic elements in stories turned the stories into truth for the African speaker and listener alike. It is important to note, however, that in writing her history, White does not have to believe that agents of the colonial state actually sucked blood. What is important for the historian is that the subjects she studies think the stories are true: as White summarizes, "vampires are a story, but belief in vampires is a fact."2 Nancy Rose Hunt, when dealing with similar stories of bloodsucking doctors in A Colonial Lexicon, reminds us that truly blood-curdling things did take place under colonial rule in Africa. Foremost among the horrors was the dismemberment inflicted on many during King Leopold's Heart of Darkness reign in the Belgian Congo. Against this backdrop, Western doctors dug up human bones (to procure skeletons for research and teaching), extracted lymph through painful lumbar punctures (a test for sleeping sickness), and performed thousands of autopsies on adults and infants alike. On this last point, Hunt's interpretation is quite stark: in Africa, she suggests, "a key incentive for 1 Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 5. 2 Ibid., 308. 3 colonial medical research...was implicitly the ready availability of a dead and dissectible subject population."3 Dismemberment and violence were part and parcel of colonial rule. It is not surprising, then, that the Africans in Hunt's book believed that white doctors drank the blood of Africans or chopped up their bodies to make tinned meat. However, no matter how seriously these Africanists say they are taking the stories of their informants, in all these examples, rumor is nevertheless still perceived of as working on the level of metaphor. The researcher is quite certain that white doctors, no matter how racist they might have been, in fact did not drink African blood, nor did they make Africans into Spam. In spite of insistence on "taking stories at face value," in these works there still exists two separate worlds of belief, one mistaken or at the very least metaphorical (colonial doctors committed inhuman atrocities), and one true, grounded in fact (colonial doctors were part of a inhumane system, but they did not commit inhuman atrocities).4 But what happens when some of the stories about "vampires" are true? The evil of Unit 731's doctors has been well documented.5 From 1932 until the end of the war in 1945, scientists with the Japanese military, apparently in conjunction with civilian 3 Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 191. 4 Although European researchers certainly conducted racist and unethical biomedical investigations in Africa. See, for example, Wolfgang Eckart, "Colony as Laboratory: German Sleeping Sickness Campaigns in German East Africa and in Togo, 1900-1914," History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 24.1 (2002): 69-89. 5 Works on Unit 731 in English include Sheldon Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-Up (London: Routledge, 1994); Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: Japan’s Secret Biological Warfare in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1989); Tanaka Yuki, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996); Hal Gold, Unit 731 Testimony (Tokyo: Yenbooks, 1996); and most recently, Daniel Barenblatt, A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan’s Germ Warfare Operation (New York, HarperCollins, 2004). Many more works on Unit 731, published in the 1980s and 90s, are available in Japanese and Chinese. 4 scientists, experimented on humans, conducted vivisections, and used germ warfare against military and civilian targets. What has not been well documented and what can perhaps never be accurately determined is the specific extent of the Japanese military's biological warfare attacks, the geographical scope and frequency of the intentional spreading of infectious disease outside of the germ warfare laboratories. This gives one pause when one encounters, from a variety of sources, suggestions that Japanese scientific personnel engaged in heinous acts throughout China from the very beginnings of the twentieth century. I suspect that not all major outbreaks of disease that occurred in wartime China were intentionally caused by the Japanese military. I also have a hunch that many research publications on infectious disease in China are not evidence of human experimentation, and that in most cases, vaccines distributed to Chinese by Japanese did not contain invisible agents of genocide. Convictions to the contrary, however, permeate Chinese discussions of the legacy of Japanese science in Manchuria on many levels, affecting not just the realm of popular culture, but also the worlds of Chinese politics, law, and history. In my work I would like to be able to document the activities of Japanese scientists. A byproduct of this work (although not an explicit goal) might be that one could determine which Japanese scientists ultimately functioned as “vampires,” and which did not. Various accounts of evil Japanese scientist lore could then be suspended in a realm apart, studied as a part of popular culture but separated from a more verifiable set of historical actions and atrocities (some of which could still be adjudicated in various legal forums). However, the scholar working on twentieth-century China, in contrast to the scholar of twentieth-century Africa, is not at liberty to profess a post-modern embrace 5 of representation as “fact” while simultaneously maintaining a modern belief in what is true and what is not. A foreign scholar who voices skepticism about certain Chinese tales of Japanese “vampires,” or attempts to deal with such stories as metaphor, runs the risk of being accused of sympathies with right-wing Japanese challenges to the credibility of Chinese war memory. One becomes, in effect, something akin to a holocaust denier. It is this research conundrum that this paper seeks to explore. * * * * A consistent narrative genre about the evil Japanese scientist-physician exists in many Chinese media. Perhaps the best-known manifestation of the evil Japanese physician story lurks at the heart of Bruce Lee’s film, The Chinese Connection (aka Fist of Fury). Set in early twentieth-century Shanghai, The Chinese Connection narrates how Chen Zhen (Bruce Lee) and other members of the Jingwu school of martial arts avenge the death of the school’s founder, Huo Yuanjia. The film is actually based on real occurrences in China’s treaty-port history. The famed Chinese pugilist Huo Yuanjia died in Shanghai in 1913, not long after he won a public match against a Japanese judo expert. Histories of the Jingwu school from as early as 1925 claim that Huo died from injections administered to him by Japanese physicians who wished to kill him as revenge for
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