I've got plenty to say about the prison storyline -- well, I have
plenty to say on a lot of subjects! ;) -- but just for now, this is
something I wrote up for my own journal as notes on a BotI synopsis.
It's about the 20th-century historical basis of the storyline, which
not a lot of Americans know about, and which I thought might help
provide more context for readers wondering why the hell Samura spent
so much time with it. (Well, other than his well-established taste for
drawing pictures of people getting their limbs hacked off!)

Sorry for taking a heavy-duty academic tone on a manga list. :P As a
fan, I have gotten a big kick out of various elements of the prison
storyline, not all of it grim. But the history of Japanese Army
activity in China during the 1930s has been a family-related interest
of mine for a long time, and so...


Be warned before you read this note; it describes human atrocities
much worse than those which appear in the BotI manga, and it's not
fictional.


Much of the prison plotline is apparently inspired by the history of
Unit 731, an Imperial Japanese Army medical research project. The unit
carried out numerous experiments on living human subjects during the
1930s and 1940s, primarily in Northern China but also in Tokyo. Their
methods and motivations were similar to those of Dr. Josef Mengele at
Auschwitz, including vivisection, freezing, disease, and attempted
transplants. One experiment involved amputating the living subject's
arms and sewing them on again, reversed from right to left.

The people used in these operations were initially Chinese and
Koreans, and later Allied prisoners and even repatriated Japanese
POWs, who were considered to have forfeited all right to life by
surrendering or being captured in battle. The experimenters researched
ways of treating Japanese soldiers who had suffered burns or frostbite
and to train army doctors to repair internal injuries and perform
amputations. Since the administrators realized that most people would
initially have trouble mutilating and killing human beings, they
progressively desensitized their medical trainees by forcing them to
inject rabbits and other animals with chemicals and watch them as they
died in agony.

The human subjects were referred to as "logs of wood" instead of
people. Men, women, children and infants were operated on without
anesthetic and left to die after removal of limbs and organs; women
were raped and impregnated in order to vivisect them and their fetuses
at various stages of pregnancy.

Prisoners were kept outdoors in sub-zero temperatures, their limbs
doused with cold water until they froze solid. They were shot to give
doctors practice at treating bullet wounds. Prisoners were
deliberately infected with plague and other diseases to test them as
biological weapons. When those tested and propagated diseases were
deliberately spread in Chinese civilian populations by means of air
drops and infected food, hundreds of thousands died or were left
disabled. The list goes on. Since Unit 731 and a number of associated
units functioned for close to fifteen years, they accounted for far
more total deaths than Dr. Mengele.

The records of Unit 731 were partially destroyed at the time of the
Japanese surrender in 1945, since the administrators knew that their
activities would be considered war crimes. Even in the early stages,
everyone working at Unit 731 was sternly warned never to reveal its
secrets. The research subjects were hastily disposed of before the
Americans landed, sometimes by being buried alive en masse or gassed.

However, much of the research material survived and passed into the
hands of the American occupiers. In exchange for turning it over and
interpreting it for possible benefit to American medical and
biological warfare research, the doctors and administrators of Unit
741 were not prosecuted. Many of them went on to high-placed medical
and government careers in postwar Japan. The unit's activities never
came up during the Tokyo war crimes trials. Only one peripheral
incident involving a captured American bomber crew resulted in
convictions, and all of those sentences were shortened and eventually
commuted. All of the unit's material was returned to Japan by the US
government in the 1950s and has not been seen since. No copies were kept.

In the middle 1980s (when Hiroaki Samura was a teenager) revelations
about Unit 731 began to emerge, and testimony by its former personnel
shocked the nation. Mass graves filled with victims' remains and
severed body parts were uncovered in the middle of Tokyo during
construction digs. Especially since the 1989 death of Emperor
Hirohito, who almost certainly personally signed authorizations for
these atrocities, elderly veterans of the unit have continued to come
forward with confessions and accusations, and more evidence of the
unit's activities keeps emerging. Recently another set of mass graves
was unearthed, returning Unit 731 to the headlines.

If you've read this far, it should be obvious that the main substance
and many details of the prison storyline are directly derived from
Unit 731's methods, with the fictional twist of immortality. Any
Japanese reader would instantly recognize the resemblance. The
post-facto complicity of the US government and armed forces is almost
unknown in this country. Can't imagine why.

[There are many articles and other material available online if you're
interested in reading more about this or want documentation. I've used
other sources as well, particularly an extensive interview with a
veteran of Unit 731 published in "Japan at War: An Oral History", by
Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook.]