A Japanese university has opened a museum acknowledging that its staff dissected downed American airmen while they were still alive during World War Two. The move is a striking step in a society where war crimes are still taboo and rarely discussed, although the incident has been extensively documented in books and by US officials. A gruesome display at the newly-opened museum at Kyushu University explains how eight US POWs were taken to the centre’s medical school in Fukuoka after their plane was shot down over the skies of Japan in May 1945. There, they were subjected to horrific medical experiments - as doctors dissected one soldier’s brain to see if epilepsy could be controlled by surgery, and removed parts of the livers of other prisoners as part of tests to see if they would survive.
Another soldier was injected with seawater, in an experiment to see if it could be used instead of sterile saline solution to help dehydration. All of the soldiers died from their ordeal. The horrific episode has been described in previous books, one by a Japanese doctor who took part in the experiments, but the museum represents an official acknowledgement of the atrocity
After the prisoners were killed, Japanese doctors preserved their remains in formaldehyde until the end of the war. Evidence of the experiments was heard at an Allied War Crimes tribunal in 1948 against 30 doctors and university staff, by which time the body parts had been destroyed. In total 23 people were found guilty of vivisection – dissecting and performing surgery on a living thing – and five were sentenced to death. General Douglas MacArthur later commuted all death sentences when he was military governor of Japan.
