The book "Devil's Food - The Secret of Japan's 731 Germ Warfare Unit" written by the famous Japanese writer Makoto Morimura was published and distributed in Japan from 1981 to 1982, and after more than ten years of efforts, after verifying some historical facts and supplementing relevant materials, the book was finally released in China.
The author uses documentary methods to systematically expose the historical facts of the Japanese germ unit Unit 731 establishing large-scale germ warfare research bases in Pingfang Town, Harbin and other places, using more than 3,000 Chinese, Soviet and other prisoners of war and civilians to conduct vivisection, develop bacteriological weapons, and conduct bacteriological warfare on the border between China and the Soviet Union.
The book is divided into three parts, the first of which mainly interviews the former Unit 731 personnel, revealing the dark inside story of this germ warfare unit known as the "devil".
The second part adds some of the facts of Unit 731 ascertained, and also uses information preserved in the United States to expose the dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union over the issue of germ warfare forces and the inside story of the united States and Japan's transaction of technical information on Japan's research on germ weapons and the implementation of germ warfare.
The third part focuses on interviewing Chinese victims in China about Japanese germ war crimes and various physical evidence collected at the scene.
Although reading such a history is by no means pleasant, and even makes people fall into various negative emotions from time to time, it has to be admitted that the author's tone has the attraction of making people continue to read. Just as there may be many people who know about this history, there are countless right-wing politicians in Japan who strenuously deny this history. In the process of reading, there are many shocks, in addition to understanding and reading this book, and then more deeply understand this history, and be shocked by this history, some of the shock is also from this writer's land, a writer who dares to face the dark history of his own country. It is said that in the process of creating this book, Morimura Washichi was regarded as a thorn in the side by right-wingers, and even had personal safety concerns. As a Japanese writer, I feel even more precious for daring to expose a true history that is not conducive to Japan. The author, Seiichi Morimura, said: "My real intention in writing 'Devil's Feed' is not only to expose the cruelty of the invading army and expose its crimes themselves, but to pass the truth on to the next generation who do not understand the war, so as to prevent the Japanese from repeating the mistakes of the past." I believe this is the obligation of war experiencers. This sentence is also printed on the back cover of this book, and I think that the person who can say such a sentence is definitely a person who faces history squarely, a person with a sense of responsibility and conscience.
To name a few books that document the atrocities of the invaders:
1. There is a group of Japanese who occupy a city in China. On a boat, they found a family member preparing to flee. So, they took the turn X all the women. After that, they asked the men of the family to force X women, that is, to make them mess with X. So all the people of this family committed suicide by throwing themselves into the river. That's how the aggressor forces you into a situation where there's no way back. Therefore, when you are just beginning to be violated, you should rise up and resist.
2. There is a female soldier who is captured by a group of Japanese. They hung the female soldier up and took out the female soldier's X palace and put it on her head, and the X palace gradually shrank and the female soldier was choked to death. They cooked the female soldiers and ate them. It was horrific, and even more frightening, it was told by one of the participants. He said he didn't think anything was wrong at the time, and only felt he had gone too far after the war. Listen, think about it, such a group of people, can you expect them to have any humanity?
3. There was a female soldier, and after they captured her, they divided her into two horses.
4. We only know that Unit 731 has conducted vivisection experiments. After reading, I learned that vivisection was the norm for the Japanese, and in order to train new military doctors and make them skillfully perform various operations for wounded soldiers, they used living people to train, remove the internal organs of a living person, and finally strangled him with a rope, and then threw it to feed the dogs. And the most hateful thing is that until now, they do not think that this kind of behavior is inhumane, but feel that they strangled people to death before throwing them out, which is already very benevolent. This kind of person, this kind of thinking, can you still reason with him?
5, they will use living people to test the knife, exercise the soldier's assassination ability. In their eyes, the defeated countries have no such concept.
In the process of reading this book, I often feel this way - although this history has been told by adults since childhood, many of the contents of the book are still heart-wrenching.
Although I saw episodes such as lighting sky lanterns in film and television dramas when I was a child, and I was mentally prepared for the brutality of the Japanese, reading these plots still made me feel shocked. The fate of the people of the defeated countries is so tragic that how can they not rise up and resist? Those who shout that "those who must be outside must first be safe inside", because they do not resist for their own selfish interests and do not cooperate with the Allies, should all be sinners of history. As a man, as a soldier, it is unforgivable to not go all out to defend the country and to plunge his people into hell, no matter what the reason, no matter what the excuse. If the Japanese really occupied China in the end, who would die well? Your little bit of self-interest has no soil at all.
So, how should we understand the bacterial research of Unit 731? I think that when we really explore him as history, rather than just being satisfied with a cathartic outlet; when we realize that the "bacterial experiment of Unit 731", like the Nanjing Massacre and the Auschwitz concentration camp, is a tragedy of human nature, the common grandeur of mankind and the great regression of civilized society, when we begin to seriously reflect on the reasons for this tragedy, and not just attribute its cause to "the cruelty of the Japanese nation", then we may really begin to understand this history.
In fact, the book "Devil's Food" alone is not enough to explain this history, but through this book, we can understand this period of history, and the value of this period is immeasurable. The feelings that burst out from time to time when reading books are very heavy when they are written. But reading is the same as life, you can not only see the sun, but also always remember that there is still a haze, but also to reflect often under the haze.
Santayana once said, "He who forgets the past is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past." "I think it shouldn't be just Japan that needs to remember this phrase, it should be the whole world.