American cover-up of Japanese war crimes
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Through Tribunal, Democracy and Authoritarianism
Cover-up
The American government sent General MacArthur to oversee rebuilding post-war Japan and the shift to a democracy from a previously authoritarian system of governance. During the occupation, MacArthur assigned Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders to gather data on Japan's biological warfare, which was obtained through human experimentation. At Sanders' suggestion, MacArthur offered full political immunity to high-ranking officials who were instrumental in perpetrating crimes against humanity, in exchange for the data about their experiments. Among those was Shirō Ishii, the commander of Unit 731. During the cover-up operation, the U.S. government paid money to obtain data on human experiments conducted in China, according to two declassified U.S. government documents.
The total amount paid to unnamed former members of the infamous unit was somewhere between 150,000 yen to 200,000 yen. An amount of 200,000 yen at that time is the equivalent of 20 million yen to 40 million yen today.
Japan's emperor Hirohito gave his consent regarding the policies and activities of Unit 731, Unit 100 and other human experimentation facilities. Though it is unclear on whether Emperor Hirohito was made aware of the full extent of Unit 731, the emperor's younger brother, Prince Mikasa, had toured the headquarters of Unit 731 and wrote in his memoirs that he watched films of how Chinese prisoners were "made to march on the plains of Manchuria for poison gas experiments on humans."
MacArthur, abiding by the Potsdam Declaration, gathered a jury for the Tokyo trials, where a number of Japanese officials were successfully tried and convicted. In 1981, one of the last surviving members of the Tokyo Tribunal, Judge Bert Röling, expressed his unhappiness that the war crimes committed in Unit 731 had been protected by the US government and wrote, "It is a bitter experience for me to be informed now that centrally ordered Japanese war criminality of the most disgusting kind was kept secret from the court by the U.S. government."
American POWs returning home from Japanese custody were told not to discuss their experiences with the media or anyone who was not cleared by the military.