Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my lasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there’s nothing learned, nothing gained. It’s simple, but it’s cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.
Why didn’t I tell Evan about my grandfather? I don’t know. I suppose I was a coward. I was afraid that he might feel that something in me would be tainted, a corruption of blood. Because I could not then find a way to empathize with my grandfather, I was afraid that Evan could not empathize with me. I kept my grandfather’s story to myself, and so I locked away a part of myself from my husband. There were times when I thought I would go to the grave with my secret and so erase forever my grandfather’s story.
I regret it, now that Evan is dead. He deserved to know his wife whole, complete, and I should have trusted him rather than silenced my grandfather’s story, which is also my story. Evan died believing that by unearthing more stories, he caused people to doubt their truth. But he was wrong. The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial—the truth only dies when true stories are untold.
This urge to speak, to tell the story, I share with the aging and dying former members of Unit 731, with the descendants of the victims, with all the untold horrors of history. The silence of the victims of the past imposes a duty on the present to recover their voices, and we are most free when we willingly take up that duty.
[Dr. Kirino’s voice comes to us off-camera, as the camera pans to the star-studded sky.]
It has been a decade since Evan’s death, and the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium remains in place. We still do not know quite what to do with a past that is transparently accessible, a past that will not be silenced or forgotten. For now, we hesitate.
Evan died thinking that he had sacrificed the memory of the Unit 731 victims and permanently erased the traces that their truth left in our world, all for nought, but he was wrong. He was forgetting that even with the Bohm-Kirino particles gone, the actual photons forming the images of those moments of unbearable suffering and quiet heroism are still out there, traveling as a sphere of light into the void of space.
Look up at the stars, and we are bombarded by light generated on the day the last victim at Pingfang died, the day the last train arrived at Auschwitz, the day the last Cherokee walked out of Georgia. And we know that the inhabitants of those distant worlds, if they are watching, will see those moments, in time, as they stream from here to there at the speed of light. It is not possible to capture all of those photons, to erase all of those images. They are our permanent record, the testimony of our existence, the story that we tell the future. Every moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the eyes of the universe.
For far too long, historians, and all of us, have acted as exploiters of the dead. But the past is not dead. It is with us. Everywhere we walk, we are bombarded by fields of Bohm-Kirino particles that will let us see the past like looking through a window. The agony of the dead is with us, and we hear their screams and walk among their ghosts. We cannot avert our eyes or plug up our ears. We must bear witness and speak for those who cannot speak. We have only one chance to get it right.
? ? ?
AUTHOR’S NOTES: This story is dedicated to the memory of Iris Chang and all the victims of Unit 731.
I first got the idea for writing a story in the form of a documentary after reading Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See: a Documentary.”
The following sources were consulted during the research for this story. Their help is hereby gratefully acknowledged, though any errors in relating their facts and insights are entirely my own.
For the phrase “exploiters of the dead” and the history of Heian and premodern Japan:
Totman, Conrad. A History of Japan, Second Edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
For the history of Unit 731 and the experiments performed by Unit 731 personnel:
Gold, Hal. Unit 731 Testimony, Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1996.
Harris, Sheldon H. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932–45 and the American Cover-Up, New York: Routledge, 1994.
(Numerous other newspaper and journal articles, interviews, and analyses were also consulted. Their authors include, among others, Keiichi ?Tsuneishi, Doug Struck, Christopher Reed, Richard Lloyd Parry, Christopher Hudson, Mark Simkin, Frederick Dickinson, John Dower, Tawara Yoshifumi, Yuki Tanaka, Takashi Tsuchiya, Tien-wei Wu, Shane Green, Friedrich Frischknecht, Nicholas Kristof, Jun Hongo, Richard James Havis, Edward Cody, and Judith Miller. I thank these authors and regret that the sources are not listed here individually for space reasons.)
For descriptions of the vivisections and practice surgery sessions with live Chinese victims conducted by Japanese doctors, their treatment as prisoners after the War, and Japan’s postwar responses to memories of the War:
Noda, Masaaki. “Japanese Atrocities in the Pacific War: One Army Surgeon’s Account of Vivisection on Human Subjects in China,” East Asia: An International Quarterly, 18:3 (2000) 49–91.
Note that based on testimonies and other documentation, the Japanese doctors of Unit 731 typically infected their victims while wearing protective suits to avoid the possibility that resisting prisoners would infect the doctors by struggling.
Aspects of Shiro Yamagata’s post-Unit 731 recollections are modeled on the experiences of Ken Yuasa (a Japanese military doctor who was not a member of Unit 731), described in the Noda article.
The obituary for Evan Wei is modeled upon the Economist’s November 25, 2004 obituary for Iris Chang.
The hearing of the Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment is modeled upon the February 15, 2007, hearing before that same Subcommittee on House Resolution 121, concerning Japan’s wartime enslavement of women for sexual purposes (known as “comfort women”).
Austin Yoder provided pictures from modern-day Pingfang, Harbin, and the Unit 731 War Crimes Museum.
The various denialist statements attributed to “men in the street” are modeled on Internet forum comments, postings, and direct communication to the author from individuals who hold such views.