A university museum in Japan has broken a seven-decade taboo on discussing the dissection of live US prisoners of war by medical personnel towards the end of the Second World War.
The museum opened on Saturday in the grounds of Kyushu University, in the city of Fukuoka, and details more than a century of innovation at one of Japan’s foremost medical schools. But one small section provides details of a darker chapter in the university’s history, according to Kyodo News.
A B-29 Superfortress that had taken off from the Pacific island of Guam and completed a bombing run against an airfield near Fukuoka was rammed by a Japanese fighter on May 5, 1945. Local records indicate that 12 of the crew bailed out, but one died when his parachute cords were severed by another fighter and two others were stabbed to death by locals when they landed.
Nine of the crew were taken into custody, with Capt. Marvin Watkins separated from his men and sent to Tokyo for interrogation. The remainder were handed over to a military physician and transported to Kyushu Imperial University’s College of Medicine, the predecessor of the modern-day institution.
In testimony against 30 doctors and university personnel presented to a hearing of the Allied War Crimes tribunal in Yokohama in 1948, it was claimed that doctors gave the POWs intravenous injections of seawater to test if it could serve as a substitute for sterile saline solution. Others had parts of their livers removed to determine if they could survive. Another experiment was to determine whether epilepsy could be controlled through the removal of part of the brain.
None of the crew of the aircraft survived these monstrous trials and their remains were preserved in formaldehyde until the end of the war, when the doctors attempted to cover their tracks by destroying the evidence.
One such doctor committed suicide in prison before the trial and charges of cannibalism were dropped due to a lack of evidence, but 23 people were found guilty of carrying out vivisection or the wrongful removal of body parts. Five were sentenced to death, four received life prison terms and the rest received shorter sentences.
Two years later, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the military governor of Japan, commuted all the death sentences and reduced most of the prison terms. By 1958, every one of the people involved in the case had been released.
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This one is technically not yet history, because at the time of posting, the little craft has about half an hour left to go. That said, let’s proceed.
In 2017, NASA’s Cassini space probe ended its twenty-year mission at Saturn. After a nearly-seven-year-long journey there, it orbited the ringed planet for 13 years and just over two months, gathering copious amounts of information about the planet, said rings, and many of its moons. It landed an ESA probe called Huygens on Titan, the first-ever soft landing in the outer Solar System. It discovered lakes, seas, and rivers of methane on Titan, geysers of water erupting from Enceladus (and passed within 50 miles of that moon’s surface), and found gigantic, raging hurricanes at both of Saturn’s poles.
And the images it returned are beautiful enough to make you weep.
On this day in 2017, with the fuel for Cassini’s directional thrusters running low, the probe was de-orbited into the Saturnian atmosphere to prevent any possibility of any contamination of possible biotic environments on Titan or Enceladus. The remaining thruster fuel was used to keep the radio dish pointed towards Earth so the probe could transmit information about the upper atmosphere of Saturn while it was burning up due to atmospheric friction.
This is us at our best. We spent no small amount of money on a nuclear-powered robot, launched it into space, sent it a billion miles away, and worked with it for two decades just to learn about another planet. And when the repeatedly-extended missions were through, we made the little craft sacrifice itself like a samurai, performing its duty as long as it could while it became a shooting star in the Saturnian sky.
Rhea occulting Saturn
Water geysers on Enceladus
Strange Iapetus
Look at this gorgeousness
A gigantic motherfucking storm in Saturn’s northern hemisphere
Tethys
This image is from the surface of a moon of a planet at least 746 million miles away. Sweet lord
Mimas
Vertical structures in the rings. Holy shit
Titan and Dione occulting Saturn, rings visible
Little Daphnis making gravitational ripples in the rings
That’s here. That’s home. That’s all of us that ever lived.
1. “Anxiety: The feeling where you stay up at night, stare at your ceiling, ask yourself an infinite number of questions, then sit there and debate on whether or not you actually want to know the answer. The feeling where you wonder who truly cares about you and who is just using you; who is there for you and who is so desperately waiting for you to fail. The feeling where you feel like you’re not good enough; that you need to be this, this, and this to be successful and liked. You crave for the attention you know you can’t have. The feeling where you get frustrated because it’s physically impossible to be 100% happy. You want someone to vent to, but no on will understand you. The feeling where you question your value, your worth, your pride, yourself, everything… and you think. Over think. All night. All you’re left with, is you, yourself, and a very dark place.” By: Neal Houston
2. “Anxiety makes you sit there and overthink every single thing. At times it makes you think people in your life are leaving you. You begin to feel abandoned, and not worth anything because the most important person/people in your life don’t want you. So you push away for fear of being hurt. You push them away so they can’t discard you or leave you. When in reality, nobody was ever leaving. Anxiety this bad makes you leave the one you love. It sucks.” By: Unknown
