Lost in Manchuria

For the person who decided they ship Ishii with Yoshimura Hisato and gave me an idea.

It was a still, quiet spring evening in Manchuria. The setting sun mixed with the remnants of the previous day's dust storm to stain the sky a deep blood red. Hisato smiled slightly to himself as he looked up from the stack of graphs and tables on his desk and out of the window. It was quiet, at least as quiet as it ever got. The hum of the generator and distant machinery was always present somewhere in the background. As Hisato watched a train go by in the distance bound for Harbin, the steam diffusing and fading against the sunset, the calm was shattered by hurried footsteps outside and the door of his office crashing open, shoved so hard it hit the bookshelf on the wall behind. Shiro practically ran in, loud voice echoing off the walls before he was fully through the doorway.

‘Hisa-kun, this is an emergency inspection!’

he almost shouted, striding up to the desk and sitting down in the chair opposite Hisato.

‘Next week I am going to Xinjing to report to high command, as you know’

He continued, eyes shining in the way they usually did whenever he was announcing an opportunity to make himself sound important, a boyish grin on his face.

‘I’m going to meet with General Umezu personally and spend the afternoon with him, none of this quiet negotiation at the back of the conference room stuff. In light of the situation in China and the excellent results we have been bringing in, I am anticipating being able to get a 50% increase in our budget. We can get it, I know it, the steel industry in Manchukuo is still struggling to scale up to capacity and our conventional munitions production targets are behind schedule. Biological weapons represent an immeasurable improvement in cost performance, a hundred yen here saves a thousand in bullets for the front lines and General Umezu knows it. I think I’m finally winning over all the others to the idea as well even if the infantry generals keep moaning about their budget being sidelined. Within the next year, we are going to be the best funded division in the whole Army, I can see it already’

Shiro spoke very fast, his hands constantly in motion agitatedly as if the fact he couldn’t speak as fast as he could think was frustrating for him. He leaned in close across the desk without decreasing the volume of his voice, growing more and more animated. When he started talking about how he would probably be able to present the results of the campaign in the south Hisato thought he was actually going to reach across the desk and grab his hands in his excitement, the way he often did after a few Sapporo beers too many in the officers’ bar, but he seemed to restrain himself at the last moment. He finally paused to look at Hisato’s reaction properly. Hisato smiled weakly, trying to pretend that he’d been able to follow the last few minutes of machine-gun fire information.

“That’s… Excellent, Ishii-san. I’m glad to hear it. You always do seem to make a good impression”

Ishii smiled brightly.

“Thank you, Hisa-kun!”

Shiro showed no sign of registering the dark circles under his colleague’s eyes, nor his more subdued demeanour than usual. What for Shiro, largely safe from physically demanding work and the demands of a normal Army officer’s day in his office (where he often stayed until four in the morning and did not reappear until early afternoon), was a dynamic and exciting plan for budget expansions and military glory, was for his colleagues and subordinates a punishing and unpredictable work schedule. New experiments, new ideas, new campaigns on some godforsaken front in the interior of China where Shiro had decided Unit 731’s involvement would be indispensable, all of it produced more overtime, more funding grant applications, and an ever-increasing backlog of results to analyse and report on. And more ‘emergency meetings’ initiated by Shiro barging into the office (or laboratory, or private quarters in the dead of night) of whoever he decided needed to be updated with the latest developments.

‘Um, Ishii-san… Ishii-san!’

Hisato finally managed to interrupt Shiro’s increasingly grandiose vision of the forthcoming meeting in Xinjing.

‘Yes, what?’

Hisato tried but failed to conceal his irritation.

‘Ishii-san, did you put powdered hiropon on your rice instead of furikake this morning? You are telling me five things at once and I am struggling to work out which if any are relevant to me.’

Shiro blinked, surprised, but he didn’t snap back at being cut off.

‘Ah, I’m sorry, I just wanted to give you the background-‘

‘Ishii-san,’

Gently but insistently Hisato continued,

‘You said this was an emergency meeting. What is the emergency, and what is the meeting about?’

Shiro finally paused for a moment to gather his thoughts, and when he spoke again his face was more serious as he looked at Hisato.

‘Hisa-kun, it’s about your research results. The frostbite experiments. It’s nearly winter, you know. The chance of another border skirmish with the Soviets under freezing conditions are just as high as they were last year. We need to have the upper hand, we can’t have another Nomonhan.’

Hisato was momentarily taken aback.

‘Yes, Ishii-san, I know that. The trials of cold weather tolerance using different forms of the new prototype winter uniforms are going well.’

‘Are they? Really?’

Shiro’s voice had lost its enthusiastic tone and he looked irritated. He didn’t smile. His hands stayed still on the desk.

‘I asked you to start this project back in June. Why have I not seen any results yet? It would have been very nice for me to have those results before my meeting with General Umezu.’

Hisato paused, his earlier mild annoyance replaced with a sense of genuine apprehension as he saw the way Shiro was looking at him now, less like a partner in research and more like a problem to be solved. He found that he was consciously trying to look calm.

‘It’s alright’,

He thought to himself,

‘Ishii-san is just in a mood again, that’s what happens when you spend all weekend in the entertainment district and then have to work flat out on a grant application and drown your exhaustion in coffee. He’ll be fine. This will be fine’.

‘Hisa-kun’

Shiro’s voice cut sharper,

‘How do I know you’re actually doing anything of value in there all day? No results? No information? Not even a basic case fatality rate? If I’m honest, I feel like you’re not taking this seriously enough.’

‘Ishii-san, I’m doing my best, these things just take-‘

‘Get up. Now. Let’s go take a look for ourselves.’

Before Hisato could fully rise from his seat Shiro grabbed him by the collar and pulled him upright.

‘Come on. Let’s go.’

Hisato wasn’t quite sure what to expect as they walked down the long corridor out of the office. He tried to look through the open doors of the offices as they passed by, hoping to attract someone’s attention who might provide a welcome distraction. Kitano san? His desk empty. Naito san? Looking down, ensconced in paperwork. Ishikawa san? The last door before the stairs passed. Ishikawa san was talking to a group of junior researchers, if he heard the footsteps outside he didn’t think to look up.

Not slowing down, Shiro looked back at Hisato impatiently as he tried and failed to hang behind and catch Ishikawa’s attention.

‘Come on, Hisa-kun, hurry up. I’d like to see the setup you’ve got going on in that laboratory, you must be doing something wrong if everything seems to be going without incident.’

Hisato stayed quiet as Ishii pushed open the double doors and ushered him outside, their footsteps crunching across the gravel as the courtyard and walked down the narrow road leading away from the administration building and towards the frostbite laboratory.

After a couple of minutes they reached the doors, and Hisato fumbled slightly with the keys as he undid the double lock. Inside, the laboratory was empty. A small, unassuming-looking concrete box of only one floor, the room was eerily silent, except for the constant hum of the refrigeration unit which stayed turned on. No research assistants, no maruta. Nothing was scheduled today, Hisato had left the week clear of any experiments in order to finally write up the results they had already.

‘Are you sure it’s cold enough? It doesn’t seem like it.’

Shiro hadn’t even attempted to open the double-paned class door to the refrigerated room when he made that pronouncement. Already it seemed he had decided Hisato had made some kind of trivial error.

‘Ishii-san, it’s minus twenty-five in there, I assure you I’ve been paying attention to-‘

‘The front against the Soviets if they attack in January will be minus thirty easily, why are you producing data that doesn’t match the battlefield conditions? For God’s sake, anyone could survive that!’

‘Ishii-san, the protocol we agreed was to start higher and progressively decrease the temperature for the tests until-’

Hisato’s increasingly agitated voice cut off as Shiro grabbed him by the collar before he could react, pulling him towards the glass doors.

‘I think this environment is easily survivable, take a look for yourself’

Shiro pulled the doors open and shoved Hisato inside, remaining in the doorway. The cold took his breath away like a punch to the throat and before he could take a breath to respond Shiro slammed the door shut. It locked automatically.

Hisato couldn’t bring himself to the indignity of banging on the door to be let out, perhaps the image of all the Chinese prisoners he had seen bang on that door and be ignored burned too firmly into his mind. He hugged himself instinctively for warmth, breath freezing into a fine crystalline mist in the air.

‘Ishii-san! It is quite cold enough in here!’

He shouted. He knew from experience his voice would be muffled through the glass but Shiro clearly heard him enough. He only saw him shrug in response.

Shiro turned away from the door and started to walk around the room outside, inspecting pieces of paper left on the desks and reading through the observational notes Hisato and his colleagues had left from the previous week. Hisato swore under his breath as he felt a sharp pain begin to encroach on his exposed hands, quickly shoving them inside the sleeves of his jacket for what little good it would do.

‘Ishii-san! I can explain that to you properly if you let me out of here!’

Shiro turned his head, but he didn’t look concerned.

‘Don’t worry! I think you’re perfectly warm enough there based on what you’ve written here!’

His voice was light and confident, as if this was a friendly argument, while Hisato hugged himself tighter and tried not to wince in pain from the cold. Perhaps Shiro really had convinced himself that Hisato was incompetent. It wasn’t like him to be quite this vindictive. Perhaps he simply hadn’t read the report Hisato had sent him, and had drawn his own conclusions while irritatedly searching for breakthroughs that didn’t exist that he might show General Umezu.

Hisato saw Shiro looking down at something by the door interestedly, and then his breath caught as he saw him start to unwind the hosepipe that sat there. Suddenly the door opened with a bang and the eerie quiet lifted a little.

‘Hisa-kun! You need to take this more seriously.’

Shit. Shiro didn’t look at Hisato so much as somewhere above his head as he spoke, as if completely oblivious to the fact his colleague’s face was turning white and he was hunched into himself.

‘Soldiers will experience all kinds of extreme conditions on the battlefield. Deep subzero temperatures, operating equipment with no gloves, falling through ice. You need to think about all the possibilities.’

He seemed to notice Hisato wasn’t listening, but not the look on his face.

‘Oh come on, snap out of it. Anyone could survive this.’

Shiro turned a tap on the wall while raising the hose and pointing it at Hisato. Hisato got one look at his superior’s face, calm and unconcerned like he was giving a routine briefing, and then his breath was taken away as a jet of icy water soaked his clothes’

‘Fuck---’

His voice died as he flinched, raising his arms to try and protect himself. It hurt – really hurt – sharply, all over, his breath stopping and suddenly he was on the concrete floor, his legs giving out. Hisato curled into himself, his eyes screwing tightly shut as a strangled gasp of pain escaped him.

‘Come on, pull yourself together! It’s not so bad, is it? Think of how it was for the soldiers at Nomonhan!’

Shiro’s voice sounded distant and was met only with a strangled gasp of pain as the hose turned off and the jet of water stopped.

‘Think about that for a minute, Hisa-kun,’

Said Shiro, smiling slightly as it looked like his morale-boosting ‘lesson’ was sinking in with the icy water, already starting to freeze on contact. Shiro looked intently, interested as he saw frost already forming on the brim of Hisato’s hat, frozen droplets of water rising like steam. It really was quite impressive, thought Shiro. He’d never really been in here since the first phase of inspections. Hisa-kun has some state of the art equipment here. Maybe this will encourage him to use it better. Shiro stood transfixed for a few moments as he watched the clouds of frozen vapour rise and start to settle again, freshly-formed frost starting to trace an intricate pattern on the corner of the window.

This could have so much potential, Hisa-kun could really use some encouragement.

Shiro looked back down at Hisato, wondering how he would react to this more practical lesson, trying to catch a glimpse of his expression. He then looked again, actually looked, and stopped. He saw an heap on the concrete floor, Hisato’s face hidden, his whole body quivering. Alright, perhaps that’s enough. Shiro opened the door and stepped in and this time the cold slapped him across the face and he blinked as a painful cold rushed into his lungs.

‘Ah, damn! Right, Hisa-kun! I think that’s enough of this… Hisa-kun?’

There was no response. Shiro quickly crossed he space, sliding and nearly falling over on the ice that had already covered the floor.

‘Hisa-kun?’

Shiro shook Hisato’s shoulder, feeling the frozen fabric of his uniform stiff and cracklining under his hand. The epaulets at his shoulder were solid.

‘Hisa-kun!’

The confidence had left Shiro’s voice entirely as all he heard was a faint whimper of pain, and he felt his own fingers stinging sharply from the cold.

‘Oh, it is cold in here. Not a bad approximation of the Mongolian front at all. Perhaps the winter uniforms the infantry sent you to test really are good…’

No response. A faint, desperate sound only from Hisato and no sign at all that he registered anything.

‘Oh… Damn…’

Belatedly, it dawned on Shiro that perhaps Hisato’s experimental conditions had been absolutely fine. And that accordingly Hisa-kun was not fine. At all.

‘OK, Hisa-kun, let’s get you out, I’m sorry… The door is open, get up. Get up!’

Hisato was shaking too badly to move and struggled to stand. Shiro wrapped his arms around him and pulled him to his feet, trying not to slide on the ice on the floor. He was so uncoordinated he was like a lead weight as Shiro awkwardly dragged him out of the refrigerated room and shut the door firmly. Hisato staggered when Shiro released him and collapsed on the floor again. This time Shiro immediately crouched down with him and tried to hold him up. His face was white as a sheet.

‘Ah… It hurts… It hurts…’

Shiro’s eyes widened his colleague’s face contorted in an inhuman mask of pain. He pulled Hisato closer.

‘Hey, Hisa-kun, it’s OK, it’s OK…’

Almost to himself,

‘I went too far again, didn’t I?’

The shaky silence was its own reply. A rush of thoughts and feelings raced through Shiro’s mind. Regret, a rare pang of sympathy, the need for a solution, the fact he might have to announce at tomorrow’s briefing the fact that something terrible had happened to Hisato, a mental image of one of the technicians who worked under Hisato having to amputate his own supervisor’s blackened fingers – No, it can’t be that bad yet, surely, it must have been less than ten minutes. The fact that Hisato had been so hardworking and so helpful since the beginning, and Shiro had spent so many evening talking with him, and now he’d decided that he couldn’t be trusted over one delay in one part of a quarterly report, and how his colleague was half-frozen and barely responsive in his arms.

‘Damn… I’m sorry…’

As another horrifying image of the potential aftermath flashed across his eyes Shiro abruptly stood up, dragging Hisato with him and pulling Hisato’s arm around his shoulders to help him support himself.

‘Hisa-kun, let’s let you inside somewhere warmer. Now’,

Shiro kicked the door open and didn’t even think of locking it behind him as he marched Hisato back down the gravel road, turning left this time instead of right to the administration block and barely thinking as he pulled Hisato into another doorway, up a flight of stairs and through a door into his own private quarters. Once inside the living room, exhausted from practically carrying Hisato, he dropped him on the sofa and sat down heavily beside him, trying to get his breath back’

‘Hisa-kun, come here. You were right, I’m… I’m sorry’

He put an arm around Hisato’s shoulders and for a moment he thought Hisato was hugging him back, and then he realised he was just clinging onto him for warmth, shivering uncontrollably. There was still frost in Hisato’s hair as Shiro unthinkingly brushed it out of his face.

‘Alright,’

Shiro tried to sound more confident than he was,

‘Let’s try and get you warmed up.’

There was no response again and Shiro felt almost afraid to leave him as he ran down the hall to the bathroom, putting the plug in the bath and turning on the hot tap. As clouds of steam began to fill the cool air of the room he ran back, shaking Hisato’s shoulder as he lay curled up almost motionless on the sofa, face still grimacing in pain.

‘Oh, for God’s sake…’

If Shiro sounded angry this time, it was only at himself. Hisato was not much shorter than him and it was a very long time since Shiro had been low-ranking enough to do any fitness training, but he barely noticed put an arm at his colleague’s back and another under his knees and lifted him off the low sofa and walked quickly back down the hall, inwardly flinching again as Hisato’s head glanced off the door frame and he only groaned weakly in response. He got into the bathroom and realised he couldn’t put Hisato straight into the hot bath he’d ran – the circulation under his skin would be almost completely cut off already, even if the temperature would normally be comfortable it would be scalding on his skin. He set Hisato down on the floor gently, where he slumped against the wall, glancing up vacantly. He grabbed the basin from the side of the bath and filled it half full with the warm water, adding some cold just to be on the safe side.

‘Hisa-kun probably knows the actual way to warm someone up safely by now’,

he thought with a sense of bitter irony.

‘Why didn’t I believe he knew what he was doing?’

He raised the basin.

‘Hisa-kun, I hope this won’t hurt.’

He poured the water over Hisato from the nape of his neck down. Hisato gasped, but it didn’t sound like it hurt any more than anything Shiro had done already.  He refilled the basin and did it again, and Hisato shivered violently but seemed to react a little more.

‘Hisa-kun, don’t worry, I’ve got you now, OK?’

Shiro didn’t fully recognise the gentleness in his own voice as he crouched down and looked at Hisato, who looked up at him unsteadily.

‘Hisa-kun, your clothes are freezing onto you… Let me help you with that.’

Hisato replied, his voice very weak

‘O-okay..’

Shiro knelt on the floor beside him as his fingers fumbled with the brass buttons of Hisato’s uniform jacket, which he took off and discarded on the floor, followed by his soaked undershirt. His skin was whitish and cold underneath.

Shiro tried to apologise again as he reached for the basin but the words caught in his throat and wouldn’t come out. He poured another basinful of lukewarm water over Hisato, then another, hoping that might encourage the blood back into his skin a little. He filled the basin again and placed Hisato’s hand into it, his fingers stiff and cold as ice. Gently he took Hisato’s hand in both of his in the water and massaged it gently, carefully prying his fingers open until they unclenched a little, then pouring a fresh basin of water and doing the same for the other hand.

‘It hurts, doesn’t it?’

‘Y-yes..’

‘Is it helping’

‘Yes, thank you…’

It was helping. Hisato’s voice was faint but Shiro felt a rush of hot relief as he heard him actually respond. He waited for a few more minutes, pouring the lukewarm water carefully over Hisato’s head again, and then pouring water straight from the bath without cooling it down. When Hisato didn’t flinch at that anymore, Shiro put his arm around him again and gently guided him away from the wall.

‘Alright, let’s get you into the bath properly. It will help. Just one second, sorry…’

Shiro reached down to Hisato’s belt and when Hisato made no move to stop him he undid that too, quickly undressing him and helping him out of the rest of his cold and waterlogged clothes. Shiro helped him up off the bathroom floor carefully and then guided him into the bath, slowly, ready to stop if the water was too hot still and hurt him. Hisato shivered again as he sat down in the water, almost up to his neck, unsteady as if holding himself upright might be too much effort. Shiro kept a hand on his shoulder to steady him.

‘Is that alright? Is that a bit better? Does it hurt?’

Shiro asked softly but insistently. Hisato drew a shaky breath.

‘That’s… that’s better…’ he said, still very pale.

‘He looks so helpless like this’,

Shiro suddenly thought as HIsato’s wide eyes met his properly for the first time since he’d marched him into the freezer room. The same eyes that were usually calmly focused on the papers he wrote so carefully, or met his across the table in the officers’ bar after dinner, listening patiently if a little sceptically to whatever new idea he had had that day.

‘Why did I do this?’

Thought Shiro, and then realised he’d said it aloud when Hisato looked at him, slightly dazed but obviously hearing. This time Shiro forced himself to look at Hisato as he spoke.

‘I’ve known you since Zhongma, why did I think you wouldn’t be working hard now…’

His hand on Hisato’s shoulder tightened slightly. Hisato turned his face away, still looking far from himself. A thick silence descended. Hisato stayed so still, too weak to move, there wasn’t even the sound of water sloshing in the bath. Gradually, as a touch of colour began to return to Hisato’s face and Shiro let out a sigh of relief he hadn’t even realised he’d been holding as Hisato did not collapse or seem to worsen further, Shiro realised that he himself was shivering, through whether from the freezing cold of the laboratory or from his own shock at what he had done he couldn’t quite tell. He realised he was kneeling, still in full uniform, in a pool of water on the floor by the bath, his trousers and his sleeves soaked from his attempts to revive HIsato.

Poor Hisa-kun… He’s always hardworking, he’s always diligent, he didn’t deserve that. Questions of deserving and fairness did not trouble Shiro very often, but they did now. as he shivered in the cool draft from the open door and watched Hisato to make sure he was keeping his head upright. He felt wretched, like he wanted to clean his own heart up and examine it. He wanted to feel warm himself. He didn’t, of course, articulate this very well, he just looked away from Hisato again for a few moments, and then stood and quickly started to unbutton his jacket. Hisato glanced up at him, now paying a little more attention to his surroundings.

‘Is this alright?’ said Shiro very quickly and quietly,

‘It’s freezing in here. I’m soaked.’

Without daring to wait longer for a reply, he swiftly shed the rest of his clothes and then lowered himself into the bath behind Hisato.

‘Is this alright, Hisa-kun?.’

He gently pulled Hisato’s back against his chest, and let Hisato’s head fall back and rest on his shoulder. Hisato did not tense or try to pull away.

‘It’s OK, don’t worry. Even if you start to feel faint, I’ve got you’

‘Thank you, Ishii-san’, mumbled HIsato, seemingly glad to not have to hold himself upright anymore.

‘No problem.’

Shiro smiled slightly to himself as he wrapped his arms a little tighter around Hisato’s chest and felt his wet hair on the side of his face.

Hisa-kun was alright. He was talking. He was going to recover, Shiro might have forgotten himself completely but he had stopped in time, at least.

‘Don’t worry’,

Said Shiro quietly.

‘I don’t need that data to give to General Umezu next week, and I trust that you’re doing everything properly. I shouldn’t have doubted anything’

I’m so sorry and I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to honestly without you, and I hate seeing you like this’,

Shiro wanted to say. Instead, he said

“You’re looking a lot better, the colour’s back in your face and hands and your breathing sounds normal again. Do you think you can get out of the bath now, before the water starts to get cold?’

‘I think so…’

Said Hisato, and he let Ishii help him out of the bathtub, who then passed him a towel. They dried themselves off in silence. Shiro left the bathroom for a moment and then came back with a second dressing gown from somewhere.

You can borrow this, Hisa-kun, your uniform is soaked.’

‘Thank you’,

said Hisato very quietly, looking at the floor.

 With them both half-dressed again, Shiro smiled weakly and took Hisato by the arm, guiding him into the bedroom where they sat down side by side on the bed.

‘Are you warm enough here?’

Said Shiro,

‘I don’t want you to get cold again, I can turn the heating up if you want. … I’m sorry about your uniform, I’ll get someone to find a spare one for you. You wear the Type 3 one right? I think we’ve got a good stock of spare ones somewhere, even if the procurement department has been incompetent lately with just about everything’

Shiro could hear himself talking without any particular thought or awareness of what he was saying, trying as he often did to try and fill any potentially uncomfortable silence before it could last long enough to make him think about something unpleasant. Then, emphatically as if he was giving the concluding note to a presentation, he said

‘General Umezu can go fuck himself, actually. We’ve had more than enough evidence to justify the budget increase, it will be some illiterate bastard from the infantry or the artillery telling him he needs to audit more. There’s really no need for this meeting in Xinjing to be such a big performance.’

‘Ishii-san.’

Hisato’s voice was very quiet but it cut Shiro off instantly. Shiro froze, and Hisato turned to look at him directly.

‘I don’t care about your presentation in Xinjing. You could have killed me just now.’

His voice was hollow.

‘No! No, Hisa-kun, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t ever let it get that far. I’m sorry.’

Shiro’s arm was around Hisato before he could think about it.

‘I’m sorry, I should have thought I might be wrong, I should have realised that would hurt you, I just-‘

‘You just didn’t ever think that I might actually know what I’m going, and that the source of some problems isn’t because of your colleagues all being incompetent fools who only your genius can fix.’

Hisato interjected. Shiro flinched but didn’t pull away.

‘No, I didn’t mean it like that. I respect you, you’re my valued colleague, you’re very important to me’

Hisato met Shiro’s eyes. They were wide and sincere, with no trace of deception.

‘I’ll never lose faith in you again, I absolutely promise, I will conduct a more thorough review of any relevant factors before I blame any of you again.’

‘Ishii-san.’

Hisato managed more firmly, though he still lacked the energy to really raise his voice.

‘Do you, ever, stop to actually think? Somewhere in that brilliant, warped mind of yours, when you get the idea that you could do something does it ever occur to you that you could also equally well choose not to do it?’

Shiro went very still.

Hisato continued, his his voice heavy with exhaustion.

‘I really did not think you would do something like that. Why do you always get carried away? I do believe you that you weren’t trying to really hurt me, but I did not deserve any of that’

But he sounded more tired than angry.

‘You’re shivering again, Hisa-kun.’

Said Shiro softly. Before he could stop himself he had pulled Hisato into a tight hug, wrapping his arms around him.

‘I don’t want you to get cold again... I’m sorry, I really am so sorry. I don’t want to hurt you, I never meant to seriously hurt you…’

Shiro guided Hisato to lie down beside him and pulled the duvet up over them both. Hisato went still, but he gradually relaxed.

Shiro being contrite was rare, he usually seemed impervious to guilt and shame. But now Hisato felt himself being drawn closer until his head was resting on Shiro’s chest, and he didn’t resist as he felt Shiro’s fingers stroking  through his hair.

He closed his eyes tightly, trying to sustain his anger and pull together the words to tell Shiro that this was appalling, that if there was any due process in this army he should have been relieved of command long ago. But there wasn’t, and he didn’t say anything, and just the thought of trying to have the argument made his head start to spin with exhaustion until he just wanted to give up and stay here. It was warm, and Shiro’s touch and his voice were soft now, and even if he had the energy he didn’t actually want to get up and storm out only to return to his own empty quarters and his thoughts.

Shiro smiled slightly to himself as he felt Hisato finally relax, going limp in his arms with a mixture of exhaustion and relief, his eyes closed and his breathing evening out, his face peaceful looking again, finally. He reached to cup Hisato’s face in his hand and saw him smile slightly and lean into it.

‘You’re important to me, Hisa-kun. I hope you know that. I care about you, I’m sorry I got carried away’.

Hisato’s hand found Shiro’s under the covers and squeezed it tightly.

‘Ishii-san, I know. You don’t need to say it ten times.’

‘I promise I won’t do anything like this again.’

Hisato smiled faintly at that.

‘You will, I know you will. But not to me again. Please.’

‘Of course not.’

For a few minutes there was silence. Shiro reached over for another pillow and positioned it under Hisato’s head, trying to make him as comfortable as possible.

Hisato felt the edges of his consciousness start to blur, sleep beginning claim him.

‘…Hisa-kun?’

‘What?’ – half awake

‘Do you want to come to Xinjing with me next week? We could take the train together and look around the place after the conference?’

‘Oh… alright, that sounds fine.’

‘Thank you!’

Shiro didn’t say any more for a moment, he just shifted closer to Hisato and pulled the covers up further, resting his hand on his back and burying his face in his hair, which was soft and almost dry now.

‘You must be tired, Hisa-kun. Let’s sleep now, we can talk about Xinjing tomorrow.’

Hisato mumbled something unintelligible in reply, already half-asleep.

My no. 1 historical anti-favourite's graduation photo from Kyoto Imperial University, top of his class in the Faculty of Medicine.

Ishii Shiro wouldn't have known then that his speciality was going to be biological weapons - he graduated in 1920, and by all accounts he came up with the idea for a Japanese bioweapons program after reading about their prohibition in the Geneva Protocols of 1945. Sometimes I want to give this as a kind of really twisted "inspirational" story to anyone who graduates feeling like they still have no idea what they will do with their life.

When feeling despondent about the state of the world and the personality characteristics that are suited for success in our society, I've been known to pull up this photo on my phone and stare it down for a while. What was he thinking at the time, I wonder. How did he feel? Many of his classmates already noticed he was a nasty piece of work (sources say that he alienated most of them pretty quickly with his arrogant attitude), did he notice or care or even bother to give the matter thought? Did he ever worry that he might not make a success of himself, or did his array of possibly psychopathic personality traits extend to an unshakeable sense of self belief? (How the hell would it even feel to be graduating university with an unshakeable sense of self-belief?? I envy high functioning psychopaths a little sometimes, I'm not going to lie).

Inscription on memorial to the war dead at Kasuga Shrine, Shibayama, Chiba Prefecture, donated to the shrine by Ishii Shiro.

I think I might get the dubious honour of being the first person to post about this in English. The small town of Shibayama, literally next door to Tokyo's Narita Airport, under its former name of Kamo was the hometown of Ishii Shiro and his family, and during the war years he recruited a large number of people from the village to work at Unit 731 in the interests of maintaining loyalty and secrecy. Today little trace of that history remains, unsurprisingly, but at a small local Shinto shrine named Kasuga Shrine we find one piece of literal hard evidence, in this inscription on a memorial stone for war victims which clearly states it wad donated to the shrine by Ishii Shiro.

The big text reads 忠魂碑, approximately "for the consolation of the loyal spirits", and then in the smaller text on the left we clearly see 醫學博士石井四郎, "professor/doctor of medicine Ishii Shiro" (the first two characters are unsimplified forms of 医学, this was almost certainly erected long before the end of ww2.).

First history/historiography post!

This book is Deciphering the History of Japanese War Atrocities by Kenneth L. Port (otherwise well known as a scholar of Japanese law especially patent law) and it's a really excellent examination of the life of Ishii Shiro that debunks various minor myths surrounding him through extensive research and robustly-constructed lines of argument. For example:

-No, Ishii almost certainly did not fake his funeral in Shibayama/Kamo to throw GHQ off his trail

-His description of his two year study abroad tour to search biological warfare was heavily embellished, to say the least

-Both the things sometimes cited as "the one decent thing he did", namely his identification of the cause of an encephalitis outbreak in Kyushu and his development of a water filtration system, were massively exaggerated or distorted to the point of unrecognisability from the reality of his rather more modest contributions.

There is of course far more in the book from this (and I would like to talk more about it at some point), but those are the examples of some of the common podcast/Reddit talking points about Ishii Shiro that Port seemingly blows out of the water. If only I could find more reference to people citing him later. As he states in the introduction to the book: 'history deserved that we get this story right. It is bad enough in its true form' (Port 2014, p.xii), and I have to agree.

Hello!! Good question, and let me introduce myself. I am a native speaker of english and fluent non-native speaker of Japanese with a passion for Japanese history. It turns out that when I come across something in my historical studies that I find sufficiently upsetting, instead of walking away and going for a walk or something I apparently respond by allowing it premium real estate rent-free in my head and reading about it obsessively in order to find out the why and how of how on Earth it happened, and whether there is anything in that story from which we can learn today.

In this spirit I have been doing fairly extensive reading (I wouldn't say all of it is thorough enough to be called 'research', but you can be the judge of that) around the topic of Unit 731 and its afterlife in historical memory for the past few years in my free time. The peak of rigorous scholarship it may not have been, but by dint of having gone to the end of the Google search results for it in both English and Japanese a few times and read engaged with a decent amount of the literature freely available about it, I think I have a base of information from which to make a vaguely interesting resource for anyone interested in learning more about the topic, especially if they don't speak Japanese.

The exact nature of Unit 731's human experimentation, the death toll, and horrifying accounts of the suffering of the victims is information which is already widely available and discussed in extensive detail across a large number of websites (For anyone looking to move offline, Hal Gold's book Unit 731: Testimony is an excellent place to start for this). As such, that will probably be less of a main focus on this blog, although it will of course come up incidentally. I will assume you know quite a bit about the atrocities already, and so I am more likely to jump straight in to talking about the historiography of Unit 731 and random pieces of information about it that I think are interesting and/or overlooked.

This blog is also likely to have a bias towards information specifically about Ishii Shiro and less about other members of Unit 731 and their roles, although I will of course discuss those where relevant. The reason for this is that one of the things I found fascinating as I went into looking at discussion of Unit 731, both academic and non-academic (of the newspaper feature article, podcast, and Reddit popular opinion category, for example), is the tendency to give an exaggerated and dramatic picture of his life and various episodes therein. I am interested in what motivates historians and popular writers to portray him in this way, and with regards to some episodes from his life I would like to reference some sources that attempt to write the record straight.

This is emphatically not my original research, but a product of reading some less well known sources, especially Kenneth L Port's Deciphering the History of Japanese War Atrocities. This book is absolutely brilliant, revelatory and tightly argued, but is a woefully rare find in libraries, while it is also not available in any ebook format. In fact, reading this book and then seeing facts that Port refutes regularly repeated across many corners of the casual history interest internet was one of the experiences that made me first think seriously about writing some kind of a blog. As such, I would like to write at some length later about various parts of its content, and I wholeheartedly encourage anyone making a serious effort to learn about Unit 731 to get their local or university library to order it in.

I don't have a specifically planned post format or update schedule for this, so I am just going to see how it goes. I have AMA turned on, so if by some miracle you find something I write interesting enough to want to engage with me, you can ask me anything I want. For now,

Yoroshiku onegaishimasu