I say lick the squirrels, how else will our modern health care system get worked out. You going in for bubonic plague is like a vaccine of learning for the doctors that have to diagnose some weird old crap, and of course, administer some sweet antibiotics.
Yup. Japan was experimenting on their civilians with the bubonic plague, cholera etc. They also tried igniting wild fires and sending bombs into in the PNW by releasing high altitude balloons. I belive one landed and killed 6 people.
Edit: Didn't get expect this to get so much traction. To follow up, I believe it was Japan testing on their own citizens.Check out the WW2 Greatest Moments in Color on Netflix. The Hiroshima episode mentioned it as one of the ethics that was weighed while deciding whether we should drop the atom bomb.
For my non-American friends the PNW is Pacific Northwest which makes up Oregon and Washington . I am sure there is another state or two that I didn't mention.
Thank you to everyone who responded I'll try to read through each comment.
well tbf a residential area in Omaha, Nebraska is one of the last places I'd expect to be attacked.
especially since afaik there had only been two attacks on the mainland continental US by then, one on a military base and one on an oil field, both on the west coast
I think it counts as mainland but not part of the main body of states, as it is reachable via land from the capital but not without crossing another country’s borders. It is possible that you know more about the definition of “mainland” but that is my interpretation
If you’re talking about the balloons, it was American citizens. If I remember correctly, it was a Sunday school teacher and some children who stumbled upon a bomb in the Pacific North West (I believe Washington) and became the only US civilian casualties on the American mainland.
Edit: as someone said below, the incident actually occurred in Oregon.
To be frank, I think your comment is the first time I’ve ever seen that acronym and I’d also be confused if I saw it despite being a native born American (probably because I live half way across the nation).
Tbf there are records of Japanese soldiers eating each other and pows. I don't think they had much issue with harming civilians after eating their squad mates
George HW Bush was doing an air raid during WWII when his plane was shot down over the ocean. Including himself, nine airmen made it out. Bush was separated from his other airmen (likely due to weather) and was recovered safely. His companions were captured, killed, and four of them were eaten.
US history could have played out very differently if the head of the CIA, Congressman, VP, President, and father of two Governors and one President had stuck with the rest of his crew to be eaten
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident
That was the Japanese army trapped on Papua New Guinea with no supplies. As terrible as Japan was during the war (and I say this as a Chinese), I don’t think that one is really on them. You put anybody on that tropical hellhole for a few months they’re prbly gonna start eating each other.
Oh god yeah. I read a few accounts of the war in Papua New Guinea and it makes Stalingrad seem like the Ritz. The whole Pacific campaign which isnt that well known in Europe is gruesome and brutal af
It's honestly not that well known in the US either. I've often wondered if that's because it was so brutal. Like, we all know the image of the flag being raised at Iwo Jima, and we hear of Midway, but it's not nearly as well known as the European front. The utter savagery and darkness on all sides in the Pacific Theatre makes it easier to collectively forget about and instead just focus on those no good Nazis.
Look up shiro ishii, he was arguably worse than joseph mengele.
Also my country paid the man for his "research info" > <
\*auto correct, why do you hate me so?
Amateurs! Balloons are unpredictable and unmotivated. See, a true artist would use bats with incendiary bombs strapped to them. What you do is spend the entirety of the war fucking around with giant canisters full of bats. Then, when the whole system is actually functional, you cancel the project because nukes just started existing. Then you spend the rest of your life wondering why you spent four years goofing around in the desert with a bunch of fucking bats.
It's at times like these I like to point out that B.F. Skinner suggested pigeon-guided missile systems during WW2, with pigeons inside the nosecone 'guiding' the missile on target.
The war crimes of their military were really horrific. Against both civilians and POWS. If they didn't already view their enemies as subhuman, they certainly did once they were beaten and especially if they surrendered.
John Rabe, a Nazi in China, used his Nazi uniform to evacuate as many Chinese as he could into his own property because he saw how brutal the Japanese treated the civilians.
I remember reading that some officers practiced cannibalism, not out of necessity but just because they wanted to kill some POWs and eat some human liver.
Do we browse the same sub? This sub fucking *loves* bombarding you with Japanese warcrimes facts ad nauseam.
Not like there's anything wrong with it, it deserves its mention. But I'll be lying if I said I'm not tired of these warcrimes competition that always happen in the comments whenever the topic is mentioned.
Yep. We found one of those baloons on some old farmland in my hometown back in the 70s. It seemed to be a dud, but it was very possible it could go off
Yes, [and the Japanese had been engaging in a significant amount of both biological and chemical warfare in China and other areas they invaded since at least 1937.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731?wprov=sfla1)
Still would have been a massive disruption, just look at Covid: the body count isn't that high but it managed to fuck over productivity significantly for a decent period of time...
Not necessarily. The plague wouldn't require a vaccine and could be treated with penicillin which was widely available. It's also not nearly as spreadable as COVID and was generally spread by bites from infected pests like rats, fleas, and other critters which themselves could have been easily combatted in modern society.
True, unless Japan was experimenting with the same plague that killed half of europe in the middle ages, because that wasn't bubonic plague, it spread so quickly that it had to be the worse variant, the pneumonic plague that also spreads through particles in the air.
covid is not only completely new, but also a virus and can't be whisked away by a cure. The bubonic plague has been known for hundreds of years and has available treatments, nowhere near as dangerous or disruptive as covid due to this.
COVID isn't over, governments just gave up trying to fight it. Long COVID is going to be a mass disabling event with effects that will be felt for decades.
Not quite. Plague still kills about 10% of those infected even with treatment. And if it advances to the stages where buobos are present, that risk increases even more. [source](https://www.cdc.gov/plague/faq/index.html#mortality) There are more easily searchable sources.
The Imperials history gets glossed over a lot. They didn't kill as many as the Nazis did but the human experimentation, it made the Nazis puke in disgust. Japan had a bunch of crazy stuff going on. They had a bunch of plans, like this and stuff I can't mention cause of NSFW it is.
It's called Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, and it was a legit plan to send planes filled with plague infested pleas and kamikaze them in the West Coast of America. The only reason the plan did not come true was because it was scheduled in the mid September 1945 but the war was over by August.
However, the plan was vetoed at the end of that same March 26, 1945, meeting, by Chief of the Army General Staff Yoshijirō Umezu. Umezu argued that: "The operation is unpardonable on humanitarian grounds... If bacteriological warfare is conducted, it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria. Japan will earn the derision of the world."
Wiki on the subject
Unit 731 I believe is the equivalent of Nazi Germany’s atrocities that Japan committed against many Asian countries (and some of their own soldiers I believe) during WW2. I would highly suggest looking into it! It was covered up because America valued the “data” from these biological crimes.
Oh yes it was! Shiro Ishii was the head of the program and I'd like to call him the Elf on Satan's shelf.
Ishii was fascinated by viruses and plagues, and Unit 731 was his playground to make them even more potent. When Japan invaded China, plague began to spread like wildfire. Unit 731 had been dropping containers full of infected fleas across the Chinese countryside. Children were dying in their parents arms, while others would live their last days alone to avoid spreading the sickness. And then 731 would appear and begin dissecting the victims, many still alive and in front of their families who were helpless to stop it.
Hundreds of thousands were infected, and we aren't perfectly sure how many died, one province alone reported up to 50,000 deaths.
With all this valuable research Shiro Ishii set his sights on America with Operation Cherry Blossoms at night. While the war was ragging in the Pacific, Japan had been sending bombs attatched to large ballong across the sea towards America. Over 9,300 ballons were sent, 200 - 300 reached the country 7 Americans in total were killed.
Ishii saw this was ineffective and wanted something more potent. His goal was to drop these same plague fleas across the west coast with the use of Kamakaze pilots. The plan failed as by this time Japan had became more concerned with defense of their own territories, and the fear of American retaliation in the final days of WWII.
Shiro Ishii never faced justice for his crimes. And many of his compartiots went to work as officials for Japan in some way. The former ,scientists of Unit 731 include the former governor of Tokyo, the former president of the Japan Medical Association, the former director of the health ministry’s preventive health research centre, the former chairman and president of Green Cross Corp. and the past heads of a number of Japanese medical schools.
None of them faced the consequences of their actions. American Army General Douglas McArthur pardoned them all in exchange for their information.
There is so much more inhumane shit that 731 committed, if you're willing to look at the Skeletons in Japan's closet. It's not for the faint of heart.
A Japanese unit before and during the war who performed some truly horrifying experiments on Chinese civilians. Look them up if you want, but there's some really fucked up things they carried out on people
Here's the link if you wanna read up on it. Trigger warning for rape/torture. Absolutely barbaric shit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731?wprov=sfla1
I read most of the Wikipedia page and now feel like the culmination of all my life's problems past, present, and future, are no big deal because I'm not in the shoes of anyone in that hell.
I also feel genuinely lightheaded just knowing what horrible things it's possible to put people through and be okay with it.
I also feel horrible knowing that somewhere on Earth there may be experiments being run just like this in modern day that we just don't know about, and I'm in bed reading Reddit memes and sipping mtn dew.
Also "epidemic prevention and water purification department of the Kwanton army" literally torturing people, often to death, while creating bioweapons to artificially create an epidemic and wipe out vast populations in China and the USA.
Ughhh, I took the plunge into that article while already being well-aware that the WWII Japs were on equal footing with the Krauts by making up what they lacked in numbers by being much more "hands-on" when compared to the Nazis' atrocities. It's for that same reason of how "hands on" the Japs were that I had declined to read any comprehensive summary of just exactly how they went about getting their hands dirty & now I feel exactly as wretched as I knew I would & had likewise previously avoided intentionally... It's made especially heinous in my mind whenever reconciling such unfathomable magnitudes of suffering since it affects a soberingly brutal realization in me that clashes with theclassic, widely-held sentiment of regarding such horrors as "inhuman", whereas I've adopted the far more poisonous view by concluding that such atrocities are *thoroughly* human... I don't think we're quite evolved enough yet to the degree that society/civilization functioning as well as it does is simply us doing a bang-up job of playing make-believe with sincere conviction & is a thing that needs to cure quite a bit longer before it's properly "baked in"..... Maybe like another half dozen ice-ages or so
Considering that they randomly sent the balloons from Japan when the wind was blowing to north America I highly doubt anything was by design other then the balloon reaching the ground vaguely in the direction of the United States
As someone who lives in Portland it really upsets me that this is the first time I've heard of this. Just like I only learned of the attempted sub attacks in the Columbia due to my own research.
Well here's a story for ya. In September 1942, a Japanese pilot by the name of Nobuo Fujita flew his floatplane from a long range Japanese sub off the west coast. He dropped two incendiary bombs in the forest near Brookings, Oregon, intending to start a forest fire. However, it had rained the night before, and the fires were quickly extinguished. He was the only axis pilot to bomb the continental US.
But that's not the end of his story. In 1962, he was invited to Brookings. Fujita decided to go, and brought his family's 400 year old samurai sword with him. He offered it to the town as penance, and they gladly accepted. He continued to periodically visit the town, and in 1992, planted a redwood tree at the bomb sight.
What the residents didn't know until later was that Fujita had planned to commit seppuku with his family sword if the town had been angry with him.
The sword currently resides in the town library.
I've heard very little about this, again, it's a thing I saw a meme about which is crazy they didn't think this was in any way important in school. I've been thinking about making a trip to go out there.
Upon looking it up penicillin is the only antibiotic that seems to not be effective against plague.
However, penicillin was still rare in the 40s, to the point that it would be recovered from patients urine for reuse and wasn't made avaliable via prescription till 1945.
It was discovered in 1928 but manufacturing did start till 1941.
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/flemingpenicillin.html
What if I tell you that... it's still relevant today? Especially the weaponized variants that totally don't exist because every relevant country totally promised to not develop bioweapons...
Sauce: just trust me bro.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/tzd5ct/i\_think\_we\_sometimes\_forget\_japan\_was\_a\_brutal/](https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/tzd5ct/i_think_we_sometimes_forget_japan_was_a_brutal/)
There is a striking similarity between this meme and yours but I just can seem to put my finger on it.
The I-400 class of submarines was supposed to be the launching point of these plague bombers. 18 were planned, 3 were completed and the 3 were scuttled to avoid soviet capture (the soviets bugged the americans to see the submarines)
Some Japanese were indeed remorseful. The only man to bomb the US mainland during the war was invited to visit the town nearest his dropped firebombs in the 60’s. He gave them his family’s 400 year-old katana as a gesture of friendship. But his plan had also been to use it to commit seppuku if he received a hostile reception. He was treated kindly, so he gave his katana to the town and later sponsoring local high school students to visit Japan.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobuo_Fujita
> However, the plan was vetoed at the end of that same March 26, 1945, meeting, by Chief of the Army General Staff Yoshijirō Umezu. Umezu argued that: "The operation is unpardonable on humanitarian grounds... If bacteriological warfare is conducted, it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria. Japan will earn the derision of the world." Naval authorities protested, but Umezu's decision held.
//Wikipedia
Maybe if they had more resources and another 10 years or so they could've come up with something formidable lol. Something like the bubonic plague could be fairly easily contained and treated with antibiotics, even in the 1940s.
I would recommend everbody to see this video by youtuber Shaun. He goes into detail what happened leading up the bombings.
https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go
But the Japanese literally decided against doing that specifically because it was inhumane. In the words of the man who vetoed it "The operation is unpardonable on humanitarian grounds... If bacteriological warfare is conducted, it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria. Japan will earn the derision of the world".
This isn't really the gotcha you think it is. it's literally an example of America being the barbarians who decided to use a WMD to destroy a civilian population while Japan (by all accounts the more evil of the two sides) decided not to do it because of shared humanity.
I feel like so many people, when saying the bombings weren't justified, underestimate just how fucked up the things Japan were doing throughout the war were. Of course there's the main justification of avoiding a ground invasion, and that alone is enough to justify the bombs, but looking at what Japan did throughout the war, saying those bombs were anything short of deserved becomes harder and harder.
The issue with that thinking is that the people incinerated and poisoned by the bombs by and large were not the same people committing atrocities or starting the war. The bomb that hit Hiroshima landed directly on top of a hospital. Hundreds of thousands of people, school children, working poor, elderly people, etc. who had done nothing died instantly or days later in agony.
The ground invasion was also never really an option. The reason to drop the bombs was more “well we spent a fortune building them, it will scare the shit out of the rest of the world, and hopefully Japan will surrender before the USSR declares war on them so we can keep Stalin out of the negotiations.” The excuse that a ground invasion was necessary and would have led to 2 million or more casualties wasn’t even talked about by the American government until more than two years later.
There was also a surplus of nearly 500,000 purple hearts after the war. This is because they made 100s of thousands in preparation for the ground invasion. We're probably still giving out these purple hearts intended for the invasion of mainland Japan today, because the number of US casualties across all wars and conflicts since WW2 does not exceed the number of surplus medals.
Let that sink in: all wars and conflicts since WW2 combined were less deadly to US troops than what we expected Japan's invasion to be.
Jokes on them...it had already been here in the squirrels for decades by then! ....don't let your kids play with them folks ...
Well no more licking squirrels for me, then.
shouldnt let some piddly little disease stop you from engaging with your true life passions
Actually it’s only found naturally in the western United States, so you can still lick squirrels in a good deal of the country.
Come on over, folks! We've got: • Non-bubonic squirrels, compared to elsewhere's bubonic squirrels, apparently
Fawkkk yea, I’m in Florida and got the day off. Look for me on the news.
Oh thank god
I say lick the squirrels, how else will our modern health care system get worked out. You going in for bubonic plague is like a vaccine of learning for the doctors that have to diagnose some weird old crap, and of course, administer some sweet antibiotics.
That’s just government propaganda to stop you from discovering that the squirrels are cyborgs. Keep licking them for the good of America!
Lifeprotip: let the squirrels lick ***you,*** instead.
Just like right now near the grandcanyon in America has wildlife carriers
The fuck?
Didn't know the fluffy little bastards in Cali carry Black Death ?
It's treatable with antibiotics 🙂
If you catch it early enough…
...isn't that any treatment?
i mean, not on viruses, because they're viruses and not bacteria
So you need antivirals. Or virophage injection.
isn't that way less effective tho
Even with treatment, the weakest version has a 10-15% death rate
[удалено]
Armadillos can carry leprosy, too.
Yep there is a case every few years, oh and armadillos carry leprosy.
wait was that a real plan?
Yup. Japan was experimenting on their civilians with the bubonic plague, cholera etc. They also tried igniting wild fires and sending bombs into in the PNW by releasing high altitude balloons. I belive one landed and killed 6 people. Edit: Didn't get expect this to get so much traction. To follow up, I believe it was Japan testing on their own citizens.Check out the WW2 Greatest Moments in Color on Netflix. The Hiroshima episode mentioned it as one of the ethics that was weighed while deciding whether we should drop the atom bomb. For my non-American friends the PNW is Pacific Northwest which makes up Oregon and Washington . I am sure there is another state or two that I didn't mention. Thank you to everyone who responded I'll try to read through each comment.
They landed a bomb in Omaha Nebraska
Lmao us thinking it was fireworks is so American I find it funny
well tbf a residential area in Omaha, Nebraska is one of the last places I'd expect to be attacked. especially since afaik there had only been two attacks on the mainland continental US by then, one on a military base and one on an oil field, both on the west coast
Japan attacked some islands in Alaska as well
that's not mainland
I think it counts as mainland but not part of the main body of states, as it is reachable via land from the capital but not without crossing another country’s borders. It is possible that you know more about the definition of “mainland” but that is my interpretation
WAIT?!, REALLY
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/site-of-a-japanese-balloon-bomb-explosion
It's kind of ironic that there is a pizza place right next to the site
... but does it have a basement.
Buttery males?
Lol no shit!?
Dundee to be more specific. There’s a plaque and everything. Cool bit of history.
Dundee was just a neighborhood at that point. It was annexed in 1915.
Me whose lived here all my life… They did what now?? How am I just hearing about this?
Was it *their civilians* or other civilians…
If you’re talking about the balloons, it was American citizens. If I remember correctly, it was a Sunday school teacher and some children who stumbled upon a bomb in the Pacific North West (I believe Washington) and became the only US civilian casualties on the American mainland. Edit: as someone said below, the incident actually occurred in Oregon.
thank you for not using the PNW accronym, accronyms are a nuisance to a global audience
To be frank, I think your comment is the first time I’ve ever seen that acronym and I’d also be confused if I saw it despite being a native born American (probably because I live half way across the nation).
The comment like 2 comments before yours used it. I also had no idea what they were saying with PNW so I thank you as well.
No problem, and I’m a derp for missing that.
well I'm referring to its use just a few comments before which left me puzzled
Oh, must have over looked that.
Southern Oregon, not Washington.
Yes
(・_・;)
A government performing highly unethical outright evil medical procedures on its citizens without their knowledge or consent? Say it ain’t so.
Tuskegee
There was a family on picnic and they got really unlucky, they do got a monument to them now though so... silver linings?
Unit 731 has entered the chat
Shiro Ishii has also entered the chat.
Unit 731: thats what I said, test subjects.
The craziest part is that if one of the soldiers running the place died, then their body would be used for experiments next
Recycling is not crazy
Reduce, reuse, recycle...
Tbf there are records of Japanese soldiers eating each other and pows. I don't think they had much issue with harming civilians after eating their squad mates
George HW Bush was doing an air raid during WWII when his plane was shot down over the ocean. Including himself, nine airmen made it out. Bush was separated from his other airmen (likely due to weather) and was recovered safely. His companions were captured, killed, and four of them were eaten. US history could have played out very differently if the head of the CIA, Congressman, VP, President, and father of two Governors and one President had stuck with the rest of his crew to be eaten https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident
That was the Japanese army trapped on Papua New Guinea with no supplies. As terrible as Japan was during the war (and I say this as a Chinese), I don’t think that one is really on them. You put anybody on that tropical hellhole for a few months they’re prbly gonna start eating each other.
Oh god yeah. I read a few accounts of the war in Papua New Guinea and it makes Stalingrad seem like the Ritz. The whole Pacific campaign which isnt that well known in Europe is gruesome and brutal af
It's honestly not that well known in the US either. I've often wondered if that's because it was so brutal. Like, we all know the image of the flag being raised at Iwo Jima, and we hear of Midway, but it's not nearly as well known as the European front. The utter savagery and darkness on all sides in the Pacific Theatre makes it easier to collectively forget about and instead just focus on those no good Nazis.
there are plenty of times they ate POWS *even* with plenty of food though (ofc the situation you described was also valid)
Look up shiro ishii, he was arguably worse than joseph mengele. Also my country paid the man for his "research info" > < \*auto correct, why do you hate me so?
Amateurs! Balloons are unpredictable and unmotivated. See, a true artist would use bats with incendiary bombs strapped to them. What you do is spend the entirety of the war fucking around with giant canisters full of bats. Then, when the whole system is actually functional, you cancel the project because nukes just started existing. Then you spend the rest of your life wondering why you spent four years goofing around in the desert with a bunch of fucking bats.
It's at times like these I like to point out that B.F. Skinner suggested pigeon-guided missile systems during WW2, with pigeons inside the nosecone 'guiding' the missile on target.
I see you've also watched that episode of Dark Matters.
If you thought the German rocket program wasn't very accurate wait until you learn about Japanese balloon bombs.
But this sub taught me that all Japan ever did was bomb a few boats.
The war crimes of their military were really horrific. Against both civilians and POWS. If they didn't already view their enemies as subhuman, they certainly did once they were beaten and especially if they surrendered.
They also somehow killed more than the Nazis.
Well, China has a lot more people in general so…
yeah even some of the Nazis thought they went too far and that’s saying something
To be fair (I guess) some of the Japanese also thought the Nazis were going too far in Europe. Obviously, both of them went way too far.
Pretty sure in both cases it was embassy staff in the countries being invaded (China and I’m pretty sure Japanese ambassador to Poland).
John Rabe, a Nazi in China, used his Nazi uniform to evacuate as many Chinese as he could into his own property because he saw how brutal the Japanese treated the civilians.
I remember reading that some officers practiced cannibalism, not out of necessity but just because they wanted to kill some POWs and eat some human liver.
Sup primals, liver king checkin in
Do we browse the same sub? This sub fucking *loves* bombarding you with Japanese warcrimes facts ad nauseam. Not like there's anything wrong with it, it deserves its mention. But I'll be lying if I said I'm not tired of these warcrimes competition that always happen in the comments whenever the topic is mentioned.
It was called "Cherry Blossoms at Night", and it was actually cancelled I believe.
Yep. We found one of those baloons on some old farmland in my hometown back in the 70s. It seemed to be a dud, but it was very possible it could go off
Yes, [and the Japanese had been engaging in a significant amount of both biological and chemical warfare in China and other areas they invaded since at least 1937.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731?wprov=sfla1)
Seems like a pretty shitty plan considering it would have been pretty easily treatable.
Still would have been a massive disruption, just look at Covid: the body count isn't that high but it managed to fuck over productivity significantly for a decent period of time...
Not necessarily. The plague wouldn't require a vaccine and could be treated with penicillin which was widely available. It's also not nearly as spreadable as COVID and was generally spread by bites from infected pests like rats, fleas, and other critters which themselves could have been easily combatted in modern society.
In addition, the USA was in full war economy mode. Not getting treatment would be aiding an enemy.
Wish it was that easy today...
True, unless Japan was experimenting with the same plague that killed half of europe in the middle ages, because that wasn't bubonic plague, it spread so quickly that it had to be the worse variant, the pneumonic plague that also spreads through particles in the air.
They're the same disease, caused by the same pathogen. The manifestation is based on where the infection develops in an individual.
covid is not only completely new, but also a virus and can't be whisked away by a cure. The bubonic plague has been known for hundreds of years and has available treatments, nowhere near as dangerous or disruptive as covid due to this.
If you think a million Americans isn’t a lot idk what to tell you
Double the deaths of Americans in the war itself
COVID isn't over, governments just gave up trying to fight it. Long COVID is going to be a mass disabling event with effects that will be felt for decades.
What is a mass disabling event? Like people who experience long term symptoms, or the cumulative effect of it staying with us?
Not quite. Plague still kills about 10% of those infected even with treatment. And if it advances to the stages where buobos are present, that risk increases even more. [source](https://www.cdc.gov/plague/faq/index.html#mortality) There are more easily searchable sources.
Penicillin was in pretty short supply in those days
The Imperials history gets glossed over a lot. They didn't kill as many as the Nazis did but the human experimentation, it made the Nazis puke in disgust. Japan had a bunch of crazy stuff going on. They had a bunch of plans, like this and stuff I can't mention cause of NSFW it is.
yea, Im glad more people are talking about the fact that japan was way worse than people think It was
It's called Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, and it was a legit plan to send planes filled with plague infested pleas and kamikaze them in the West Coast of America. The only reason the plan did not come true was because it was scheduled in the mid September 1945 but the war was over by August.
Look up massacre of Nanking and ask that again
Operation cherry blossoms at night I believe
However, the plan was vetoed at the end of that same March 26, 1945, meeting, by Chief of the Army General Staff Yoshijirō Umezu. Umezu argued that: "The operation is unpardonable on humanitarian grounds... If bacteriological warfare is conducted, it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria. Japan will earn the derision of the world." Wiki on the subject
[it was called Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cherry_Blossoms_at_Night)
Unit 731 I believe is the equivalent of Nazi Germany’s atrocities that Japan committed against many Asian countries (and some of their own soldiers I believe) during WW2. I would highly suggest looking into it! It was covered up because America valued the “data” from these biological crimes.
Oh yes it was! Shiro Ishii was the head of the program and I'd like to call him the Elf on Satan's shelf. Ishii was fascinated by viruses and plagues, and Unit 731 was his playground to make them even more potent. When Japan invaded China, plague began to spread like wildfire. Unit 731 had been dropping containers full of infected fleas across the Chinese countryside. Children were dying in their parents arms, while others would live their last days alone to avoid spreading the sickness. And then 731 would appear and begin dissecting the victims, many still alive and in front of their families who were helpless to stop it. Hundreds of thousands were infected, and we aren't perfectly sure how many died, one province alone reported up to 50,000 deaths. With all this valuable research Shiro Ishii set his sights on America with Operation Cherry Blossoms at night. While the war was ragging in the Pacific, Japan had been sending bombs attatched to large ballong across the sea towards America. Over 9,300 ballons were sent, 200 - 300 reached the country 7 Americans in total were killed. Ishii saw this was ineffective and wanted something more potent. His goal was to drop these same plague fleas across the west coast with the use of Kamakaze pilots. The plan failed as by this time Japan had became more concerned with defense of their own territories, and the fear of American retaliation in the final days of WWII. Shiro Ishii never faced justice for his crimes. And many of his compartiots went to work as officials for Japan in some way. The former ,scientists of Unit 731 include the former governor of Tokyo, the former president of the Japan Medical Association, the former director of the health ministry’s preventive health research centre, the former chairman and president of Green Cross Corp. and the past heads of a number of Japanese medical schools. None of them faced the consequences of their actions. American Army General Douglas McArthur pardoned them all in exchange for their information. There is so much more inhumane shit that 731 committed, if you're willing to look at the Skeletons in Japan's closet. It's not for the faint of heart.
Ah yes, unit 731…
Fun fact, they have their own level of hell named after them. Because they fucking earned it.
I’m not surprised, truly
I heard about them, but what was it exactly?
A Japanese unit before and during the war who performed some truly horrifying experiments on Chinese civilians. Look them up if you want, but there's some really fucked up things they carried out on people
Wow, just read a little bit about them. It was pretty disturbing indeed
Here's the link if you wanna read up on it. Trigger warning for rape/torture. Absolutely barbaric shit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731?wprov=sfla1
Like a car crash, I wanted to look away from this article but couldn’t stop.
I read most of the Wikipedia page and now feel like the culmination of all my life's problems past, present, and future, are no big deal because I'm not in the shoes of anyone in that hell. I also feel genuinely lightheaded just knowing what horrible things it's possible to put people through and be okay with it. I also feel horrible knowing that somewhere on Earth there may be experiments being run just like this in modern day that we just don't know about, and I'm in bed reading Reddit memes and sipping mtn dew. Also "epidemic prevention and water purification department of the Kwanton army" literally torturing people, often to death, while creating bioweapons to artificially create an epidemic and wipe out vast populations in China and the USA.
Spoiler alert: You're gonna regret reading this.
Ughhh, I took the plunge into that article while already being well-aware that the WWII Japs were on equal footing with the Krauts by making up what they lacked in numbers by being much more "hands-on" when compared to the Nazis' atrocities. It's for that same reason of how "hands on" the Japs were that I had declined to read any comprehensive summary of just exactly how they went about getting their hands dirty & now I feel exactly as wretched as I knew I would & had likewise previously avoided intentionally... It's made especially heinous in my mind whenever reconciling such unfathomable magnitudes of suffering since it affects a soberingly brutal realization in me that clashes with theclassic, widely-held sentiment of regarding such horrors as "inhuman", whereas I've adopted the far more poisonous view by concluding that such atrocities are *thoroughly* human... I don't think we're quite evolved enough yet to the degree that society/civilization functioning as well as it does is simply us doing a bang-up job of playing make-believe with sincere conviction & is a thing that needs to cure quite a bit longer before it's properly "baked in"..... Maybe like another half dozen ice-ages or so
Didnt the US decided to exchange some officials from this unit for their results in their experiments or something like that?
They granted them immunity from any accusations/convictions of war crimes.
Thanks, I read that some time ago but didnt knew the whole picture
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Operation Fu-Go I believe. Only a few ever made it to the US, and unfortunately killed a pregnant woman and kids.
> and unfortunately killed a pregnant woman spawn kill
Not even that, pre-spawn kill.
Failed to create account (username already exists)
Hardware ban
Knowing imperial japan, that was by design. Those were their favorite targets
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The will of the emperor is a pathway to many abilities, some considered to be unnatural
Is it possible to learn this power?
Not from a westerner.
It's not a story the Allies would tell you
Considering that they randomly sent the balloons from Japan when the wind was blowing to north America I highly doubt anything was by design other then the balloon reaching the ground vaguely in the direction of the United States
Considering the fact that that was pretty obvious, I think that comment was a joke.
As someone who lives in Portland it really upsets me that this is the first time I've heard of this. Just like I only learned of the attempted sub attacks in the Columbia due to my own research.
Well here's a story for ya. In September 1942, a Japanese pilot by the name of Nobuo Fujita flew his floatplane from a long range Japanese sub off the west coast. He dropped two incendiary bombs in the forest near Brookings, Oregon, intending to start a forest fire. However, it had rained the night before, and the fires were quickly extinguished. He was the only axis pilot to bomb the continental US. But that's not the end of his story. In 1962, he was invited to Brookings. Fujita decided to go, and brought his family's 400 year old samurai sword with him. He offered it to the town as penance, and they gladly accepted. He continued to periodically visit the town, and in 1992, planted a redwood tree at the bomb sight. What the residents didn't know until later was that Fujita had planned to commit seppuku with his family sword if the town had been angry with him. The sword currently resides in the town library.
I've heard very little about this, again, it's a thing I saw a meme about which is crazy they didn't think this was in any way important in school. I've been thinking about making a trip to go out there.
Fuck, that dude did a 180 of a Journey….. Glad he did tho, thats a really nice story.
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Yeah, the flea and rat stocks were in short supply by then. They were needed for the war effort.
There is a really cool essay about the mice shortage of 1945 called "better then bubonic plague: the atomic bomb".
I also strap a pipe bomb to my rat when I need to off someone.
Yes but antibiotics were not widely avaliable in 1945 so it could have still worked potentially.
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Upon looking it up penicillin is the only antibiotic that seems to not be effective against plague. However, penicillin was still rare in the 40s, to the point that it would be recovered from patients urine for reuse and wasn't made avaliable via prescription till 1945. It was discovered in 1928 but manufacturing did start till 1941. https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/flemingpenicillin.html
What if I tell you that... it's still relevant today? Especially the weaponized variants that totally don't exist because every relevant country totally promised to not develop bioweapons... Sauce: just trust me bro.
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TL:DR: That shit is still considered good enough to be considered to be a bioweapon, and taught as such in CBRN classes.
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I'm sure the common cold could be considered a bioweapon If I intended to use t in a malignant way
*sneezes on someone, and is immediately tried as a war criminal*
Tbf in the modern day antibiotics are all it takes to effectively treat the bubonic plague, so a viral pathogen would be far better
10% mortality rate with treatment for bubonic. Septicemic at 70%.
Fuck 1940s Japan, all my homies hate 1940s Japan
1930s Japan can go suck a dick too
[https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/tzd5ct/i\_think\_we\_sometimes\_forget\_japan\_was\_a\_brutal/](https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/tzd5ct/i_think_we_sometimes_forget_japan_was_a_brutal/) There is a striking similarity between this meme and yours but I just can seem to put my finger on it.
Goodness, I wonder why.
This is just flat better though, warranted improvment as far as I'm concerned
You’re right
PCM are cringe tho.
We never apologized to Japan for that.
Actually, America never apologised for the nuclear strikes.
They seem to be rather proud of it actually
Japan also wasn't planning to release the bombs by the end either. Strawman vs strawman
Freshly stolen and wrong meme: 15,2k internet points and up
I mean it's not like Japan has apologized for any ww2 shit either
The I-400 class of submarines was supposed to be the launching point of these plague bombers. 18 were planned, 3 were completed and the 3 were scuttled to avoid soviet capture (the soviets bugged the americans to see the submarines)
I thought we never apologized to them tho
Who's apologising?
USA Never apologized. And probably never will
Did you take this meme from pcm. Be honest.
Kinda looks that way huh
....perhaps....
Some Japanese were indeed remorseful. The only man to bomb the US mainland during the war was invited to visit the town nearest his dropped firebombs in the 60’s. He gave them his family’s 400 year-old katana as a gesture of friendship. But his plan had also been to use it to commit seppuku if he received a hostile reception. He was treated kindly, so he gave his katana to the town and later sponsoring local high school students to visit Japan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobuo_Fujita
That's, simultaneously horrific and wholesome. I am confusion.
> However, the plan was vetoed at the end of that same March 26, 1945, meeting, by Chief of the Army General Staff Yoshijirō Umezu. Umezu argued that: "The operation is unpardonable on humanitarian grounds... If bacteriological warfare is conducted, it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria. Japan will earn the derision of the world." Naval authorities protested, but Umezu's decision held. //Wikipedia
Uhhhh when did the US apologize for the nuclear attacks?
as if the US is remorseful in literally any way lol
The US wasn't that remorseful, at least not the government.
We were never groveling on our knees begging for forgiveness lmao
Dont forget that japan already used the bubonic plague and anthrax against civillians in china beforehand
To be fair, nowadays the bubonic plague can be cured with antibiotics. It's still a bad disease but not the end of the world anymore
Wait when did america apologize to japan ?
Both are pretty messed up
Japan was as bad if not worse than the nazis...
Was it unit 731 that was planning this?
Yes, yes it was
Nuts that we’re equating real atrocities to hypothetical ones here lmao
Maybe if they had more resources and another 10 years or so they could've come up with something formidable lol. Something like the bubonic plague could be fairly easily contained and treated with antibiotics, even in the 1940s.
Probably not the worst that the Imperial Army has done.
I would recommend everbody to see this video by youtuber Shaun. He goes into detail what happened leading up the bombings. https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go
Japan about to kill all pows: yea apologies accepted
But the Japanese literally decided against doing that specifically because it was inhumane. In the words of the man who vetoed it "The operation is unpardonable on humanitarian grounds... If bacteriological warfare is conducted, it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria. Japan will earn the derision of the world". This isn't really the gotcha you think it is. it's literally an example of America being the barbarians who decided to use a WMD to destroy a civilian population while Japan (by all accounts the more evil of the two sides) decided not to do it because of shared humanity.
I feel like so many people, when saying the bombings weren't justified, underestimate just how fucked up the things Japan were doing throughout the war were. Of course there's the main justification of avoiding a ground invasion, and that alone is enough to justify the bombs, but looking at what Japan did throughout the war, saying those bombs were anything short of deserved becomes harder and harder.
The issue with that thinking is that the people incinerated and poisoned by the bombs by and large were not the same people committing atrocities or starting the war. The bomb that hit Hiroshima landed directly on top of a hospital. Hundreds of thousands of people, school children, working poor, elderly people, etc. who had done nothing died instantly or days later in agony. The ground invasion was also never really an option. The reason to drop the bombs was more “well we spent a fortune building them, it will scare the shit out of the rest of the world, and hopefully Japan will surrender before the USSR declares war on them so we can keep Stalin out of the negotiations.” The excuse that a ground invasion was necessary and would have led to 2 million or more casualties wasn’t even talked about by the American government until more than two years later.
Iirc a ground invasion would have resulted in many more Japanese casualties than the atomic bombs did.
There was also a surplus of nearly 500,000 purple hearts after the war. This is because they made 100s of thousands in preparation for the ground invasion. We're probably still giving out these purple hearts intended for the invasion of mainland Japan today, because the number of US casualties across all wars and conflicts since WW2 does not exceed the number of surplus medals. Let that sink in: all wars and conflicts since WW2 combined were less deadly to US troops than what we expected Japan's invasion to be.