泡沫之夏

Exclusive: Scholars trace Imperial Japanese Army’s germ-warfare outrage across Asia, calling for preventing atrocities from recurring_我的网站

舞林大会

A |

Photo: screenshot of the CNA documentary Inside Unit 731: Japan's Secret Human Experiments
A documentary revisiting the Imperial Japanese Army's lethal human experiments and biological warfare program has attracted more than 1 million views online, bringing renewed global attention to one of World War II's darkest chapters and a history still little known outside Asia.
Produced by Singapore-based Channel NewsAsia (CNA), Inside Unit 731: Japan's Secret Human Experiments features historians and descendants of survivors from countries including the UK, the US, Japan and Singapore. Through their accounts, the documentary details the germ warfare, human experimentation and other crimes against humanity committed by Unit 731 - officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army - during Japan's war of aggression.
Several US, Singaporean and Japanese scholars featured in the documentary recently told the Global Times that the evidence of Unit 731's crimes against humanity is irrefutable. The atrocities represent a shared trauma not only for Asian countries subjected to Japanese fascist aggression, but also for all humanity. "More than 80 years after the war, reviving the collective memory of affected countries is essential to safeguarding peace," they said.
Victims of germ warfare
For much of his life, Katsutoshi Takegami knew only that his father had once worked in China. It was not until years after his father's death that a discovery in the family storehouse prompted the 78-year-old resident of Komagane, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, to investigate what that work had involved.
Several thick photo albums had been packed into boxes marked "Nara Army Hospital." Across the black-and-white photographs were references to the "Epidemic Prevention Section" and the "Central China Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department."
"My father worked at a local public health center after World War II. He had mentioned that he had worked in China, but never revealed any details," Takegami told the Global Times. "When I saw those photographs, I desperately wanted to know what my father had done in China."
Determined to find an answer, Takegami closed the café he had spent years building, began examining historical records and consulted researchers. He even traveled to China in search of clues.
His investigation eventually revealed that his father had been a member of Unit 1644, also known as Unit Ei 1644, a germ-warfare formation based in Nanjing. The discovery came as a profound shock.
"When people talk about the Imperial Japanese Army's germ warfare, Unit 731 is usually the first thing that comes to mind. In fact, the Japanese military operated many such units," Takegami said.
"The general public knows almost nothing about them, and very few scholars study them. Historical evidence shows that the areas victimized by germ warfare extended far beyond Harbin, where Unit 731 was headquartered. China was by no means the only victimized country," he added.
For Singaporean independent scholar Lim Shao Bin, the realization that this biological warfare network had reached Southeast Asia came on February 14, 2016.
That day, Nobuyoshi Takashima, professor emeritus at the University of the Ryukyus, and his wife took Lim to the former Tampoi Mental Hospital on the outskirts of Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Pointing to a row of buildings, Takashima told him: "This was a wartime production base for Unit 731's plague bombs."
"That cut deeply into me," Lim told the Global Times. "I had studied in Japan since the 1980s and believed I knew a great deal about the crimes committed by the Japanese invaders in China. But I never imagined that Singapore and Malaysia - right on our doorstep - had also suffered at the hands of Unit 731."
From that day forward, Lim began systematically tracing the activities of Japanese germ-warfare units in Southeast Asia.
He explained that the Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory of the Imperial Japanese Army Medical School established the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army in Pingfang, Harbin, which became known as Unit 731.
Photo: screenshot of the CNA documentary Inside Unit 731: Japan's Secret Human Experiments

Photo: screenshot of the CNA documentary Inside Unit 731: Japan's Secret Human Experiments
Using Unit 731 as the center of its operations, the Japanese military established the North China Expeditionary Army Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department in Beijing, known as Unit 1855; Unit Ei 1644 in Nanjing; and Unit Nami 8604 in Guangzhou.
''Yet this network still contained a major missing piece - Southeast Asia,'' Lim said.
The Japanese military established the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of Southern Expeditionary Army in Singapore under the code name Oka Unit 9420. Together, these interconnected germ-warfare formations constituted what Lim described as the "Unit 731 system."
A map compiled by Lim marks five branches of Oka Unit 9420 across Southeast Asia: the Malaya, Java, Manila, Indochina and Thailand branches. These facilities produced plague bacilli and fleas on a large scale, supplying the Japanese military with biological warfare materials and forming a regional germ-warfare network.
Historical documents indicate that Oka Unit 9420 was the largest Japanese germ-warfare unit operating outside the China theater.
In May 2025, Lim and Wang Xuan, president of the Zhejiang Provincial Historical Society's research association on the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45), published a book on the Japanese Army's Oka Unit 9420 after five years of extensive research and writing.
The book offered the first comprehensive account of this nearly forgotten unit and was also the first historical monograph devoted to the Southern Expeditionary Army Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department.
Work far from over
The CNA documentary traces the origins of Japan's biological warfare ambitions to the 1925 Geneva Protocol, humanity's first major post-World War I attempt to prohibit the use of chemical and biological weapons.
Instead of treating the prohibition as a moral boundary, Shiro Ishii, the notorious commander of Unit 731, recognized the enormous military value of such weapons and regarded them as "a decisive means of winning future wars," according to the documentary.
Unit 731 presented itself publicly as an epidemic-prevention and public health organization. Its real purpose, however, was to conduct secret human experiments in support of biological warfare.
The experiments included infecting victims with plague-bearing fleas, injecting them with dysentery pathogens and subjecting them to frostbite tests in temperatures dozens of degrees below zero.
Japanese soldiers referred to prisoners of war and civilian victims as maruta, meaning "logs," stripping them of their humanity before using them as experimental subjects. Everyone sent into the laboratories eventually died.
As Lim's research shows, the system supporting these experiments extended far beyond Unit 731's headquarters in Harbin.
In February 2018, Lim obtained exclusive access to a reel of wartime film footage shot after 1942 by Tomosada Masuda, a close associate and former schoolmate of Ishii who later became a core member of Unit 731. The footage documented the activities of Oka Unit 9420 in Southeast Asia.
"Harbin's severe winters made it impossible to breed plague-infected fleas on a large scale throughout the year, so Unit 731 urgently needed a warm and humid cultivation base," Lim said. "The optimal conditions for breeding the fleas were temperatures of 27 to 30 C and humidity of around 90 percent. Singapore's climate met all of these requirements."
Another document preserved in a Japanese archive showed that Japanese military "researchers" had successfully isolated a new virus from rats in Singapore and planned to transport it to Unit 731's headquarters in Harbin.
Lim said the virus was not originally native to Singapore but had been deliberately cultivated and introduced by the Japanese military. The Japanese Imperial Army recorded the body temperatures, symptoms and other experimental data of 70 test subjects in detail.
"The documentary examines in depth the crucial role Singapore played in the broader biological warfare operation," Alexis Dudden, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, told the Global Times. "This not only expands the geographical scope of research into Unit 731's criminal activities, but also makes one point clear: This history cannot simply be characterized as a dispute between China and Japan. At its core, it was a transnational crime done by Japanese imperial expansion."
Dudden also pointed to the testimony of Hideo Shimizu, a former teenage recruit of Unit 731 who appeared in the documentary. Accounts by those who directly witnessed the unit's activities demonstrate that "the work of exposing this dark history is far from over," she said.
The documentary also highlights the stark disparity in postwar accountability.
After World War II, the victorious Allied powers conducted international trials of leading Nazi war criminals and criminal organizations in Nuremberg, Germany. Yet many of Unit 731's "executioners" returned to Japanese society, where they resumed ordinary careers in medicine and other professions.
"In a sense, this forces all of us to ask: How could a person commit such horrifying crimes, then return home and continue to act as a caring partner, a kind friend or a responsible parent?" Dudden said.
Understand history, learn from it
As of press time, "Inside Unit 731: Japan's Secret Human Experiments" has attracted more than 1.13 million views on YouTube and other platforms, with the figure rising.
Its reception raises a broader question: Why has a history rooted in wartime Asia resonated so strongly with audiences across national borders?
"Many people outside China know little or nothing about this history," Dudden said. "For a long time, international understanding of Unit 731 has not merely contained blind spots. It has been marked by widespread historical ignorance - people simply do not know this history."
Dudden cited an example from the university where she teaches. An accomplished professor who held a doctorate from Kyoto University and had spent years living and working in Japan was stunned after watching the documentary.
"I grew up in Bosnia and worked and lived in Japan for many years. My own grandparents died in Nazi concentration camps, yet I had never heard of this history," the professor said.
The professor urged Dudden to introduce the documentary in her classes and help disseminate the historical truth about Unit 731 because "everyone can and must understand this history and learn from it."
At the same time, Dudden emphasized that "understanding history and learning historical knowledge does not mean hating Japan or the Japanese people."
Asked by the Global Times what lessons remembering and reflecting on history can offer for preventing past tragedies from recurring and safeguarding peace and justice, amid Japan's accelerating rightward shift and mounting conflicts worldwide, Dudden said that "choosing silence in the face of atrocities is, to some extent, tantamount to abetting evil."
"Collective numbness and inaction can all too easily give rise to further harm. If humanity is unwilling to reflect together and defend our shared human values, similar tragedies will very likely happen again. Therein lies the answer," Dudden said.
For historians, years of work with archival materials are essential to identifying decisive evidence and exposing the falsehoods of historical denialists, Dudden said.
"But the challenge remains: Distorted and sanitized narratives have already hardened into mainstream opinion in some countries," she noted. "From this perspective, the historical truth about Unit 731, including that presented in CNA's documentary, deserves to be disseminated widely."
Da Zhigang, a research fellow at the Institute of Northeast Asian Studies of the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that the Imperial Japanese Army's germ warfare, chemical warfare and other atrocities were not confined to China.
They also spread across Southeast Asia and the Pacific theater, inflicting profound suffering on people in numerous countries, he said.
Da said the Japanese government has long pursued historical revisionism by deliberately confining its wartime crimes to a bilateral China-Japan framework. It has even substituted concepts and reversed right and wrong, portraying a deliberately launched war of aggression as "an act of self-defense under a complex international environment," he said.
Such narratives seek to reduce the perceived geographical scope of Japan's atrocities and dilute its responsibility for wartime crimes, Da noted.
"Japan's historical revisionism is, in essence, a flagrant violation of the spirit of the UN Charter, international human rights norms and the principles of Japan's own Constitution," Da said.
"The current Sanae Takaichi administration uses AI and other means to manipulate public opinion, continually poisoning the Japanese public's understanding of history and fundamentally distorting the purpose of peace education," Da said.
"This erroneous view of history is highly transmissible and has serious spillover effects. It undermines the foundations of Japan's relations with regional countries and risks triggering a chain of negative consequences with lasting repercussions," the expert warned.
Many Asia-Pacific countries share memories of suffering under Japanese militarism as well as a strong emotional resonance rooted in that history. This provides a solid foundation for building a multilateral system of historical accountability, Da said.
Victimized countries across the region should preserve their shared historical memory, work together to expose false narratives promoted by Japan's right wing and fully restore the historical record of Japanese aggression, he added. Such efforts would provide a firm historical basis for upholding regional peace and justice.
For Lim, turning that goal into reality requires overcoming serious obstacles. The countries of Southeast Asia were ruled by different colonial powers during the war, and their archives were consequently preserved in different languages. Records relating to Singapore and Malaysia were largely written in English under British colonial rule, those in Indonesia in Dutch, and those in Vietnam in French.
Already scarce documents are therefore scattered across different countries and divided by linguistic barriers, leaving researchers with very limited material, Lim added.
"Unit 731's germ warfare, human experimentation and other crimes are not only a source of pain for China. They are a shared trauma for all Asian countries that suffered Japanese aggression, and for humanity as a whole," Lim said. "Researching this history is therefore not the responsibility of any one country, but a common responsibility of the international community."
Lim called on countries to strengthen archival sharing and academic cooperation, break down linguistic and national barriers, and jointly uncover more historical truths that have remained buried.
"More than 80 years after the war, reviving the collective memory of affected countries is essential to safeguarding peace," Lim said. "Only by facing history squarely and reflecting on it can we prevent such tragedy from recurring and build a solid foundation for peace."
。最近的PC行业，是真的有点难。

B | 以前大家不换电脑，厂商还能怪牙膏挤得不够。现在牙膏已经快挤成水枪了，内存、硬盘、显卡价格却一个比一个离谱，新机发布会看下来，性能确实涨了，就是轻薄本也要卖到工作站的价格。消费者一看，旧电脑又不是不能开机，算了，再战三年。

C | 厂商当然也急，于是乎过去两年，所有PC都开始往AI上靠。

D | 处理器有NPU，键盘有AI键，系统里塞个助手，开会能总结，照片能抠图。结果消费者买电脑时还是看性能、续航和价格，很少有人认真说，我就是冲着这些AI功能来的。归根结底，这PC之所以叫Personal Computer，那本质还是给人用的。这就给AMD带来了一个新想法，既然给PC增加定义大家不买账，那我直接掏出一个新词：Agent Computer，你们又该如何应对呢？（图源：AMD）好家伙，AI还没给我发工资呢，这就跑来找我申请电脑了？ Agent能用的电脑，简称AC 首先，我来解释一下什么叫Agent Computer（下称AC）。按照AMD的定义，AC是一种专供AI Agent长期运行的设备，主打始终在线、始终可用、始终工作。如果AI PC是给你的电脑请助手；Agent PC是助手操作你的电脑；那么AC就是你给助手配了个人电脑。

E | 用户不需要坐在它前面点鼠标，只要通过手机、聊天软件或者另一台电脑派活，Agent就能在后台调用模型、文件和工具，持续工作几个小时，甚至几天。

F | （图源：AMD）因此，AC不一定要有自己的屏幕、键盘和鼠标。为了给自家产品做宣传，其实AMD有在介绍页面给出一系列推荐产品，可以看到大部分被定义为AC的产品，都是塞满了大内存和AI算力的小主机，主打的就是静音运行、待机低功耗和相对高性能。对，就像今年年初爆火的Mac mini那样。（图源：AMD）说到这里，大家估计也能看出这个概念到底是怎么来的了。

G | 有趣的是，在今年WAIC上，尽管各家宣传口径不一，但是我们确实能够看到不少符合这个概念的产品。以联想为例，他们在今年的展会上带来了新近发布的联想AI主机MINI。（图源：联想）据悉，这款产品出厂预装Ubuntu系统，用户需通过手机扫描二维码完成设备配置。

H | 它的最大特点就是搭载了国产算力平台——此芯P1处理器，该处理器采用6nm制程，Arm架构，配备12核CPU和G720 MC10 GPU，此外还配有一个专用NPU，使联想宣称的总算力达到45TOPS。这玩意的本地算力确实一般，它主打的是让全家人或全团队接入同一个天禧Agent，以此实现多成员的任务共享，联想将其定义为一个长年运行的本地AI中枢。当然，想要充足的本地算力，联想这边也能提供。例如这款后摩智能和联想推出的联想AI主机P7，整机只有约300克，号称拥有190TOPS本地算力，最高支持千亿级模型部署。（图源：雷科技）最重要的是，这款产品有移动电源就能工作、有网没网都能跑模型，你完全可以把视作一台可以随身揣兜里的个人AI服务器。就是这6999元的价格，不管怎么说都算不上便宜就是了。此外，现场还有AI WorkMate这类带摄像头、语音交互和投影的Agent桌面设备，可以说外形已经从传统电脑一路滑向桌面机器人。（图源：雷科技）至于商汤科技和创盈芯，他们也在本次WAIC上展出了一个“虾盒”。（图源：雷科技）不难看出，从硬件厂商、芯片厂商到模型厂商，很多企业都开始注重起软硬结合，他们都在朝着Agent Computer这一定义发力，试图实现硬件与智能体的深度协同。人和Agent，非得用不同装备吗？看到这里，有人肯定就要问了，真的有必要给Agent专门整一台电脑嘛？嗯...只能说AMD认为有必要，甚至更夸张一点，他们认为人和Agent最好不要永远共用一台电脑。（图源：AMD）理由也很简单，人的电脑负载是间歇性的。写稿、修图、打游戏，用完随手就关；Agent的理想状态却接近服务器，它要持续等待任务、同时推进项目、失败后重试，还可能在你睡觉时继续工作。特别是Codex这类应用，主打的就是多Agent并行和长时间任务，你给它电脑关了，它还怎么运行下去？至于性能方面的问题嘛……我个人倒是觉得还好。

I | 简单介绍一下配置，目前我在用的PC是i5-13600KF+RTX 4070 Ti，整整10TB SSD+64GB内存，这个配置虽说跑不了什么大参数的本地模型，但是平时跑Codex，确实没有遇到明显卡顿、资源爆炸或者Agent抢走鼠标的情况。要知道，很多Agent计算本来就在云端完成，本地更多负责读文件、调用工具和展示结果，再加上我基本不需要进行什么批量操作、定时任务，远没到必须给它在隔壁买台电脑的程度。但这多少属于配置替我承担了岁月静好，事实上，网上关于Agent占资源、内存不释放、长任务崩溃的反馈并不少。（图源：reddit）现在很多大学生用的都是轻薄本，起步内存大多是16GB，自己开着网页、微信、文档和剪辑软件，再让几个Agent并行跑任务，那体验别提有多酸爽了。人嫌Agent吃内存，Agent嫌人爱关机，属于是相看两厌了。当然，相比性能损失和使用习惯上的小问题，或许权限才是人和Agent应该分开的真正原因。 Agent要替你干活，就得接触文件、邮箱、浏览器、代码库，甚至是你的公司内部系统。然而它能力越强，出错时的破坏力也越大，我们已经不止一次看到X上面的精英程序员遭遇删库级别的事故了。

J | 所以AMD才建议，把高自主Agent放进独立设备里，别一上来就把主账号、个人信息和公司机密打包送给它，让它把你的数字人生梭哈了。所以AC会全面取代PC吗？我认为AC在未来会持续存在，而且对一部分人非常有用。比如开发者、研究人员、内容团队，他们本来就有大量需要长时间运行的任务。

K | 让Agent常驻在一台独立设备里，处理资料、跑代码、整理数据库，不会因为员工合上笔记本就原地失业，这个逻辑完全成立。这玩意有点像NAS，对很多人来说可能意义不明，但是对于需要搭影视库、备份素材、管理照片的人来说，那叫一个旦用难回。（图源：雷科技）但你要说用这玩意取代PC，那我觉得根本就是无稽之谈。

L | 对普通人来说，让AI总结文档、修张图片、查点资料，现有PC和云端大模型已经够用，甚至可以说绝大多数人用豆包都绰绰有余了，指望大家舍弃现在的交互方式，完全转向指令式交互，多少是有点痴心妄想了。此外，考虑到价格飞涨的市场环境，指望大伙为了Agent专门买一台高性能小主机，这点多多少少也有些抽象好吧。