Shirō Ishii

Shirō Ishii

Surgeon General Shirō Ishii (石井 四郎, Ishii Shirō, [iɕiː ɕiɾoː]; 15 June 1892 – 9 October 1959) was a Japanese microbiologist, army medical officer, and war criminal who served as the director of Unit 731, a biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army. Ishii led the development and application of biological weapons at Unit 731 in Manchukuo during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945, including the bubonic plague attacks at Chinese cities of Changde and Ningbo, and planned the Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night biological attack against the United States. Ishii and Unit 731 engaged in forced human experimentation on civilians and prisoners of war that resulted in the death of over 10,000 people, and were responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes of Imperial Japan during the Pacific War. Ishii and Unit 731 were granted immunity in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East by the United States government in exchange for information and research for the U.S. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Shirō Ishii has received more than 1,171,569 page views. His biography is available in 27 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 25 in 2019). Shirō Ishii is the 65th most popular physician (up from 89th in 2019), the 70th most popular biography from Japan (up from 82nd in 2019) and the most popular Japanese Physician.

Shirō Ishii is most famous for his experiments on humans in Unit 731. He experimented on humans by injecting them with various diseases and chemicals to see how they would react.