My research project while in Japan will focus mostly on moral injury and moral repair in context to Unit 731. Sorensen-sensei and I have come up with a few questions we would like to answer in conducting our research. They are as follows:
(1) What kinds of human experimentation did Unit 731 do? How are they like and different from human experimentation in the U.S. and Germany during the same period? (Work on this project will benefit from careful attention, at museums and the Hiroshima memorial, to the way the Pacific War is represented, and also maybe a visit to the two-room museum on “Rabbit Island.” Background info here may come from Sheldon Harris’s Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up; Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors; James Jones’s Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment; and Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics.) [This item could actually be split up into two projects: one comparing Japan and the U.S., and one comparing Japan and Germany.]
(2) Why did the U.S. handle the case of Unit 731 differently than it handled the Nazi doctors? How should we regard the U.S. treatment of the Unit 731 data as the Pacific War ended? (Background info here may come from Sheldon Harris’s Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up and discussions of the case of the Pernkopf Anatomy.)
(3) Once an agent has done something wrong, what is required of her by way of what we might call “moral repair”? Is the answer about moral repair the same for nations that have done something wrong? What sorts of moral repair are there in Japanese history? (Work on this project will benefit from careful attention at museums and other sites in Japan. Background info may include Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing.)
My focus will primarily be on that of topic (3), specifically in context of moral repair and moral injury. In a large aspect I hope to draw some parallels between Unit 731 and my previous Summer Fellows project "The Hidden Wounds of War: An Exploration of Moral Injury Sustained in Combat." I will be focusing on the relevant continental differences between (if there are any) in the occurrence of moral injury and the cultural specificities of moral repair (again, if this is indeed culturally relevant). I hope to find some core things that remain the same irregardless of the context of moral injury, but I would also love to find things that are different about different types of moral injury (ie. combat v. noncombat and/or Japanese moral injury v. US moral injury).
Hickey-san, Thank you for your very detailed description of the larger project that many of you will be pursuing with Sorensen-sensei, and also for the information about your particular focus. As you know, I have only recently been introduced to the concept of moral repair, and I find it to be very intriguing and potentially useful in looking at Japanese history, society and culture. The potential applicability of this concept ranges all the way back to somewhat stereotypical ideas about such things as suicide (by way of accepting responsibility and offering apology) and the concept of "face," with the idea of Japan as a "shame culture." These two caricatures of Japan have some kernel of truth, but are also in danger of perpetuating Orientalist stereotypes and prejudices. More recently, we have the phenomenon of mizuko kuyo (and the morally complex business of providing a vehicle for what one might call moral repair in the context of abortion, but also exploiting the very people in need of an outlet for this) and the situation of Tepco (the power company) and the ongoing Fukushima disaster. I recently heard a presentation on how the Japanese government has, instead of exploring moral repair, has been putting a huge burden of potential guilt on Japanese families by making them responsible for judging the safety of the food that they consume (rather than the government inspecting and destroying any potentially harmful food products). Of course, I am ranging far afield from the focus of your topic, but I'm writing this because I find the topic to be so valuable as a conceptual tool. Besides war-related issues that you may encounter in museums, etc., there are other issues such as the treatment of (that is, the near extermination of) the Ainu people, for example. This is indeed a very rich topic, and I am glad that a group of you will be focused on this during the summer program.
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