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Remembering Biowarfare Unit 731 Through Musical Activism: A Performance of the Choral Work The Devil's Gluttony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Philip Seaton
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Kitara is Sapporo's state-of-the-art concert hall in the middle of picturesque Nakajima Park. On 2 July 2014 I went there with different expectations than usual. I was not going to hear a professional orchestra playing a masterpiece of the classical repertoire, but an amateur choir singing a little-known choral work called Akuma no Hōshoku (The Devil's Gluttony), composed by Ikebe Shinichiro with words by Morimura Seiichi, a leading novelist. The piece was about Unit 731, Japan's infamous chemical and biological warfare unit located near Harbin in northeastern China (Manchukuo) in the years 1934-45, which murdered 3,000 people in gruesome vivisections and medical experiments.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 11 , Issue 28 , July 2013 , e4
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2013

References

Notes

1 In February 2014, Samuragochi, who had been dubbed the “Japanese Beethoven” was revealed as a fraud. His symphony was ghostwritten and possibly not even originally written with the A-bombing of Hiroshima in mind. But from 2008 to 2014 it had been lauded as an inspiring musical tribute to victims in Hiroshima.

2 For a full translation of the poem by Morimura set to music by Ikebe, see Yasuo Kawabata, “The Role of Drama for Regional Reconciliation: “Ho’o Pono Pono: Pax Pacifica” Proposed by Johan Galtung and Transcend-Japan”, pp. 108-113. Available here.

3 Franziska Seraphim (2006) War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 287-95.

4 Kawabata, pp. 103-4.