"Several factors have conspired to keep Unit 731’s activities from receiving the attention they so richly deserve. The decades of concealment of the outfit’s history were partly the fruit of the Japanese central government’s reputed skill at inactivity, along with its priority on avoiding all manners of controversy, whether domestic or international. Evidence also failed to surface simply because there were no survivors among the victims of Unit 731; all were eliminated before the end of the war. Then, there was the combination order-threat by commanding general Ishii Shiro himself that former unit members were to “take the secret to the grave.” Obedience to the command was probably not at all difficult for those surviving Japanese members of the unit who could have borne witness but would have felt scalpels turned in their own hearts were their children to ask, “Daddy! How could you do something like that?”- and feel it even more acutely in their later years when the question would be prefaced with “Grandpa.”"