Who Can Truly Cast the First Stone?

          Many of us have jumped to these negative assertions about Japan after reading about these Japanese human experimentation facilities, but I would argue that this article concentrates so much on the atrocities of these experiments that it fails to shed light on the positive effects that practicing these human experiments had on the greater good of both Japan and the US. The experiments that were conducted could have been categorized as explanation of diseases, development of therapies and research into and development of biological and chemical warfare. By conducting such experiments the science of that time was accelerated forward at a pace that could have other wised taken many decades long. Given this information scientist today are able to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Some argue that the cost was too great because POW were killed to obtain this scientific research, but I argue that if we are now able to save more people than were sacrificed is it still wrong that they died to save us all? I also question the ability for a culture to negatively label Japan for their actions regarding their form of torture. This is not the first time a great number of people were killed for the betterment of the future. I would argue that it is easy for a culture such as ours to look at other cultures and tell them that they are morally corrupt for the way in which they choose to build a better future. The US, for instance, has no right to cast that stone because they too are guilty of building America off of the backs of slaves. One could even go as far as to say that they did even worse to the innocent slaves than Japan did to the POW, where at least there was a logical reasoning behind the torture and imprisonment of the Japanese POW in the first place being that they were prisoners. Now on another note, I can agree that both forms of torture are wrong, but I question the reasons that make it wrong. It seems as though the experimentation on humans is wrong because people were sacrificed because they were POW but how is that different from our death penalty? Lethal injection is used often enough on the prisoners on death row and some of them are innocent but still die. What gives anyone the reason to kill another human being? The Japanese POW were at the very least used for the greater good while day after day prisoners of our own are killed for nothing at all, where is the morality in that?

           Overall, I think that this article has made Japan look like a bad culture for their involvement in such ridiculous experiments. I feel as though the entire picture is not shown adequately enough in this reading in order to shed light on the good that arose from the atrocities and I believe there are atrocities like this that have happened and still happen today but cultures choose to not condemn it.