The surrender of the Empire of Japan in World War II was announced by Emperor Hirohito on 15 August and formally signed on 2 September 1945, bringing the war's hostilities to a close. By the end of July 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) had become incapable of conducting major operations and an Allied invasion of Japan was imminent. Together with the United Kingdom and China, the United States called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces in the Potsdam Declaration on 26 July 1945—the alternative being "prompt and utter destruction".
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo Trial and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, was a military trial convened on 29 April 1946 to try leaders of the Empire of Japan for their crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity, leading up to and during the Second World War. The IMTFE was modeled after the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, Germany, which prosecuted the leaders of Nazi Germany for their war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity.
The Xuantong Emperor (born Puyi; 7 February 1906 – 17 October 1967), courtesy name Yaozhi (曜之), was the last emperor of China as the eleventh and final monarch of the Qing dynasty and ruler of the puppet state of Manchukuo under the Empire of Japan from 1934 to 1945. He became emperor at the age of two in 1908, but was forced to abdicate at the age of six in 1912 during the Xinhai Revolution. His era name as Qing emperor, "Xuantong" (Hsuan-t'ung, 宣統), means "proclamation of unity".
The Nuremberg Code (Nürnberger Kodex) is a set of ethical research principles for human experimentation created by the court in U.S. v Brandt, one of the Subsequent Nuremberg trials that were held after the Second World War. Though it was articulated as part of the court's verdict in the trial, the Code would later become significant beyond its original context; in a review written on the 50th anniversary of the Brandt verdict, Jay Katz writes that "a careful reading of the judgment suggests that [the authors] wrote the Code for the practice of human experimentation whenever it is being conducted.
Vivisection () is surgery conducted for experimental purposes on a living organism, typically animals with a central nervous system, to view living internal structure. The word is, more broadly, used as a pejorative catch-all term for experimentation on live animals but the term is rarely used by practising scientists. Human vivisection, such as live organ procurement, has been perpetrated as a form of torture.
Harbin (ha:r'bIn,_-bi:n; ; ) is a sub-provincial city and the provincial capital and the largest city of Heilongjiang province, People's Republic of China, as well as the second largest city by urban population after Shenyang and largest city by metropolitan population (urban and rural together) in Northeast China. Harbin has direct jurisdiction over nine metropolitan districts, two county-level cities and seven counties, and is the eighth most populous Chinese city according to the 2020 census.
Khabarovsk (Хабаровск xɐˈbarəfsk) is the largest city and the administrative centre of Khabarovsk Krai, Russia, located from the China–Russia border, at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, about north of Vladivostok. As of the 2021 Russian census, it had a population of 617,441. The city was the administrative center of the Far Eastern Federal District of Russia from 2002 until December 2018, when the status was given to Vladivostok. It is the largest city in the Russian Far East, having overtaken Vladivostok in 2015.
was an Imperial Japanese Army facility called the Kwantung Army Warhorse Disease Prevention Shop that focused on the development of biological weapons during World War II. It was operated by the Kempeitai, the Japanese military police. Its headquarters was located in Mokotan, Manchukuo, a village just south of the city of Changchun. It had branches in Dairen and Hailar. The Hailar branch was later transferred to Foshan. Between 600 and 800 people worked at Unit 100. Unit 100 had six sections.
The Nanjing Massacre (, Nankin Daigyakusatsu) or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as Nanking) was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanking in the Second Sino-Japanese War, by the Imperial Japanese Army. Beginning on December 13, 1937, the massacre lasted six weeks. The perpetrators also committed other war crimes such as mass rape, looting, and arson. The massacre is considered to be one of the worst wartime atrocities.
The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) (originally briefly styled Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers) was the title held by General Douglas MacArthur during the United States-led Allied occupation of Japan following World War II. It issued SCAP Directives (alias SCAPIN, SCAP Index Number) to the Japanese government, aiming to suppress its "militaristic nationalism". The position was created at the start of the occupation of Japan on August 14, 1945.
