Bernalillo students take documentary on deadly Japanese lab to top competition

ALBUQUERQUE — Four Albuquerque School of Excellence students who hail from Bernalillo traveled to the Washington, D.C.-area this past week for a national competition to showcase their documentary on a deadly Japanese laboratory responsible for committing experiments on hundreds of thousands of people during World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Sophomores Nicole Briceno Gabauer, Tam Pham, Masara Algburi and Smriti Monger showed their 10-minute short, “The Hidden Atrocities of Unit 731: Denial, Duty, and the Right to Justice,” at the National History Day National Contest from June 8-12 at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. Almost 3,000 students participated, contest organizers said.

Pham said the group felt a sense of “surprise and amazement” making into the contest, which they did after placing first in New Mexico National History Day’s documentary competition on April 11.

“At first, we never thought we would win at all — we thought we would completely and utterly lose, being completely decimated by all the other great documentaries from state and regionals,” she said. “That’s just a whole different thing, being able to spread our message in a different community.”

The message the students hope to send is awareness of Unit 731, a laboratory once located in a puppet state of Japan that is now considered China, operated by the Imperial Japanese Army under the guise of the “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department,” according to the students’ documentary, published on YouTube and pacificatrocities.org, where the students obtained some of the information for their film.

The lab’s victims were men, women and children, referred to by Army personnel as “logs,” who were subjected to torture, including forced rapes, limb amputations, food deprivation and weapons testing, the students’ documentary and pacificatrocities.org said.

Following Japan’s surrender to the U.S. in 1945, ending the war, numerous officials who oversaw Unit 731 were prosecuted during the so-called “Tokyo Trials,” the students’ film said. Although numerous lab members were tried and sentenced to prison time or death, the U.S. granted immunity to high-ranking members of Unit 731 in exchange for its research findings, the film said.

“The United States failed to uphold its responsibility to bring about justice and protect the rights of civilians and prisoners of war under international law,” the film said.

Pham said one of the film’s biggest points is that the lab has “a lasting legacy” on its victims that is still felt today that is “forgotten and covered up by the (Japanese) government.”

Briceno Gabauer added: “Even professors now, to this day, are trying to look for answers about what happened during Unit 731, and it’s that still a relevant topic in history to this day.”

The students’ documentary was born out of a group project in their Advanced Placement class. Tasked with doing research on a problem and presenting a solution, Gabauer, Pham, Algburi and Monger contended that Japanese wartime atrocities that arose out of Unit 731 were not as widely known as they could have been. Their solution was to inform others by funding the digitization of historical materials about the lab.

Alongside the group project, the students were encouraged by their AP class instructor, Shannon Beyer, to make a documentary about Unit 731 and enter it into a contest with National History Day, a nonprofit aimed at encouraging the education of students on historical topics.

Beyer applauded her students’ documentary for detailing a topic that she believes is relatively unknown in both world and U.S. history.

“Bringing Unit 731 back into public conversation and reminding the general public that discussion of the impact of World War II should not be perpetually limited to the Jewish Holocaust and the atomic bomb,” Beyer wrote in an email to the Observer. “There are survivors and perpetrators of Unit 731’s actions still alive, and unlike Jewish victims, there is no resolution, no closure, and perpetual denial by the Japanese government that these events occurred. It’s a topic worthy of ongoing public discussion with roots that vine into the present.”

Pacificatrocities.org was used in the students’ initial research, and they became intrigued by the fact that the lab was an often-overlooked aspect of World War II, Algburi said.

“We decided to choose a competitive topic and one that piqued our interest because we never heard about it or learned about it in a lot of our history classes,” she said.

Every day for three months, the students spent several hours making their documentary. Their research involved combing through thousands of pages of journals and books and translating those materials into English. They even submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. government for previously undisclosed information.

“It was really difficult because (the lab) was secretive, so there was not a lot of footage or anything from it — so we had to really dig for it and had to make sure it was reliable,” Pham said.

During the national contest, which will include a panel of judges, Monger said with a laugh, “our main aim is to win!” But the group’s goal is, in fact, much deeper than that, Monger said.

“Having a larger audience, compared to state, regionals and school, is a lot more meaningful to us,” she said. “We’re trying to bring light to an event, so having a bigger audience ... means we get to educate more people.”

With their documentary-making in the rearview mirror, the students noted they hope to make a mini vacation out of their trip to the D.C.-area by visiting various landmarks. Only Briceno Gabauer has visited before.

“I’m really excited to go back,” she said.

The students’ documentary can be found on YouTube at youtube.com/watch?v=ce1yp1MDusw.