Purification

Ishii was born in Japan in 1892 and became a doctor in 1920, graduating from Kyoto Imperial University. He had a reputation for being thoughtless towards colleagues but subservient to superiors. Ishii married the daughter of the university's president and joined the Army Medical Corps. Despite the 1925 Geneva Protocol banned the use of bacteriological and chemical weapons in war, he began to urge the creation of a Japanese bacteriological weapons program. Ishii reasoned that such weapons must be very effective, otherwise they wouldn't have been prohibited. Ishii traveled through Europe and the United States for several years with an interest in the bacteriological weapons used in World War I. Upon his return he was appointed professor of immunology at the Tokyo Army Medical School and given the rank of major. While there Ishii quickly made a name for himself, inventing an effective water purification filter that he allegedly demonstrated before the Emperor. But the fame and riches that this invention brought were not enough for Ishii; he continued advocating that the Japanese army develop biological weapons. In 1932 the government put him in charge of a testing and production facility in the Chinese province of Manchuria, which the Japanese had invaded the previous year. As head of what would be euphemistically named the "Anti-Epidemic Water Supply and Purification Bureau," Ishii eagerly got to work.