A new exhibit at a Japanese museum is shedding light on torturously brutal medical experiments performed on American POWs in World War II. The exhibit, which opened at the Kyushu University Medical History Museum on Wednesday, traces a century of the school's history — including a panel that explains the so-called vivisection experiments, in which the eight crew members of an American B-29 bomber shot down by the Japanese were experimented on alive. They were injected with sea water, had their lungs removed and lost huge amounts of blood; all eight of them died. A post-war tribunal found no systematic involvement from the school, but 23 military and university workers were later convicted of war crimes for the gruesome acts. The university said the exhibit was intended to acknowledge and confront its past atrocities — something Japan has long been criticized for not doing when it comes to how it treated World War II POWs.
