Akira Makino (牧野 明, Makino Akira) (November 1922 – May 2007) was a former medic in the Imperial Japanese Navy who, in 2006, became the first Japanese ex-soldier to admit to the experiments conducted on human beings in the Philippines during World War II.
The prisoners were mostly Moro Muslims,[1][2][3][4][5] and included women and children, as well as two Filipino men suspected of spying for the United States.
He said he sedated the men by placing ether-soaked cloth over their mouths, and then was instructed to study their livers after making an incision with a surgical knife.
[7] Makino stated that, at the time, he thought it was a "horrible" thing that he was doing, but that he was too scared to refuse orders because he would have been killed for disobedience.
Makino's account is one of only a few from Japanese veterans concerning human experimentation in Southeast Asia during World War II.