The British writer Peter Fleming visited Manchukuo in 1935 , and while riding a train through the countryside of Manchukuo , a group of Japanese colonists mistook his Swiss girlfriend Kini for a Russian refugee , and began to beat her up . It was only after Fleming was able to prove to the Japanese that his girlfriend was Swiss , not Russian , that the Japanese stopped and apologized , saying that they would never had beaten her up if they had known she was Swiss , saying that they sincerely believed she was a Russian when they assaulted her . Fleming observed that in Manchukuo : " you can beat White Russians up till you are blue in the face , because they are people without status in the world , citizens of nowhere " . Fleming further noted that the Japanese in Manchukuo had a strong dislike of all white people , and because the Russians in Manchukuo were stateless without an embassy to issue protests if they were victimized , the Japanese liked to victimize them . Until World War II , the Japanese tended to leave alone those travelling to Manchukuo with a passport as they did not like to deal with protests from embassies in Tokyo about the mistreatment of their citizens . The Kwantung Army operated a secret biological-chemical warfare unit based in Pinfang , Unit 731 , that performed gruesome experiments on people involving much visceration of the subjects to see the effects of chemicals and germs on the human body . In the late 1930s , the doctors of Unit 731 demanded more white subjects to experiment upon in order to test the efficiency the strains of anthrax and plague that they were developing leading to a great many of the Russians living in Manchukuo becoming the unwilling human guinea pigs of Unit 731 . The Russian Fascist Party , which worked with the Japanese was used to kidnap various " unreliable " Russians living in Manchukuo for Unit 731 to experiment upon
Unit 731
Unit 731
Manchukuo