RIGHTS-JAPAN: Admission of Germ Warfare Forces Look at War Past

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Oct 22 2002 (IPS) - For more than half a century, 76-year-old Yoshio Shinozuka, a former soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army, kept a dark secret locked in his heart.

Then last year he confessed, breaking down in tears as he recalled to his family and activists how he had worked in the notorious Unit 731 set up by the Japanese Imperial Army in the thirties to conduct experiments on humans to develop biological weapons.

”What I have done was something that nobody should have done as a human being. I cannot escape that responsibility,” he told a Japanese courtroom in August, becoming the unit’s first soldier to confess.

Unit 731 – known at the time as the epidemic prevention and water supply unit – was in fact a germ warfare experimental facility built in Harbin city, Manchuria in China in 1936.

Japan’s colonisation of northern China, which began in 1931, ended in 1945 after its defeat in World War II. Retreating Japanese soldiers destroyed the germ warfare facility at the end of the war.

Shinozuka’s confession, apart from testimony by Chinese experts, led to the Aug. 27 acknowledgement by a Tokyo District Court of the brutal, inhumane activities of Unit 731 in response to a 1997 lawsuit filed by 180 Chinese victims.

These Chinese were victims of the release by Japanese doctors of fleas carrying the bubonic plague, in order to test the use of the outbreak of the illness as a weapon.

”This trial is the first time the whole grand picture of the damage caused by Unit 731 has been revealed, a step forward in our long fight to accept our past,” says Shigeo Nasu, who organises a travelling exhibition displaying information about Unit 731.

While the court rejected compensation of around 84,000 U.S. dollars per person and an official apology demanded by the elderly Chinese survivors, the case has been leading to further moves to make Tokyo more accountable for actions that have ranged from its use of sexual slavery to brutal wartime acts.

Tsuchiya, chief lawyer for the plaintiffs, said that with the help of some politicians activists are proposing new laws that will hold the government responsible for individual compensation.

”This is the next crucial step towards admitting our war atrocities and fostering better relations with our Asian neighbours,” he says.

For activists trying to get the Japanese government to apologise and compensate the victims of its wartime atrocities in Asia, Japan’s germ warfare experiments are seen as particularly brutal, more so because the perpetrators of these crimes have mostly escaped justice.

Nasu says, ”Only a few former members of Unit 731 have served prison sentences and some have carved out respectable careers in Japan.” One, Lt Col Ryoichi Naito, became the founder of the Japan Blood Bank.

Professor Sheldon Harris of the California State University in the United States and an expert on Japan’s biological weapons programme in China, estimates that more than 150,000 people were killed in research laboratories and that over 250,000 people were killed in field tests by the Japanese Imperial Army.

Evidence to date suggests that Unit 731 was part of an ambitious programme to try and spread plague and disease behind Chinese lines from 1940 to 1942. This was achieved by ‘bombing’ China’s eastern province of Zhejiang and central Hunan province with bubonic plague-carrying fleas, causing a severe outbreak of the disease.

Harris, who studied information obtained from Japan by the U.S. government after the war, said public knowledge of Unit 731 was covered up by the Allied powers.

Knowledge of Unit 731 has remained a secret for this long partly because the U.S. government granted the Japanese doctors immunity from war crimes prosecution in exchange for their germ warfare data.

In a research paper, Professor Masataka Mori, a researcher and investigator of Unit 731, says the United States used germ warfare in North Korea during the early 1950s based on Unit 731 wartime experiments.

While the Japanese government continues to publicly deny knowledge of biological warfare, studies point in the opposite direction to show it had undertaken mass production of cholera, dysentery, anthrax, bubonic plague, and typhoid with a view to using them as weapons.

Japanese doctors in Unit 731 had injected humans with the plague and dissected them while still alive to monitor how humans reacted to the diseases.

Researchers say the Imperial Army had been attempting to produce biological weapons that could be transported by balloon to the United States as part of a germ warfare attack campaign.

”Japan was the only country at the time developing germ warfare. The cruel treatment of humans in Unit 731 can compare to the horror of the Nazis’ Auschwitz,” says Koken Tsuchiya, a lawyer.

Tsuchiya belongs to a veteran team of lawyers who are appearing for hundreds of Asian victims of Japanese wartime occupation who have filed lawsuits against Japan.

Plaintiffs include a large number of ‘comfort women’ – Asian women from Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea who were forced to provide sex to occupying Japanese soldiers in their countries – and old men used as slave labour by the Japanese army and Japanese companies.

The demand for war reparations and official apologies has forced some official change over the years, with some former prime ministers having personally apologised and visited sites where atrocities have been committed.

But full knowledge and acknowledgment of Japan’s wartime past remains contentious, as reflected in the content of school textbooks that critics say whitewash its atrocities.

Old-guard conservatives in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party also regularly deny Japan’s aggression during World War II.

Many Japanese argue that Japan’s responsibility for its wartime crimes ended with the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal at the end of the war.

The government also says it has paid war reparations to its former colonies and has laws that protect it from compensation claims by individuals under international law.