Australian Policy towards Japan changes with election of Rudd Labor Government
In March 2007, John Howard signed an unprecedented bilateral security agreement with Japan. Howard stupidly being drawn into the treaty by pressure from the ultra right wing hawke US Vice President Dick Cheney’s (the real President!)longterm scheme of tieing together a US-Japan-Australia-India virtual alliance aimed at containing China.
The wisdom of the security agreement with Japan however is very questionable given the underlying hatred of the U.S (and by inference our country) by much of their elite and the lingering dream of neo-militarists in the governing LDP of reconstructing their despised 'Greater Co-prosperity sphere' once more.
Sanity luckily after a lost decade is once again seemigly prevailing in Canberra and the new PM Rudd has let it be known that whilst he supports military ties with Japan, he considered the defence pact was a bridge too far.
In a speech to the Global Foundation in Melbourne on 8 March last year he said that the treaty “may unnecessarily tie our security interests to the vicissitudes of an unknown security policy future in North East Asia”.
Translated - Australia enjoys the advantages of distance from North Asia and it need not buy directly into security problems with bilateral agreements with either China or Japan.
Whilst Rudd will not likley formally abrogate the agreement that Howard signed, as no doubt such an action would cause great loss of face to the 'master race' his government does not own this treasonable treaty and hopefully he will allow it to sink into obscurity.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Saturday, April 7, 2007
Mr Howard just why are we signing a military pact with Japan when it has never faced its cruel past and repented its Militarism ??
Mr Howard just why are we signing a military pact with Japan when it has never faced its cruel past and repented its Militarism ??
At the tomb of the unknown apology
Illustration: Spooner April 12, 2005 Fairfax
Japan unlike Germany has never faced up to its War Crimes and to this day many in the Japanese elite (like the current Prime Minister Abe) are trying to rewrite history.
We call on all Australians to protest our Governments decision at signing a military pact with Japan.
We call on the Prime Minister to reconsider his closeness to those who promote Japanese Militarism in the LDP Government such as current PM Shinzo Abe.
Further he should realise that with his electorate having a large elderly population and the biggest Korean community in Australia that his inability to understand the unacceptability of this disgraceful act of promoting a military pact with Japan that many would consider "akin to treason" may well cost him his own seat at the coming election.
Given John Howards support for a Security Pact with Japan and his close ties to the regime of racial supreamist Shinzo Abe and the other neo-militarists of the LDP can he hold his seat of Bennalong? It has a large Korean Australian and Chinese Australian component along with many other older Australians whom are very angry about Abe's refusal to acknowledge Japan's war guilt.
Electorate of Bennalong
For other articles -
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/09/24/1095961857148.html?from=storylhs
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21286273-2,00.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21286619-601,00.html
http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Future-of-NSW-federal-MPs-on-the-line/2006/06/29/1151174324039.html
At the tomb of the unknown apology
Illustration: Spooner April 12, 2005 Fairfax
Japan unlike Germany has never faced up to its War Crimes and to this day many in the Japanese elite (like the current Prime Minister Abe) are trying to rewrite history.
We call on all Australians to protest our Governments decision at signing a military pact with Japan.
We call on the Prime Minister to reconsider his closeness to those who promote Japanese Militarism in the LDP Government such as current PM Shinzo Abe.
Further he should realise that with his electorate having a large elderly population and the biggest Korean community in Australia that his inability to understand the unacceptability of this disgraceful act of promoting a military pact with Japan that many would consider "akin to treason" may well cost him his own seat at the coming election.
Given John Howards support for a Security Pact with Japan and his close ties to the regime of racial supreamist Shinzo Abe and the other neo-militarists of the LDP can he hold his seat of Bennalong? It has a large Korean Australian and Chinese Australian component along with many other older Australians whom are very angry about Abe's refusal to acknowledge Japan's war guilt.
Electorate of Bennalong
For other articles -
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/09/24/1095961857148.html?from=storylhs
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21286273-2,00.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21286619-601,00.html
http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Future-of-NSW-federal-MPs-on-the-line/2006/06/29/1151174324039.html
Friday, April 6, 2007
Shobun - A Forgotten War Crime in the Pacific
BOOK REVIEW
SHOBIN - A Forgotten War Crime in the Pacific
by Michael J. Goodwin
When nations clash in war, more than armies are involved. Cultures become antagonists as well, and there are occasions when the differences are so great that what one group comes to regard as commonplace another may regard as a heinous crime.
So it was in World War II, especially in the Pacific theater. For centuries Japanese culture had seen death in battle as glorious and surrender as a dishonoring disgrace. Those who yielded rather than die lost not only face and honor, but even their right to life itself. At the same time, that culture taught that all others were barbarians, entitled neither to respect nor to what Western culture would consider humanitarian treatment.
In wartime those unique cultural values combined to produce tragedy. Though fewer than one- tenth of all Allied prisoners of war in Germany perished in captivity, fully a third of those taken by the Japanese died in their prison camps, victims of climate, inadequate nourishment, routine neglect, and even brutal mistreatment.
Worse yet was the fate of a few, chiefly air- men, who fell into Japanese hands in the later years of the war. Their story is the story of
Shobun: A Forgotten War Crime in the Pacific. Through years of difficult research both here and abroad, Michael J. Goodwin has pieced together the harrowing tale of one patrol plane's crew after the crash landing of their PBY Catalina and their subsequent capture. It is a story of the clash of
cultures, of bureaucratic neglect and inefficiency, of the code of bushido, of willful flouting of the rules of war, of brutality, and of terrifying tragedy-all wrapped in the shifting definitions of the Japanese word "shobun."
And Shobun is something more. Underlying the book is the story of a son's search for the father he never met, of the attempt to recover from the bland pages of official documents and the harsh, hot landscape of the Southwest Pacific a sense of a man's life, and somehow, to make some sense out of his brutal death. Further, it is a search for truth and justice for all those unfortunate Allied airmen who became victims to a hazard of war that none expected, and who fell to the most deadly enemies of all: prejudice, incompetence, and the darkest side of human nature.
150 pp - hardback - Published 1995
Order Information see: http://www.warbooks.com.au/orderformnew.htm
Source: http://www.warbooks.com.au/IndividualBooks/shobun.html
Truth: last casualty of Japan's war
Abe ignores evidence, say Australia's 'comfort women'
Stephen Moynihan
March 3, 2007 TheAge
THE association representing "comfort women" living in Australia has launched an attack on Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Co-ordinator Anna Song told The Age that Mr Abe's comments were surprising.
"Mr Abe is not only denying his own government's previous statements, but also ignoring the evidence researched by UN bodies and international human rights organisations such as Amnesty International," she said.
Last month Australian Jan O'Herne travelled to Washington to tell her story before a US Congressional hearing.
In 1944, when Mrs O'Herne was 21 and interned in Java with her family, she and nine other young women were taken to a house used as a brothel by the Japanese military. For the next three months, they were raped repeatedly.
Next week, Friends of Comfort Women in Australia will rally at the Japanese consulate in Sydney. Mrs O'Herne and two other women will tell their stories.
"If the Prime Minister and the members of his Government have yet to hear the evidence, we sincerely invite them to listen to the testimonials of three comfort women survivors from Australia, Taiwan and Korea," Ms Song said.
"We believe the Japanese Government is capable of seeing the facts in its history and, as a result, providing a sincere and official apology to the survivors.
Source: http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/abe-ignores-evidence-say-australias-comfort-women/2007/03/02/1172338881441.html
Jan Ruff-O'Herne
The Forgotten Ones
"It's something that you'd love to tell, to scream about. But you could never talk about it because the shame was too great. It's something that nobody can imagine, to live with this for fifty years. Something so terrible. It is unspeakable."
Don't sign treaty unless war crimes admitted, PM told
Penelope Debelle
March 14, 2007 The Age
A WOMEN'S support group has warned Prime Minister John Howard against signing a military treaty with Japan because of its failure to admit war crimes.
"We are concerned that Australia's actions today are another step towards the international community allowing Japan to remilitarise while they still refuse to acknowledge some of the wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese military in World War II against women," Friends of Comfort Women in Australia spokeswoman Anna Song said.
The group is concerned that the history taught in Japan's schools and museums is almost entirely restricted to the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
It makes no mention of the conduct of Japanese captors at prisoner-of-war camps, the enforced sexual slavery of women prisoners, such as Adelaide woman Jan Ruff O'Herne, and other atrocities including the use of forced labour on the Burma railway.
"It is not at all about Japan being a former enemy, it's not that kind of dynamic at all," Ms Song said. "It is about having a state which is a member of the UN Human Rights Council but which has not acknowledged or taken full responsibility for its war crimes."
She said Mr Howard's enthusiasm for a new security pact was endorsing Japan's failure to face its history.
"The partner of that treaty is a state that refuses to recognise its own human rights violations and war crimes. In that sense, it is a great step backwards," she said.
"In their war museums and history books, the rhetoric is geared towards making Japan the victim of Hiroshima and the nuclear bombs that were dropped to stop the war."
Ms Song, a Melbourne-based former Amnesty International activist, is a co-founder of Friends of Comfort Women.
The group is the Australian link to a network of organisations seeking justice for between 100,000 and 200,000 women forced into wartime sexual slavery by the Japanese.
While most comfort women were from Korea, Taiwan and China, Ms O'Herne was taken from a prison camp in Indonesia in 1944 and sent to a Japanese military brothel where she was repeatedly raped.
AN ADELAIDE woman forced into sexual slavery by Japanese forces during World War II is disappointed and saddened that her story has been denied.
Jan Ruff O'Herne, 84, said she was one of the thousands of women interned in brothels as prostitutes, known as "comfort women", for Japanese soldiers during the war.
Last month, she testified at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing in Washington that she had been raped "day and night" for three months by soldiers.
Yesterday, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told Parliament in Tokyo that there was no evidence the military coerced women in the strict sense - such as kidnapping -into serving in the brothels.
Mr Abe said none of the testimony in the U.S. hearings offered any solid proof of abuse, and his government would not apologise even if the U.S. demanded it.
Ms O'Herne accused the Japanese Government of failing to take responsibility for their crimes. She said the Japanese did not want to pay compensation to victims and rewrite history.
"I am terribly disappointed that they are trying to deny it all - it is unbelievable," she said.
"I always had hope and trust in the honour of the Japanese Government to own up to what they did and teach the next generation. But now they deny it."
Ms O'Herne, a Netherlands-born Australian, said she was 19 when she was seized from a prisoner of war camp in Indonesia and forced into a brothel to become a prostitute.
She said many high-ranking Japanese military officers had admitted to her that they had used the military brothels during the war.
"Everyone knows that it happened - but they are denying it," Ms O'Herne said. "I find it a little difficult to understand."
Ms O'Herne, from Adelaide, said she was "raped day and night" by Japanese soldiers for three months during the war.
She has been campaigning for justice for herself and other comfort women for 15 years, after keeping silent about her experiences for 50 years.
Ms O'Herne said a formal apology would help the healing process to begin.
"An apology will give us back our dignity," she said.
"You can't imagine the shame that we have lived with.
"After you've experienced those things, those atrocities, you feel dirty, you feel ashamed, you feel soiled, and we carry that shame all our life."
The Netherlands-born Australian, who was captured by the Japanese in 1942 and spent three and a half years in prisoner of war camps, said she hoped the Congressional hearing would put pressure on Japan to finally act on the matter.
"After 60 years a lot of us are already dead," she said.
"I'm 84 and it's about time that we want Japan to acknowledge their wartime atrocity."
Japan won't expand on sex slaves apology
March 7, 2007 SMH
Japan, under fire for appearing to sidestep responsibility for forcing women to act as wartime sex slaves for its soldiers, says the government stands by a 1993 apology acknowledging coercion.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stirred anger around the world with remarks last week appearing to question the nation's role in forcing women to act as prostitutes during World War II, although he also said the earlier apology stood.
The apology, known as the "Kono Statement" after then-chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono, in whose name it was issued, acknowledged the Japanese military's role in setting up and running wartime brothels as well as the fact that many of the women were taken to and kept in the brothels against their will.
"The government stands by the Kono Statement, including its recognition of coercion," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki told a news conference on Wednesday. "Recent comments by the prime minister show this stance will not change."
Abe touched off additional protests when he told parliament on Monday that Japan would not apologise again over the sex slave issue even if US politicians adopt a resolution calling for an apology.
The non-binding resolution introduced by US Congressman Michael Honda, a California Democrat, calls on Japan to unambiguously apologise for the tragedy that thousands of women, many Korean, endured at the hands of its Imperial Army.
An Australian woman forced into sexual slavery by Japanese forces said on Monday she was disappointed and saddened that her story of abuse had been denied.
Eighty-four-year-old Jan Ruff O'Herne said she was one of the thousands of women interned in brothels as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during the war.
The Adelaide woman testified last month at a US House of Representatives hearing in Washington that she had been raped "day and night" for three months by soldiers when she was just 19.
On Wednesday about 30 women gathered in Sydney to protest, waving red paper butterflies with the words "Break the silence. Bring justice to comfort women."
Elderly South Korean women who served as "comfort women" - Japan's euphemism for wartime sex slaves - also protested in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, while in Tokyo members of a women's group gathered near parliament to lambast Abe's remarks and show solidarity with the victims.
South Korea had expressed outrage over Abe's remarks and Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing urged Japan to confront its past on the topic and accept responsibility while Taiwan called on Japan to apologise and compensate the women.
US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, visiting Seoul on Tuesday, noted that Japan had apologised in the past.
But an editorial in the New York Times blasted Tokyo for what it termed "efforts to contort the truth" - an attack that was featured on Japanese news programs.
Shiozaki sought to allay concern that Abe's refusal to apologise again contradicted the spirit of the 1993 statement.
"Parts of the resolution are not based on objective fact, and it does not include what the government has done up to now, so that's why the prime minister has said Japan will not apologise again - a view that does not contradict the statement at all," he said, adding that the intensifying debate was not constructive.
"The longer this discussion goes on, the more misunderstandings there are likely to be," Shiozaki said.
Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Japan-wont-expand-on-sex-slaves-apology/2007/03/07/1173166791725.html
Stephen Moynihan
March 3, 2007 TheAge
THE association representing "comfort women" living in Australia has launched an attack on Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Co-ordinator Anna Song told The Age that Mr Abe's comments were surprising.
"Mr Abe is not only denying his own government's previous statements, but also ignoring the evidence researched by UN bodies and international human rights organisations such as Amnesty International," she said.
Last month Australian Jan O'Herne travelled to Washington to tell her story before a US Congressional hearing.
In 1944, when Mrs O'Herne was 21 and interned in Java with her family, she and nine other young women were taken to a house used as a brothel by the Japanese military. For the next three months, they were raped repeatedly.
Next week, Friends of Comfort Women in Australia will rally at the Japanese consulate in Sydney. Mrs O'Herne and two other women will tell their stories.
"If the Prime Minister and the members of his Government have yet to hear the evidence, we sincerely invite them to listen to the testimonials of three comfort women survivors from Australia, Taiwan and Korea," Ms Song said.
"We believe the Japanese Government is capable of seeing the facts in its history and, as a result, providing a sincere and official apology to the survivors.
Source: http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/abe-ignores-evidence-say-australias-comfort-women/2007/03/02/1172338881441.html
Jan Ruff-O'Herne
The Forgotten Ones
"It's something that you'd love to tell, to scream about. But you could never talk about it because the shame was too great. It's something that nobody can imagine, to live with this for fifty years. Something so terrible. It is unspeakable."
Don't sign treaty unless war crimes admitted, PM told
Penelope Debelle
March 14, 2007 The Age
A WOMEN'S support group has warned Prime Minister John Howard against signing a military treaty with Japan because of its failure to admit war crimes.
"We are concerned that Australia's actions today are another step towards the international community allowing Japan to remilitarise while they still refuse to acknowledge some of the wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese military in World War II against women," Friends of Comfort Women in Australia spokeswoman Anna Song said.
The group is concerned that the history taught in Japan's schools and museums is almost entirely restricted to the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
It makes no mention of the conduct of Japanese captors at prisoner-of-war camps, the enforced sexual slavery of women prisoners, such as Adelaide woman Jan Ruff O'Herne, and other atrocities including the use of forced labour on the Burma railway.
"It is not at all about Japan being a former enemy, it's not that kind of dynamic at all," Ms Song said. "It is about having a state which is a member of the UN Human Rights Council but which has not acknowledged or taken full responsibility for its war crimes."
She said Mr Howard's enthusiasm for a new security pact was endorsing Japan's failure to face its history.
"The partner of that treaty is a state that refuses to recognise its own human rights violations and war crimes. In that sense, it is a great step backwards," she said.
"In their war museums and history books, the rhetoric is geared towards making Japan the victim of Hiroshima and the nuclear bombs that were dropped to stop the war."
Ms Song, a Melbourne-based former Amnesty International activist, is a co-founder of Friends of Comfort Women.
The group is the Australian link to a network of organisations seeking justice for between 100,000 and 200,000 women forced into wartime sexual slavery by the Japanese.
While most comfort women were from Korea, Taiwan and China, Ms O'Herne was taken from a prison camp in Indonesia in 1944 and sent to a Japanese military brothel where she was repeatedly raped.
AN ADELAIDE woman forced into sexual slavery by Japanese forces during World War II is disappointed and saddened that her story has been denied.
Jan Ruff O'Herne, 84, said she was one of the thousands of women interned in brothels as prostitutes, known as "comfort women", for Japanese soldiers during the war.
Last month, she testified at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing in Washington that she had been raped "day and night" for three months by soldiers.
Yesterday, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told Parliament in Tokyo that there was no evidence the military coerced women in the strict sense - such as kidnapping -into serving in the brothels.
Mr Abe said none of the testimony in the U.S. hearings offered any solid proof of abuse, and his government would not apologise even if the U.S. demanded it.
Ms O'Herne accused the Japanese Government of failing to take responsibility for their crimes. She said the Japanese did not want to pay compensation to victims and rewrite history.
"I am terribly disappointed that they are trying to deny it all - it is unbelievable," she said.
"I always had hope and trust in the honour of the Japanese Government to own up to what they did and teach the next generation. But now they deny it."
Ms O'Herne, a Netherlands-born Australian, said she was 19 when she was seized from a prisoner of war camp in Indonesia and forced into a brothel to become a prostitute.
She said many high-ranking Japanese military officers had admitted to her that they had used the military brothels during the war.
"Everyone knows that it happened - but they are denying it," Ms O'Herne said. "I find it a little difficult to understand."
Ms O'Herne, from Adelaide, said she was "raped day and night" by Japanese soldiers for three months during the war.
She has been campaigning for justice for herself and other comfort women for 15 years, after keeping silent about her experiences for 50 years.
Ms O'Herne said a formal apology would help the healing process to begin.
"An apology will give us back our dignity," she said.
"You can't imagine the shame that we have lived with.
"After you've experienced those things, those atrocities, you feel dirty, you feel ashamed, you feel soiled, and we carry that shame all our life."
The Netherlands-born Australian, who was captured by the Japanese in 1942 and spent three and a half years in prisoner of war camps, said she hoped the Congressional hearing would put pressure on Japan to finally act on the matter.
"After 60 years a lot of us are already dead," she said.
"I'm 84 and it's about time that we want Japan to acknowledge their wartime atrocity."
Japan won't expand on sex slaves apology
March 7, 2007 SMH
Japan, under fire for appearing to sidestep responsibility for forcing women to act as wartime sex slaves for its soldiers, says the government stands by a 1993 apology acknowledging coercion.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stirred anger around the world with remarks last week appearing to question the nation's role in forcing women to act as prostitutes during World War II, although he also said the earlier apology stood.
The apology, known as the "Kono Statement" after then-chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono, in whose name it was issued, acknowledged the Japanese military's role in setting up and running wartime brothels as well as the fact that many of the women were taken to and kept in the brothels against their will.
"The government stands by the Kono Statement, including its recognition of coercion," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki told a news conference on Wednesday. "Recent comments by the prime minister show this stance will not change."
Abe touched off additional protests when he told parliament on Monday that Japan would not apologise again over the sex slave issue even if US politicians adopt a resolution calling for an apology.
The non-binding resolution introduced by US Congressman Michael Honda, a California Democrat, calls on Japan to unambiguously apologise for the tragedy that thousands of women, many Korean, endured at the hands of its Imperial Army.
An Australian woman forced into sexual slavery by Japanese forces said on Monday she was disappointed and saddened that her story of abuse had been denied.
Eighty-four-year-old Jan Ruff O'Herne said she was one of the thousands of women interned in brothels as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during the war.
The Adelaide woman testified last month at a US House of Representatives hearing in Washington that she had been raped "day and night" for three months by soldiers when she was just 19.
On Wednesday about 30 women gathered in Sydney to protest, waving red paper butterflies with the words "Break the silence. Bring justice to comfort women."
Elderly South Korean women who served as "comfort women" - Japan's euphemism for wartime sex slaves - also protested in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, while in Tokyo members of a women's group gathered near parliament to lambast Abe's remarks and show solidarity with the victims.
South Korea had expressed outrage over Abe's remarks and Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing urged Japan to confront its past on the topic and accept responsibility while Taiwan called on Japan to apologise and compensate the women.
US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, visiting Seoul on Tuesday, noted that Japan had apologised in the past.
But an editorial in the New York Times blasted Tokyo for what it termed "efforts to contort the truth" - an attack that was featured on Japanese news programs.
Shiozaki sought to allay concern that Abe's refusal to apologise again contradicted the spirit of the 1993 statement.
"Parts of the resolution are not based on objective fact, and it does not include what the government has done up to now, so that's why the prime minister has said Japan will not apologise again - a view that does not contradict the statement at all," he said, adding that the intensifying debate was not constructive.
"The longer this discussion goes on, the more misunderstandings there are likely to be," Shiozaki said.
Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Japan-wont-expand-on-sex-slaves-apology/2007/03/07/1173166791725.html
Japan's Amnesia Re: Comfort Women
An essay on the violations of korean women During WW2: By Michael Green
Overview
So far we have learned about the daily work habits of Korean women, traditional values, and the current lives and traditions that these women hold. However, Korean women have gone through several harsh decades in gaining back their freedom of the tyranny of the Japanese government from events that occurred during World War II. During this time these women were known as "comfort women." The following essay is designed to give a brief overview of the history, women, and current issues surrounding the comfort women debate.
History
During World War II, Korea was occupied by Japan. During these war ridden times, the Japanese military commanded that Korean women would be used for the “entertainment” of the Japanese military. The women were not only forced be slaves for the men, but were also forced to perform deviant sexual acts, which commonly followed their own execution. The history surrounding and following these events has been very controversial and debated since the end World War II.
The country of Korea is located between the North Eastern part of China and the islands of Japan . Because of their unfortunate location, Korea has developed a long hard and troubled history. Being constantly attacked and colonized by several countries, Korea now stands as two separate entities of North and South.
One of the more horrific aspects of Korea history is that of the lives of Korean comfort women during the Second World War. These military comfort women were used by the Japanese military as sex slaves and for other forms of deviant entertainment. Though comfort women came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, Korean women were used more than any other ethnic culture for the Japanese military's pleasures. (1)
Beginnings
The term comfort women is described as a Japanese euphemism. Meaning that the name “comfort women” does not come close to describing the harsh and difficult conditions that these women had to endure as slaves to the Japanese military. Some articles and research have reported that these women were often “sexually” used to death. Most Korean women were reported to have been sexually assaulted dozen of times in a single day. They were even forced to have sex with their own children that followed their own inhumane executions. The monstrosities and reports of these acts are amazingly abundant and have constantly being questioned by the Japanese government.
Because of the grand scale of abuse that occurred during this time there is no official estimate on how many women were effected by this Japanese take over. Some researchers believe that the range is between 80,000 and 200,000, about 80% were believed to be Korean. (2) However according to the research of Dr. Dr. Hirofumi Hayashi , a professor at Kanto Gakuin University , this number could even have been as many as 300, 000. (2) Regardless of how small or large this number may be the acts that were committed against the comfort women speak for themselves.
Continued Debate and Struggles
Despite the numerous reports and testimonies given by comfort women, some Japanese people still deny that these women were “forced” into sexual acts or killed. This echoes other parts of history that seem to be neglected by other countries and ethnic cultures, such as the Holocaust or the Native American Indian massacres. Not only were comfort women forced into slavery, sometimes causing them to die from exhaustion, depression, or diseases; but they have also had a harsh road of gaining back their own dignity. In December of 1991 35 Korean women sued the Japanese government for damages against Korean comfort women. The Korean women hoped to collect about Y700m ($5.5 million US). (6) This event marked the first time that the Japanese government was sued by Korean war victims. Because of this historical event, the South Korean government actively pursued to document and record the names of victims of the Japanese comfort brothels.
According to a 2000 journal of Contemporary Women’s Issues, several Japanese textbooks are being used to teach young Japanese children that these acts were justified and Japan’s right for aggression and colonization of its neighbors. And that certain facts pertaining to the Japanese military sexual slavery system were erased. (8) Luckily numerous human rights groups have protested the textbooks and demanded that the facts be corrected. However even as new textbooks emerged in Asia, facts were still ignored.
As the August 27, 2001 Newsweek reports, 20 young men chopped off part of their pinkies in a protest of “fury” that new Asian textbooks were still ignoring facts. The article even goes on to report that high-school history books often contain only ONE sentence in regards to the topic of comfort women. (5) These events show the continuous efforts of the Japanese to simply ignore and forget the events that occurred during the war.
This is one of the many ongoing struggles that Korean comfort women have had to face.
Possibly one of the most recent and famous struggles was when 75 women broke their silence during a trial on Japan’s wartime record held through 7th-12th of December 2000. (7) Their gathering was to out of the home that the Japanese would take responsibility for the actions that occurred during World War II. The Korean tribunal even sent a formal invitation to the Japanese government, which the Japanese turned down, creating a even more distopia of events. (7) Even though the Japanese government chose to ignore the event, the event has opened up a channel for comfort women to find some peace with their own troubled past.
However a recent article of the New Statesmen, dated March 7, 2005, explains that younger generations of Koreans and Japanese are coming to terms with each other. This year, 2005, has been declared “Korea-Japan Friendship Year.” The article explains that a recent ban that lifted cultural exchanges has caused a popular flow of music, manga, and film to reach each side’s borders. The most staggering fact is that the two countries exchange 10,000 visitors daily, instead of 10,000 annually 40 years ago. (4)
Though there are still bitter and harsh debates that continue around this topic, it seems that the Korean and Japanese are finally starting to put the past behind them and work together to make both of their worlds a better place. But both countries should still be educated and reminded of the horrific tragedy and violations of human rights during World War II. If this is simply forgotten or left undulated, events and acts similar to the comfort women could very well happen again.
What is being done now? - Film and Boook
Recently a documentary has been made called Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women. Presented by the NAATA or National Asian American Telecommunications Association, this documentary entails personal testimonies of victims and interviews that were done with Japanese military men who deny the abuse.(3) This documentary was possible because of the work done by Kim-Gibson, who published a book with the same title. The documentary was also part of collection of films sponsored by Steven Speilberg!
According to Cara White's article(3) Dai Sil Kim-Gibson was born in Northern Korea during Japanese rule until she came to the United States in 1962. There she eventually received a PHD from Boston University and has continued to research and produce short films about Korean culture.(3) Her films have been screened in several national and international film festivals. Kim-Gibson's work is one of the many that focuses not only on the injustices of comfort women, but that of other abuses that occur because of cultural and ethnic classes. It is important for her to continue to do research in order to unravel the issues surrounding this controversial topic.
Sources:
(1) The Comfort Women Project:Chunghee Sarah Soh, Ph.D. San Francisco StateUniversity
http://online.sfsu.edu/~soh/comfortwomen.html
(2) Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women
(3) Cara White, Silence Broken:Korean Comfort Women
http://www.kimsoft.com/2000.comfort.htm
(4) Victoria, James. How Korea Became Cool. New Statesman.
7th, March. 2005. New Statesman Ltd.
(5) Hajari, Nisid. At War with History. Newsweek.
27th, August. 2001. Atlantic Edition, Newsweek.
(6) Comfort without Joy. The Economist.
18th, January. 1992. The Economist Newspaper Ltd.
(7) Women Break Silence on War Crimes. Contemporary Women’s Issues
December. 2000. Gale Group INC.
(8) Women Break Silence on War Crimes. Contemporary Women’s Issues
June. 2001. Gale Group INC.
Korean WWII sex slaves fight on
William Horsley
BBC News Tuesday, 9 August 2005
Former sex slaves are still demanding official compensation
"Japan - reveal the truth! Admit the crime! Officially apologise! Punish the criminals!" South Korean protesters chant every Wednesday outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.
In their midst, a small group of elderly women sit silently.
They are the survivors of the brutal, Asia-wide system of sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army, which the military government encouraged and helped to operate for 13 years, from 1932 until the end of World War II in 1945.
They were euphemistically called "comfort women". But experts like Korean American scholar Edward Chang of the University of California say the network of "comfort stations" were actually officially-sanctioned rape camps.
Many of the women were even killed as part of an attempt to cover up the crime.
"There should be no time limit on prosecuting these crimes against humanity," Prof Chang said.
Japan says all potential claims by individuals for sufferings inflicted in the war were closed years ago, by treaties normalising its ties with other Asian countries.
But Kang Kyung-wha, a senior official at South Korea's foreign ministry, has recently urged Japan to come to terms with its "legal responsibility" and human rights obligations towards the former comfort women.
Repeatedly abused
Kim Gunja, now aged 80, is too frail to attend the Wednesday demonstrations.
Her story is typical of the tens of thousands - some estimates say 200,000 - women from across Asia whose lives were ruined when they became military sex slaves to the Japanese.
At the age of 17, she was tricked into being abducted by a Korean middle-man who delivered large numbers of young women and girls to his country's then Japanese colonial masters.
Kim Gunja is especially angry at current Japanese leaders
Kim Gunja suspects that her foster father, a policeman, sold her for money or promotion.
She was taken by train to the so-called comfort stations for the Japanese army in Manchuria, north-east China, where she says she was raped by the soldiers many times a day for three years.
"The soldiers didn't know when they would die, and they were very cruel," she said.
She was beaten so badly that she lost her hearing in one ear. After the war she could never marry or get a good job.
She still cannot forgive. And she saves her fiercest hatred for current Japanese leaders.
She wants them to show sincere atonement for Japan's past wrongdoings and to take responsibility by paying official compensation.
Facing up to the past
Japan stands accused of a series of evasions in facing up to the military sex slave issue.
According to Mr Chang, Japan's first admission of involvement only came in 1991, after a wartime document came to light in the foreign ministry about the granting of travel permits for Asian women in areas occupied by the Japanese army.
He says that, since then, the Japanese authorities have continued to hinder the search for detailed evidence about the fate of the former comfort women.
But his own research team's trawl through America's national archives has produced a sheaf of files captured by the US army from the retreating Japanese forces.
They contain photos and other personal details of dozens of young Filipino women - evidence, he says, of the most extensive system of female trafficking the world has ever seen.
Since 1992 Japanese prime ministers have all made formal apologies for the war.
But Shin Heisoo, head of the Korean council supporting the former military sexual slaves, believes these statements are just empty words.
Only legal reparations, she says, will suffice to acknowledge what she sees as war crimes.
In Japan, a recent opinion poll showed that only 13% of the population think further apologies to Asian countries are needed.
Many in South Korea cannot just forget the past
In 1995 the Japanese government took its boldest step so far, setting up an Asian Women's Fund, which collected private donations and sent "atonement money" worth $30,000 or more to each of 364 former comfort women in Taiwan, the Philippines and South Korea.
It also directly funded medical care for the recipients.
A director of the fund, Yasuaki Onuma, acknowledges the criticism of Japan's slow and limited response.
But he also holds some hard-line South Korean campaigners responsible for the impasse.
Many of the Korean victims, he says, were put under intense social pressures to refuse the Japanese donations, although they sorely needed that support.
It was recently decided that the fund will shut down within two years.
So the poison from past cruelties will be passed on to a new generation of Koreans and Japanese.
Kim Gunja now lives near Seoul in a home for former comfort women supported by the South Korean government. She says she hopes Japan will reveal the truth and offer her official compensation.
"Otherwise", she said, "I will not be able to close my eyes when I die."
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4749467.stm
Japan overturns sex slave ruling
As many as 200,000 women were forced into sexual slavery
BBC Asia Thursday, 29 March, 2001
A Japanese court has overturned the first and so far only compensation award ever made to World War II sex slaves, prompting outrage in South Korea.
All victimised countries in Asia will fight to the end until the day will come for the Japanese government to pay damages
Chongdaehyop coalition
Hiroshima's High Court reversed a 1998 district court ruling that ordered the Japanese government to pay a total of 900,000 yen ($7,260) in damages to three South Korean women.
Presiding judge Toshiaki Kawanami said abducting the women to use them as forced labourers and sex slaves was not a serious constitutional violation.
The three women were among 10 plaintiffs who had asked for a total of 564m yen ($44.3m) in compensation.
Fury
A coalition of 22 South Korean civic groups on Thursday furiously condemned the Hiroshima ruling.
The coalition, known as Chongdaehyop, said in a statement: "The ruling runs against the entire world's demand that the issue be settled as early as possible because many victims are getting closer to death".
Former 'comfort women' are demanding an official apology
"All victimised countries in Asia will fight to the end until the day will come for the Japanese government to pay damages" it added.
The three former sex slaves and seven forced labourers, including one who has since died, argued they were deceived by the Japanese government.
The former sex slaves said they were taken to brothels in Taiwan and Shanghai to provide sex to Japanese troops between 1937 and 1940.
The forced labourers came to Japan around 1943 to work at a factory in Toyama, central Japan. They never received any payment, the court heard.
Landmark decision
In the original 1998 ruling, the Yamaguchi District Court said the Japanese government has failed to enact laws to accommodate the payment of compensation to sex slaves.
For former sex slaves memories are bitter
The women and their supporters hailed the ruling as a landmark decision.
But they also appealed against the amount of compensation, saying it was too small.
The Japanese government also appealed, refusing to pay compensation.
Tokyo has acknowledged that its wartime army set up brothels and forced thousands of Koreans into military service, but it has refused to pay direct, or official compensation to individuals.
The Japanese government officially admitted the existence of the military brothels in 1992.
As many as 200,000 women, mostly Korean but also Filipinos, Chinese and Dutch, were forced into sexual slavery during World War II.
Nine court cases seeking compensation from former sex slaves from Asian women are still pending in Japan.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1249236.stm.
Japan's Dirty Secret - The Asian Auschwitz of Unit 731
The Asian Auschwitz of Unit 731
Shane Green The Age Toyko Correspondant August 29 2002
The noise was like the sound when a board is struck. On the frozen fields at Ping Fang, in north-east China, chained prisoners were led out with bare arms, and subjected to a current of air to accelerate the freezing process. Then came the noise. With a short stick, the arms of the prisoners would be struck to make sure their limbs had indeed frozen.
In the gruesome world of Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, experiments with frostbite on human subjects became a favourite in a macabre litany of cruelty. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, until the end of World War II, the secret unit used Manchuria as a killing field. It was a case of science gone truly mad for the greater glory of the divine Emperor and Japan.
Apart from the frostbite experiments, prisoners were infected with diseases including anthrax, cholera and the bubonic plague. To gather data, human vivisections were performed. Whole villages and towns were infected with the plague and cholera.
In the end, at least 3000 prisoners, mainly Chinese, were killed directly, with a further 250,000 Chinese left to die through the biological warfare experiments.
It is called the Asian Auschwitz and, in terms of inhumanity and horror, it certainly warrants this description. Yet there remains a fundamental difference with the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against Jews. While Germany has shown deep contrition and remorse, the leaders of the country that spawned the evil of Unit 731 still struggle to come to grips with what occurred.
This week in a Tokyo court, the world was again reminded of Japan's inability to deal with its march across Asia. In courtroom 103, three judges of the Tokyo District Court rejected a claim for an apology and compensation by 180 Chinese, either victims or the family of victims of Unit 731.
If there was anything positive out of the decision for the Chinese, it was that for the first time, a Japanese court had acknowledged that Unit 731 and other units had engaged in "cruel and inhumane" biological warfare in China, costing many lives.
But that was it. The judges claimed there was no legal basis for the plaintiffs' claim, as all compensation issues were settled by a treaty with China in 1972.
While it had an authoritative legal ring to it, there was a deep sense of injustice around the courtroom and among supporters waiting outside. How could a court acknowledge a crime had been committed, yet fail to do anything about it?
The Chinese are planning to appeal, but regardless of what may come out of that, one positive factor to emerge from this case has been that the international community - and, indeed, the Japanese themselves - has been reminded of one of the darkest hours of the Japanese Imperial Army.
Unit 731 was the creation of a brutal psychopath, Lieutenant-General Ishii Shiro. His perverted imagination was captured by the possibilities of biological and chemical warfare, and in the Japan of the 1920s and '30s, he found supporters in the increasingly nationalistic and fanatical military.
Part of his fame came from the invention of a water filter that would be used by the Japanese military in the field. Yet even this innocuous invention had a connection with the grossness of Ishii's character. He once reportedly demonstrated the effectiveness of the filter to Emperor Hirohito by urinating through it, and offering the result to the Hirohito to drink. The Emperor declined, so Ishii drank it himself.
Water purification was also to have a link with the grisly activities of Unit 731. The official cover name for the unit was the Water Purification Bureau.
This latest court case, which began in 1997, has revealed much about the operations of the unit. One of the most harrowing testimonies has come from a former member of the unit, Yoshio Shinozuka, who has declared his remorse, and has vowed to tell the truth about the atrocities committed in China.
Shinozuka revealed in horrific detail what occurred at the unit headquarters in Ping Fang, just outside Harbin in northern China. The Chinese victims were known as "logs", and it was Shinozuka's job to scrub them down before the vivisection.
"I still remember clearly the first live autopsy I participated in," he recalled. "I knew the Chinese individual we dissected alive because I had taken his blood once before for testing. At the vivisection, I could not meet his eyes because of the hate he had in his glare at me."
The victim had been infected with the plague, and was totally black. Shinozuka was reluctant to use the brush on the man's face. "Watching me, the chief pathologist, with scalpel in hand, impatiently signalled me to hurry up," he recalled. "I closed my eyes and forced myself to scrub the man's face with the deck brush. The chief pathologist listened to the man's heartbeat with his stethoscope and then the procedure started."
The case before the Tokyo court also heard from the victims, and family of the victims, in villages and towns infected by the plague and cholera between 1940 and 1942.
Peize Xue was a young boy in Jiangshan when the Japanese infected the area with cholera. He recalled how his sister's three children had been struck down: "The three little ones died such tragic deaths. They were poisoned by the Japanese army," she sobbed. "Before Shuanglan (aged eight) passed away, she asked me, lying limply on her bed, to build a small casket for her."Sixty years on, these testimonies have a powerful and revelatory impact, in part because the activities of Unit 731 and related units remained forgotten until relatively recently. It was only in 1981 that international attention refocused on these awful events when an American journalist, John W. Powell junior, published A Hidden Chapter in History, alleging an American cover-up. Since then, academics and journalists have built an impressive case that details how Ishii and other key players received immunity from prosecution in return for supplying their research to American scientists.
In his authoritative Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45, and the American Cover-up, Sheldon Harris recounts that the matter was raised only once at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal in 1946-48.
An American counsel assisting the Chinese, David N. Sutton, stunned the war crimes tribunal by saying: "The enemy . . . took our countrymen as prisoners and used them for drug experiments. They would inject various types of toxic bacteria into their bodies, and then perform experiments on how they reacted . . . this was an act of barbarism by our enemy."
According to the book, the presiding chief judge, Australia's Sir William Webb, asked: "Are you trying to tell us about a poison liquid being administered? Are you trying to provide more evidence? This is a new fact that you have presented before we judges."
The writer Sheldon Harris says that after a brief pause, Webb said: "How about letting this item go?" Sutton replied: "Well, then, I'll leave it." The issue never surfaced again, Harris writes.
Would things have been different if Allied soldiers were involved? There have always been suspicions and allegations that this happened at Camp Mukden in China, where Allied prisoners - including Australians - were held. Yet Sheldon, in his extensive research that contains many examples of the unit's activities, such as the frostbite experiments, was unable to find "substantive evidence" of this.
The immunity granted to those in Unit 731 saw the doctors involved return to mainstream Japanese society. In 1989, the now-defunct Japanese magazine Days Japan revealed how those who had escaped prosecution had gone on to take some of the most prestigious positions in the Japanese medical community.
The man who succeeded Ishii Shiro as commander of Unit 731, Dr Masaji Kitano, became head of Japan's largest pharmaceutical company, the Green Cross. Others took up posts heading university medical schools, and also worked in the Japanese healthministry.
This may in part explain the difficulty in confronting and acknowledging the activities of Unit 731, let alone compensating the victims. It is perhaps important to also distinguish between the response of the Japanese Government and the Japanese people.
Waiting in the long line this week to get into the courtroom, Kazuyo Yamane struck up a conversation. She lectures in peace studies at Japan's Kochi University, and had come to hear the decision because of a deep personal interest.
Yamane and other like-minded Japanese travelled to China in 1998 to find out more about the activities of Unit 731. "Because we didn't have any means to know what really happened, we decided to go and try to know what really happened," she says.
They spoke to people who had lost family members because of the biological warfare experiments. "We felt really guilty as Japanese," she says. As a result, the group decided to support the Chinese in their action.
Yamane believes that the Japanese Government should apologise and compensate the victims of the "terrible damage" done during the war in Asia. "That's what we citizens think. But I think there is a huge gap between the citizens and the Japanese Government.
"I think maybe now Japan is getting nationalistic, and the right-wingers are getting stronger."
In the only official comment on the day of the decision, the Japanese Justice Ministry said the court's decision verified the validity of the Japanese Government's position in refusing compensation and an apology to the victims of Unit 731.
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/28/1030508070534.html
Site of the Former Japanese Imperial Army's "Unit 731" Headquarters
The former Unit 731 headquarters, where the Japanese Imperial Army conducted biological-warfare experiments on human "guinea pigs," is now a historical museum.
The Unit 731 Site is located in Ping Fang, China's far east corner, about 47 kilometers outside Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province (former Manchuria).
The site now is only remnant of what was once a "human laboratory" where the Japanese Imperial Army, during 1935-45, conducted secret experiments to develop bacteriological weapons, using human's as guinea pigs.
As many as 3,000 Chinese, Russians and Koreans were tortured and deliberately infected with pathogens such as anthrax, plague and cholera, and lost their lives. The Japanese military's experiments were in direct violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 that banned germ warfare.
Death Factory
In front of the former headquarters of Unit 731, is a large stone monument inscribed with the words: "Remains of Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army that invaded China." There are 13 rooms inside the hall, incontrovertibly exhibiting the crimes commited by Unit 731.
Thinly disguised as the "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department," Unit 731 was founded by the Japanese Imperial Army as a biological-warfare unit in 1936. The huge compound consisted of more than 150 buildings covering over six square kilometers outside the city of Harbin. Japanese army physicians and surgeons took part in cruel and senseless experiments on humans and developed bacteriological weapons that released plague, anthrax and cholera viruses. No one was allowed to live within a three-kilometer radius of the compound. Former unit members say they called their victims "marutas" or "logs." Many were Chinese war prisoners and anti-Japanese activists but some were also Russians, Mongolians and Koreans.
In one exhibit hall a miniature model of the compound providing a panoramic overview of the death factory. On the walls are photographs of Japanese soldiers and medical staff attached to the unit, who stare back in cold silence.
A panel introduces Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, the physician in-charge, whose obsession with developing bacteriological weapons was realized at Unit 731. A Chinese guide explained in Japanese to the Soka Gakkai youth that Ishii was promoted from lieutenant colonel to full colonel for running the unit and eventually torturing and killing thousands of innocent people. Then, at the end of the war, the U.S. Government exonerated Ishii and all his subordinates for war crimes in exchange for their human experiment data.
Detailed explanations in Japanese are attached to each item displayed, such as gas masks, syringes, shackles used to prevent escape, and scalpels used to vivisect live victims. One is a large wooden hook "used to hang internal organs taken from live victims. Many inmates were forcibly taken to the compound, administered anesthesia and had their internal organs carved out as "specimens,"
The displays are however sparse as in the final days of the war, Japanese troops, under Ishii's orders, blew up the laboratory compound and killed the remaining "subjects" to cover up the crimes.
Although most of the buildings were successfully destroyed to cover-up evidence, the boiler building once used to cultivate deadly viruses, and the railroad track used to carry human marutas that lies alongside survive as do large chunks of the underground facilities remain intact- Germ warfare shell-casings for plague cultures and ceramic bombs containing plague-infected fleas, are however reproductions based on testimony of witnesses - underground jails, rooms used for frostbite experiments and the rat-breeding room used to culture plague-infected fleas.
It is estimated that outside the compound wall more than 200,000 Chinese were killed during "field testing" of germ warfare bombs. Victims were often taken to a "proving" ground called Anda where they were tied to stakes in a pattern and then bombarded with experimental weapons to test the efficacy of new technologies. Planes sprayed the zone with a plague culture or dropped bombs with plague-infected fleas to see how many people and at what distance from the center would become infected and then die. It is said that plague-infected animals were released as the war was ending and caused plague outbreaks that killed at least 30,000 people in Harbin from 1946 through 1948.
Heilongjiang Province, China, launched a three-stage-project of investigating, excavating and preserving the compound ruins. The project is now in its secondary stage and it is expected that a complete picture of the germ warfare center will come to light within five to six years. Heilongjiang Province is now working to register the remains as part of UNESCO's World Heritage.
A Government in Denial
Among the upper echelons of Japanese society, there are those who still try to hush up or turn a blind eye to the historical reality of Unit 731. Japanese history education barely touches on Japan's past invasion of its Asian neighbors, let alone details about the biological-warfare unit in China. Recently the Japanese government has been under fire by the international community, especially by Japan's Asian neighbors, over its authorization of a controversial new secondary school history textbook that glosses over events such as the 1937 Nanjing massacre and the sexual enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Asian women who served as "comfort women" for the Japanese army. The textbook also attempts to validate and temper Japan's encroachment of neighboring countries in the first half of the 20th century. The international community regards not acknowledging past deeds as denial, and leaving these facts out of the educational curriculum points to a lack of remorse.
To this day, the Japanese government still will not apologize for or officially recognize the criminal offenses it has committed.
State-Imposed Shinto Used to Justify Aggression
It is well known that, during the war, the Japanese government forced, not only its own people, but people of countries it occupied, to adhere to Shintoism, the religious ideology used by the military government to justify and promote its wars of aggression. It is estimated that 300 to 500 shrines were established in northeast China alone. There was also a shrine which deified war dead who died fighting for Japanese-occupied Manchuria. This shrine had the same role as the Yasukuni shrine, which was, by Imperial decree, founded in 1869 for the worship of "divine spirits"--the war dead--who "sacrificed themselves for their country."
In 1868, the Japanese government formally instituted State Shinto for unifying religious and governmental activities. The Meiji Constitution emphasized the sovereignty and sanctity of the emperor, which was reinforced by the divinity accorded him by Shinto. The contradiction between the government's support of State Shinto and freedom of religion guaranteed under the constitution was evaded during the various revisions to the constitution, and in 1932 the Ministry of Education declared Shinto shrines to be non-religious institutions for fostering patriotism and loyalty. State Shinto ended in 1945 after Japan's defeat in World War II. [The controversy continues, however, as some cabinet ministers continue to pay official visits to pray for war dead at the Yasukuni Shrine, which includes shrines for Class A war criminals. The government insists that it is within the confines of the current constitution's principle of separation of church and state.]
There are factions of the Japanese government and society that condone, or even encourage the prime minister and the cabinet to pay homage to the Yasukuni Shrine in utter disregard of the sensibilities of Asian neighbors who suffered atrocities at the hands of Japanese militarism. Such arrogance and callousness raise serious concerns over the ramifications on Japan's future relations with its Asian neighbors, and whether Japan can ever gain their trust.
For the Chinese, Shinto shrines were, and still are, nothing but symbols of the Japanese army's barbarism.
When and How Will Japan Come to Terms With Its History?
Artifacts dug up from the remains of Unit 731. Among the items are earthenware clearly marked "Ishii Butai" (Ishii's Corps).
People throughout Asia, including an increasing number of Japanese citizens, are asking, "Has Japan atoned, or made any amends for the suffering it caused its Asian neighbors?"
In a related tragedy, a major pharmaceutical company was among those indicted in the AIDS scandal of recent years, in which Japanese pharmaceutical companies continued to sell unheated blood products tainted with the AIDS-causing HIV virus despite having known of the risks. It was revealed during the fiasco that the prestigious drug firm had been founded by a former member of Unit 731. Nearly 2,000 Japanese, mostly hemophiliacs who depend on regular bloodclottting treatments, contracted AIDS from tainted products, and hundreds have already lost their lives.
Having a correct recognition and understanding of history will become the cornerstone for future peace. Unless Japan can squarely face and acknowledge its past deeds, there exists the likelihood of the resurgence of ultra-nationalism.
[Adapted from an article appearing in the September 2, 2001 issue of the Seikyo Shimbun newspaper.]
Shane Green The Age Toyko Correspondant August 29 2002
The noise was like the sound when a board is struck. On the frozen fields at Ping Fang, in north-east China, chained prisoners were led out with bare arms, and subjected to a current of air to accelerate the freezing process. Then came the noise. With a short stick, the arms of the prisoners would be struck to make sure their limbs had indeed frozen.
In the gruesome world of Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, experiments with frostbite on human subjects became a favourite in a macabre litany of cruelty. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, until the end of World War II, the secret unit used Manchuria as a killing field. It was a case of science gone truly mad for the greater glory of the divine Emperor and Japan.
Apart from the frostbite experiments, prisoners were infected with diseases including anthrax, cholera and the bubonic plague. To gather data, human vivisections were performed. Whole villages and towns were infected with the plague and cholera.
In the end, at least 3000 prisoners, mainly Chinese, were killed directly, with a further 250,000 Chinese left to die through the biological warfare experiments.
It is called the Asian Auschwitz and, in terms of inhumanity and horror, it certainly warrants this description. Yet there remains a fundamental difference with the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against Jews. While Germany has shown deep contrition and remorse, the leaders of the country that spawned the evil of Unit 731 still struggle to come to grips with what occurred.
This week in a Tokyo court, the world was again reminded of Japan's inability to deal with its march across Asia. In courtroom 103, three judges of the Tokyo District Court rejected a claim for an apology and compensation by 180 Chinese, either victims or the family of victims of Unit 731.
If there was anything positive out of the decision for the Chinese, it was that for the first time, a Japanese court had acknowledged that Unit 731 and other units had engaged in "cruel and inhumane" biological warfare in China, costing many lives.
But that was it. The judges claimed there was no legal basis for the plaintiffs' claim, as all compensation issues were settled by a treaty with China in 1972.
While it had an authoritative legal ring to it, there was a deep sense of injustice around the courtroom and among supporters waiting outside. How could a court acknowledge a crime had been committed, yet fail to do anything about it?
The Chinese are planning to appeal, but regardless of what may come out of that, one positive factor to emerge from this case has been that the international community - and, indeed, the Japanese themselves - has been reminded of one of the darkest hours of the Japanese Imperial Army.
Unit 731 was the creation of a brutal psychopath, Lieutenant-General Ishii Shiro. His perverted imagination was captured by the possibilities of biological and chemical warfare, and in the Japan of the 1920s and '30s, he found supporters in the increasingly nationalistic and fanatical military.
Part of his fame came from the invention of a water filter that would be used by the Japanese military in the field. Yet even this innocuous invention had a connection with the grossness of Ishii's character. He once reportedly demonstrated the effectiveness of the filter to Emperor Hirohito by urinating through it, and offering the result to the Hirohito to drink. The Emperor declined, so Ishii drank it himself.
Water purification was also to have a link with the grisly activities of Unit 731. The official cover name for the unit was the Water Purification Bureau.
This latest court case, which began in 1997, has revealed much about the operations of the unit. One of the most harrowing testimonies has come from a former member of the unit, Yoshio Shinozuka, who has declared his remorse, and has vowed to tell the truth about the atrocities committed in China.
Shinozuka revealed in horrific detail what occurred at the unit headquarters in Ping Fang, just outside Harbin in northern China. The Chinese victims were known as "logs", and it was Shinozuka's job to scrub them down before the vivisection.
"I still remember clearly the first live autopsy I participated in," he recalled. "I knew the Chinese individual we dissected alive because I had taken his blood once before for testing. At the vivisection, I could not meet his eyes because of the hate he had in his glare at me."
The victim had been infected with the plague, and was totally black. Shinozuka was reluctant to use the brush on the man's face. "Watching me, the chief pathologist, with scalpel in hand, impatiently signalled me to hurry up," he recalled. "I closed my eyes and forced myself to scrub the man's face with the deck brush. The chief pathologist listened to the man's heartbeat with his stethoscope and then the procedure started."
The case before the Tokyo court also heard from the victims, and family of the victims, in villages and towns infected by the plague and cholera between 1940 and 1942.
Peize Xue was a young boy in Jiangshan when the Japanese infected the area with cholera. He recalled how his sister's three children had been struck down: "The three little ones died such tragic deaths. They were poisoned by the Japanese army," she sobbed. "Before Shuanglan (aged eight) passed away, she asked me, lying limply on her bed, to build a small casket for her."Sixty years on, these testimonies have a powerful and revelatory impact, in part because the activities of Unit 731 and related units remained forgotten until relatively recently. It was only in 1981 that international attention refocused on these awful events when an American journalist, John W. Powell junior, published A Hidden Chapter in History, alleging an American cover-up. Since then, academics and journalists have built an impressive case that details how Ishii and other key players received immunity from prosecution in return for supplying their research to American scientists.
In his authoritative Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45, and the American Cover-up, Sheldon Harris recounts that the matter was raised only once at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal in 1946-48.
An American counsel assisting the Chinese, David N. Sutton, stunned the war crimes tribunal by saying: "The enemy . . . took our countrymen as prisoners and used them for drug experiments. They would inject various types of toxic bacteria into their bodies, and then perform experiments on how they reacted . . . this was an act of barbarism by our enemy."
According to the book, the presiding chief judge, Australia's Sir William Webb, asked: "Are you trying to tell us about a poison liquid being administered? Are you trying to provide more evidence? This is a new fact that you have presented before we judges."
The writer Sheldon Harris says that after a brief pause, Webb said: "How about letting this item go?" Sutton replied: "Well, then, I'll leave it." The issue never surfaced again, Harris writes.
Would things have been different if Allied soldiers were involved? There have always been suspicions and allegations that this happened at Camp Mukden in China, where Allied prisoners - including Australians - were held. Yet Sheldon, in his extensive research that contains many examples of the unit's activities, such as the frostbite experiments, was unable to find "substantive evidence" of this.
The immunity granted to those in Unit 731 saw the doctors involved return to mainstream Japanese society. In 1989, the now-defunct Japanese magazine Days Japan revealed how those who had escaped prosecution had gone on to take some of the most prestigious positions in the Japanese medical community.
The man who succeeded Ishii Shiro as commander of Unit 731, Dr Masaji Kitano, became head of Japan's largest pharmaceutical company, the Green Cross. Others took up posts heading university medical schools, and also worked in the Japanese healthministry.
This may in part explain the difficulty in confronting and acknowledging the activities of Unit 731, let alone compensating the victims. It is perhaps important to also distinguish between the response of the Japanese Government and the Japanese people.
Waiting in the long line this week to get into the courtroom, Kazuyo Yamane struck up a conversation. She lectures in peace studies at Japan's Kochi University, and had come to hear the decision because of a deep personal interest.
Yamane and other like-minded Japanese travelled to China in 1998 to find out more about the activities of Unit 731. "Because we didn't have any means to know what really happened, we decided to go and try to know what really happened," she says.
They spoke to people who had lost family members because of the biological warfare experiments. "We felt really guilty as Japanese," she says. As a result, the group decided to support the Chinese in their action.
Yamane believes that the Japanese Government should apologise and compensate the victims of the "terrible damage" done during the war in Asia. "That's what we citizens think. But I think there is a huge gap between the citizens and the Japanese Government.
"I think maybe now Japan is getting nationalistic, and the right-wingers are getting stronger."
In the only official comment on the day of the decision, the Japanese Justice Ministry said the court's decision verified the validity of the Japanese Government's position in refusing compensation and an apology to the victims of Unit 731.
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/28/1030508070534.html
Site of the Former Japanese Imperial Army's "Unit 731" Headquarters
The former Unit 731 headquarters, where the Japanese Imperial Army conducted biological-warfare experiments on human "guinea pigs," is now a historical museum.
The Unit 731 Site is located in Ping Fang, China's far east corner, about 47 kilometers outside Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province (former Manchuria).
The site now is only remnant of what was once a "human laboratory" where the Japanese Imperial Army, during 1935-45, conducted secret experiments to develop bacteriological weapons, using human's as guinea pigs.
As many as 3,000 Chinese, Russians and Koreans were tortured and deliberately infected with pathogens such as anthrax, plague and cholera, and lost their lives. The Japanese military's experiments were in direct violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 that banned germ warfare.
Death Factory
In front of the former headquarters of Unit 731, is a large stone monument inscribed with the words: "Remains of Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army that invaded China." There are 13 rooms inside the hall, incontrovertibly exhibiting the crimes commited by Unit 731.
Thinly disguised as the "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department," Unit 731 was founded by the Japanese Imperial Army as a biological-warfare unit in 1936. The huge compound consisted of more than 150 buildings covering over six square kilometers outside the city of Harbin. Japanese army physicians and surgeons took part in cruel and senseless experiments on humans and developed bacteriological weapons that released plague, anthrax and cholera viruses. No one was allowed to live within a three-kilometer radius of the compound. Former unit members say they called their victims "marutas" or "logs." Many were Chinese war prisoners and anti-Japanese activists but some were also Russians, Mongolians and Koreans.
In one exhibit hall a miniature model of the compound providing a panoramic overview of the death factory. On the walls are photographs of Japanese soldiers and medical staff attached to the unit, who stare back in cold silence.
A panel introduces Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, the physician in-charge, whose obsession with developing bacteriological weapons was realized at Unit 731. A Chinese guide explained in Japanese to the Soka Gakkai youth that Ishii was promoted from lieutenant colonel to full colonel for running the unit and eventually torturing and killing thousands of innocent people. Then, at the end of the war, the U.S. Government exonerated Ishii and all his subordinates for war crimes in exchange for their human experiment data.
Detailed explanations in Japanese are attached to each item displayed, such as gas masks, syringes, shackles used to prevent escape, and scalpels used to vivisect live victims. One is a large wooden hook "used to hang internal organs taken from live victims. Many inmates were forcibly taken to the compound, administered anesthesia and had their internal organs carved out as "specimens,"
The displays are however sparse as in the final days of the war, Japanese troops, under Ishii's orders, blew up the laboratory compound and killed the remaining "subjects" to cover up the crimes.
Although most of the buildings were successfully destroyed to cover-up evidence, the boiler building once used to cultivate deadly viruses, and the railroad track used to carry human marutas that lies alongside survive as do large chunks of the underground facilities remain intact- Germ warfare shell-casings for plague cultures and ceramic bombs containing plague-infected fleas, are however reproductions based on testimony of witnesses - underground jails, rooms used for frostbite experiments and the rat-breeding room used to culture plague-infected fleas.
It is estimated that outside the compound wall more than 200,000 Chinese were killed during "field testing" of germ warfare bombs. Victims were often taken to a "proving" ground called Anda where they were tied to stakes in a pattern and then bombarded with experimental weapons to test the efficacy of new technologies. Planes sprayed the zone with a plague culture or dropped bombs with plague-infected fleas to see how many people and at what distance from the center would become infected and then die. It is said that plague-infected animals were released as the war was ending and caused plague outbreaks that killed at least 30,000 people in Harbin from 1946 through 1948.
Heilongjiang Province, China, launched a three-stage-project of investigating, excavating and preserving the compound ruins. The project is now in its secondary stage and it is expected that a complete picture of the germ warfare center will come to light within five to six years. Heilongjiang Province is now working to register the remains as part of UNESCO's World Heritage.
A Government in Denial
Among the upper echelons of Japanese society, there are those who still try to hush up or turn a blind eye to the historical reality of Unit 731. Japanese history education barely touches on Japan's past invasion of its Asian neighbors, let alone details about the biological-warfare unit in China. Recently the Japanese government has been under fire by the international community, especially by Japan's Asian neighbors, over its authorization of a controversial new secondary school history textbook that glosses over events such as the 1937 Nanjing massacre and the sexual enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Asian women who served as "comfort women" for the Japanese army. The textbook also attempts to validate and temper Japan's encroachment of neighboring countries in the first half of the 20th century. The international community regards not acknowledging past deeds as denial, and leaving these facts out of the educational curriculum points to a lack of remorse.
To this day, the Japanese government still will not apologize for or officially recognize the criminal offenses it has committed.
State-Imposed Shinto Used to Justify Aggression
It is well known that, during the war, the Japanese government forced, not only its own people, but people of countries it occupied, to adhere to Shintoism, the religious ideology used by the military government to justify and promote its wars of aggression. It is estimated that 300 to 500 shrines were established in northeast China alone. There was also a shrine which deified war dead who died fighting for Japanese-occupied Manchuria. This shrine had the same role as the Yasukuni shrine, which was, by Imperial decree, founded in 1869 for the worship of "divine spirits"--the war dead--who "sacrificed themselves for their country."
In 1868, the Japanese government formally instituted State Shinto for unifying religious and governmental activities. The Meiji Constitution emphasized the sovereignty and sanctity of the emperor, which was reinforced by the divinity accorded him by Shinto. The contradiction between the government's support of State Shinto and freedom of religion guaranteed under the constitution was evaded during the various revisions to the constitution, and in 1932 the Ministry of Education declared Shinto shrines to be non-religious institutions for fostering patriotism and loyalty. State Shinto ended in 1945 after Japan's defeat in World War II. [The controversy continues, however, as some cabinet ministers continue to pay official visits to pray for war dead at the Yasukuni Shrine, which includes shrines for Class A war criminals. The government insists that it is within the confines of the current constitution's principle of separation of church and state.]
There are factions of the Japanese government and society that condone, or even encourage the prime minister and the cabinet to pay homage to the Yasukuni Shrine in utter disregard of the sensibilities of Asian neighbors who suffered atrocities at the hands of Japanese militarism. Such arrogance and callousness raise serious concerns over the ramifications on Japan's future relations with its Asian neighbors, and whether Japan can ever gain their trust.
For the Chinese, Shinto shrines were, and still are, nothing but symbols of the Japanese army's barbarism.
When and How Will Japan Come to Terms With Its History?
Artifacts dug up from the remains of Unit 731. Among the items are earthenware clearly marked "Ishii Butai" (Ishii's Corps).
People throughout Asia, including an increasing number of Japanese citizens, are asking, "Has Japan atoned, or made any amends for the suffering it caused its Asian neighbors?"
In a related tragedy, a major pharmaceutical company was among those indicted in the AIDS scandal of recent years, in which Japanese pharmaceutical companies continued to sell unheated blood products tainted with the AIDS-causing HIV virus despite having known of the risks. It was revealed during the fiasco that the prestigious drug firm had been founded by a former member of Unit 731. Nearly 2,000 Japanese, mostly hemophiliacs who depend on regular bloodclottting treatments, contracted AIDS from tainted products, and hundreds have already lost their lives.
Having a correct recognition and understanding of history will become the cornerstone for future peace. Unless Japan can squarely face and acknowledge its past deeds, there exists the likelihood of the resurgence of ultra-nationalism.
[Adapted from an article appearing in the September 2, 2001 issue of the Seikyo Shimbun newspaper.]
Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare,1932-1945, and the American Cover-Up
Photo - 1936 -- Unit 731, a biological-warfare unit disguised as a water-purification unit, is formed. Japanese General Ishii directs the construction of more than 150 buildings over six square kilometers - at Pingfan, outside the city of Harbin.
BOOK REVIEWS
Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare,1932-1945, and the American Cover-up
By Sheldon H. Harris
Routledge, 2002
385 pages, $57 (pb)
By Phil Shannon
28 August 2002
In the last days of World War II, as the Japanese retreated from the Soviet army's advance into Japanese-occupied China, great care was taken by the Japanese army to destroy certain of their bases in dozens of Chinese cities. Red Army soldiers, arriving at these sites, discovered mass graves, many of the bodies still warm. The Japanese retreat was hasty but highly methodical. There was something they wanted to keep secret.
US and Soviet military investigators soon began piecing together the ugly story of Japan's biological warfare (BW) research in China, including experiments on humans. Sheldon Harris has meticulously documented the gruesome story in Factories of Death.
The primarily Chinese victims, but also Korean and Japanese civilians and Allied soldiers, were infected with pathogenic bacteria including bubonic plague, anthrax, cholera, typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis and dozens of other diseases to determine the most deadly killers. Some victims had vivisection performed on them. Those that did not die from the infections were no longer “viable experimental material” and were killed, their bodies burned in crematoria.
Field trials of delivery mechanisms (bombs, aerial spraying, poisoning of water and animals) were conducted against victims tied to stakes, and against whole Chinese villages and cities. Epidemics raged. In Nanjing, during the two-month slaughter and rape-fest of 1937-8, Chinese POWs were given dumplings laced with typhus and released to spread the disease. Children were given chocolate infected with anthrax. In border skirmishes with Soviet troops, pathogens were spread to thousands of Red Army soldiers.
Around 30,000 to 50,000 people are estimated to have been killed from the experiments alone in the BW bases, while victims of the open-air field trials reached six-figures. The human suffering was incalculable.
The standard defence of Japanese politicians and military comma-nders, then and now, was that these atrocities were the result of the “rogue” Kwantung army, the “loose cannon” Japanese military force in “Manchuria” (the three north-eastern provinces of China) which was occupied from 1931 to 1945. This force supposedly operated beyond the control of civilian and military authorities in Tokyo. This is a lie.
The ultra-right, fervently nationalist political and military forces which increasingly dominated Japan from the early 1930s had a program of military expansion of which biological warfare, made militarily practicable by human experimentation, was an accepted strategy.
Army doctor Major Ishii Shiro, a professor of immunology at Japan's top military medical school, the Tokyo Army Medical College, had conducted BW experiments on Japanese civilians in Tokyo and was given the opportunity to experiment on a much larger scale in occupied China.
He headed the infamous Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army located in the region known as Ping Fan. This massive BW factory and laboratory had ready access to thousands of prisoners — Chinese resistance fighters, Communist guerrillas, common criminals, POWs and Chinese civilians (people with an intellectual disability, vagrants, opium addicts and random people swept from the streets when “experimental stocks” were running low).
Unit 731 at any one time had 5000 personnel, including some 500 scientists (mostly microbiologists) from Japan's most prestigious universities. The war ministry in Tokyo lavishly funded the unit and support came from the highest levels of the military establishment, the scientific community, the Japanese Diet (parliament) and the royal family. Tens of thousands directly participated in Unit 731, including Prince Takeda (Emperor Hirohito's cousin and Kwantung army official who later headed the Japan Olympic Committee for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games).
Any diligent investigation by the US occupying forces after the war would have uncovered Japan's BW program and the war criminals responsible for it. Surviving victims, disaffected subordinates, dissident scientists, the conscience-stricken and the merely opportunistic could all have dobbed in their principals. The Japanese left, particularly the Japanese Communist Party, which strongly opposed (and infiltrated) Japan's BW network, had highly accurate knowledge of the atrocities.
Information from all these sources flooded into the US agencies investigating the Japanese leadership's war crimes. Yet by the time the war crimes trials concluded in 1948, not one of those responsible for the BW atrocities had been indicted, let alone convicted.
Although the chief war crimes prosecutor had compiled a detailed picture of the BW program and of those responsible (tracing the line of authority all the way to Tokyo), the plug was pulled by Washington as a deal was hatched to offer immunity from prosecution to the BW war criminals in return for providing the US with the results of their work.
Most “highly valued” were the human experiments “showing the direct effects of biological warfare agents on man”. This was the view of the US State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), a high-level, powerful body of the departments of state and war, and the US Navy, which determined occupation policy in Japan.
Prosecution for BW crimes, the SWNCC argued, would “stop the flow of information”. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed, including commander-in-chief President Harry Truman, who in March 1947 ordered an end to BW war crimes investigations.
The “utmost secrecy” was also ordered about the decision to trade immunity for information. A cover-up would “guard against embarrassment” of the US political and military authorities letting war criminals go unpunished so that the US could reap the benefits of their atrocities. Knowingly accepting the proceeds of crime is a crime itself, and the US had to be spared this awkwardness.
Washington's own BW research program had begun in 1943 with secret government funding of US$60 million, and by 1945 the US army had operational plans for 1 million anthrax bombs. Public revulsion at biological experiments on humans, however, had restrained the Dr Strangeloves so the Japanese BW research was a godsend.
The cover-up in Japan and the US has continued ever since. The master war criminal, Ishii, lived in quiet retirement on a handsome government retirement package. Other BW war criminals went on to illustrious careers with the Japanese ministry of health and welfare and the universities, their past un-investigated, ignored or covertly valued.
Every director bar one of the Japanese National Institute for Health, a government-sponsored research institute, has been a war criminal who served in a BW unit and experimented on humans. Half the scientific staff of the NIH had been veterans of Unit 731. For three decades after the war, they continued work on unfinished Unit 731 projects, and performed other biological experiments on unwitting prisoners, babies, psychiatric patients and soldiers of the Japanese “self-defence” army. In the 1980s, hospitalised children were given untested vaccines by NIH researchers, thousands dying or becoming disabled as a result.
The government-employed BW war criminals worked hand-in-hand with their war crime colleagues in the private pharmaceutical and blood-treatment companies, the primary concern of this network of war criminals being company profitability. Unit 731 has vanished from the school textbooks approved by the Japanese ministry of education.
As well as importing German Nazi scientists and intelligence officers after the war, Washington continued on its BW path, enriched by the windfall Japanese data and occasionally working in collaboration with its Japanese compilers. The US used biological warfare during the Korean War. From 1948 to 1968, a secret BW testing program was launched on misled or uninformed US citizens (a pale shadow of Unit 731 atrocities but a shadow cast by the same moral framework).
In both Japan and the US, the biological warfare atrocities, the deal with the war criminals and its cover-up, the post-war BW programs and human experiments, and the pharmaceutical company scandals were justified by the “national interest”, military “defence” and corporate profits.
The joint regard for Unit 731 held by both Japanese and US military and political elites show that when it comes to human rights, the concerns of those who hammer away about the “national interest” amount to nothing but immense suffering and death for humanity.
From Green Left Weekly, August 28, 2002.
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A Plague upon Humanity - The Hidden History of Japan's Biological Warfare Program
by Daniel Barenblatt
Chapter Excerpt-Chapter One
A Doctor's Vision
Few have the imagination for reality.
-- Goethe
It began in Kyoto in 1927. Dr. Shiro Ishii had his decisive revelation while going about his customary routine, thumbing through a stack of scientific research journals, making his usual effort to keep abreast of the latest research literature. At the age of thirty-five, the physician had just received his Ph.D. in microbiology from Kyoto Imperial University, one of the world's top institutions in that field and a school comparable in distinction to an American Ivy League college. Ishii was a rather eccentric young man, but he was even then highly respected among his Japanese peers and professors, with a reputation for brilliance and innovation that caused many of them to overlook his extracurricular activities and tastes.
Browsing through a medical periodical, Ishii came across an article that electrified him. He had discovered a report on the Geneva Convention of 1925, to which Japan had been a signatory. The article, written by a War Ministry delegate to the conference, First Lieutenant Harada, explored why Japan had signed the convention, a treaty organized by the League of Nations that banned the use of chemical weapons. As of 1925, some 1.3 million men in Europe and North America still suffered severe health problems resulting from their exposure to poisonous gas in the battles of World War I. Few in the league wanted to see this calamity repeated, and to the convention was added one more prohibition: It was also forbidden to make weapons from the germs responsible for infectious disease epidemics and pandemics such as bubonic plague, or the Black Death, as it was called, which wiped out 25 million Europeans in a five-year period during the fourteenth century.
Ishii read the text of the Geneva Convention over and over again, with both fascination and a sense of validation, for this was the direction in which he had been heading for some time. Titled the "Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare," the compact states that "the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world ... [T]he High Contracting Parties ... accept this prohibition, agree to extend this prohibition to the use of bacteriological methods of warfare and agree to be bound as between themselves according to the terms of this declaration."
The treaty was signed in Geneva on June 17, 1925, by 128 nations -- nearly every country on the planet. The prospect of germ warfare obviously created universal feelings of terror and revulsion among the civilized nations of the world. But Shiro Ishii took a different lesson from the Geneva Convention. If the prospect of germ warfare created such dread, he reasoned, Japan must do everything in its power to create the most virulent germ weapons, as well as effective methods for destroying wartime enemies with lethal diseases.
For years Ishii had spoken to colleagues and military officials of the strategic military potential of disease, and now the framers of the Geneva Convention had inadvertently done the Japanese physician a great service. Their fear of germ warfare catalyzed him to new levels of action. He would visit offices of Japan's top military officers, trying once more to persuade them that a program to conduct biological and germ warfare was the key to victory for Imperial Japan in any future wars.
By 1927 the nation had already conquered and occupied Korea and large portions of China, and powerful men in the ruling circles of Japanese society hungered for further expansion. Ishii now saw the way to make real his dream of state-of-the-art laboratories that could produce billions of deadly germs upon a general's request. The bacteriological weapons so reviled by the dignitaries who had traveled to Geneva in 1925 would become Japan's secret weapon. Ishii would be their mastermind.
At nearby Kyoto Army Hospital, to which Ishii had been attached as an active duty officer soon after attaining his doctorate, he proselytized about the military's need to make biological weapons. He took a train to Tokyo to see his old army buddies posted at the Tokyo Army First Hospital, where he had been on staff as a military surgeon five years earlier. There he managed to charm his way into the offices of high-ranking officials. He also got in to see top commanders and tacticians in Japan's War Ministry.
Ishii pleaded with them to begin researching biological weapons, citing the Harada article. He urged them to make tactical plans for the deployment of germ weapons. He also reminded them that most of the nations that had used chemical gas weapons in World War I also had ratified the Hague Convention of 1899, which banned the use of poison gas. One had to expect, he argued, that in the event of war, other countries would again develop banned weapons regardless of whatever international treaties to which they had sworn agreement.
The generals, colonels, and military scientists listened politely to Ishii, and not for the first time. The young doctor's face was well known around staff headquarters. "He always emphasized the role of bacteriological warfare in our tactical planning," wrote General Saburo Endo in his diary. But Ishii's ideas fell on deaf ears at the War Ministry. The government at the time, under Prime Minister Giichi Tanaka, had stressed a more limited role for the military and a less aggressive foreign policy. The Japanese army and navy commanders went along for the most part with the Tanaka directives, and those heading up Japan's military were unimpressed with the theoretical concepts of biological warfare. They preferred to abide by Japan's moral obligations as outlined broadly in the 1925 Geneva Convention, which Japan had signed, although not ratified.
Japan had ratified the 1899 Hague Convention, which banned chemical weapons ...
The foregoing is excerpted from A Plague upon Humanity by Daniel Barenblatt. All rights reserved. ISBN: 9780060933876; ISBN-10: 0060933879; Imprint: Harper Paperbacks; Publication Date: 09/02/2005; Format: Trade PB; Trimsize: 5 5/16 x 8; Pages: 304; $26.95
TV REVIEWNightmare in Manchuria - History channel
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This is the shocking history of video Unit 731 - Nightmare in Manchuria which documents japanese developement of biological warfare in World war 2. To reach their goal of world domination, the Imperial Government of Japan decided that they would have to build a huge arsenal of bioÂchemical weapons. Their takeover of the Chinese province of Manchuria was the first step, and in a top secret research facility called Unit 731, Japanese doctor Shiro Ishii and his staff conducted weapons research that claimed the lives of untold thousands perhaps even hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians. These atrocities were not exposed and no one was ever punished because the documents recording the grim findings were secretly sold to the United States in exchange for amnesty. These crimes against humanity are finally revealed, condemning two governments for their complicity in keeping this story silent for so long, and the repercussions may be felt for a long time. 50 min. A must see for everyone. History channel
More info at:
http://www.ihffilm.com/r660.html
http://www.nesa.org.uk/html/unit731.htm
Other documentaries on the same topic:
http://indypeer.org/show_file_page.php?file_id=301 (subtitles at: http://indypeer.org/show_file_page.php?file_id=471)
ed2k://|file|Unit.731.-.Nightmare.in.Manch...410BB3F05314A|/
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