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.]
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