Some Japanese military veterans recently confessed to a visiting
Chinese delegation that they conducted germ warfare experiments on
live Chinese during World War II.
Most of these revelations provided convincing evidence of Japan's
war crimes in China, said Shi Jiaxing, head of the four-man
delegation from northeast China's Harbin, where the world's largest
germ warfare experimental base is located.
Yoshio Shinotsuka, a former member of Unit
731, a Japanese military division notorious for its germ
laboratory in China, said that he participated in an experiment
during which five innocent and healthy Chinese were used as
"material" for a test on plague bacteria.
"Before we injected the plague into these people, four of the
Chinese were given plague vaccines we developed from different
sources," Shinotsuka said.
One month later, laboratory tests on their blood showed that the
one not vaccinated were the first to be infected with the bacteria.
"After that, we dissected and gutted them alive," said Shinotsuka,
admitting it was the first time that he had told this publicly.
In
describing a field test of bacterial weapons in China, another
veteran surnamed Obara, also a member of Unit 731, said, "When
airdropped germ bombs exploded among Chinese test subjects tied
fast onto crosses, I could see their pain as their faces became
gradually distorted."
Obara said that he had participated in a total of seven such field
tests in the city of Anda, in northeast China's
Heilongjiang Province.
"Unit 731 experimented in the culture, research and testing of
bacteria such as anthrax, cholera, the plague and typhoid fever,"
said former officer Kansuke Morioka.
He
recalled that one Chinese was cut open with a scapel from neck to
abdomen by a military surgeon surnamed Izu.
Those who were dissected alive lost consciousness gradually, said a
veteran surnamed Yuasa.
He
still remembered one operation he participated in, during which he
was responsible for sawing bones and incising tracheae.
According to Yuasa, the dissected Chinese claimed to be a soldier
from the Eighth Route Army kept puffing during the operations until
after the head surgeon injected air into his heart several times in
succession.
Listening to the confession made by aged Japanese veterans which
have been recorded verbatim, Shi said that people's hunger to know
the truth of the dark periods in history is intensifying as time
passes.
Currently, Chinese researchers have found more than 1,200
evidentiary items from the remains of the slaughterhouse in Harbin,
including syringes, high-pressure boilers used to destroy germs and
the vestiges of germ bombs.
Experts estimated that as part of Japan's Kwantung Army, with
headquarters in Harbin, Unit 731 experimented on more than 10,000
prisoners of war and civilians from China, the Korean Peninsula, Mongolia,
and the former Soviet Union.
During World War II, more than 100,000 deaths were caused by the
germ warfare experiments launched by the Japanese, mostly in
China.
Although 5,570 Japanese war criminals were indicted by the allied
countries at the end of the war, none of them were tried for
participating in germ weapons research.
The Kwantung Army headquarters burned and buried the records of
Unit 731 in an attempt to get rid of evidence before Japan
surrendered on August 15, 1945, leaving historians to rely on the
personal accounts of the less than 300 living veterans to piece
together the story.
To
meet the veterans willing to tell the truth and to collect evidence
of crimes of the Japanese Army during World War II, Shi and his
delegation have visited many Japanese cities including Nagoya,
Osaka, Kochi and Tokyo.
( December 13, 2001)