The Japanese courts recently recognised for the first time that Japan hadconducted biological warfare with horrific consequences in China during thesecond World War. While Japan refuses to pay compensation for thousands of deaths and injuries, the US bears responsibility for granting immunity to the perpetrators, reports David McNeill in Tokyo
Yoshio Shinozuka was just 16 years old when he was dispatched from Tokyo to work on a secret project in the Japanese puppet state of Manchuko. It was 1939: the emperor's troops were butchering their way across China; fighting with the Russians loomed in the north, and the search for a war-winning weapon was on.
The boy soldier was assigned to a four-mile complex of squat buildings in Ping Fang, south of Harbin, in what was supposedly a water treatment and epidemic prevention facility - a piece of Orwellian truthspeak worthy of Joseph Goebbels.
Far from preventing epidemics, the unit developed them in what was, at the time, the most elaborate biological warfare programme ever created. Later dubbed Unit 731, the Ping Fang complex turned diseases such as typhoid, anthrax, smallpox, cholera and dysentery into mass-produced killers.
"As soon as I arrived I was told the golden rule of the unit," says Shinozuka. "Don't look, don't listen, don't tell, about the atrocities I saw there."
The atrocities included dissection of live prisoners in an attempt to determine the effects of pathogens on the human body. Shinozuka remembers the first time he assisted in an experiment on one of the prisoners who were dubbed "murata", or logs.
"I knew the Chinese individual we dissected alive," he recalls. "At the vivisection I could not meet his eyes because of the hate in them. He was infected with plague germs and, as the disease took its toll, his face and body became totally black.
"Still alive, he was brought on a stretcher to the autopsy room, where I was ordered to wash the body. I used a rubber hose and a deck brush to wash him. I remember feeling hesitant in using the brush on his face, but the chief pathologist, with scalpel in hand, impatiently signalled me to hurry up. The man's organs were methodically excised one by one."
The results harvested by military scientists from these grotesque experiments in Unit 731 and at similar germ warfare factories around the country were, by 1940, being used to spread typhoid, cholera and plague across China. Teams of soldiers were sent to dump pathogens in rivers and water supplies - up to 1,000 wells in and around Harbin alone were poisoned in 1939 and 1940. When these methods proved too slow and soldiers ended up poisoning themselves, military brains were racked for more efficient delivery systems. Shinozuka and his colleagues were put to work cultivating fleas.
When Japanese planes flew over Chongshan village in Zheijiang Province in 1942, the residents remember seeing a black cloud descending from the skies.
Within days, many came down with high fevers, headaches and swollen lymph nodes; the symptoms of flea-borne plague - the same disease that wiped out one-third of the European population in the Middle Ages. Within two months, about 400 people, or a third of the village's population, had died.
"Japanese soldiers in white robes and gas masks arrived at the village and began inspecting the bodies, but they weren't there to help," says Wang Lijun, whose oldest sister and brother were among the victims. "They dissected the bodies of some of the sick people. Later they returned and burned many of the houses out."
Estimates of casualties from Japan's germ warfare programme in China from 1932 to 1945 vary, but the most careful English- language study so far, by US historian Sheldon H. Harris, says that even by late 1942 the casualty count "fell into the six-figure range". Outbreaks of disease continued long after the scientists - whose parting gift to their Chinese hosts was to release thousands of disease-ridden rats before dynamiting the germ factories - melted back into post-war civilian life back home.
With a shattered Japan firmly under the control of the US military from 1945, some form of haphazard but cathartic Nuremberg-style justice was expected. In fact, the whole sordid tale of biological warfare in China had a bitter sting in its tail, courtesy of the American liberators.
While Shinozuka and other Unit 731 minions were sent to Chinese prisons as war criminals, the military mandarins who had built the programme and boasted of its war-winning potential to Tokyo were protected in exchange for their research findings.
In newly released documents published by historians over the past decade, US military scientists emphasised the "extreme value" of the intelligence information gained in Japanese germ-warfare tests. "The value to the US of Japanese biological warfare data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from 'war crimes' prosecution," wrote one.
The military seal of approval meant immunity for the key figures, including the programme's architect, Shiro Ishii, who died in Tokyo in 1959 without ever spending a day in court. Many went on to have lucrative post-war careers in the medical industry.
This is, by any measure, one of the most barbaric episodes of the 20th century and ranks, according to veteran Japanese civil rights lawyer Keiichiro Ichinose, with the worst of the Nazis' war crimes. "The government here has got to come to terms with this before it can move forward with the rest of its Asian neighbours," he says.
Ichinose was part of the Japanese legal team that represented 180 Chinese plaintiffs from Hunan and Zhejiang provinces in a lawsuit against the Japanese government, which delivered its verdict recently. After five years of evidence, which included working diaries by Unit 731 officers and the testimony of Shinozuka, the three judges accepted that the germ warfare programme did exist. However, they dismissed claims for compensation 731announced
