TOKYO (AP) — Depending on who you ask, bones that have been stored in a Tokyo repository for decades could be the remains of early 20th century anatomy classes or unburied and unidentified victims of one of the most notorious war crimes from the country.
A group of activists, historians and other experts who want the government to investigate links to wartime human germ warfare experiments gathered over the weekend to mark the 35th anniversary of their discovery and renew their call for an independent panel to examine the exams.
Japan’s government has long avoided discussing wartime atrocities, including the sexual abuse of Asian women known as “comfort women” It is Korean forced laborers in Japanese mines and factories, often due to lack of documentary evidence. Japan has apologized for its aggression in Asia and since the 2010s has been repeatedly criticized in South Korea and China for backing down.
About a dozen skulls, many with cuts, and parts of other skeletons were unearthed on July 22, 1989, during construction of a Ministry of Health research institute on the site of the wartime Army Medical School. The school’s close ties to a biological and bacteriological warfare unit led many to suspect it could be the remains of a dark history that the Japanese government never officially acknowledged.
Based in northeastern China, then controlled by the Japanese, Unit 731 and several related units injected typhus, cholera and other diseases into prisoners of war, according to historians and former unit members. They also say the unit performed unnecessary amputations and organ removals on living people to practice surgery and froze prisoners to death in stress tests. The Japanese government only acknowledged that Unit 731 existed.
Senior Unit 731 officials were not tried in postwar courts as the U.S. sought to obtain data on chemical warfare, historians say, although lower-ranking officials were tried in Soviet courts. Some of the unit’s leaders became medical professors and pharmaceutical executives after the war.
An earlier Ministry of Health investigation said the bones could not be linked to the unit and concluded the remains were likely from bodies used in medical education or brought from war zones for analysis, in a 2001 report based on the interrogation of 290 associated people. with the school.
He acknowledged that some interviewees had links to Unit 731. One of them said he saw a head in a barrel sent from Manchuria, in northern China, where the unit was based. Two others noted that they had heard about specimens from the unit being stored in a school building but had not actually seen them. Others denied the link, saying the specimens could include those from the pre-war era.
A 1992 anthropological analysis found that the bones came from at least 62 and possibly more than 100 different bodies, mostly adults from parts of Asia outside Japan. The holes and cuts found in some skulls were made after death, he said, but no evidence was found linking the bones to Unit 731.
But activists say the government could do more to uncover the truth, including publishing full accounts of their interviews and carrying out DNA tests.
Kazuyuki Kawamura, a former Shinjuku district assembly member who has dedicated most of his career to solving the mystery of the bones, recently obtained 400 pages of research materials from the 2001 report using freedom of information requests, and says that this shows that the government “tactfully excluded” important information from witness accounts.
The newly published material does not contain a smoking gun, but it does include vivid descriptions – the man who described seeing a head in a barrel also described helping to handle it and then running away to vomit – and comments from several witnesses who suggested that more forensic investigation may show a link to Unit 731.
“Our goal is to identify the bones and return them to their families,” Kawamura said. The bones are pretty much the only evidence of what happened, he says. “We just want to find out the truth.”
Health Ministry official Atsushi Akiyama said the witness accounts had already been analyzed and included in the 2001 report and that the government’s position remained unchanged. An important missing link is documentary evidence, such as a label on a sample container or official records, he said.
Documents, especially those involving Japan’s atrocities during the warthey were carefully destroyed in the final days of the war and it would be difficult to find new evidence to prove them.
Akiyama added that the lack of information about the bones would make DNA analysis difficult.
Hideo Shimizu, who was sent to Unit 731 in April 1945 at age 14 as a laboratory technician and attended the online meeting from his home in Nagano, said he remembers seeing heads and body parts in formalin vials stored in a sample room in the main building of the unit. . What impressed him most was a dissected belly with a fetus inside. They told him that they were “maruta” – logs – a term used to designate prisoners chosen for experiments.
Days before Japan’s surrender, on August 15, 1945, Shimizu was ordered to collect bones from the bodies of prisoners burned in a pit. He was then given a pistol and a packet of cyanide to kill himself if he was caught on his journey back to Japan.
He was ordered never to tell anyone about his experience at Unit 731, never to contact his colleagues, and never to seek a job in the government or medical field.
Shimizu said he cannot say whether any specimen he saw in 731 could have been among the Shinjuku bones by looking at photos, but that what he saw in Harbin should never be repeated. When he sees his great-grandchildren, he said, they remind him of that fetus he saw and the lives lost.
“I want younger people to understand the tragedy of war,” he said.
