News-Info-Alerts

Re: Unit 731

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: August 10, 2002

"Japan criticized over germ warfare
By MARI YAMAGUCHI
Associated Press

TOKYO - A former Japanese soldier who took part in Tokyo's World War II germ warfare program urged the government to confess to killing thousands of people in China in attacks and biological experiments and to compensate the victims.

Yoshio Shinozuka, 79, a former member of the army's notorious Unit 731, said Japan has a chance to clear its conscience in a Tokyo District Court when it rules on a lawsuit Aug. 27 brought by Chinese survivors.

"The ruling will be a crucial test for Japan's conscience," he told reporters at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.

About 180 Chinese suing Tokyo for compensation and an apology say their relatives were killed in biological warfare and human experiments carried out by Unit 731, the Japanese army unit that was based in Harbin, northern China. The plaintiffs are representing at least 2,100 Chinese who they say died from exposure to germs.

Shinozuka and other Japanese veterans have testified in court that they mass-produced cholera, dysentery, anthrax and typhoid in Harbin until 1945 to use mostly against prisoners of war and the Chinese people. Historians estimate that the unit may have killed as many as 250,000 in their experiments.

While the Japanese government has acknowledged that Unit 731 existed, it has refused to confirm the accounts of the unit's soldiers. Details of Japan's wartime germ project have emerged in recent years from documents confiscated by the United States after the war."