Medical site excavation sees Japan dig into murky period of its history

Published on Monday 21 February 2011 16:23

Japan began excavations yesterday at a former army medical school to search for human remains linked to a notorious Second World War programme said to have experimented on foreign prisoners of war.

There is no certainty the excavation will unearth anything, but it is a sign the government is open to the possibility of facing its long-kept wartime secrets, including the experiments conducted by the shadowy Unit 731.

Its activities - including allegedly conducting biological warfare in China - have never been officially acknowledged by the government, though historians and participants have documented them.

The excavation is the first government investigation of the Tokyo site. It follows a former nurse's revelation that she helped bury body parts there as American forces began occupying the Japanese capital at the end of the war.

Yasushi Torii, head of a group which has been investigating the case for decades, said: "If the bones, or organs with traces of live medical experiments, are found, the government would have to admit a wartime medical crime. This is a start, although we probably need more evidence to prove Unit 731's role."

From its wartime base in Japanese-controlled Harbin in northern China, Unit 731 and related units injected prisoners of war with typhus, cholera and other diseases to research germ warfare, according to historians and former unit members. Unit 731 also is said to have frozen prisoners to death in endurance tests.

Historians estimate the unit's victims to number from the thousands to as many as 250,000 - mostly Chinese, but also possibly other nationalities. They believe some bodily remains of victims were transferred from China to Tokyo for analysis.

In 2002, a Japanese court acknowledged the unit's germ warfare in China, but ruled that Japan had no obligation to atone to the victims. After years of denial, Tokyo acknowledged Unit 731's existence, but has never disclosed details of its activities.

Unit leaders were spared prosecution in exchange for turning over information to the United States, and were given senior posts in Japan's pharmaceutical industry, medical schools and the health ministry.

Former nurse, Toyo Ishii, now 88, came forward in 2006 to say that she and colleagues at an army hospital at the site were ordered to bury numerous corpses, bones and body parts during the weeks following Japan's surrender on 15 August, 1945 before US troops arrived in the capital.

Her disclosure led to a face-to-face meeting with the health minister at the time and a government pledge to investigate.However, authorities held off beginning the excavation until the relocation of residents and demolition of apartments on the site last year.

The Democrats, which overthrew the conservative Liberal Democratic Party in 2009, have generally been "more open to the idea of taking an account of what happened in history and trying to turn a new page," said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Health ministry official Kazuhiko Kawauchi said the excavation - costing about 100 million yen (about 740,000) - is aimed at finding out if anything is buried in the plot.

He said: "We are not certain if the survey will find anything. If anything is dug up, it may not be related to Unit 731."

But Keiichi Tsuneishi, a Kanagawa University history professor and expert on biological warfare, said: "The site used to be the research headquarters of Unit 731. If bones are found there, they are most likely related to Unit 731."

The site is near another area where a mass grave of possible wartime experiment victims was uncovered in 1989 during the construction of a health ministry research institute.