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Tuesday August 22, 2017

A DOCUMENTARY recently released by Japan’s public broadcaster NHK has triggered heated discussions and calls for refl ection upon war history in Japanese society.

The documentary, titled “The Truth of Harbin Unit 731,” revealed the outra-geous crimes committed by Unit 731, a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.

Outrageous atrocitiesUnit 731, notorious for cold-blooded

lethal human experimentation among other crimes, is a subject seldom touched in Japan, with the authorities eager to cover up and even deny that part of history.

The documentary, released Aug. 13 by NHK, however, through testimonies of Unit 731 participants and authentic records of the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials in 1949, presents the cruel truth to the public.

Unit 731 was based in Harbin’s Pingfang District, the largest city then in Northeast China. The unit, set up around 1936, conducted experiments on live human beings to test germ-releasing bombs and chemical bombs, among other atrocities.

The majority of the victims they experimented on were Chinese, while a small percentage were Soviet, Mongo-lian, Korean, and soldiers of the Allied Forces taken captive. Some of them were children.

“I saw no one leave the camp alive [after being experimented on],” testi-fi ed Kiyoshi Kawashima, an offi cer of Unit 731, according to an audio record of the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials in 1949.

Toshihide Nishi, a medical offi cer, tes-tifi ed at the trials that they had taken the captives outside where the temperature was below minus 20 degrees Celsius, and fanned the victims to cause frostbite.

Kurakazu, another offi cer, testifi ed that he had seen fi ngers of three Chinese victims in such an frostbite experiment turn black and chip off in the freezing temperature.

Takeshi Misumi, only 14 years old when he joined the unit as a junior member, told NHK that he saw with his own eyes how the unit conducted lethal human experimentation.

He also testifi ed that just before the war ended in 1945, in order to cover up their atrocities, the unit, under the orders of the Japanese military, killed all the surviving people they were experi-menting on.

Misumi was ordered to pour gasoline on the bodies and light them on fi re. The horrible scenes have since haunted him for the rest of his life.

“The war was so cruel, so inhuman. ... It was something that should never have happened,” he said with tears in eyes in the documentary.

History shall be rememberedThe documentary, while irritating the

ultra-rightwing forces, exposed many Japanese people to the truth of the war, and many start to refl ect upon history.

Nobuo Okimatsu, a World War II vet-eran and head of a civil group dedicated to promoting Sino-Japanese friendship, said that in Japan, the truth about Unit 731 is a part of the history that has been touchy to many, but it is also something that the people should know about.

“The Japanese people should know about the crimes that Japan has com-mitted in the past,” he said.

NHK Documentary on

Japanese Unit 731 triggers public outrage

Tamaki Matsuoka, a former primary teacher who has devoted 30 years of her life to conveying the truth about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre to the Japanese people, said it was great for the documentary to make public the audio records about Unit 731 and the Khabarovsk Trials.

But she also pointed out that the documentary failed to ask the question why most of the offi cers and research-ers responsible for the crimes of Unit 731 went back to Japan untried and unblamed after the war, and even enjoyed academic fame afterwards.

Instead of being tried for war crimes, the researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the United States in exchange for the data they gath-ered through human experimentation. Only those few that had been arrested by Soviet forces fi rst were tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949.

“Japan has been trying to cover up the history for over 70 years. ... Whitewash-ing the war crimes and highlighting its own sufferings to pretend to be the victim instead of the victimizer does no good to Japan if it wants to rebuild relationship with its neighbors in Asia,” she added.

An alarm for presentWhile calling for the war crimes of

Unit 731 to be never forgotten, scholars in Japan are alarmed about the current situation that has some similarities to those before the end of the war, especially as the government is attempting to revise the pacifi st Constitution, and is allocat-ing more funds for military research programs in universities.

During World War II, Japanese military and universities had rather close bonds, with the military providing research funds for the universities, while universities supplied the military with the so-called “research talents.”

According to NHK, Kyoto University sent 37 medical researchers to help the invading Japanese army in China in 1936, and the yearly number rose to 75 in 1942. Other universities such as the University of Tokyo and Keio University were also sending an increasing number of researchers to the army.

“As the documentary showed, the best universities at that time in Japan all provided research personnel for the invading army and became accomplices to the war crimes,” said Hiroshi Onishi, a professor of economics at Keio University in Tokyo.

He added that the documentary sounded the alarm bell for the present, as Japan’s Defense Ministry started a research funding program called the National Security Technology Research Promotion in 2015, which assists and supports the research of technologies that could be used for military equipment.

“Budget for the program was 300 mil-lion yen (US$2.71 million) in 2015, 600 million yen in 2016, and surged to 11 bil-lion yen in 2017,” said Onishi.

“While the government is cutting funds for fundamental research, the surge in funding for military research could lead astray research in universities and research institutions, especially public universities that rely on government support,” said Onishi.

Satoru Ikeuchi, professor emeritus at Nagoya University, said the researchers,

once in the government funding program, have to report their research results to the Defense Ministry, and even after the sponsorship ends, follow-up surveys on the researcher could still be conducted, and researchers involved could hardly get rid of the infl uence of the Defense Ministry.

Japanese academic circles have been stepping up their protests against this research funding program. Science Coun-cil of Japan (SCJ), an organization set up in 1949 to represent Japan’s scientists both domestically and internationally, issued a statement in March, reiterating the commitment to not conduct research for military purposes, and calling for sci-entists to not join that program.

Takashi Okada, commentator from Japan’s Kyodo News, said that stepping up support for military research was consistent with the Abe administration’s previous policies including the attempts to revise the pacifi st constitution, lifting the ban on collective self-defense rights, and allowing exports of military equip-ment by changing the “Three Principles on Arms Exports.”

If this trend goes on unchecked, academic freedom and independence would be infringed upon and the past mistakes of scholars becoming accom-plices of war crimes could be repeated in Japan, a number of Japanese scholars told Xinhua.

“In this sense, records about the atroci-ties committed by Unit 731 should also be listed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, just like the documents about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, so that the historical lesson could never be forgotten,” Okada said. (Xinhua)

A video clip from the NHK documentary shows the headquarters of Unit 731 in Pingfang District in Harbin. File photos

Japanese medical offi cers serving in Unit 731. Sketches show the design of germ-releasing bombs.