Soldier Testifies on Germ Warfare
By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated Press
Writer
TOKYO--Yoshio Shinozuka is
still haunted by the ghoulish experiments he
helped carry out on captured
Chinese civilians and soldiers as part of Japans
top-secret biological warfare
program during World War II.
The Japanese military
performed vivisections without anesthesia in northern
China, casually referring to the
people as "logs," the veteran recalled Wednesday
in Tokyo District Court.
"I remember using the word as
we compared how many logs we cut that day
with other unit members," he said.
Though Shinozuka, 77, has
spoken out before about his role, his testimony
makes him the first member of the
notorious Unit 731 to detail Japans biological
warfare activities for the legal
record. He was called as a witness for nearly 180
Chinese suing the Japanese
government for compensation and an apology for the
deaths of family members allegedly
killed by the unit.
Shinozuka testified about
participating in the mass production of cholera,
dysentery and typhoid germs at the
units base in the city of Harbin in the early
1940s. He said he was often told to
help out departments that needed to boost
germ production for upcoming
deployments, including the 1939 Nomonhan clash
with Soviet troops near Mongolia
and several other germ bombing attacks in
southern China in the 1940s.
He said that just before the
Nomonhan attack, he was responsible for
transferring dysentery and typhoid
germs from test tubes to bigger jars, packing
them into barrels, sealing them and
taking them to a night train for the attack.
Several unit members died after
contracting typhoid.
Shinozuka said he is still
bothered by the vivisections, or surgical experiments
on living people.
"I committed all these war
crimes because I was ordered to do so," he said.
"The government should try to learn
about the victims. I really think its time for
Japan to face this issue with
humanitarian consideration."
Shinozuka said the unit
members were prohibited from disclosing to outsiders
what happened inside the unit.
Notes and other written instructions were all
collected afterward.
Former Unit 731 pilot Shoichi
Matsumoto told the court later Wednesday that
he spread plague-infected fleas
from an airplane over Hangzhou in 1940 and
Nanjing in 1941.
Matsumoto told the court he
carried healthy rats from a Tokyo suburb to
Harbin to get them infected with
bubonic plague. He also flew to Singapore and
Java with the rats.
The two veterans were
testifying in the case, filed in 1997, that say at least
2,100 people were killed in the
experiments. The trial is expected to continue for
several more months.
Although some Japanese
veterans such as Shinozuka have come forward in
recent years and confessed to war
crimes, the Japanese government has resisted
making official apologies to China.
Several years ago -after
decades of denial -Tokyo finally acknowledged that
Unit 731 existed. But it has
refused to confirm the extent of its activities.
Japanese textbooks too often
present only brief, perfunctory accounts of the
nations aggression in East Asia
from the mid-1930s until the wars end in 1945.
Shinozuka said one of his
reasons for testifying was disappointment with the
governments efforts to come clean
about the war, and said he was deeply sorry
for his actions.
"What I have done was
something that nobody should have done as a human
being," he said. "I cannot escape
that responsibility."
http://www.latimes.com/wires/20001115/tCB00V0223.html
