War documentary calls for reflection

Cruel truth presented through testimonies and authentic records

TOKYO — A documentary recently released by Japan’s public broadcaster NHK has triggered heated discussions and calls for reflection on the country’s war history.

The documentary, The Truth of Harbin Unit 731, revealed the outrageous crimes committed by Unit 731, a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Japanese army during World War II.

Unit 731, notorious for coldblooded lethal human experimentation among other acts, is a subject seldom touched on in Japan, with the authorities eager to cover up that part of the past.

The documentary, released on Sunday, however, through testimonies of Unit 731 participants and authentic records of the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials in 1949, presents vividly the cruel yet irrefutable historical truth to the unwitting public.

Outrageous atrocities

Unit 731 was based in the Pingfang district of Harbin, 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 weapons among other atrocities.

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

“I have seen no one left the Nobuo Okimatsu, WWII veteran camp alive (after being experimented on),” testified Kiyoshi Kawashima, an officer of Unit 731, according to an audio record of the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials in 1949.

Toshihide Nishi, a medical officer, testified at the trials that they had taken the captives outside where the temperature was below -20 C, causing many of the victims to succumb to frostbite.

Kurakazu, another officer, testified that he had seen the fingers of three Chinese victims turn black and fall off in the freezing temperatures.

Takeshi Misumi, who was only 14 years old when he joined the unit as a junior member, said he saw with his own eyes how the unit conducted lethal human experiments.

He also testified that just before the war ended, in order to cover up their atrocities, the unit killed all the people they were experimenting on.

Misumi was ordered to pour gasoline on the bodies and set them on fire. He said the horrible scenes have haunted him ever since.

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

‘Touchy’ to many

The documentary, while irritating the ultra-rightwing forces, exposed many Japanese people to the truth of the war, and many have started to reflect upon history.

Nobuo Okimatsu, veteran of World War II 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.

“Japanese people shall know about the crimes that Japan has committed in the past,” he said.

Tamaki Matsuoka, a former primary teacher who has devoted 30 years of her life to conveying the historic 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 answer why most of the officers and researchers responsible for the crimes of Unit 731 went back to Japan untried and unblamed after the war, and even enjoyed academic fame afterward.

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 gathered through human experimentation. Only those few that had been arrested by Soviet forces first were tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949.

“Japan has been trying to cover up the history for over 70 years ... Whitewashing 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 said.

Japanese people shall know about the crimes that Japan has committed in the past.”