The bones that were dug up from the remains of a wartime Army Medical School site in Tokyo decades ago possibly associated with Japan’s infamous Unit 731 are stored somewhere for identification.
Activists, historians, and experts commemorated the 35th anniversary by calling on governments to authorize an inquiry into the relationship of these bones with human germ warfare testing.
This notorious unit was based in Manchuria in China that was controlled by Japan at that time, and it used inmates of its concentration camp as guinea pigs to test cholera, typhoid fever and other diseases on them. It also conducted unnecessary limb amputations or organs removals, froze prisoners to death through endurance tests. The Japanese government only acknowledged the existence of Unit 731.
In 1989, several skulls mostly with cuts and parts of other skeletons were discovered during construction works at a former location of an army medical school. This suggested that the school had been involved in germ and biological warfare activities.
A previous Health Ministry investigation in 2001 concluded that most probably these remains are bodies used for teaching anatomy or brought back from battlefields. But some respondents mentioned Unit 731 while others talked about specimens taken there for storage purposes.
According to a forensic examination carried out in 1992, these bones belonged to more than possible one hundred different individuals (mostly adults) originating from Southern Asia countries except Japan. Some skulls contained cavities and cuts inflicted after death; however no evidence linked them to Unit 731.
To uncover the truth activists demand more openness from the government including publishing full interviews transcripts as well as doing DNA tests.
Using freedoms of information requests recently Kazuyuki Kawamura acquired three hundred pages worth of research materials from the said report by way of being a former Shinjuku district assembly delegate. He claims that important data was “carefully omitted” from witness accounts by authorities.
Among it were vivid descriptions given by witnesses such as one who told of seeing a human head in a vat when he helped carry it out, only to rush off and throw up. Based on these testimonies there might be more room for forensic evaluation to reveal links with Unit 731.
“Our aim is to identify the bones and give them back,” said Kawamura. According to AP, “We just need to get at the truth.”
Witness accounts had previously been considered during the 2001 report by Ministry of Health officials, according to Atsushi Akiyama, an official with Japan’s ministry of health. He also added that lack of documents or labels on containers is a crucial piece missing.
Japan’s wartime atrocities papers were destroyed as soon as WWII ended making any new evidence difficult to find. Also, there are no details about these remains making DNAs test hard, says Akiyama.
Hideo Shimizu was aged 14 in April 1945 when he joined Unit 731 as a laboratory assistant; he still remembers heads and other body parts kept in formalin-filled jars inside the museum’s specimen room. These were called “maruta” (logs) among prisoners chosen for experiments.
In August 1945, three days before Japan surrendered Shimizu was charged with looking for and collecting bones burnt in the pit that held bodies of prisoners’. After that he was handed a gun and cyanide with orders to kill himself if detected while returning home.
He was not sure if any of the cases he saw at Unit 731 could have been one of the Shinjuku bones, but underlined that none of what he had seen in Harbin as for him should never happen again. “I wish to indulge youth about war tragedies,” he said.
