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Unit 10—Handout 7
Read the following articles about lawsuits by survivors:
International Herald Tribune March 11, 2001
CHINA/JAPAN: Chinese Survivors Recall Horror of Japan’s
Germ Warfare Attacks
By Doug Struck Washington Post Service
TOKYO The old Chinese men were nervous. It had taken them six decades to get here. They told the
Japanese court about their relatives, the victims of Japan’s germ warfare, the targets of Japan’s still unpunished
medical experimentation unit in World War II.
They told how the bubonic plague dropped by Japanese Imperial Army Unit 731 had spread from village
to village from 1940 to 1942. How it rode with the mourners of one funeral back to their homes to cause the
next. How it caught the father of 8-year-old Ding De Wang at a rural wedding, and in two days gripped him
in convulsions and turned his body hideously black.
“He couldn’t say anything to me before he died,” said Mr. Ding, now 68. “All he could do is look at me
and cry.”
Mr. Ding and three other Chinese witnesses told their horrifi c stories to a mostly empty courtroom last
week. They are plaintiffs in a lawsuit brought by 180 Chinese citizens alleging that crimes against humanity
committed by the notorious medical experimentation unit have gone unacknowledged and unpunished.
The suit, fi rst fi led in 1997, has received little attention in Japan. It is given scant chance of winning,
and its impact has been numbed by ponderous progress; there have been only fi ve hearings in the case and
no decision is expected until year’s end. But most aggravating to the plaintiffs is the refusal of the Japanese
government to address the allegations. Against piles of mounting evidence the Japanese government insists it
does not know what the wartime unit did.
“Almost 50 years after the war, the Japanese government has not admitted or apologized for the existence
of Unit 731 or their experiments,” said Keiichiro Ichinose, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “The cruelty of what
happened is equal to that of the Nazis.”
The charge gets to the heart of lingering resentments in Asia that Japan has not adequately faced up to
its wartime invasions of Korea, China and Southeast Asia.
Some of the worst brutality involved Unit 731, based in northeast China, which carried out grotesque
medical experiments on thousands of prisoners. The unit tested and developed biological weapons, spreading
bubonic plague, cholera and typhus. The Chinese government says the diseases killed 270,000 civilians,
although that estimate is largely guesswork.
Mr. Ichinose and a handful of Japanese scholars have joined the Chinese plaintiffs because they say they
fear that Japanese historians will erase the unit’s crimes from historical records.
“In Japan, there is a strong reactionary historians’ group,” said Takao Matsumura, a professor at Keio
University who has joined the suit. “They are trying to educate the younger generations with a strange historical
philosophy” that negates Japanese guilt.
The Japanese Education Ministry in 1965 ordered a textbook author to delete references to Unit 731 -
as well as references to Japan’s invasion of China and massacre in Nanjing - because there was “no credible
scholarly research” to corroborate them. The order led to a 32-year legal fi ght that ended when the Supreme
Court said the ministry was wrong.
“Even if we don’t win the case, by fi ling the lawsuit, a lot of historical facts become revealed and become
clear,” Mr. Matsumura said.
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