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For the Chinese witnesses at the trial, the motivation is more personal. “Neither the Japanese government
nor the Japanese people had the right to violate our lives,” said Zhou Hong Gen, 71, a retired municipal
worker who said he lost 15 family members to the plague.
“The Japanese government committed a crime against us,” he told the court last week. “Shouldn’t they be
responsible for this? This is why I came from China to Japan.”
The suit is part of a worldwide trend to seek legal redress of history. Claims from prisoners and victims
of Japan’s wartime activities have been fi led around the world, but in Japanese courts, they have consistently
been dismissed.
Government lawyers have offered no rebuttal to the testimony presented in court, claiming that there is
no legal jurisdiction for the case. But the plaintiffs are heartened that the Tokyo District Court has not thrown
out the case.
“Through this trial, this is the fi rst time the whole grand picture of damage caused by Unit 731 has been
revealed,” said Makato Ueda, a professor at Rikkyo University in Tokyo.
The government was forced to acknowledge the existence of the unit a decade ago, but has refused to
acknowledge the unit’s actions.
“We do not have enough evidence or documents to say what experiments took place,” said Kenko Sone,
an offi cial in the China bureau of Japan’s Foreign Affairs Ministry. “We have not been able to confi rm clearly
what happened with Unit 731.”
That explanation contradicts painstaking evidence compiled by historians and journalists, and the vivid
testimony in this court case. Yoshio Shinozuka, 76, who was drafted at age 15 to perform chores in Unit 731,
testifi ed in November that he had helped prepare biological weapons and had witnessed experimentation on
human prisoners.
Mr. Shinozuka said he helped cultivate fl eas on rats - and then bottled the fl eas using a contraption made
from a bathtub in a third fl oor room. The fl eas were then infected with the plague, mixed with wheat to draw
rats that would be carriers, and dropped by airplane on several civilian areas in China.
Mr. Shinozuka said he also helped doctors who injected bubonic plague into prisoners and then cut them
open to see the effect of the disease.
Few members of the unit have faced consequences for their actions. Some offi cers became pillars in the
Japanese medical establishment after the war. Lower-ranking unit members lived out quiet lives, chastened by
the vows they took upon entering the unit never to discuss its activities, on pain of death.
Source: International Herald Tribune Posted on 2001-03-11
Verdict in another lawsuit by Wang Xuan and 180 Chinese plaintiffs:
One of the plaintiffs, Wang Xuan, lost nine relatives in a 1942 plague outbreak after the
notorious Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, based in the northeastern Chinese city of
Harbin, scattered lethal microbes over her village in east China’s Zhejiang Province.
August 30, 2002 Tokyo District Court
Judges agreed that the accusations were accurate but ruled that Japan would neither
formally apologize nor pay any compensation. They based their ruling on an agreement made
in 1972 between China and Japan when diplomatic relations were normalized. This 1972
agreement stated that China would give up claims for compensation involving wartime related
damages. Appeal fi led May 20, 2003.
A Japanese high court on Tuesday rejected compensation appeals by 180 Chinese victims
of Japan’s World War II biological warfare program (China Daily, July 20, 2005).
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