Japanese Germ-War Atrocities: A Half Century of Stonewalling the World  

March 4, 1999, NYTIMES

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL with JUDITH MILLER

More than 50 years after the Japanese army attacked China with germ weapons and conducted gruesome experiments on thousands of human beings, Japan is resisting demands that it compensate the victims or make records of the atrocities public.

The Japanese government has declined to cooperate with efforts by the Justice Department to put the names of several hundred surviving veterans of the germ warfare operations on a list of suspected war criminals barred from entering the United States, U.S. officials say.

It has also rebuffed researchers seeking access to a vast archive of military documents in Tokyo that detail the World War II activities of the Japanese Imperial Army, including its chief biological warfare arm, known as Unit 731.

The American authorities seized the archive after World War II but returned it to Japan in 1958 after only a small number of documents were copied.

Japan's approach stands in contrast to that of Germany, which has paid about $80 billion to war victims and their families. Private industries and banks in Germany and Switzerland plan to pay billions more.

Despite the refusal of the Japanese government to release information, new details are emerging about the scope of the biological program. Research by scholars, campaigns by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles and the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, and a lawsuit in Japan by Chinese plaintiffs have unleashed a flood of new accounts that substantially expand the historical record.

The accounts have heightened tensions between Japan and its neighbors. They suggest that Japan's World War II germ attacks were even more widespread than first thought, stretching from Burma (now Myanmar), Thailand, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) to Russia and Chinese cities and hamlets.

The death toll from Japan's biological warfare remains in dispute. Some scholars assert that several hundred thousand people died, mostly in China. Others say the casualties were far lower. Scholars estimate that an additional 10,000 prisoners were killed in experiments, perhaps a dozen times the number who died at the hands of Dr. Josef Mengele and other Nazi scientists.

Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of the Office of Special Investigations in the Justice Department, said the dispute between Tokyo and Washington over suspected war criminals has been quietly building for three years.

The Justice Department's worldwide list of war crimes suspects now includes the names of about 60,000 Germans and other Europeans, including Kurt Waldheim, the former U.N. secretary-general, president of Austria and wartime intelligence officer in Hitler's army.

By contrast, Rosenbaum said the United States had dates of birth and other identifying data on fewer than 100 suspected Japanese war criminals. The Justice Department has hundreds of names to add to the "watch list," but it cannot do so until Japan confirms basic information like dates of birth.

"For a friendly government to deny us access is astonishing, beyond the pale," Rosenbaum said. "Most outrageous of all is that the Japanese government will not provide the dates of birth of war crimes suspects identified by OSI so that they can be barred from the United States. They won't even tell us if they will ever assist us."

A Japanese Embassy press spokesman in Washington, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto, said his government would have no comment because the issue concerned "the specifics of Japanese cooperation with the United States, which are of a diplomatic nature."

Little was publicly known about Japan's germ operations until the 1980s, when scholars published their first accounts. More recently, veterans of Unit 731 have been speaking publicly in Japan about their misdeeds, seeking expiation.

According to participants, victims and records, the unit mounted widespread germ attacks with anthrax, typhoid and other pathogens. Among other experiments, its doctors infected prisoners with disease germs, removed organs and blood and withheld water to collect data on how the human body copes with illness and deprivation. Many victims were then dissected alive.

Only one former member of the unit was ever turned away from entering the United States: Yushio Shinozuka, who arrived last summer to join a forum and publicly express anguish over having prepared victims for vivisection.

Rather than fading with time, diplomats and scholars say, sensitivities over the issue are becoming sharper as new generations re-examine wartime events, as they have with the Holocaust in Europe.

Complicating the issue is the complicity of American officials in shielding from prosecution top Japanese scientists who turned over their data to the United States, which was developing its own germ warfare program.

Among the questions that remain unresolved is whether doctors working with Unit 731 experimented on American prisoners of war.

"The cover-up continues," said Sheldon H. Harris, emeritus professor of history at California State University in Northridge and the author of "Factories of Death" (Routledge, 1994), an account of the Japanese germ warfare program and the American hunger for its secrets. The book is scheduled for publication in Japan this spring.

Harris said in an interview that while he had unearthed American translations of three Japanese autopsy reports comprising nearly 1,000 pages recounting wartime medical experiments on dead and living prisoners, 17 other reports were missing, along with some 8,000 photographic slides documenting the experiments.

The origins of Unit 731 go back to 1930 and the Tokyo laboratory of an ultranationalist surgeon and microbiologist, Shiro Ishii, who was later made a general. Within two years, after Japanese troops overran Manchuria in northeast China, Ishii, using the cover of a sanitation unit, set up the first of several large biological warfare and human research centers in Ping Fan and other areas around Harbin, a heavily Russian city near the Soviet border.

Over the next decade, scholars and researchers say, the Japanese attacked hundreds of heavily populated communities and remote regions with germ bombs. Evidence of the attacks continues to emerge.

"There appears to have been a massive germ war campaign in Yunnan Province bordering Burma," said Daniel Barenblatt, a graduate psychologist and New York City researcher who has been assembling material for five years for a documentary with the film director David Irving, chairman of the undergraduate film and television department at New York University.

"They seem to have been killing ethnic minorities in a jungle campaign," Barenblatt said.

Many questions remain unanswered.

It is still not established, for example, whether American prisoners of war were among those experimented on. Some Americans have said they were sickened by contaminated feathers in their food, and Japanese accounts tell of jars containing body parts labeled American among other nationalities.

Frank James, 77, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, ended up in 1942 at a Japanese prison camp in Mukden, Manchuria, where, he said, he became a 70-pound living skeleton.

"They gave us shots, sprays in the face," he recounted in a telephone interview from his home in Redwood City, Calif., where he is confined with diabetes and lung disease.

He said one of his jobs at Mukden was to retrieve for dissection frozen corpses that he was certain were American. "They opened them up so they could look into the lining of the stomach," he recalled. "The light pink icicles in the stomach weren't thawed."

A new hourlong documentary to be broadcast on Sunday on the History Channel, "Unit 731: Nightmare in Manchuria," features interviews with several other surviving American war prisoners who say they were victimized by Japanese experiments.

But records of their debriefings by American officials remain unavailable. Harris, the author, said he applied for the records under the Freedom of Information Act several years ago and was told by the Veterans Administration that they had been destroyed in a fire in St. Louis.

After the war, American interest in prosecuting members of Unit 731 for war crimes faded fast. While Germany was split in a four-power occupation, the United States had a largely free hand in rebuilding Japan and was forging close ties to the new government.

In addition, Harris said, American scientists were "salivating" over the chance to obtain the forbidden secrets of Japan's human experiments. The American authorities granted Ishii and his associates immunity from prosecution and in exchange received detailed information about the germ warfare program.

The Allies did prosecute 5,570 Japanese, none for biological warfare. Nine Japanese medical school professionals were convicted, and some executed, for vivisecting eight captured American fliers in 1945.

Toshimi Mizobuchi makes no secret of his years with Unit 731. A vigorous 76-year-old real estate manager living outside the Japanese city of Kobe, Mizobuchi is organizing this year's reunion for the several hundred surviving veterans of Unit 731. He says he did not take part in experiments on humans, though he knew of them and argues that they were justifiable.

In a recent interview at home near Kobe with Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center that was recorded and transcribed through an interpreter, Mizobuchi said he still regarded the victims of the experiments as "maruta," or logs.

"They were logs to me," said Mizobuchi, a training officer with the unit. "Logs were not considered to be human. They were either spies or conspirators." As such, he said, "they were already dead. So now they die a second time. We just executed a death sentence."

He said about 30 other veterans of the unit were living near him and that a reunion was held almost every year, drawing 40 or 50. Mizobuchi said he had never visited the American mainland. But in follow-up questions he said he had been to Hawaii twice for sightseeing.

"It's a stain on history," said Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, founded in 1977 in the name of the Viennese concentration camp survivor and Nazi-hunter to keep alive the memory of the genocide of the Jews and to campaign for tolerance and human rights.

Cooper said he had interviewed former germ war soldiers and others last month in Japan and planned to present Congress and the White House with evidence he had gathered.

"This blanket amnesty can't stand," he said.

Nearly 60 years later, Ada Pivo of Los Angeles is still looking for the truth about Unit 731's operations.

During the war, she said in an interview, she lived with her family in Harbin, where the unit made its headquarters. In 1940 her 17-year old sister, Leah, was one of two members of a Jewish youth group who contracted typhoid and died after an outing. Mrs. Pivo believes that her sister was infected by a bottle of lemonade spiked with bacteria by Japanese scientists.

It is known that food and drink and even children's sweets were sometimes laced with pathogens. But without access to Japanese wartime records, it may never be possible to establish the link to a particular operation in Harbin.

Japan has long restricted access to military records, which were in the hands of the American authorities for nine years after the war.

The documents, first screened by the CIA, include hundreds of thousands of pages of War Ministry records from 1868 to 1942, Naval Ministry records from 1868 to 1939 and operational records of many units throughout the war.

In 1948 the CIA turned over the records to the National Archives, with no indication of what, if anything, had been removed. In 1957 the collection was ordered returned to Japan.

Concerned over the potential loss, a group of scholars including Edwin O. Reischauer of Harvard University and John Young of Georgetown University, obtained a Ford Foundation grant to hurriedly microfilm what they could.

In February 1958, after about 5 percent of the records were copied, Young recalled in an interview, the documents were sent to Baltimore and and loaded aboard a ship for Japan. "There was no way we could read them all," said Young, who deplored the loss.

In any case, Young, who assisted Allied war crimes investigators in China after the war, compiled a 144-page index to the pages that were microfilmed.

A microfilm set was presented to the National Diet Library in Tokyo, an irony, Young said, considering t
 

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