Japan set to unearth site linked to grisley WWII secerets

Article from CTV news site.

KTK

Japan to excavate site linked to grisly WW2 secrets - CTV News


The Associated Press
Date: Sunday Feb. 20, 2011 2:32 PM ET
TOKYO — Japan is starting to excavate the site of a former medical school that may reveal grisly secrets from World War II.
The investigation begins Monday at the former school linked to Unit 731, a germ and biological warfare outfit during the war. Shadowy experiments conducted by the unit on war prisoners have never been officially acknowledged by the government but have been documented by historians and participants.
It is the first government probe of the Tokyo site, and follows a former nurse's revelation that she helped bury body parts there as American forces began occupying the capital at the end of the war.
Health Ministry official Kazuhiko Kawauchi said the excavation is aimed at finding out if anything is buried in the plot.
"We are not certain if the survey will find anything," Kawauchi said. "If anything is dug up, it may not be related to Unit 731."
The former nurse, Toyo Ishii, now 88, broke 60 years of silence in 2006, saying she and colleagues at an army hospital at the site were ordered to bury numerous corpses, bones and body parts during the weeks following Japan's Aug. 15, 1945, surrender before American troops arrived in the capital.
Her disclosure led to a face-to-face meeting with the health minister and a government pledge to investigate. The digging had to wait until the scheduled relocation of residents and the demolition of apartments on the site last year.
The site is close to another area where a mass grave of dozens of possible war-experiment victims was uncovered in 1989 during the construction of a Health Ministry research institute.
Any remains found at the planned excavation site would have a stronger connection to Unit 731, said Keiichi Tsuneishi, a Kanagawa University history professor and expert on biological warfare.
"The site used to be the research headquarters of Unit 731," Tsuneishi said. "If bones are found there, they are most likely related to Unit 731."
From its wartime base in Japanese-controlled Harbin in northern China, Unit 731 and related units injected war prisoners with typhus, cholera and other diseases to research germ warfare, according to historians and former unit members. Unit 731 also is believed to have performed vivisections and to have frozen prisoners to death in endurance tests.
The 1989 find revealed dozens of fragmented thigh bones and skulls, some with holes drilled in them or sections cut out. Police denied there was any evidence of criminal activity.
The ministry concluded that the bones could not be directly linked to Unit 731. It said the remains were mostly of non-Japanese Asians and were likely from bodies used in "medical education" or brought back from the war zone for analysis at the medical school.

 

I posted this story in the "General" section since I was having some problem figuring out if (since it is contemporary) it really qualified for this section. No harm I suppose, but since nothing has been done as of yet and nothing has been either found or documented, I thought is was more of a general information article.

As I said, not a problem for me but maybe we should combine the two? Just a thought.

 

Maybe one of the mods could toss this one for us?

Thanks,

KTK

 

Not a problem, I'll move mine into yours if that is ok?

 

^Barbaric indeed. The more coverage this gets the better I say.

 

Well I think that you were the first to post Clint and hopefully yours will be the one to stay. But thank you for offering to leave mine, that was classy.

Ken

 

Wow, you are right.

These sentences bothers me.

"Iishi and his colleagues received immunity from prosecution and ... in exchange they provided a great deal of information to U.S. authorities." In particular, they provided the results of "field tests" in which hundreds of thousands of civilians in China and eastern Russia were exposed to and died from deadly germs such as anthrax and plague."

And none of the death sentences were carried out by the Americans and the Japanese were all free, what 13 years later.

KTK

 

What bothers me the most these days is how its denied in Japan itself. We get Japanese tourists here (Darwin NT Australia) and they can't and in some cases won't beleive what they read at the war museam. The little train that was the first to use the Burma built by POWs railway has written on it "dedicated to those who "suffered" building the railway" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thats got to be the understatement of the 20th century.

 

"Face" is such an overwhelming concept for Japanese that it is hard for westerners to grasp. To formally apologise for a mistake is the worst possible outcome to an action. Which helps explain why thier leaders commited suicide rather than surrender.

 

Agreed Belsasar..but their facesaving is their handle to get hold of not ours. As for mistake..this was nothing any of us could ever agree was a mistake. Amistake is something you do on a computer but Itake your point...If your looking for a mistake..attacking America at Pearl Harbour was their mistake. Killing allied pows was certainly not conjusive to any mistake.

 

This topic is a couple of months old, but on the same topic, Clive Cussler mentions Unit 731 in his novel: Plague Ship. His novels are always entertaining, if you haven't discovered him as of yet.

 

It is sickening what happened to those captured and imprisoned by the Axis in WW2. Especially the Rape of Nanking, yesterday I was reading a book on the Rape of Nanking and it showed a picture of a Chinese youth with his hands bound and tied to a stake staring at the camera, it looked like it was an open field. The caption of the picture claimed that he was used as a bayonete target, It says that he was stabbed in the face. I was horrified, I can't imagine the pain he wen't through, somebody my age to endure such pain. I pray for him. I could feel his fear, what was going through his mind as they took the photograph, just moments before they murdered him.