Authorities in Japan have begun excavating the former site of a medical school that may contain the remains of victims of the country’s wartime germ and biological warfare programme.
The school has links to Unit 731, a branch of the imperial Japanese army that conducted lethal experiments on prisoners as part of efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.
The Japanese government has never officially acknowledged the unit’s existence, despite testimony from former members and a growing volume of documentary evidence.
The health ministry agreed to launch the investigation after Toyo Ishii, a former nurse, said she had helped bury body parts on the site as the US occupation forces moved into Tokyo at the end of the second world war.
Officials, however, said that so far there was no evidence that the site had been used to conduct experiments, or that Unit 731 had been involved.
“We are not certain if the survey will find anything,” Kazuhiko Kawauchi, a health ministry official, told Associated Press. “If anything is dug up, it may not be related to Unit 731.”
Ishii (88) broke her 60-year silence in 2006, claiming that she and colleagues had been ordered to bury numerous corpses, bones and body parts in the grounds of the army hospital before US troops arrived in Tokyo following Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945.
Mass graves
The site, in the capital’s Shinjuku district, could not be explored until residents had been relocated and their apartments demolished for redevelopment last year.
The area is close to another site where the mass graves of dozens of people who may have been victims of wartime experiments was uncovered in 1989.
Investigators concluded, however, that the remains were not connected to Unit 731 and that there was no evidence of criminal activity.
Unit 731, which was based in Harbin in northern China, conducted experiments on tens of thousands of mostly Chinese and Korean prisoners, and a small number of Allied prisoners of war.
According to historical accounts, male and female prisoners were subjected to vivisection without anaesthesia after they had been deliberately infected with diseases such as typhus and cholera.
Some had limbs amputated or organs removed, while others were hanged upside down until they choked or frozen to death in tests of human endurance.
Leading members of the unit were secretly granted immunity from prosecution in return for giving US occupation forces access to years of research into biological warfare. – guardian.co.uk