Posted on 08/01/2002 9:14:54 AM PDT by Conagher
TOKYO - A self-confessed Japanese war criminal called on the government to apologise for testing biological weapons on thousands of Chinese prisoners yesterday in advance of a legal ruling on the activities of a germ warfare unit during the second world war Yoshio Shinozuka, a veteran of the top-secret Unit 731, told reporters he had done what no man should do in developing bubonic plague viruses and conducting vivisections on captives near Harbin in China.
"These human beings were called logs. We said we have chopped one log, two logs," the frail and bespectacled 78-year-old said. "This unit cruelly murdered human beings, first by caging them and then by killing them."
Mr Shinozuka is a key witness in a case in the Tokyo district court in which 180 Chinese plaintiffs are demanding compensation and an apology from the Japanese government for the death of relatives they say were killed by Unit 731.
Historians say that few details of the Unit 731's activities came to light after the war, because the US wanted to use the research of what was then the world's leading biological warfare research team in the subsequent cold war.
The case is the most detailed and longest-running of more than a dozen war-related suits against the Japanese government. It has produced witnesses who have detailed how the Japanese army dumped fleas infected with bubonic plague near Harbin in 1940, in a deadly trial of germ warfare.
Up to 3,000 Chinese are believed to have died as a direct result of Unit 731's experiments to make weapons of mass destruction from diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, cholera, bubonic plague and anthrax.
Mr Shinozuka described how he participated in the vivisection of five Chinese prisoners, and in the mass production of deadly pathogens.
His role was to hose the prisoners down and scrub them with a brush before the operations. Once they were cleaned, army surgeons would check that the captives' hearts were still beating and then cut them open with a scalpel, he said.
"This lawsuit is to question the conscience of Japan as a whole," Mr Shinozuka said. "If you admit that you have done something wrong, you apologise."
The government, which only recently acknowledged the existence of Unit 731, has rarely challenged the evidence provided during the five-year long case, but has not put anyone involved on trial.
As in previous actions brought by former prisoners of war and women forced into sexual slavery for Japanese troops, the government is expected to have the case rejected on a technicality: that all claims were settled by the 1951 San Francisco treaty.
But the mass of uncontested facts presented are an embarrassment, and will add to the country's difficulties in laying to rest its bitter wartime legacy.
Seems to me that, in some ways, not much has changed.
Of course the Japanese will come crying to the US because the big bad Chinese are giving them their comeuppins.
This issue transcends communist/capitalist ideology. It is really about Japanese arrogance and the radical right wing who still adheres to their Nazi-like racial superiority ideology. Hopefully these types will be gradually put away and/or die off.
Ironic, also, that the Japanese government employs a CCP tactic of keeping their populace ignorant. Whatever works, right?
Right wing as in less government, more freedom? Nazis were not right wing. Communists and their media puppets spread that lie after the Nazi atrocities were revealed.
What does racism have to do with being "right wing?" The biggest racists in America are from the left...they look at people as objects and see first color, sex, etc., for political purposes. The Republican Party was formed in the US to protest slavery in the mid 1850s...and to keep slavery from moving west with national expansion.
Sorry, didn't mean to go off topic, but as long as this "Nazi=right wing" lie is allowed to live, those tyrant leaders and nations will continue to rise and they will not be held accountable by their fellow media socialists. If "racial superiority" and nationalism were right wing, N. Korea's 50 some year history of mass murder and torture under Communist rule would have the whole world up in arms. Yet, the press, OUR press gives this left wing monster a pass.
Mussolini coined the "third way" as a mix of communism and capitalism (and other unreported facts about the left):
Joseph Goebbels own words: "Those Damn Nazis"
A Little Secret About the Nazis
Socialist Origins of Neo-Nazi-ism
You Mean Hitler Wasn't a Priest?
All Socialism is National.
No. "Right wing" as in conservative, as in seeking to oppose change, as in adhering to the ideals of the Imperial Japanese government circa 1930.
"Racist" as in the Japanese are descendents of God himself, and everyone else is merely a two-legged animal. This ideology allowed the Japanese to carry out bayonet practice on living Chinese peasants, rape women from eight to 80 years old, often to death, drive nails into living peoples limbs, skulls and pelvises, clog the river with the bodies of the dead, have beheading contests and other heinous activities.
FYI, do not attempt to equate political labels between or among countries. It just does not work, as has been shown.
Sorry. Just calling 'em as I sees 'em.
Well, then again, maybe not.
No, they are not. I know several of them.
"THOSE GOVERNMENTS DON'T EXIST ANYMORE!"
The Emperor of Japan remained in power until the 1990s. Several of the unprosecuted wartime generals went on to high offices in government and in the private sector. To this day most of them deny any wrongdoing in World War II.
"You touchy feely liberals are too much!"
I'm not a "touchy-feely liberal."
The Japanese government has not lifted a finger to help these people. Korean comfort women have sued for reparations only to have their case dismissed. American servicemen who worked as slave laborers in Japan have also had their case dismissed. Japan escaped the war largely unscathed, Hiroshima and Nagasaki notwithstanding.
In contrast, Germany, having been utterly destroyed by the Allies, has shown contrition almost to a fault and, if my memory serves, has paid reparations.
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