- TOKYO (Reuters) - A Japanese
court should look to its conscience when it rules next month on the deaths
of Chinese used as guinea pigs by a top secret Japanese biological warfare
unit in World War II, a veteran of the program said Tuesday.
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- "I was a member of Unit 731 and I have done what
no human being should ever do," said Yoshio Shinozuka, 78, a former
Imperial Army soldier who conducted experiments and vivisections on Chinese
captives near the northern Chinese city of Harbin.
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- Shinozuka has given testimony on the secret activities
of Unit 731 on behalf of 180 Chinese who are suing the Japanese government
for compensation and an apology for deaths of family members they say were
killed in experiments at the world's first biological warfare laboratory.
-
- "These human beings were called logs. We said we
have chopped one log, two logs," the slight, balding, bespectacled
Shinozuka said in an address to foreign correspondents in Tokyo.
-
- "Human beings were synonymous with logs."
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- The court is due to rule Aug. 27 in the case, which has
brought to light details of Unit 731. Some 3,000 Chinese are believed to
have died in experiments to mass produce diseases such as cholera, bubonic
plague and anthrax as weapons of war.
-
- "This lawsuit ... is to question the conscience
of Japan as a whole," Shinozuka said.
-
- But he hinted that he did not expect the plaintiffs'
demand for an apology to succeed even though he estimated 250,000 people
died as a result of experiments devised by the secret biological testing
center.
-
- Shinozuka declined to comment directly on the likely
outcome of the case, filed in 1997, but said recent history showed Japanese
courts were unlikely to issue an apology.
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- IF YOU'RE WRONG, SAY SORRY
-
- "There is a very clear trend now to admit facts
but to reject an apology for the facts," he said. "But if you
admit that you have done something wrong, you apologize. That is the way
a man should live."
-
- Japanese courts have in recent months ruled in favor
of plaintiffs suing private companies for their use as wartime forced labor.
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- However, no case against the government has gone this
far. Most have been rejected on the grounds that the 1951 San Francisco
Treaty that officially ended the war also put a full stop to claims for
compensation against Japan.
-
- Describing the grisly activities of Unit 731 in minute
detail, Shinozuka said he took part himself in the vivisection of five
Chinese prisoners as well as in the mass production of cholera, typhoid
and bubonic plague germs.
-
- It was his job to wash the prisoners with a hose and
scrub them with a brush before the operations began. As soon as a stethoscope
had been used to check the heartbeat, a knife was wielded on the victim.
-
- "So this unit thus cruelly murdered human beings,
first by caging them up and then by killing them," he said.
-
- Asked whether Allied prisoners or Russians had been among
the human guinea pigs at Unit 731, destroyed along with any human evidence
as Soviet troops advanced at the end of the war, Shinozuka said he knew
of no Allied prisoners.
-
- "But it was not only Chinese. I saw one Russian
woman," he said.
-
- Shinozuka, who was held in a prison camp in China until
1956, said he deeply regretted his own actions.
-
- "What I have done in China entirely comprised war
crimes, what I admit are very serious war crimes," he said.
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