Mysterious bones may contain evidence of Japanese war crimes, campaigners say

TOKYO —

Depending on who you ask, the bones that have been sitting in a Tokyo repository for decades could be either leftovers from early 20th-century anatomy classes or the unburied, unidentified victims of one of the country’s most notorious war crimes.

Campaigners, historians and other experts who want the government to investigate links to wartime germ warfare experiments on humans gathered last weekend to mark the 35th anniversary of their discovery and renew their call for an independent panel to review the evidence.

The Japanese government has long avoided discussing wartime atrocities, including sexual abuse of Asian women known as “comfort women” and Korean forced laborers in Japanese mines and factories, often due to a lack of documentary evidence. Japan has apologized for its aggression in Asia, but since the 2010s it has repeatedly come under fire in South Korea and China for backsliding.

A dozen skulls, many with cuts, and other skeletal parts were discovered on July 22, 1989, during construction of a Health Ministry research institute on the site of the then Army Medical School. The school’s close ties to a bacteriological and biological warfare unit led many to suspect that they might be remnants of a dark history that the Japanese government has never officially acknowledged.

Based in northeastern China, then under Japanese control, Unit 731 and several related units injected prisoners of war with vaccines against typhus, cholera and other diseases, according to historians and former members of the unit. They also say the unit performed unnecessary amputations and organ harvesting on living people to practice surgery and froze prisoners to death in endurance tests. The Japanese government has only acknowledged the existence of Unit 731.

No trial for leaders

Senior Unit 731 officials were not tried in postwar tribunals as the United States sought to obtain data on chemical warfare, historians say, although lower-ranking officials were tried in Soviet courts. Some of the unit’s leaders became medical professors and pharmaceutical industry executives after the war.

An earlier Health Ministry investigation said the bones could not be linked to the unit and concluded that the remains were most likely from bodies used in medical education or brought back from war zones for analysis, in a 2001 report based on interviews with 290 people associated with the school.

The agency acknowledged that some people interviewed had established links to Unit 731. One said he had seen a head in a barrel shipped from Manchuria, in northern China, where the unit was based. Two others said they had heard of specimens from the unit stored in a school building but had not seen them. Others denied the connection, saying the specimens could include those from the prewar era.

An anthropological analysis in 1992 found that the bones came from at least 62 and possibly more than 100 different bodies, mostly adults from parts of Asia other than Japan. The holes and cuts found in some of the skulls were made after death, it said, but it found no evidence linking the bones to Unit 731.

But campaigners say the government could do more to uncover the truth, including publishing full accounts of his interviews and carrying out DNA testing.

Kazuyuki Kawamura, a former Shinjuku district assemblyman who has devoted much of his career to solving the mystery of the bones, recently obtained 400 pages of research documents from the 2001 report using freedom of information requests, and said it shows the government has “tactfully excluded” key information from the witnesses’ accounts.

Vivid descriptions

The newly released documents do not contain compelling evidence, but they do include vivid descriptions — the man who described seeing a head in a barrel also described helping to handle it and then running away to vomit — and comments from several witnesses who suggested that further forensic investigation might show a connection to Unit 731.

“Our goal is to identify the bones and return them to their families,” Kawamura said. The bones are virtually the only evidence of what happened, he added. “We just want to find out the truth.”

Health Ministry official Atsushi Akiyama said the testimonies had already been analyzed and considered in the 2001 report, and the government’s position remained unchanged. He added that documentary evidence, such as the label on a sample container or official documents, was a key missing link.

Documents, especially those concerning Japan’s atrocities during the war, were carefully destroyed in the final days of the war, and it would be difficult to find new evidence.

Akiyama added that a lack of information about the bones would make DNA analysis difficult.

Disturbing memory

Hideo Shimizu, who was sent to Unit 731 in April 1945 at the age of 14 as a lab technician and participated in the online meeting from his home in Nagano, said he remembered seeing heads and body parts in jars of formalin stored in a specimen room in the unit’s main building. One of the pieces that struck him most was a dissected belly with a fetus inside. He was told they were “maruta” (logs of wood), a term used for prisoners chosen for experiments.

A few days before Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, Shimizu was ordered to collect the bones of prisoners burned in a pit. He was then given a pistol and a packet of cyanide to commit suicide if caught on his journey back to Japan.

He was ordered never to speak to anyone about his experience at Unit 731, never to contact his colleagues, and never to seek employment in government or the medical field.

Shimizu said he couldn’t tell whether a specimen he saw at 731 could be among the Shinjuku bones by looking at their photos, but that what he saw in Harbin should never happen again. When he sees his great-grandchildren, he said, they remind him of that fetus he saw and the lives lost.

“I want young people to understand the tragedy of war,” he said.