China opens museum of Japanese torture

Press, 31 August 1985, Page 30

China opens museum of Japanese torture

AAP NZPA-Reuter Peking China has opened a museum in the buildings where Japanese army researchers tortured more than 3000 prisoners to death in germ warfare experiments, the Peking Review magazine said.

Between 1936 and 1945 the camp and laboratories at Harbin city’s Pingfang district in north-east China were the headquarters for Unit 731, which initially disguised itself as the “Water Supply Epidemic Prevention Department.” In experiments that echoed the atrocities of the Nazi, Josef Mengele, at Auschwitz, the unit drained blood from captives and replaced it with that of horses, or froze people to death in order to observe the effects of cold. The researchers infected Chinese, Russian, and Korean prisoners with cholera, syphilis and plague, then dissected them to study the military applications of the diseases, according to Chinese officials in Harbin and foreign historians. “They screamed and screamed but we did not regard the logs as human beings. They were lumps of meat on a chopping block,” one Unit 731 veteran was quoted as saying by Japan-

ese authors, Seiichi Yoimura and Masaki Shimozato.

Although China had long known details of Unit 731’s activities, it kept quiet even after Yoimura revealed details in a 1981 expose. This reticence changed in 1981 when Japan planned revisions in its school textbooks to alter and moderate references to atrocities by its troops in Asia during the war.

“Of course the textbook controversy had an influence on our decision to open the museum two years ago,” Lu Ankui, a Harbin official who helped set up the exhibits, told Reuters.

But the contents of the exhibition were so politically delicate for China’s relations with its present top trading partner that the museum refused to grant a preview until the official opening.

The exhibits occupy a few rooms in one corner of Unit 731’s office block, a long yellow stucco building which now houses Harbin’s number 25 middle school.

The prison building where most victims died is now a lumber yard but the crumbling corridor through which they walked to their deaths still stands, as does a squat concrete hut where the Japanese bred rats and

fleas to carry plague germs. China’s continued bitterness over the war was revealed by strong reproaches in the press when the Prime Minister, Mr Yasuhiro Nakasone, visited Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shinto shrine to Japan’s war dead earlier this month. The activities of Unit 731 have recently drawn public attention in the West after the showing of a British television documentary, which revealed that United States, British, and Australian prisoners, held in Mukden south of Harbin, were among the victims of Unit 731.

They were given similar diseases as in Harbin, to compare the reactions of Anglo-Saxons with Asians or Russians. Both the British documentary film and Yoimura’s book accused United States investigators of covering up the war crimes of Unit 731’s officers, in return for the scientific information which the Japanese had gleaned from experiments on humans.

It said that several prominent Japanese scientists, who learned their skills with Unit 731, are successful and honoured figures today.