Volume 4 | Issue 10 | Article ID 2246 | Oct 02, 2006 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus

Tokyo Homes May Sit on World War II Mass Grave

Yamaguchi Mari

Tokyo Homes May Sit on World War II Mass A mass grave of between 62 and more than 100 Grave possible war-experiment victims was uncovered in a nearby area in 1989. But Ishii's account - Yamaguchi Mari publicly released in June - could yield a far larger number and a firmer connection to Unit TOKYO - The Toyama No. 5 apartment block is 731, Japan's dreaded germ and biological quiet at midday - laundry flapping from warfare outfit. balconies, old people taking an after-lunch "If the bones are actually there, they are likely stroll. But the building and its nearby park may related to Unit 731 itself, because the facility be sitting on a gruesome World War II secret. that used to stand in that part of the compound A wartime nurse has broken more than 60 was closely linked to the unit," said Keiichi years of silence to reveal her part in burying Tsuneishi, Kanagawa University history dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bodies there as professor and expert of Japan's wartime American forces occupied the Japanese capital. biological warfare.

The way experts see it, these were no ordinary Ishii's disclosure led to a face-to-face meeting casualties of war, but possible victims of with Health Minister Jiro Kawasaki and a Tokyo's shadowy wartime experiments on live government pledge to investigate. But it may prisoners of war - an atrocity that has never be a long time before anything is confirmed. been officially recognized by the Japanese Health Ministry official Jiro Yashiki rules out a government, but is well documented byspeedy exhumation. historians and participants. "People still live there and we can't visit each The neighborhood on the west side of Tokyo is family to remind them of the bones ... just deeply troubled. imagine how they feel about it," he said. "What if we find nothing after all the trouble?" "I feel sorry for remains with such a sad history," said Teppei Kuroda, a college senior The 84-year-old nurse's story is the latest twist who lives there. "I think they should be dug up in the legacy of Japan's rampage through Asia and mourned properly." in the 1930s and '40s.

Their first burial was anything but dignified. From its base in Japan-controlled Harbin, China, Unit 731 and related units injected war Former nurse Toyo Ishii says that during the prisoners with typhus, cholera and other weeks following Japan's surrender on Aug. 15, disease as research into germ warfare, 1945, she and colleagues at an army hospital at according to historians and former unit the site were ordered to bury corpses, bones members. Unit 731 also is believed to have and body parts - she doesn't know how many - performed vivisections and frozen prisoners to before the Americans arrived. death in endurance tests.

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The 1989 find, during construction of a Health In an interview at her Tokyo home, she said she Ministry research institute at the former army was assigned to the hospital's oral surgery medical school site in Tokyo, revealed dozens department in 1944. of fragmented thigh bones and skulls, some with holes drilled in them or sections cut out. She said the hospital had three morgues, where bodies with numbered tags around their necks Police denied any evidence of a crime, and the floated in a formalin-filled pool, awaiting bones weren't properly analyzed until two dissection. Body parts were preserved in years later. In 2001 the Health Ministry bottles. concluded that the remains - many of them of After the surrender, workers piled the bodies non-Japanese Asians - were most likely from and bottles in carts and brought them to empty bodies used in "medical education" or brought lots in the compound, she said. back from the war zone for analysis at the medical school. "We took the samples out of the glass containers and dumped them into the hole," she The ministry said the bones could not be wrote in a statement to the government in June. directly linked to Unit 731, though it "We were going to be in trouble, I was told, if acknowledged that some interviewees had American soldiers asked us about the suggested they were shipped from Manchuria, specimens." northern China, where the unit was based. She said a hospital official told her years later In 2002, the Health Ministry built a memorial that a public housing complex for the families repository for the bones. But it has refused of senior doctors and hospital officials, repeated requests for DNA tests from relatives including himself, was built at the site to cover of several Chinese believed to have perished in up the mass grave. That complex was later Unit 731. replaced by Toyama No. 5.

Ishii says she was never involved in nor knew about experiments on humans. Her account This story was written for the Associated Press dwells on the final chapter of the war and the on September 17, 2006. Posted on Japan Focus, rush to conceal it. October 13, 2006.

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