[Nasional-m] Japan must face its biological warfare legacy.

[Ambon]

EDITORIAL: Court ruling on Unit 731

Japan must face its biological warfare legacy.

This time Japan must stop hiding from its past. The government response to a
suit by Chinese regarding Japan's Unit 731 has again underscored Japan's
refusal to face the reality of its own history.
The Tokyo District Court has formally upheld the historic fact that Unit 731
of the Japanese Imperial Army waged biological warfare in China in World War
II, even though it refused to award damages to the plaintiffs. The ruling is
the first court recognition of Japan's biological warfare.
The court heard considerable testimony from the plaintiffs, former members
of Unit 731 and Japanese and Chinese researchers who have studied the
circumstances and found that the unit, under army headquarters' orders, in
fact killed many Chinese with air-dropped fleas that had been infected with
pest bacilli and poisoned their wells with cholera bacilli.
Biological weapons had already been banned from combat under international
law at the time. The Tokyo District Court acknowledged that the germ warfare
did ``truly horrible and enormous'' harm to Chinese people and denounced the
army's actions as ``inhumane.''
Oddly, however, the government, a defendant in the suit, neither denied nor
confirmed Unit 731's role in bacteriological warfare. Without a position on
the allegations, the government based its defense purely on the legal
argument that Japan no longer has any obligation to compensate war victims.
For many years, the government has insisted it has no knowledge of this dark
chapter of the war. It has said in the Diet and elsewhere that there is no
present evidence to confirm just what Unit 731 did.
But no nation can be permitted to avoid clarifying the facts of its own
actions with such grave consequences in the not-so-distant past. By refusing
to bring out the truth, the government is, in effect, denying its
responsibility to the people. Such an attitude only deepens the distrust of
Japan abroad, especially among Japan's Asian neighbors.
Japan has a political obligation to back international efforts to stop the
spread of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and eliminate them. If
the government cannot set the record straight on the nation's own past germ
warfare, however, any call to ban biological weapons would ring hollow.
The government must swiftly investigate the activities of Unit 731 and
publish the findings. The Diet could conduct its own independent
investigation.
Key to the fact-finding efforts are records about the unit that were
confiscated from Japan by the United States during the Allied Occupation.
These documents have already been returned to Japan, according to Americans
familiar with the issue. But the Japanese government still claims there are
no such documents. The government must now make a sincere effort to reveal
the truth about allegations of medical experiments on Chinese people and the
unit's biological attacks, with the cooperation of China and the United
States.
Some historians believe the United States obtained the pertinent documents
in exchange for its agreement not to try senior Unit 731 officers in the
Tokyo war crimes tribunal. It is also necessary to dig out the truth and the
hidden accounts of the grisly activities of Unit 731 now obscured.
Any nation seeking a place of honor in the community of nations has a moral
obligation to make its responsibilities clear on their own initiative and
consider how to compensate its victims.
Japan can never bury the ghosts of its past without confronting them first.
Dealing with the haunting legacy of wartime brutality is a harsh test of
Japan's national integrity.
--The Asahi Shimbun, Aug. 29(IHT/Asahi: August 30,2002)