The Art Neuro Weblog

Who's Got It?
As the days wear on in this Sino-Japanese row, it seems to me that the Chinese really mean to drag everything through the mud. Now they want the site of the infamous Unit 731 commemorated by UNESCO.

Jin Chengmin, a researcher with the Harbin Municipal Academy of Social Sciences, pointed to the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz in Poland and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan as precedents for UNESCO protection of war ruins.

"The Unit 731 site should also qualify as a World Heritage site," Jin was quoted as saying. Located south of Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang province, the laboratories, prisons and crematoria were notorious for experiments on humans to develop germ weapons, such as bubonic plague, typhoid, anthrax and cholera.

At least 3,000 people, including Chinese civilians, Russians, Mongolians and Koreans, were killed in the experiments between 1939 and 1945, Xinhua said. Outside the site, more than 200,000 Chinese were killed by biological weapons produced by Unit 731, it said.

"We will apply for World Heritage status to let more people in the world know the truth, which may serve to remind us of the barbarity of war," Wang Peng, curator of the 731 Exhibition Hall, was quoted as saying.

In a landmark ruling in 2002, the Tokyo District Court acknowledged that the unit had tested biological weapons in China. But it rejected demands for compensation from 180 Chinese plaintiffs who said their relatives were killed by the unit, saying the issue had been settled in post-war treaties.

Japan's government officially neither denies nor recognizes the activities of the unit.
"The government is not in possession of materials that tell us about the activities of this unit. If we do find some materials, we would accept it as a solemn fact of history," Foreign Ministry deputy spokesman Akira Chiba said.

So I smirked.
At the end of WWII, the USA's OSS swooped in and grabbed everything it could on Unit 731. Of course the Japanese would have no documentation on that today because the Americans took it. And of course they are still using knowledge gathered there today. Heck, they even sold some of that tech to Saddam Hussein, which is why they knew he had access to BW; they even knew the first BW threat would come as anthrax, which was the bacillus used by Unit 731. And of course Saddam bought Sarin gas CW Agents off the Aum Supreme Truth Sect. All this results in the Japanese government effectively saying, we don't have any papers that document, let alone comment upon the said Unit. These are all merely allegations, blah, blah, blah. Well, the Executive arm of the Japanese government's got some reasons to keep playing dumb. Chalk it up to another irony of history.

However, I do draw your attention to the bit where the judgement handed down by the Japanese courts in 2002 that acknowledged Unit 731 happened, but also that the compensations were paid out at the time of the San Francisco Treaty. That's no lie there.

- Art Neuro