The Toyama No. 5 apartment block is quiet at midday -- laundry flapping from balconies, old people taking an after-lunch stroll. But the building and its nearby park may be sitting on a gruesome World War II secret.
A wartime nurse has broken more than 60 years of silence to reveal her part in burying dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of bodies there as US forces occupied the Japanese capital.
The way experts see it, these were no ordinary casualties of war, but possible victims of Tokyo's shadowy wartime experiments on live prisoners of war -- an atrocity that has never been officially recognized by the Japanese government.
PHOTO: AP
The neighborhood on the west side of Tokyo is deeply troubled.
"I feel sorry for remains with such a sad history," said Teppei Kuroda, a college senior who lives there.
Former nurse Toyo Ishii says that during the weeks following Japan's surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, she and colleagues at an army hospital at the site were ordered to bury corpses, bones and body parts -- she doesn't know how many -- before the Americans arrived.
A mass grave of between 62 and more than 100 possible war-experiment victims was uncovered in a nearby area in 1989. But Ishii's account -- publicly released in June -- could yield a far larger number and a firmer connection to Unit 731, Japan's dreaded germ and biological warfare outfit.
"If the bones are actually there, they are likely related to Unit 731 itself, because the facility that used to stand in that part of the compound was closely linked to the unit," said Keiichi Tsuneishi, a Kanagawa University history professor and expert on Japan's wartime biological warfare.
Ishii's disclosure led to a face-to-face meeting with Health Minister Jiro Kawasaki and a government pledge to investigate. But it may be a long time before anything is confirmed. Health Ministry official Jiro Yashiki rules out a speedy exhumation.
"People still live there and we can't visit each family to remind them of the bones ... just imagine how they [would] feel about it," he said. "What if we find nothing after all the trouble?"
The 84-year-old nurse's story is the latest twist in the legacy of Japan's rampage through Asia in the 1930s and 1940s.
According to historians and former unit members, from its base in Japan-controlled Harbin, China, Unit 731 and related units injected war prisoners with typhus, cholera and other diseases as part of their research program into germ warfare. Unit 731 is also believed to have performed vivisections and frozen prisoners to death in endurance tests.
The 1989 find, during construction of a Health Ministry research institute at the former army medical school site in Tokyo, revealed dozens of fragmented thigh bones and skulls, some with holes drilled in them or sections cut out.
Police denied any evidence of a crime, and the bones were not properly analyzed until two years later. In 2001, the ministry concluded that the remains -- many of them of non-Japanese Asians -- were most likely from bodies used in "medical education" or brought back from the war zone for analysis at the medical school.
The ministry said the bones could not be directly linked to Unit 731, though it acknowledged that some interviewees had suggested they were shipped from Manchuria, where the unit was based.
In 2002, the ministry built a memorial repository for the bones. But it has refused repeated requests for DNA tests from relatives of several Chinese believed to have perished in Unit 731.
Ishii says she was never involved in nor knew about experiments on humans. Her account dwells instead on the last chapter of the war and the rush to conceal it.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
RSS