Australian Broadcasting Corporation
LATELINE
Late night news & current affairs
TV PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT
LOCATION: Source
Broadcast: 28/8/2002

Japan admits war crimes conducted in WWII

Professor Yuki Tanaka of the Hiroshima Peace Institute joined Lateline to discuss Unit 731.
Compere: Tony Jones Reporter: Tony Jones

Professor Yuki Tanaka of the Hiroshima Peace Institute joined Lateline to discuss Unit 731.

Professor Tanaka has written extensively on Japanese war crimes, in particular, the medical experiments carried out by the Japanese on prisoners of war.

He is currently in Australia and he joins me now in our Melbourne studio.

Yuki Tanaka, we hear a great deal about weapons of mass distraction these days and of course, Unit 731 was set up precisely to perfect and test chemical and biological weapons.

How was their work conducted?

PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA, HIROSHIMA PEACE INSTITUTE: The Unit 731 was set up by a guy called Ishii, General Ishii, who became the Inventory General, an army General, but a very prominent physician and he went to Europe in 1928 in order to investigate the situations regarding biological weapons in western nations.

As the many western nations were conducting research on these weapons at that time.

When he returned to Japan, he set up the epidemic prevention laboratory within a medical school in Tokyo.

But that was expanded to a large research and production facilities in China, at a place called Pingfam - not very far from Haping in Manchuria.

Not only did they build the large complex of the research and production, but also they built the prisons next to these facilities so that they could utilise the prisoners, mainly Chinese prisoners, for the human experiments.

TONY JONES: What can you tell us about those human experiments that they conducted in those years?

PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA: Well, they used various type of pathogens bacterias and viruses, for example, typhoid, bubonic plague, anthrax, cholera, and the like, and tested those weapons on these prisoners.

Although you call prisoners, but they were not POWs.

They were mainly political dissidents who rebelled against the Japanese occupation in China.

TONY JONES: How widespread were these experiments?

I know you've done research looking at what the unit was responsible for closer to Australia, in Papua New Guinea.

PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA: Unit 731 was initially operating only in China, but when the Pacific war started, they set up the branch units, for example in Beijing, Nanjing, Quandong and Singapore and various other places, and even in New Guinea and New Ireland.

And those branch units were responsible for testing the biological and chemical weapons developed by Unit 731 in those regions and planned for the waging of biological warfare in those regions.

So the staff number of Unit 731 so far is about 3,000, but if you include the members who were working for the branch units, the total number was probably 20,000.

TONY JONES: Which is an astonishing number of war criminals, when you think about it.

We just heard that Chinese woman say after the court case was rejected in Tokyo, "Who's going to punish these criminals?"

Why after all these years has nothing been done to punish the people who did these horrific things?

PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA: Partly because the United States was reluctant to prosecute those people who were responsible for committing such atrocious crimes against humanity because the Ishii unit asked for immunity from prosecution in return for providing vital information, the research results they accumulated during the operations of Unit 731 in China.

Although, the Soviet Union actually found that Unit 731 was conducting a human experiment in China, and to some members of Unit 731 who were arrested by the Soviet Union, and they were prosecuted, and the Soviets actually asked General Macarthur to prosecute Ishii, but Macarthur ignored the request from the Soviet Union in order to monopolise the result of the research that Unit 731 conducted.

TONY JONES: Do you know at all, is it documented, what use the United States actually made of this scientific data that was gathered through these inhuman experiments?

PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA: Yes, actually, the large number of research documents were translated into English and they were sent to a United States laboratory in Utah.

They're still there. So the evidence is there, and also General Ishii was invited to the US after the war and he gave lectures to American scientists working for the US forces.

TONY JONES: Japan must have some complicity in this as well. I think it was in 1976 that Japanese journalists first exposed the crimes of Unit 731.

Why did the Japanese Government itself - successive governments indeed - never do anything about this?

PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA: Well, it's a very complex issue.

It's not just the Unit 731 issue, but the many other war crimes concerned, as far as many other war crimes are concerned, the Japanese governments are very reluctant to acknowledge the responsibility.

There are various reasons, but one reason is that many Japanese people see themselves as the victims of war, probably because of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yes, it was the crimes against humanity, so there is no doubt that Japan and Japanese people were victims of the war crimes, but also they were the perpetrators of the war crimes.

Therefore, Japan have to acknowledge this fact in order to be seen as trustworthy and responsible nation.

Japan have to respond to the criticism from neighbouring nations, especially Chinese and Koreans.

TONY JONES: Yuki Tanaka, thank you for joining us tonight on Lateline.

PROFESSOR YUKI TANAKA: Thank you.


Lateline  Archives  About
Lateline@your.abc.net.au
© 2002 Lateline. Australian Broadcasting Corporation.