Activists say mysterious pile of bones may contain evidence of Japanese war crimes

Depending on who you ask, the bones that have lain in a Tokyo repository for decades could be either the remains of an early 20th-century anatomy class or the unburied and unidentified victims of one of the most notorious war crimes in the country’s history.

A group of activists, historians and other experts who want the government to investigate links to human biological weapons experiments during the war met last weekend to mark the 35th anniversary of their discovery and renew their call for an independent panel to examine the evidence.

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The Japanese government has long avoided discussing wartime atrocities, including the sexual abuse of Asian women known as “comfort women” and Korean forced laborers in Japanese mines and factories, often due to a lack of documentary evidence. Japan has apologized for its aggression in Asia but has faced repeated criticism in South Korea and China since the 2010s for backtracking.

About a dozen skulls, many with slash wounds, and parts of other skeletons were unearthed on July 22, 1989, during construction of a Ministry of Health research institute on the grounds of the military’s Medical School. The school’s close ties to a biological and bacterial warfare unit led many to suspect they might be remnants of a dark history that the Japanese government has never officially acknowledged.

Pink tape is marked on the ground at the site of a former medical school in Tokyo, February 21, 2011. Japan has begun excavations at the site of a former school linked to Unit 731, a wartime biological weapons unit. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

Based in then-Japanese-controlled northeastern China, Unit 731 and several affiliated units inoculated prisoners of war with typhus, cholera, and other diseases, according to historians and former members of the unit. They also say the unit performed unnecessary amputations and harvested organs from live people to practice surgery, and froze prisoners to death in stress tests. The Japanese government has only acknowledged that Unit 731 existed.

Unit 731’s top officials were not tried in postwar tribunals because the U.S. sought to obtain data on chemical weapons, historians say, although lower-ranking officials were tried in Soviet tribunals. Some of the unit’s leaders became medical professors and pharmaceutical executives after the war.

A previous Ministry of Health investigation concluded the bones could not be linked to the school. A 2001 report, based on interviews with 290 people associated with the school, concluded the remains most likely came from bodies used in medical education or brought from war zones for analysis.

It was acknowledged that some interviewees had seen a connection to Unit 731. One said he had seen a head in a barrel shipped from Manchuria in northern China, where the unit was stationed. Two others noted that they had heard of specimens from the unit being stored in a school building but had not actually seen them. Others denied the connection, saying the specimens could include those from the pre-war period.

A 1992 anthropological analysis showed that the bones came from at least 62 and probably more than 100 different bodies, mostly adults from parts of Asia outside Japan. Holes and cuts found on some of the skulls were made after death, it said, but no evidence was found linking the bones to Unit 731.

But activists say the government could do more to uncover the truth, including by releasing full interviews and conducting DNA tests.

Kazuyuki Kawamura, a former Shinjuku district assemblyman who has devoted much of his career to solving the bones mystery, recently obtained 400 pages of research materials from the 2001 report through public records requests and says they show the government “tactfully omitted” key information from witness statements.

The newly released footage is not hard evidence, but it includes vivid descriptions — the man who described seeing the head in the barrel also described helping to serve it, then running off to vomit — and comments from several witnesses who suggested that further investigation could show a connection to Unit 731.

“Our goal is to identify the bones and return them to their families,” Kawamura said. The bones are virtually the only evidence of what happened, he said. “We just want to know the truth.”

Health Ministry official Atsushi Akiyama said witness statements had already been analyzed and included in the 2001 report, and the government’s position remains unchanged. A key missing link is documentary evidence, such as a label on the sample container or official records, he said.

Documents, especially those relating to Japan’s war atrocities, were carefully destroyed in the final days of the war and finding new evidence would be difficult.

Akiyama added that the lack of information about the bones will make DNA analysis difficult.

Hideo Shimizu, who was sent to Unit 731 in April 1945 at age 14 as a lab technician and joined the meeting online from his home in Nagano, said he remembers seeing heads and body parts in jars of formalin stored in a specimen room in the unit’s main building. What struck him most was the sight of a cut-open abdomen with a fetus inside. He was told they were “maruta” — logs — a term used for prisoners selected for experiments.

Days before Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, Shimizu was ordered to collect the bones of prisoners burned in a pit. He was then given a pistol and a packet of cyanide so he could kill himself if he was caught on the way back to Japan.

He was ordered never to tell anyone about his experiences in Unit 731, never to contact his colleagues, and never to apply for government or health care employment.

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Shimizu said he couldn’t tell whether any of the specimens he saw in 731 might be among the Shinjuku bones based on photos of them, but what he saw in Harbin should never be repeated. When he sees his great-grandchildren, he said, they remind him of the fetus he saw and of the lives lost.

“I want young people to understand the tragedy of war,” he said.