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Unit 731 & Shirō Ishii Documentary

....These attacks, orchestrated by Japan’s infamous Unit 731 between 1932 and 1945, are the only documented mass use of germ weapons in modern times. Scholars say that we will never know exactly how many were killed. Sheldon H. Harris, the late American historian, estimated in a pioneering work that between 10,000 and 12,000 Chinese prisoners perished in the bloodcurdling experiments that Unit 731 performed in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Another 300,000 to 500,000 civilians died, he wrote, as a result of Japan’s massive germ assaults on more than 70 Chinese cities and towns. China itself has disclosed no official tally. In fact,...

U.S. journalist John W. Powell, whose 1950s articles alleging American use of germ warfare in Korea sparked sedition charges, has died at 89, his son says. Powell, who had lived for many years in San Francisco, died in the city Monday of complications from pneumonia, son John S. Powell told Wednesday's New York Times. U.S. prosecutors put Powell on trial in 1959 on a rare charge of sedition, after he authored articles for his Shanghai publication The China Monthly Review asserting that U.S. military had employed germ warfare against North Korea, using methods they had allegedly learned from the defeated...

After more than 60 years of silence, World War II's most enduring and horrible secret is being nudged into the light of day. One by one the participants, white-haired and mildmannered, line up to tell their dreadful stories before they die. Akira Makino is a frail widower living near Osaka in Japan. His only unusual habit is to regularly visit an obscure little town in the southern Philippines, where he gives clothes to poor children and has set up war memorials. Mr Makino was stationed there during the war. What he never told anybody, including his wife, was that during...

For 62 years, Akira Makino spoke not a word of what he’d done, but to those who knew him well it must have been obvious that he was a man with a tortured conscience. Why else would he have returned so often to the obscure, mosquito-blown town in the southern Philippines where he had experience such misery during the Second World War? He set up war memorials, gave clothes to poor children, and bought an entire set of uniforms for a local baseball team. Last year, at the age of 83, he embarked on a gruelling pilgrimage to 88 Buddhist...

HONOLULU--Haruki Murakami has won international acclaim with his tales of talking cats and monsters that lurk below ground. The Japanese novelist claims that these strange, dark things have no place in his personal life. "When I'm not writing they are gone, totally," he assures me. "I don't even dream." Mr. Murakami seems pleasantly detached from the obsessive worlds of his novels, where protagonists teeter on the edge, narrowly avoiding some abyss below. "Good writers always look into the darkness," he says, but some "go mad" in the process. Not so for Mr. Murakami, who peers into the underworld but always...

TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- Former Japanese prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, an outspoken politician who jousted with U.S. officials over the auto trade and brought "Big Bang" financial reforms to Tokyo, died on Saturday at the age of 68. Hashimoto, who retired from politics last September citing poor health, had undergone surgery to remove a large part of his intestine after being rushed to hospital on June 4, his son told a news conference. He died in a Tokyo hospital. Hailed as a forceful leader who would tackle reform when he took office in 1996, Hashimoto ultimately faltered in the face...

Ex-soldier fights to make Japan remember its past By Colin Joyce in Tokyo (Filed: 07/06/2006) Japan's amnesia over its militarist past is being challenged by a compelling documentary film which suggests that the Japanese army breached the terms of surrender in 1945 by leaving soldiers to fight on in China. The Ants, to be released next month, records the struggle of the Japanese veteran Waichi Okumura to put atrocities on record and to tell the story of the forgotten soldiers left behind in China. Now 81, Mr Okumura revisited Shanxi province where he fought, including a pilgrimage to the place...

A federal indictment unsealed Thursday charges 32 people with racketeering crimes, including people described as the acting boss, members and associates of the Genovese organized crime family. The 42-count indictment says the defendants engaged in crimes for more than a decade. Those crimes include murder, violent extortion of individuals and businesses, labor racketeering, obstruction of justice, narcotics trafficking, money laundering and firearms trafficking. Federal prosecutors planned to release details at a noon news conference.

Sixty-four years ago today, a quick swipe of a pen by President Franklin D. Roosevelt forever changed the lives of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens. Two months after the Dec. 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering all Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast to move inland, fearing an uproar from their assumed loyalty to Japan. (snip) In 1988, President Ronald Reagan issued an apology for the wrongful imprisonment of the 120,000 American citizens. Those incarcerated were issued $20,000, meant to compensate their losses. (snip) For those living, Fuyuume called the payment a small-token...

The United States will become a second-rate economic power unless it can match the educational performance of its rivals abroad and get more of its students to achieve at the highest levels in math, science and literacy. Virtually every politician, business leader and educator understands this, yet the country has no national plan for reaching the goal. To make matters worse, Americans have remained openly hostile to the idea of importing strategies from the countries that are beating the pants off us in the educational arena. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed four years ago, was supposed to put...

The United States will become a second-rate economic power unless it can match the educational performance of its rivals abroad and get more of its students to achieve at the highest levels in math, science and literacy. Virtually every politician, business leader and educator understands this, yet the country has no national plan for reaching the goal. To make matters worse, Americans have remained openly hostile to the idea of importing strategies from the countries that are beating the pants off us in the educational arena... ...Lurking behind these test scores, however, are two profoundly important and closely intertwined topics...

http://www.centurychina.com/wiihist/japdeny/tokyo_trial.html The Failure of the Tokyo Trial Wu Tianwei "No. One War Criminal" Not Brought to Trial. " "The Majority of Class A War Criminals Not Tried but Released." "all the uncondemned Class A war criminals were set free by Gen. MacArthur in 1947 and 1948. Most of them immediately returned to the Japanese political arena, which was again dominated by the same Fascists and militarists though clad in democratic cloak in disguise." "All Killers of "Human Experimentation" At Large. " "Hundreds of doctors of the former Unit 731 are still practicing or living in retirement in Japan today. "...

IMPERIAL JAPANESE CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: Witness Account "C" Test How Long a Human Being Could Survive With Just Water and Biscuits Imperial Japanese Medical Orderly Ishibashi witnessed: (Translation) "I saw the malnutrition experiments. They were conducted by the project team under the technician Yoshimura. He was a civilian project team under the technician Yoshimura. He was a civilian member of Unit 731. The purpose of the experiments, I believe, was to find out how long a human being could survive just with water and biscuits. Two individuals were used for this experiment. They continuously circled a prescribed course within...

SEOUL (AFP) - President Roh Moo-Hyun has raised the stakes in a heated dispute with Japan, urging South Koreans to prepare for "diplomatic war" with their neighbour. Anger over Japan's claim to a remote group of islets controlled by South Korea has stoked South Korean enmity against its former colonial power in recent weeks. Roh added fuel to the flames Wednesday by accusing Tokyo of failing to make amends for historic wrongs against Koreans. He also attacked Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi for his continued visits to a shrine for Japanese war dead despite protests by Seoul and Beijing. The...

Remnants of Unit 731 Human Experiment Center in China TOKYO — A former soldier of a biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army believes he has a duty to tell the truth about Japanese war crimes committed in China during World War II as part of his effort to apologize for his deeds and because much of what happened is still unknown. Yoshio Shinozuka, 78, has spoken about his war experiences across the country over the decades, vowing not to remain silent about the activities of the notorious Unit 731. The secret unit is believed by some historians...

TOKYO - A self-confessed Japanese war criminal called on the government to apologise for testing biological weapons on thousands of Chinese prisoners yesterday in advance of a legal ruling on the activities of a germ warfare unit during the second world war Yoshio Shinozuka, a veteran of the top-secret Unit 731, told reporters he had done what no man should do in developing bubonic plague viruses and conducting vivisections on captives near Harbin in China. "These human beings were called logs. We said we have chopped one log, two logs," the frail and bespectacled 78-year-old said. "This unit cruelly murdered...