http://smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/27/1030053055881.html Court rejects compensation for Chinese victims August 28 2002 Tokyo: A Japanese court today rejected compensation claims by Chinese who were victims of wartime atrocities committed by Japan's notorious germ warfare unit. The civil suit had been brought by 180 Chinese plaintiffs who claim they are survivors or relatives of the victims of Japanese germ warfare attacks in Zhejiang and Hunan provinces from 1940 to 1942. They had sought an apology and damages of Y10 million ($A154,000) each from Tokyo for atrocities carried out by Unit 731, including "bombing" cities with plague, cholera and other germs. The Tokyo District Court rejected the claims while recognising the Japanese military had engaged in germ warfare. The Japanese government, which only acknowledged there was a Unit 731 decades after the end of World War II, says it knows nothing about its wrongdoings and has rejected related damages claims. It also argued individuals do not have the right of demanding compensation from a state they fought. Unit 731 was set up in Manchuria after the Japanese Kwangtung army formed a puppet state in northeastern China in 1931. With headquarters in Harbin, the 2,000-strong unit operated till the end of World War II as what some historians call a killing factory cultivating fatal germs and conducting live autopsy. It is blamed for the deaths of up to 10,000 Chinese and Allied prisoners of war (POWs), according to estimates in Japanese, Chinese and other studies. Records show people from China, Korea, Mongolia and Russia were used as guinea pigs there. Some members of the Unit have come forward in recent years to speak about the crimes. Yoshio Shinozuka, who joined the unit at the age of 16 and returned to Japan in mid-1950s after being released from a Chinese prison, has said the unit had been cultivating anthrax and other killer germs for use on the Chinese. He also confessed he had taken part in the vivisection of five Chinese individuals in a two-month period. "I still remember clearly the first live autopsy I participated in. I knew the Chinese individual we dissected alive because I had taken his blood once before for testing," he once said. Ordered to wash the man's body, which had turned totally black as he was infected with plague germs, Shinozuka "closed my eyes and forced myself to scrub the man's face with the deck brush." "I could not meet his eyes because of the hate he had in his glare at me." Those allegedly engaged in the germ warfare escaped punishment as the issue was not taken up at the 1946-48 International Military Tribunal for the Far East, better known as the Tokyo Trial. The war tribunal, often seen as the Pacific version of the Nuremberg trial of Nazi Germany's leaders, involved 28 leaders of Japan's prewar and wartime governments, of whom seven were sentenced to hang. http://smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/27/1030053055868.html Asia's Aushwizt archive.