Fort Detrick precursor sued.

[Matthew X]

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.