A pink tape is marked on the ground on Monday at the site of a former medical school in Tokyo as Japan has started to excavate the site of the former school linked to Unit 731, a germ and biological warfare outfit during the war. -- PHOTO: AP
TOKYO - JAPAN on Monday started excavating a Tokyo site that has been linked to the notorious World War II covert biological and chemical warfare Unit 731, searching for human remains.
The plot once housed an army medical college and research centre of the unit and is near a location where the skulls and bones of some 100 people were dug up in 1989 during a construction project.
A former World War II nurse, Toyo Ishii, in 2006 testified she had helped bury corpses to hide them as US troops marched to Tokyo after Japan's surrender and said more human remains were buried nearby. The fresh search that started Monday was ordered the same year by then-health minister Jiro Kawasaki after he met Ishii.
The dig at the 3,000-square-metre property in Shinjuku ward was finally able to get under way once local residents had been relocated and apartment buildings and parking lots had been demolished.
Japan has not officially acknowledged the atrocities Unit 731 is accused of having committed. Historians say the unit, based in occupied China, conducted bacterial weapons research and lethal experiments on prisoners of war.
According to some historians and veterans, victims were deliberately infected with diseases such as cholera and plague, subjected to live vivisections and hanged upside down, electrocuted or frozen to death. -- AFP
