Whistleblowers expose Japanese war crimes involving heinous medical experimentation

Thursday, February 24, 2011 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: war crimes, medical experiments, health news

(NaturalNews) More than 50 years after participating in the massive cover-up, Toyo Ishii, a former Japanese military nurse during World War II, has come forward saying that she helped bury evidence of Japan's involvement in wartime biological experimentation programs on humans. The program involved deliberately poisoning and drugging prisoners, operating on them, and harvesting their bones and organs in order to develop biological weapons of mass destruction.

The Tokyo medical school where Ishii says she and others helped bury human remains is said to be connected with Unit 731, a branch of the imperial Japanese army that is known to have conduct such experiments on prisoners for "research" purposes. And if remains are found at the site, the Japanese government could be forced to confess, in detail, its activities during the war.

"If bones or organs with traces of live medical experiments are found, the government would have to admit a wartime medical crime," said Yasushi Torii, head of a group that has been pursuing a proper investigation into the matter for several decades. "This is a start, although we will probably need more evidence to prove Unit 731's involvement."

Japanese officials are already saying that remains may not even be found at the site. And even if they are, they may not be connected to Unit 731, they say. But the evidence will speak for itself, if eventually brought to light, and it will prompt further inquiry into the matter.

Ishii's testimony falls in line with several other investigations that have occurred in areas near the site in question, where similar evidence of wartime crimes has already been unearthed. One site in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, for instance, was found in 1989 to contain human skulls that were clearly drilled or otherwise modified as part of experimentation programs.

According to a recent report in the U.K. Guardian, historical accounts of Unit 731's activity during the war reveal that prisoners were deliberately infected with serious diseases like typhus and cholera, cut apart, and dissected. Upon capture by U.S. forces during the war, those involved in such massacres are said to have been granted immunity for sharing their findings with the U.S., and later given positions of power within the pharmaceutical, health, and academic industries.

Sources for this story include:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/21/...