JAPAN'S WORLD WAR II ' S UNIT 731 REVIEWED AGAIN

TOKYO: More than 60 years after the end of World War II, the name Unit 731 still has the power to generate shock, revulsion and denial in Japan.

The Imperial Japanese Army's notorious medical research team carried out secret human experiments regarded as some of the worst war crimes in history.

It subjected more than 10,000 people a year to grotesque torture in the name of science. Russian soldiers and downed American aircrews were among the victims.

Experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive and injecting air into their veins. Some victims were subject to vivisection.



The bones of up to 100 people were discovered in a mass grave in 1989 during construction work. They bore the marks of saws and some of the skulls had drill holes and portions of the bone cut out. But the issue is so controversial in Japan that the remains have since been stored in a repository.

Acting on information from a former nurse, the authorities have said they will re-examine the bones to determine whether they were part of the experiments carried out by Unit 731 in the last days of the war.

Toyo Ishii came forward to say that during the weeks after Japan's surrender in August 1945, she and her colleagues at an army hospital were ordered to bury corpses, bones and body parts before the Allies arrived.

She claimed that the hospital had three mortuaries where bodies with numbered tags around their necks were stored in a pool of formalin to preserve them before they were dissected. Organs and other body parts were preserved in glass jars.

The sites that Mrs Ishii pinpointed as mass graves will now be excavated. The area is an apartment complex in the Shinjuku district of the city which is scheduled for redevelopment.

An investigation after the remains were found in 1989 concluded they were mostly non-Japanese Asians and had probably been used in ''medical education'' or taken to the medical school from battlefields overseas for analysis. .

Unit 731 was mostly active in China, where it carried out biological, bacteriological and chemical weapons tests on civilians and prisoners of war.