Simkin: For the first time in nearly sixty years Yoshio Shinozuka is going to China returning to the scene of his crimes.

Shinozuka: Our unit did things no human being should ever do.

Simkin: During the Second World War, Shinozuka was part of a top secret Japanese army unit that committed some of the worst atrocities in modern history.

Shinozuka: When I think of the people who I killed so cruelly, and those who fell ill because of the germs I produced, I cannot help apologising to them.

Simkin: Few people outside China have ever heard of Harbin – and yet it should have the same connotations as the Nazi death camps. Today, it is a thriving industrial centre. In the 1930s, when Japan occupied China, it became the headquarters of Unit 731 – home to the world’s largest biological weapons research complex. At the end of the war, the retreating Japanese destroyed most of evidence, but some buildings remain.

Shinozuka: I came here to Harbin in May, 1939. We were given various orders. The one I can remember clearly even now was ‘don’t look, don’t listen, and most importantly of all, don’t tell anyone what happens here’.

Simkin: What happened was that Unit 731 perfected the art of germ warfare. Under the command of this man, General Shiro Ishii, Japan’s brightest scientists bred cholera, anthrax and other deadly diseases. These pits once housed thousands of rats. They were used to cultivate bubonic plague. The worst horrors were reserved for this place. Thousands of prisoners were deliberately infected with disease. The doctors took careful notes – this was, after all, a scientific exercise. After the victims became sick, they were cut open while still alive. The doctors wanted to chart the course of the infection. Shinozuka is still haunted by his first vivisection.

Shinozuka: There was a dissecting table, which was covered with tiles. The human guinea pig, who was to die, was over there, being carried by a special team.

Simkin: The victim was not given any anaesthetic in case it affected the germs. Shinozuka, who had no medical training, prepared the body.

Shinozuka: My legs were shaking at first and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I think I closed my eyes. I used a brush and water to scrub his body.

Simkin: The leaders of Unit 731 wanted to cover up what they were doing here. They told the locals this was a disease prevention and water purification plant – when of course it was nothing of sort. The prisoners themselves were called ‘logs’, a reference to their subhuman nature, and to the timber yard next door, where ‘logs’ were chopped up.

Shinozuka: We’d ask each other, ‘How many logs did you chop today?’ People would answer, ‘Two logs were cut at my section’, or ‘No logs were cut at my section’.

Simkin: Unit 731’s work was not confined to Harbin. The diseases developed there were deliberately spread across China. As many as one quarter of a million people died.
The ghosts of that terrible past haunt the present. These people still remembers the day the Japanese planes flew over their village. Not long after, everyone started falling sick. Soon after that, they began to die.

Man: In that family three generations were lost -- great grandmother, grandmother, grandson, the pregnant daughter in law and her baby – five people died.

Simkin: The disease was cholera – the villagers thought it was a curse from God. Zhang Wenzheng’s father was one of the victims. By the time he died, there were no adults left to carry the coffin.

Zhang: I was just 14 years old, and all I could do was cry. Those who died, died very terrible deaths. You could hear them screaming loudly. They suffered terrible cramps and diarrhoea – they were in agony.

Simkin: The men and women of this man’s village developed terrible sores on their bodies. Liu Mushui was infected, but survived – he still bears the scars.

Liu: I have tried to fix my leg for so long, but it has never healed. It has cost me a lot of money. I will show you. Take a look – see how bad they are? It is very bad. If I had money, I would be able to get it cut off with a knife.

Simkin: Some of those who survived the Unit’s actions and the relatives of those who didn’t have gathered to demand justice. The villagers are fighting for an apology and compensation. In 1995, the Japanese government finally issued a general apology for the war, but it’s yet to even admit that Unit 731 existed.

Rally leader: We must fight – we must. The Japanese government must compensate us!

Simkin: The villagers are led by this woman – Wang Xian. She lost her uncle, and one third of her village, to the germs.

Wang: A terrible death. It’s like the end of the world.
There was a young woman, about 20 year old, was vivisected in this temple behind me, and the villagers still remember her screams. She said, “I’m not dead yet, don’t cut me open!”

Simkin: Now, for the first time, a member of Unit 731 has returned to the scene of the suffering. This time, though, Yoshio Shinozuka is armed only with an apology.

Shinozuka: Looking at your faces, I am deeply sorry for what I did. I committed such atrocities. I realise that simply bowing my head and saying sorry is not enough to earn your forgiveness.

Simkin: It’s the first time these people have heard a Japanese apology – and it means a lot.

Wang: I think he is a hero. I’m probably the first person in the world to say it. I’m proud of him. I think Japan should be proud of Shinozuka. He’s just an ordinary Japanese man – you know, he was enlisted when he was a child. He didn’t know anything. He tried to serve his country, but see the trauma he has had post-war.

Simkin: A hero in China, perhaps – but not back here in his homeland. Other members of 731 consider Shinozuka a traitor, brainwashed by the Chinese authorities. They still maintain their Unit was a force for good – and have no sympathy for the prisoners who were vivisected.

Mizobuchi: From Japan’s point of view, they were criminals who had been sentenced to death. We were merely acting as the executioners.

Simkin: Toshimi Mizobuchi used to teach 731’s recruits. He now leads a comfortable life in Kobe, and organises the Unit’s annual reunion.When the war was lost, Mizobuchi was given the job of destroying the evidence – including leftover prisoners.

Mizobuchi: The rooms that we kept the logs in were closed up tightly. Usually we sent air through pipes into the room -- but instead, methane gas was pumped in. They all choked to death.

Simkin: As many as twelve thousand human guinea pigs died at Harbin… but from this member of Unit 731, there’s no apology… and no remorse.

Mizobuchi: I am proud of what we did. If I was younger I’d consider doing it all again, because it was an interesting Unit.

Simkin: Japan has a selective and subjective approach to its military past. They say the victors write history, but that’s not always true. Japan lost the war, but – more than half a century on – is still manufacturing its own version of it – a fiction the United States has been happy to endorse.
The Yasakuni shrine honours the two and a half million Japanese who have died fighting for their country – including convicted war criminals. Each year, on the anniversary of Japan’s defeat in world war two, thousands come to pay their respects. As far as these people are concerned, Japan has nothing to apologise for.

Shimizu: All lies! China is the one who did bad things. If Japan did not exist in Asia, China would have been divided up by the West like Africa was.

Simkin: Keihachiro Shimizu is a professor at a respected University. He’s convinced Unit 731 never existed.

Shimizu: It is all nonsense. The same thing happened with the so-called ‘Nanjing Massacre’ – the Chinese pay people to say things. In 50-100 years time you will know the truth of history. The Japanese race has never done bad things. That is why we have become such a strong country now.

Simkin: In China, children are taught about 731 in gruesome detail. The main building of the Unit’s headquarters in Harbin has been turned into a museum. 150,000 people visit each year.

Visitor to museum: Unit 731 was very cruel. They did not have any sense of humanity at all. They did not treat men, women or children as human beings. They treated them as animals.

Simkin: Japanese children are given a very different version of history. Few of these students have even heard of Unit 731. Pupils are taught virtually nothing about the Second World War. Most teachers leave the subject out of class altogether, saying they don’t have time to cover it.

Teacher: There is an ambiguous atmosphere and a consciousness that we should not refer to the war or the Emperor’s role in it. Because of that, there are no questions about the war in University entrance exams, and so it is unnecessary to teach it in high school.

Simkin: Many school textbooks present Japan as a liberator, rather than invader -- a victim not an aggressor.

Kingston: If the Ministry of Education had their druthers, it would be an orchestrated collective amnesia – in terms of the textbook screening process, they have presided over a long-term whitewashing of Japan’s past, particularly the shared past with Asia. I think there has been in the past, a tendency to sweep the unpleasant past under the national tatami mat.

Simkin: This is the public face of Japanese denial – an ultra nationalist group prowling the streets of Tokyo. There are more than 900 groups like this one. They’re well organised and well connected – with ties to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP.

Ultra-Nationalist: Don’t be deceived by foolish left-wing teachers and Marxist foreigners teaching anti-Japanese sentiment and advocating a dark and self-tormenting view of history.

Simkin: An increasing number of Japanese are questioning the country’s past, but for the government the issue is taboo. It remains captive to a nationalist constituency.

Kingston: It’s not like in France, Germany or Great Britain where the ultra-nationalists are out of the mainstream political debate. They are part of the mainstream.

Simkin: Japan’s denial is extraordinary, but so is the overseas reaction. If the German government refused to acknowledge the holocaust, there’d be international outrage. When Japan does something similar with Unit 731, though, there’s barely a murmur outside Asia. One reason is that America did a dirty deal that makes its campaign against biological weapons in Iraq look ironic, to say the least. Tokyo, 1946 -- and with the war over, the war crimes trials began. None of Unit 731’s leaders were charged with any crime. The Americans saw to that. They wanted this – Japan’s warfare data – and did a secret deal with General Ishii to get it. With the Cold War underway, Washington was terrified the research would fall into Soviet hands.

Kingston: This was the first time scientists could get access to human guinea pigs subjected to various germs and various medical experiments, so the Americans offered immunity because they wanted unique access to all of this data, and the Japanese don’t want to talk about this shaming past, so you can understand, in a sense, how both countries didn’t really have any interest and any incentive to deal with this particular aspect.

Simkin: The leaders of the Unit returned to Japan as heroes. Their careers flourished – and a memorial was erected in their honour.

Wang: Some of them became big shots of medical society in Japan. Some of them were presidents of top universities in Japan and the dean of top medical schools in Japan and one even became the chief censor of textbooks of the ministry of education.

Williams: And so, sixty years after Unit 731 committed its horrific crimes, a Japanese man and a Chinese woman are still fighting. One for justice… the other, for redemption.