Japanese Continue Struggle With Militaristic Past
As a medical assistant in World War II, Yoshio Shinozuka helped doctors from the Japanese Imperial Army test biological weapons by infecting Chinese prisoners of war with deadly diseases.
But unlike many Japanese veterans of the army’s Unit 731 who would prefer that their past remain hidden, Shinozuka openly admits the gruesome role he played - and is glad that the United States has done something to spotlight the war crimes.
The U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday that it will bar from the United States 16 Japanese veterans who are accused of conducting horrific medical experiments on POWs or of forcing foreign women into sexual slavery for Japanese troops.
“The decision came a little too late, but I think it was good because the action finally made it clear what we had done was a war crime,” Shinozuka, 73, said Thursday.
The ban - announced 51 years after World War II ended marks the first time the United States has added former Japanese soldiers to its list of thousands of Nazis who are barred from America. The “watch list” was established in the United States in 1979.
Unit 731 operated on thousands of POWs without anesthesia and “field tested” plague bombs on Chinese cities.
Professor Keiichi Tsuneishi, who has long studied Unit 731, estimates that several hundred of its members are still alive.
None of the 16 men barred from America were identified by the U.S. government or Japan’s Foreign Ministry.
Japan’s long struggle in coming to terms with its militaristic past is evident in the little attention the U.S. Justice Department action has generated in the country.
A few of Japan’s afternoon papers put the story on their front pages, but the Justice Department move received little attention in the Japanese media.
Only right-wing groups who have long rejected any criticism of Japan’s roles during World War II reacted strongly.
Nobukatsu Fujioka, a Tokyo University professor who has opposed mentioning the sexual slavery in school textbooks, said he was outraged by the U.S. decision.
“There’s a double standard. It’s unfair,” he said. “Crimes are committed during war. But that is something every country commits.”