A former member of the Imperial Japanese Army's notorious Unit 731, which is thought to have undertaken covert biological and chemical warfare research in China during World War II, on Tuesday visited the former site of the unit's headquarters in Harbin.
Hideo Shimizu, 94, from central Japan's Nagano Prefecture, who returned to the site in northeastern China for the first time in 79 years, mourned the victims of the research operation, which is believed to have included lethal experimentation and testing on humans, in front of a cenotaph dedicated to peace.
"I had painful experiences and lost many fellow workers," Shimizu said. At age 14, he moved to the puppet state of Manchuria, now northeastern China, and later became a member of the unit's Youth Corps.
Shimizu worked at the site between April and August of 1945 in the closing days of World War II and has expressed his remorse for being involved in the unit's operations.
He visited the former site, escorted by the head of a Chinese exhibition hall on the unit, and recalled where a morgue was located.
At the unit site, prisoners of war were secretly experimented upon to develop, among other things, plague and cholera-based biological weapons, according to historians.
In 1997, Japan's Supreme Court, in a ruling concerning state textbook screeners objection to a history textbook's description of the unit's actions in China, said "the view had been established within academic circles to an undeniable extent that Unit 731 had killed many Chinese people through biological tests."
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