(Xinhua/Wang Song)
Hideo Shimizu, a former member of Unit 731, Japan’s notorious germ warfare detachment during World War II, on Tuesday identified crimes committed by the Japanese military at the site where he served 79 years ago in China.
Shimizu, now 94, arrived by plane in the city of Harbin in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province on Monday night. He visited the former headquarters site of Unit 731, including the unit commander’s office, the specimen room and the frostbite lab site, on Tuesday morning.
In the specimen room, he recalled seeing various human organs dissected in bottles filled with formalin and being ordered to collect the bones of prisoners who were being used as experimental subjects.
Shimizu was among the last group of young members of Unit 731 sent by Japan to Harbin, where he spent more than four months witnessing the unit’s war crimes, including pathogen cultivation, human dissections, and human experimentation. He fled China with the retreating Japanese forces on August 14, 1945.
In 2016, Shimizu revealed his identity as a former member of Unit 731, and began exposing the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in public speeches and interviews, in an effort to spread historical truths.
The visit marks Shimizu’s first return to Chinese soil in 79 years. He had previously expressed his strong desire to return to China to pray for the deceased and apologize to their families. The trip was made possible by donations from various Japanese civilian groups.
“For me, overcoming many difficulties to return to China is to hope that the Japanese authorities will face history, preserve peace and not repeat the mistakes of war,” Shimizu said.
Unit 731 was a top-secret biological and chemical warfare research base established in Harbin as the nerve center of Japanese biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during World War II.
At least 3,000 people were used for human experimentation by Unit 731 and more than 300,000 people were killed in China by Japanese biological weapons.
