Interview: Secret U.S.-Japan treaty to cover up germ war crimes still effective: export

The United States had a deal with Japan after World War II, which concealed Japan's heinous war crimes, including those committed by the notorious Unit 731 in northeast China in exchange for biological warfare data, a Japanese expert said.

Shoji Kondo, author of "Evidence of Unit 731 crimes," told Xinhua in an interview that the secret treaty "is possibly still effective."

He believed that the late Emperor Hirohito would be charged with war crimes if relevant materials were exposed, a consequence both Japan and the United States did not want to see.

"Unit 731 was established by the order of Emperor Hirohito. Without his order, those researchers could do nothing. If the U.S. wanted to investigate the atrocities by the Unit 731, Emperor Hirohito must be held responsible for war crimes," said Kondo, who has been studying Japanese germ warfare since 1976.

"The U.S. decided to maintain Japan's monarchy before the war crimes trials started for post-war reign of the country," Kondo said, adding that a judge who was involved in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East had told him: "Before arriving in Tokyo, boss has told me that the emperor will be given immunity. "

Furthermore, Washington did not want those data to fall into the Soviet hands, thus it "lost" interest in pursuing biological war criminals.

Kondo pointed out that biological warfare, such as germ and poison gas, could result in large numbers of civilian causalities with relatively low cost compared with firearms. "They are quite harmful both at that time and currently."

The Japanese Imperial Army formed the barbaric Unit 731 on the southern outskirts of Harbin, China's northeastern Heilongjiang province, to develop chemical and biological weapons there. At least 3,000 people, mostly Chinese civilians along with some Russians, Mongolians and Koreans, were experimented on and died between 1939 and 1945.

Two international treaties have outlawed biological weapons in 1925 and 1972, but they failed to stop countries from conducting offensive weapons research and large-scale production of biological weapons, Kondo believed.

"Without strict restrictions of ethics, it's hard to ensure a recurrence as Unit 731 will not happen in the future," he said.

Kondo also found out that such scandals like drug abuse and academic corruption in medical community occur occasionally in Japan, because the country and medical professionals did not reflect on their wartime infamy and enact laws governing universal medical ethics practices.

"What's done cannot be undone. Japan must face up to history and recognize its past atrocities. Without that, nothing could develop smoothly, including bilateral relations with China."

With revelations of more evidence about Japan's human experimentation and vivisection during WWII, the government's reluctance to recognize or intention to whitewash such atrocious crimes will only betray its secretive stance, Kondo noted. Endi