HARBIN, China – More than 200,000 Chinese filed through the remains of Japan’s notorious Unit 731 here in 2005, visiting the ghosts of World War II. In exhibits mounted throughout the bleak headquarters building, they saw wrenching descriptions of biological warfare experiments carried out on thousands of Chinese prisoners from 1939 to 1945.
The phrase “Do not forget us” was inscribed on the wall of one room, where visitors can see the names and photos of some of those who received botulism injections, were made to suffer frostbite or had their internal organs removed by Japanese military doctors.
Heeding those words, authorities have drawn up plans for a $62.5 million expansion of the museum, condemning a middle school and an apartment complex to make way for restoring the once top-secret facility, where researchers estimate 3,000 Chinese were killed and 300,000 sickened by the wartime experiments. The aim, said curator Wang Peng, is to make the story of Japan’s atrocities at Unit 731 known to a wider audience.
“Our goal is to build it into a world-class war memorial and educate people all over the world,” Wang said. “This is not just a Chinese concern. It is a concern of humanity.”
The intensifying interest in abuses at Unit 731, on the plains of Manchuria about 650 miles northeast of Beijing, is part of a rising tide of Chinese resentment over Japan’s conduct during its extended occupation of China. The resentment, long simmering in the population, has been stoked in the past several years by what Chinese officials and people contend is a refusal by Japanese leaders to acknowledge openly what happened and seek forgiveness from the victims and their relatives.
Although they remain valuable trading partners, Asia’s two major powers gradually have slipped into the role of adversaries, with officials regularly trading accusations of bad faith and Japanese leaders explicitly calling China a security threat.
The United States has watched the situation with consternation. The Bush administration has made it clear that it wants no role in the standoff. But senior U.S. defense officials acknowledge that U.S.-Japanese defense cooperation, soon to include a shared missile defense network, could make U.S. forces part of the equation if Japan and China were to escalate their confrontation.
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