TheStatutoryApe said:
Do you know if any of these people or their families still exist? Do you know if any individuals, or family members, have come forward with an apology on their own(without government endorsment)?
Sorry SA. I missed this earlier.
Yes, quite a few of the Japanese have come out and apologized and tried to become active in bringing the attrocities out in the open however, there seems to be a big impediment.
As soon as they make a public statement, they are added to the international list of War Criminals and are then denied the ability to travel internationally.
Yoshio Shinozuka, a former member of Unit 731, now 83, has devoted himself to making amends. In 1997 he testified on behalf of the 180 Chinese Biological victims suing Japan for compensation. however, The court denied them apology and compensation. The court again denied them compensation and apology in 2005. In 1998, he tried to speak at peace conferences in U.S. and Canada, but immigration turned him away as a war criminal. But Shinozuka argued that those like himself who want to tell the truth about war crimes should not be on the watch list.
"It took me a long time to get beyond the excuse that I was just following orders," he said. "I was doing what I was told. And I might very well have been killed had I disobeyed. But what we did was so terrible that I should have refused, even if that meant my own death. But I didn’t do that. And I will never be forgiven."
Though he often wanted to tell his story, "No one wanted to hear what I was saying," he said. "The Japanese prefer to think of themselves as victims in the war. Even the peace movement people told me that talking about Japan’s role as an aggressor wasn’t constructive. But I couldn’t let this piece of history remain in the dark."
Japanese war criminal denied forum
Knight Ridder Newspapers
YOKAICHIBA, Japan -- When Yoshio Shinozuka boarded a flight from Tokyo to Chicago last week, he was planning to tell Americans about "the inhuman acts" he helped carry out as a member of the Japanese Imperial Army's infamous Unit 731, which tried to infect Chinese civilians with typhus and bubonic plague and conducted biological experiments on Chinese prisoners of war.
But when Shinozuka, 74, shuffled to the head of the immigration line at O'Hare Airport and handed over his Japanese passport, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officers greeted him harshly.
"They scanned my passport on a computer," the 74-year-old, white-haired former soldier recalled yesterday. "There was a beep and they took me to another room." Within hours, he was back on a plane to Tokyo, the first Japanese to be barred from entering the United States for "crimes against humanity."
In an interview at the Buddhist temple he helps manage, the ex-soldier said the Justice Department's decision will obstruct efforts to reveal the full extent of Japanese brutality during World War II – brutality that official Japan still denies.
The Justice Department's "watch list," which identifies war criminals barred from entering the United States, "is a tool to distort and cover up the reality of what really happened," Shinozuka charged, as he sat on a straw mat on the floor of a rural temple about 60 miles west of Tokyo.
He said he suspects the Japanese and American governments made a deal to keep him out of America because high-ranking officers in his unit, including commanding officer Shiro Ishii, were never prosecuted after the war. In previous years, he said, prominent doctors and politicians who served with Unit 731 entered the United States regularly.
Saburo Ienaga, a professor of Japanese history who has battled with mixed success to get Japanese high school textbooks to include the facts of the country's conduct in World War II, said he suspects the U.S. government fears Shinozuka's testimony would embarrass American officials.
"The U.S. released members of Unit 731 after the war in order to get the know-how of biological weapons," Ienaga said in an interview. "Even General Ishii was not prosecuted at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. So it is possible that if the U.S. allows Shinozuka in and let's him speak, he will cause them problems, not because of what he did, but because of what he knows."
A Justice Department official, however, said the watch list is to keep war criminals out of the United States, not to prevent Americans from learning the truth about Japanese or German war crimes.
The Justice Department barred Shinozuka as a result of a 1996 decision to add 16 suspected Japanese war criminals to the list, which already contained names of more than 60,000 Nazi war criminals. The list was created by an act of Congress during the 1970s. Last year, 17 more Japanese were added.
But Shinozuka argued that those like himself who want to tell the truth about war crimes should not be on the watch list. He and 86-year-old Shiro Azuma, a witness to the Japanese Army's brutal 1937 occupation of the Chinese city of Nanking, had planned to discuss their wartime activities as part of an exhibit sponsored by the San Francisco-based Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II. But Azuma got a severe cold and abandoned his plan to go abroad. The exhibit leaves this week for New York; Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; and San Francisco.
It was until Dec. 3, 1996, U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) which has focused almost exclusively on Nazi war criminals despite its mandate to pursue BOTH Nazis and their allies, finally took its FIRST STEP toward redressing this imbalance by adding the FIRST 16 Japanese war criminal names on the "Watch List" (Holtzman Amendment) since it was legislated in 1978 for denying more than 60,000 Nazi German, Austrian, and Italian war criminals entry to U.S.
However, Japan is blocking probe of War Criminals and refused to cooperate with the Justice Department to put the names of several hundred surviving criminals on the Watch List.
"Japan is the ONLY country in the world from whom we seek assistance that does not provide it." said Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department’s office of Special Investigations. Rosenbaum said his office has been able to identify fewer than 100 Japanese suspects compare to 60,000 Nazi, Austrian, and Italian war criminals on the "Watch List"
"After the war, they were not punished, so why is the U.S. government dealing with this problem now ?" said Masao Okonogi, professor of political science at Keio University in Tokyo.
"This seems to me remarkably hypocritical. At the end of WWII, the U.S. occupying force was aware of the information about Unit 731 but deliberately exonerated the men in return for their agreement to be debriefed on the findings of their atrocious experiments. We agreed to Cover-Up their crimes." said John Dower, MIT professor and specialist on modern Japanese history and US relations.
Saburo Ienaga, a professor of Japanese history who has battled with mixed success to get Japanese high school textbooks to include the facts of the country's conduct in World War II, suspects that the U.S. government fears Shinozuka's testimony would embarrass American officials. "He will cause them problems, not because of what he did, but because of what he knows."
They were scheduled to take part in a historical tour called "The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII in Asia." and forum of "A Glimpse of Reconciliation-Unit 731 Photo Exhibition". It was organized by The Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WWII in Asia. It traveled five cities: Toronto, New York, Washington, D.C., Vancouver and San Francisco from late June to early July. Mr. Koken Tsuchiya, a senior lawyer from Tokyo, was leading the delegation. He is also the chief attorney for the lawsuit of 108 Chinese germ warfare victims against the Japanese government.
Of the 3 eyewitness, only Dr. Takemitsu Ogawa was allowed to enter into the US to give his testimony. In recalling the basis of Japanese military training, Ogawa explained that it was a training of killing with the three-all policy: kill all, burn all, and loot all. Even with the thorough education system at the time to brainwash the Imperial soldiers, many were not psychologically fit to kill and developed autonomic ataxia with symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhea, abnormal fever, incontinent urine, asthma, spasm, paralysis of one side of the body, etc.
"The soldiers knew that if they deserted the three-all order, they would be shot dead. In those extreme situations, they showed abnormal symptoms - that was extreme autonomic ataxia," Ogawa explained. One of "The soldier was so afraid to return to the battlefield that he killed himself." Ogawa's testimony sheds light on Japan's experience on the war -something that its government and people had for a long time kept silent about.
July 31 1998, Japanese new agriculture minister Shoichi Nakagawa, who is opposed to describing Japan's wartime atrocities in school textbooks, said that Asian women may not have been forced to work as sex slaves in Japanese army brothels during WWII. A few hours later, he retracted them. "They were forcibly recruited," He said at a later news conference. The new Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi played down the incident.
In the past Japanese cabinet ministers have frequently made similar public comments DENYING atrocities Japan committed during WWII, with some losing their posts over the statements. As in January 1997, Seiroku Kajiyama, a LDP contender for the premiership, claimed that "comfort women" had provided sex to Japanese troops "for money."
Feb. 1999 Nobukatsu Fujioka, a professor at Tokyo University and the chairman of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform which aims to erase all Japan's atrocities from textbook, "Comfort women were not sexual slaves" said the professor. They were simply prostitutes taken to war zones by private brokers," Fujioka told a luncheon at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.
August 23, 1998 Banned from entering North America, 4 Japanese veterans made a global Internet Web Apology over a satellite video link to panelists at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
