The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

in only certain of the dead POWs. He also testified that after he had been liberated, he and others had been required by the Army to sign papers promising not to reveal what had gone on at the camp under penalty of court martial. He also spoke of the difficulty in getting the VA to accept claims for illnesses he believed were caused by his time at Mukden when the VA said no medical records of such time existed.

The third witness at the 1986 hearing, Greg Rodriguez, Jr., was the son of a deceased POW and had previously testified at the 1982 hearing in Montana. He stated he believed his father’s many ailments stemmed from being experimented on at Mukden, talked of his father’s struggle to get veterans’ benefits and about the records the son had found about Mukden. The last witness, William Triplett, who had written a book focusing on involvement of Unit 731 personnel in the Tokyo Imperial Bank murders in 1948, said that in his research he had found declassified DOD documents which he believed attested to the existence of Unit 731, to the fact that it performed biological warfare experiments on human beings, and that Army occupation officials knew about these facts when dealing with former members of Unit 731. He quoted from a State Department memorandum that was part of a U.S. War Department Judge Advocate General document, which said, “It should be kept in mind that there is a remote possibility that the independent investigation conducted by the Soviets in the Mukden area may have already disclosed evidence that American prisoners of war were used to experimental purposes of a BW nature and that they lost their lives as a result of these experiments.” Mr. Triplett stated that he believed that the government was in possession of records about what happened to POWs at Mukden that could help the VA in diagnosing POWs’ ailments. Since 1994, there have been newspaper accounts discussing the experiences of several American POWs who were interned at Mukden.

In his 1994 book, Factories of Death, Sheldon Harris analyzed the fragmentary and sparse available data and concluded that “… the evidence, while inconclusive, suggests strongly that they [U.S. POWs] were not [among those] subjected to human BW experiments at Mukden”.

In Unjust Enrichment, Linda Goetz Holmes lays out in much more detail than Harris the reported incidents that led to POWs’ claims that they were experimented on at Mukden and elsewhere.

U.S. Agreement Not to Prosecute Unit 731 Members

One of the most persistent allegations surrounding Unit 731 is one made in the initial 1980 article, “Japan’s Germ Warfare: The U.S. Cover-up of a War Crime” (in The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars), in Harris’s Factories of Death, and elsewhere—that General Ishii and his staff were given immunity against prosecution as war criminals by the United States in exchange for the scientific information gathered during Unit 731’s experiments. In a letter to Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, dated December 8, 1998, Eli M. Rosenbaum, Director of the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations, indicated that such a deal was struck. Mr. Rosenbaum wrote that “Two of these [formerly classified] reports [about biological warfare data collected by the Japanese and the arrangement made between the United States and Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731], dated November 17, 1981, and May 5, 1982, confirm that Ishii and his colleagues received immunity from prosecution and that, in exchange, they provided a great deal of information to U.S. authorities.”

According to news accounts, Gen. Ishii returned to Japan after the war where he was permitted to continue medical research, was paid a Japanese government pension, and died of cancer in 1959. Moreover, many of Ishii’s chief lieutenants occupied prominent positions in post-war Japanese society. According to one news account, the several hundred remaining members of Unit 731 were still holding their annual reunion in Japan as of 1999.

Missing Records

In the 20-year controversy over whether Americans were experimented on, the chief problem has been the lack of documentary evidence to support anecdotal accounts. According to U.S. Army testimony in the 1986 hearing on treatment of U.S. POWs in Mukden, the United States captured the records of the Imperial Army when it occupied Japan. These very hard-to-translate records were brought to this country, remained here for some 13 years largely untranslated and unread, and were then returned to Japan. However, according to a 1999 New York Times article, in 1948 the Central Intelligence Agency screened the records before they were turned over to the National Archives. Later 5% of the records were hurriedly microfilmed by a group including scholars from Harvard and Georgetown University, between the time they were ordered returned to Japan in 1957 and when they were actually put on a boat in February 1958. Japan has denied access to these records to those trying to document the actions of Unit 731. Author Sheldon Harris is quoted in the New York Times article as saying that he learned from Freedom of Information Act requests for military debriefing records dealing with this issue that relevant records were lost in the fire at the St. Louis Military Personnel Records Center in 1973. In 1995 an article in the Washington Times quoted Ken McKinnon, spokesman for the Department of Veterans Affairs, as saying, “The Veterans Administration has never seen evidence that research was done on the U.S. POWs. We would be more than willing to see new information on how POWs were treated and review the causes of injury and death.” Mr. McKinnon said that the VA depends on DOD for analysis and documentation in this area. The article then went on to say that a Pentagon spokesman said he had never heard about U.S. POWs and the germ-warfare experiments at Mukden.

Efforts to Obtain an Apology

Several times since the end of WWII, Japanese government officials made statements that they regarded as an apology for their conduct in WWII, but that other nations did not accept as a full, direct, and unambiguous apology. These statements have evolved. In 1989, Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita stated that, “We cannot say in affirmative terms whether the Japanese state was an aggressor nation. That is a matter for future historians to judge.” But, in 1991, on the 50th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa apologized to the United States by expressing his “deep remorse… that we inflicted an unbearable blow on the people of America and the Asian countries.” In 1992, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa apologized to the people of the Asia-Pacific Region, saying, “During a period in the past, the people of the Asia-Pacific region experienced unbearable suffering and pain due to our country’s behavior. I would like to express again deep remorse and regret.” According to the article citing his apology, this apology to the people of the Asia-Pacific region was the first apology by a Japanese prime minister in a policy speech. A senior government official said that this apology to the people of the Asia-Pacific region was also meant to apply to the United States. However, a month before this apology, the Japanese parliament rejected a bill which called specifically for a Japanese apology on the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. In August 1993, Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa stated that the Japanese “… state clearly before all the world our remorse at our past history and our renewed determination to do better.”

In 1994 the Japanese Foreign Ministry apologized for the “deeply regrettable” conduct of failing to break off diplomatic relations before their attack on Pearl Harbor. However, a Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman said that this apology was to the Japanese people and not to the people of the United States.

On August 15, 1995, Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama made the following statement, “During a certain period in the not too distant past, Japan, following a mistaken national policy, advanced along the road to war, only to ensnare the Japanese people in a fateful crisis, and through its colonial rule and aggression caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations.” He went on to say, “In the hope that no such mistake be made in the future, I regard, in a spirit of humility, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology.” However, some observers pointed out that he made his apology in the first person, on his behalf, and not that of Japan. This statement was not seen as adequate by various victims’ groups because, they said, it was not endorsed by the Japanese parliament. According to newspaper accounts Prime Minister Murayama’s apology obtained a tepid reaction in Asia. Speaking to veterans in Honolulu on the 50th anniversary of V-J Day, a few days after Murayama’s remarks, President Clinton said, “… let me say especially how much the American people appreciate the recent powerful words of the Japanese Prime Minister, Mr. Murayama, when he expressed his nation’s regret for its past aggression and its gratitude for the hand of reconciliation that this, the World War II generation, extended 50 years ago.”

In her September 8, 2001, speech given on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Multilateral Treaty of Peace with Japan in San Francisco, Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka echoed the statement of Murayama by saying, “Facing the facts of history in a spirit of humility, I reaffirm today our feeling of deep remorse and heartfelt apology expressed in Prime Minister Muryama’s statement of 1995.” She also said in her speech, without