Japan Press Weekly

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2025 March 19 - 25 TOP3 [SOCIAL ISSUES]

Claim of ‘No data’ on wartime Unit 731’s human experimentation turns out to be a lie

The government has insisted that there are no data showing the details of the activities of the former Japanese Army’s Unit 731 which is said to have conducted biological and germ warfare experiments on people in China to develop germ weapons during the Asia　Pacific War. However, it turns out that such documents do exist.

Japanese Communist Party lawmaker Yamazoe Taku at a meeting of the House of Councilors Budget Committee on March 21 pointed to a public record of the unit’s human experimentation and brought to light the government’s deception in claiming that there were no such documents.

Yamazoe said that the documents carry the records of the symptoms, including nerve damage, skin damage, and vomiting, during human experimentation with lethal poison gas. The documents have “Ikeda Naeo, Army Surgeon Lieutenant” written on the cover page.

The National Institute for Defense Studies of the Ministry of Defense has preserved the data stamped “handle with care” in red and “received, office of military annals” in blue. Under the seal of the head of the military annals office, the documents describe that Ikeda was a member of Unit 731 and that he donated the papers in 1964. They include a “finding” which states, “These include the results of tests conducted on human subjects and are valuable and hard to obtain.”

Yamazoe at the Committee meeting asked, “Aren’t these official documents indicating that the Japanese Imperial military had conducted human experimentation?”

In response, Defense Minister Nakatani Gen admitted that those are official documents handled in accordance with the Public Records Management Act.

Yamazoe said, “In other words, the government has been lying, hiding evidence regarding tests on humans and telling falsehoods to the Diet and the general public.”

Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru, however, defended the government’s past statements, saying, “We have no way of confirming whether the documents are authentic or not. It is not that we have concealed them from the public.”

Yamazoe demanded that the government sincerely assess and admit Japan’s past biological weapons research conducted among the enemy population.

Past related articles:
> PhD thesis that Kyoto University accepted in 1945 possibly involved wartime human experimentation [April 4, 2018]
> Former soldier testifies on lethal human experimentation [September 29, 2013]