Sorrowful Japanese Veteran Testifies on WWII Crimes

With a quavering voice, Yutaka Mio, 83, told a Tokyo courtroom last week of the atrocities he committed as a Japanese military police officer in Manchuria during World War II.

“I tortured him by holding a candle flame to his feet, but he didn’t say anything,” said Mio, after identifying from sepia photographs two Chinese whom he tried to force to confess to being Communist spies in 1941.

He told a three-judge panel that, despite doubts about their guilt, he handed the men over to the notorious Unit 731, where they died as human guinea pigs in Japan’s top-secret biological warfare program.

“I feel that I’m the one who murdered them,” Mio said. He called on the Japanese government to apologize and pay $826,000 to the bereaved families.

Dozens of geriatric Japanese veterans are at last beginning to unburden themselves of their war guilt, delivering confessional lectures and publishing books with such titles as “What We Did in China” and “The Hell I Fell Into.” But Mio is the first to describe his atrocities in court, according to his lawyers.

Last week’s legal scene was made possible by an extraordinary collaboration between Chinese who claim they were victims of Japanese aggression and a group of Japanese lawyers and activists who believe Japan has yet to shoulder full responsibility for its war crimes and so are helping their aggrieved neighbors sue the Japanese government.

The Justice Ministry says that 38 civil lawsuits filed since 1991 by Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos, as well as by former prisoners of war from the United States and the other Allied countries, are working their way through Japanese courts. Several others have been dismissed as groundless.

The Plaintiffs

The seven lawsuits by the Chinese victims or their families, all filed in the past two years, are the most ambitious, because they seek to hold postwar Japan liable for the Imperial Army’s most heinous deeds.

Plaintiffs include:

* Survivors of the estimated 40,000 Chinese dragged to Japan in 1941 as slave laborers; 6,630 are believed to have died after brutal treatment. Plaintiff Liu Lianren escaped from a Hokkaido coal mine and hid in the mountains for 13 years before he was discovered and repatriated to China. Ten Japanese corporations that employed the laborers are also defendants.

* Civilians who survived Japanese massacres. In gripping testimony earlier this year, Li Xiuying, 77, who was seven months pregnant during the 1937 Nanking massacre (in the Chinese city now known as Nanjing), described being bayoneted in the face, neck, legs and belly by Japanese soldiers after she resisted their attempts to rape her. Her fetus was stillborn.

* Former “comfort women” who say they were dragooned as sex slaves for the Japanese military.

* Families of people killed in Unit 731, in which prisoners were infected with diseases in germ warfare experiments and in some cases dissected alive, without anesthetic.

* Families of those who died after contracting bubonic plague, typhus and cholera, which were deliberately introduced among Chinese civilians by Unit 731 scientists to test the diseases as biological weapons.

* People killed or injured by chemical weapons and poison gas left behind in China by the retreating Japanese army, including some injured in the last several years when buried ordnance exploded during roadwork, river dredging and sewer repair. China says that 2,000 people have died from such causes since the war. Japan has pledged to build a facility in China to destroy leftover chemical weapons, but, fearing a flood of claims, it has resisted calls for compensation to individual victims.

Given Japan’s ponderous, conservative civil court system, the trials and appeals could drag on for years, and the plaintiffs are deemed unlikely to win. But the Japanese activists say their goal is not to win but to create an indelible legal record of the historical truth that will be hard for revisionists to deny.

“Young people do not know the truth, because it isn’t taught in schools,” Mio said. “So we must educate the next generation.”

So far, Japanese government defense lawyers have not disputed that any of the incidents described in the lawsuits occurred. All have been extensively documented by Japanese and Western historians--although many of the facts are disputed by the Japanese right wing.

But government lawyers plan to argue that Japan’s 20-year statute of limitations has long since expired and that, in any event, Japan settled these issues when it paid China wartime compensation and resumed diplomatic relations 25 years ago, said Kaoru Tokuda, the Justice Ministry attorney supervising the defense.

Lawyers for the Chinese plaintiffs, noting that Nazi war criminals are still subject to prosecution in the West, maintain that no statute of limitations should apply to international war crimes. They assert that war reparations paid to nations should not preclude individual victims from suing those who wronged them.

“If the court decides against us, we will lose only based on legal arguments; we can’t lose based on the facts,” attorney Hiroshi Oyama declared last week in a pep talk to the Society to Support the Demands of Chinese War Victims, which is sponsoring six of the lawsuits. “The problem would be if the court tries . . . to bail the government out of a tight spot, because, I’m sorry, but Japanese courts do have this tendency,” Oyama said.

Asserting that the courts will respond to political pressure, activists are asking those who sympathize with the Chinese plaintiffs to write to the presiding judges and Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto.

Hashimoto has taken pains to apologize for Japan’s wartime misdeeds and to try to forge closer ties with other Asian nations.

Last month, he became the first Japanese prime minister since World War II to visit the area of northeast China that was once the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. After a visit to a war museum in Shenyang that included photos of Unit 731, Hashimoto said, “When I think of the grief and anger of the Chinese people . . . I feel a profound remorse and pain in my heart over the Japanese actions” that led to the occupation of Manchuria.

Textbooks Revised

In recent years, Japan has also revised its textbooks to include mentions of Unit 731 and other atrocities. The revisions followed international protests and a 32-year legal battle by historian Saburo Ienaga against the Education Ministry’s decision to delete unsavory facts about Japan’s wartime past from texts.

In August, the Supreme Court ruled that the ministry had erred in ordering Ienaga to remove a description of Unit 731. He is one of the sponsors of the Chinese war victims’ lawsuits.

The Japanese activists hope their efforts will help heal the profound mistrust of Japan by its former conquests that lingers more than 50 years after World War II.

A survey conducted by the China Youth News earlier this year found that when young Chinese heard the word for Japan, 84% first thought of the Nanking massacre, while only 49% first thought of Japanese electric appliances. Only 2% said they had a favorable image of Japan, and 95% were against Japan’s bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Likewise, the Japanese public has cooled toward China, in part because of resentment over Chinese nuclear testing, a territorial dispute and the wartime responsibility issue. A poll by the prime minister’s office last year found that 51% of Japanese surveyed felt no sense of friendship with China, the highest figure since 1978.

Veterans Apologize

But, in contrast, some of the aging Japanese veterans have returned to their battlefields to apologize to their former enemies. Mio, who is suffering from advanced stomach cancer, bowed and apologized to the son of one of his victims and said he would like to meet the children of the others whose deaths he believes he caused.

He joined the military police at 22 “because the salary was higher, and I thought the uniforms looked sharp.” He was assigned to gather intelligence on the anti-Japanese resistance in Dalian, China.

One of the first suspects he interrogated was an ethnic Korean woman suspected of working for a guerrilla group. “I kept beating her [with a wooden sword] until her skin broke and started to bleed, but she didn’t answer my questions,” Mio testified. The next day, he sexually assaulted her with the sword. “Now, I regret this,” he said.

In 1943, Mio arrested Wang Yaoxuan, 46, the manager of a textile factory and a father of six, and his nephew Wang Xuenian, who had been named as friends of a suspected Communist spy. Mio tortured the elder Wang to extract a confession.

“I put him on a long desk and tied his hands and feet and put a handkerchief over his nose and poured water over his head,” Mio said. “When he couldn’t breathe, he shouted, ‘I’ll confess!’ ” But since he did not admit knowing the spy, Mio put a candle to his feet.

“I grilled them with the flame,” Mio said in an interview. “I thought it was natural. I felt nothing. . . . We did not think of them as people but as objects.”

In 1944, Mio said he transferred the two Wangs, with two other suspects, to Unit 731, an organization so secret that even the military police had no idea what it did. “The only thing I knew about the unit was that nobody had ever come out of it alive,” Mio said.

At war’s end, Mio was captured by the Soviet Union, then handed over to China and finally sent back to Japan in 1956. He became a public health worker and now lives in a Tokyo suburb. Since he agreed to testify on behalf of the families of the Unit 731 victims, he has begun receiving abusive telephone calls.

The Japanese right has long asserted that Mio and about 500 other POWs were brainwashed by the Chinese to invent tales of Japanese atrocities. The charge was repeated most recently in the September issue of the conservative magazine Seiron by historian Toshio Tanabe.

Mio dismissed the brainwashing charges with a laugh and said: “Soon it will be time for me to say goodbye. . . . In order to apologize to my four victims, I want to devote the remainder of my life to investigating the remaining mysteries of Unit 731.”

Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.