U.S. Bars 2 Repentant Japan Veterans

Shiro Azuma and Yoshio Shinozuka, two aging Japanese veterans who repeatedly have admitted participating in World War II-era atrocities, wanted to bring their quest for redemption to the United States.

The Justice Department, however, is blocking them from entering the country.

The men, one of whom participated in the 1937 Rape of Nanking and the other in the Japanese army’s infamous medical experimentation Unit 731, were scheduled to take part in a historical tour called “The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II in Asia.”

Tour organizers said that the former soldiers are essential to telling the full stories of the atrocities. Their lawyer said that their testimony in the tour would help Americans learn from the past.

But Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department’s office of special investigations, best known for its Nazi-hunting activity, said that permitting the two Japanese veterans into the United States would mark an “unprecedented departure” from his office’s enforcement of the law that prohibits suspected war criminals from entering the United States.

Rosenbaum, in a letter dated Monday to Keiichiro Ichinose, the Tokyo lawyer for the men, noted that the United States has “a reasonable basis to suspect [that they] assisted or otherwise participated in acts of Axis-sponsored persecution between 1933 and 1945,” the legal standard for keeping them out.

Ichinose acknowledged both men had “admitted that they commit atrocious action” during World War II.

As an Imperial Army soldier in China in 1937, Azuma, now 86, joined his comrades in unleashing six weeks of breathtaking brutality during what has come to be known as the Rape of Nanking--murdering and raping as many as 350,000 civilians.

In a 1995 interview with The Times at his home in rural Japan, Azuma said: “When we raped the women, we thought of them as humans but when we killed them we thought of them as pigs. This was the Japanese army at the time.” Shinozuka, 75, was an army conscript in 1939 when he was assigned to Unit 731’s headquarters in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. He helped develop lethal bacteria. Unit 731 researchers used thousands of prisoners of war as human guinea pigs, testing poison gas and biological weapons, injecting them with bacteria and freezing and defrosting their limbs to study frostbite, and vivisecting them without anesthetic.

In December 1996, when Rosenbaum’s office first added 16 Japanese citizens to the U.S. government’s “watch list” of suspected war criminals ineligible to enter the United States, Shinozuka told The Times: “It’s appropriate that my name be on the list.”

Ichinose has appealed the decision to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno.

The tour is scheduled to move Saturday from Toronto through New York, Washington and Vancouver, Canada, winding up in San Francisco on the July 4 weekend.

Justice officials said Wednesday that Reno has the appeal under consideration, leaving the door open to an eleventh-hour decision to use her authority to temporarily “parole” the men into the country “for reasons deemed strictly in the public interest.”

Canadian authorities also have barred the two men. In a letter to Ichinose, Canada’s immigration control officer said that Azuma and Shinozuka would not be allowed to enter his country because they had “perpetrated or were complicit in atrocities during the Second World War.”

On Wednesday, Japanese lawyers for the men were considering challenging the prohibition by putting Shinozuka on a plane bound from Tokyo to Chicago. If Shinozuka did make it onto the plane, under normal procedures U.S. immigration authorities could be expected to hold him at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

The atrocities are especially controversial in Japan. Azuma’s adversaries now include Japanese citizens who deny that the atrocities occurred, have threatened him with death and condemn him for dishonoring those who died in the name of the emperor.

Azuma is appealing a court ruling against him in a case brought by his former army captain, who contends that Azuma lied in his diary describing the captain’s alleged role in burning alive a Chinese person wrapped in a postal bag, according to Ichinose.

Allowing the two repentant Japanese into the United States to give their testimony would contrast sharply with how Rosenbaum’s office has dealt with the more than 60,000 individuals linked to Nazi persecution in Europe who have been on the watch list since his office’s creation 20 years ago.

Rosenbaum noted that last year 45 suspects in Nazi persecutions were stopped at U.S. ports of entry and 23 of them were found to be excludable and were barred from entering the country.

“Where does one draw the line and for whom?” Rosenbaum asked in an interview. If the two Japanese are permitted in, “are we then going to have an open market for Nazi war criminals to go on a lecture tour of the U.S.?” While the testimony of the two aging ex-soldiers “would strengthen the case of those who are drawing long-overdue attention to these crimes,” Rosenbaum said, they could do so by videotape or “live by satellite.”

The original 16 Japanese citizens put on the Justice Department watch list--the number has since doubled--were cited because they were members of Japanese Imperial Army units that conducted inhumane and frequently fatal experiments on humans or because they were involved in operating so-called “comfort women stations,” where hundreds of thousands of women were forced to have sexual relations with Imperial Army officers and enlisted men.

The women and girls were taken principally from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Burma and what is now Indonesia.

In urging Reno to open the door to Azuma and Shinozuka, Ichinose noted that the United States earlier had granted immunity from prosecution to Unit 731 veterans much higher up than Shinozuka.

After the war ended in 1945, the United States concluded that the results of the experiments conducted by Unit 731 were “of the highest intelligence value.” Fearing that the data would fall into Soviet hands, U.S. occupation authorities granted immunity from prosecution at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials to Dr. Shiro Ishii, head of the program, and his colleagues in exchange for their data.