China urged to sue over Japanese royal’s role in Unit 731 crimes

The late Emperor Hirohito of Japan should be held accountable under international law for the crimes of Unit 731, according to Chinese scholars who say the wartime ruler authorised the infamous programme but was shielded from prosecution by US policy after World War II.

The secret Japanese military unit in northeastern China, which was responsible for human experimentation, biological warfare and at least tens of thousands of civilian deaths, had been created by imperial order in 1936, said Zhou Donghua, a contemporary history professor at Hangzhou Normal University.

Before Japan’s surrender, evidence of its crimes was systematically destroyed on the instruction of Hirohito, Zhou said in a written statement to the South China Morning Post on December 14.

“Arguably, the responsibility for the unit’s atrocities ultimately rests with the emperor,” Zhou said.

He was echoing a recent wave of Chinese legal and historical scholars who are calling to bring Unit 731 to an international court for crimes against humanity – and naming Hirohito, emperor of Japan from 1926 until his death in 1989, as a top defendant.

In a paper published this month, researcher Wang Xiaohua and her colleagues from the Heilongjiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology argued that Unit 731’s activities – rather than the actions of individual doctors or commanders – constituted a state crime, meeting the legal threshold under the Nuremberg Code.

She said the emperor had issued orders to expand Unit 731 and relocate its main facilities near Harbin.

Among the tens of thousands who took part in Japan’s bacteriological warfare across Asia, only 12 were publicly tried in the Khabarovsk trials, according to Zhou.

  

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