Seiichi Morimura, a Japanese writer who helped force a reckoning upon his country with his 1981 exposé of Unit 731, a secret biological warfare branch of the Imperial Army, died July 24 at a hospital in Tokyo. He was 90.
Mr. Morimura was well-known in Japan as the award-winning author of hundreds of mystery novels. But it was his nonfiction work, published in the 1980s, that brought him to international attention and altered the way World War II is studied and remembered in Japan.
Disguised as an epidemic prevention and water purification department, the unit functioned through the end of the war as a testing ground for agents of biological warfare. Mr. Morimura’s work helped prompt more investigations in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn led to a court case that further revealed the extent of the atrocities.
Precise numbers are difficult to obtain, but many accounts of Unit 731 operations report that 3,000 or more people were killed in the medical experiments. Unit 731 field tested germ bombs on Chinese cities, according to published accounts, or in other ways precipitated outbreaks of disease. Some estimates of the death toll, although difficult to verify, reach or exceed 200,000.“Witnesses recall watching Japanese airplanes release small birds on flyovers around their village.
However, according to U.S. officials, the Japanese government continued to decline to assist American efforts to place perpetrators on a list of war criminals prohibited from entering the United States. Ishii lived in freedom until he died of throat cancer in 1959.
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