China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying addresses a press conference in Beijing, China, on January 22, 2018. /Photo via China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs
China on Monday commended the courage of the makers of a Japanese documentary for "revealing the historical truth" of the horrifying war crimes committed by the Japanese army during World War Two at the notorious "Unit 731" facility in northeast China, while calling on Tokyo to reflect on "the history of aggression by the Japanese militarism."
Beijing’s response came a day after Japan’s public broadcaster NHK on Sunday aired "Unit 731: Elite Doctors and Human Experimentation", which offered fresh evidence of the brutal testing of bacteriological weapons on live human subjects at the unit that resulted in the death of an estimated 3,000 prisoners of wars (PoWs), mostly Chinese.
"During World War II, the invading Japanese troops waged a heinous germ warfare against the Chinese people," China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying said on Monday when asked to react on the airing of the Japanese documentary.
"We appreciate the courage of those insightful Japanese people to reveal the historical truth and hope the Japanese side can carefully listen to the call for justice at home and abroad, correctly understand and deeply reflect upon the history of aggression by the Japanese militarism, and earnestly respect the feelings of the Chinese people and people of other victimized Asian countries," she added.
The 110-minute documentary, produced by the NHK, unveils the military crimes carried out by Unit 731, a biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army. It is the second film on the topic by the Japanese broadcaster which had released its first documentary on Unit 731 last August.
In an introductory passage about the film, NHK said that while the military had destroyed all evidence of the facility at the end of the war and officials remained tight-lipped, "concealing the truth for decades", the broadcaster recently found more than 20 hours of audio recordings from a 1949 war-crimes tribunal.
"The tapes contain former Unit 731 members' testimony about how, for example, typhoid and plague pathogens were tested on scores of Chinese and Manchurian prisoners," it said.
