It's amazing how many redumblicans think China should be more upset
with a communist government that feeds over a billion people than
Japanese war crimes that led to the death of 35 million. The blind
nationalism of the american citizens is just as bad as the
blind nationalism of a nazi Germany citizens. Japan deserves some
credit though, America perfomed germ warfare experiments on it's own
people aka the Tuskegee experiments, at least Japan had the sense to
take it outside.

China recalls Japanese germ warfare experiments Thu May 5, 8:33 AM ET

HARBIN, China (Reuters) - A gray sculpture depicts Japanese soldiers
holding a Chinese man down as an army doctor injects him with what
could be bubonic plague, cholera or anthrax virus.

In another tableau, a Japanese doctor observes a person lying on the
floor of a glass-walled chamber as the air pressure inside is raised
to lethal levels.

Those are among the many horrific memories of Unit 731, a Japanese
military base in northeast China used for germ warfare development
before and during World War II, that live on at a Chinese museum built
on the base's crumbling brick bones.

At least 3,000 people, including Chinese civilians, Russians,
Mongolians and Koreans, were killed in tests of biological weapons and
other experiments at Unit 731 between 1939 and 1945, Chinese state
media say.

Biological weapons developed at the base are believed to have killed
more than 200,000 Chinese during the Japanese occupation.

Now China wants to make the museum a U.N.-recognized memorial to
Japanese war crimes.

"Unit 731 did any kind of experiment they could think of and harmed a
huge number of people," said Wang Peng, curator and president of the
731 Exhibition Hall, which receives hundreds of visitors a day.

Wang is leading the effort to win the base UNESCO World Heritage
protection, a status the U.N. body has granted to the Nazi
concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland and the Hiroshima Peace
Memorial in Japan.

"They committed all manner of cruel acts. This is a unique aspect for
a world heritage site," he said of the base in Pingfang, outside
Harbin in China's northeastern province of Heilongjiang.

Chinese anger over Japan's actions during its 1931-1945 occupation of
the country, in which Beijing says 35 million Chinese were killed or
wounded, remains potent and spilled over into anti-Japanese protests
across China last month.

The demonstrations were sparked by new Japanese school history
textbooks that critics say sugar-coat its war atrocities and put ties
between Beijing and Tokyo into free fall.

Beijing and Tokyo have recently tried to mend fences, and Japanese
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in April made a rare public apology
for Japan's war past.

But Chinese resentment still runs strong over issues such as Koizumi's
visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine, where convicted war criminals are
honored along with Japanese war dead, and Japan's campaign for a
permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

On a rainy spring day, the mood at the museum seemed more somber than
angry as tourists wound through half-demolished brick edifices, grassy
lawns and tiled pits in the ground, remains of the secret underground
laboratories where most of the experiments were done.

The only completely intact structure, Unit 731's former main office,
has been transformed into an exhibition hall, in which photographs and
models bring the base's gruesome past to life.

"SHAMELESS"

Shiro Ishii, the head of Unit 731, and other Japanese officers and
unit staff peer out from period portraits. None of them has been
prosecuted as war criminals.

Many photographs show the bodies of dead prisoners -- one shows a pile
of victims' skulls.

Visitors can also walk into dark, bare cement chambers where some
prisoners were exposed to extreme temperatures to test their effects
on the human body.

"We don't want to make this known to everybody in the world so that we
can earn their pity, we just want to expose their (Japan's) historical
crimes, and show how shamelessly they acted," visitor Xue Yuanfei, a
21-year-old student, said.

Japan's government officially neither denies nor acknowledges the
activities of Unit 731.

A landmark Japanese court ruling in 2002 recognized the unit's
activities, but rejected a compensation demand by victims' relatives.
Japanese courts have dismissed similar cases, including one in May, on
grounds that government compensation issues had been resolved by
post-war treaties.

Retreating Japanese forces tried to destroy evidence of the horrors
committed at Unit 731 as they fled China at the end of the war,
bombing the site and burning surviving prisoners.

The unit's legacy, however, remains painfully alive. Since the war
ended, more than 2,000 Chinese people have been injured in encounters
with chemical weapons abandoned or buried by retreating Japanese
troops.

Regular discoveries of such weapons, mostly in northeastern China,
only fuel anti-Japanese sentiment.

"We feel a growing sense of danger because you (Japan) do not
understand history, you don't correctly understand history," Wang Peng
said.

"We fear the militarism of that time could reappear, that the historic
tragedy will be replayed."