[1] Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994; George L. Hicks, Japan's War Memories: Amnesia or Concealment? UK: Ashgate, 1997; Laura Hein and Mark Selden, Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States. NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. Norma Field asks, “Why did these impulses for a self-critical renewal fail to flourish?” Norma Field. “War and Apology: Japan, Asia, the Fiftieth, and After.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5, no. 1 (1997). p. 13. This view is not confined to Western commentators. See Wakamiya Yoshibumi, Postwar Conservative View of Asia: How the Political Right Has Delayed Japan's Coming to Terms with Its History of Aggression in Asia. NY: Free Press, 1999.

[2] Daniel Barenblatt. A Plague on Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan's Biological Warfare Program. NY: HarperCollins, 2004. p. xx.

[3] For a quick overview of the fifty-three counts, see Higurashi Yoshinobu. Tokyo saiban no kokusai kankei. Tokyo: Bokutakusha, 2002. pp. 286-87.

[4] Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II. NY: Free Press, 1989. pp. 176-79.

[5] Information in this paragraph is based upon ibid., pp. 141, 220-3.

[6] For example, the Gifu Times, the Chugoku shinbun and the Japanese Communist Party daily, Akahata. See ibid. pp. 226-27.

[7] “Shishashitsu: akuma no 731 butai.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 10, 1975. p. 20; “Shishashitsu: zoku akuma no 731 butai.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 15, 1976. p. 20; “Akuma no 731 butai: futatabi rupo hoei.” Asahi shinbun. June 21, 1982. Evening edition. p. 9. Yoshinaga had already made a name for herself and TBS with other documentaries on such controversial issues as the story of right-wing sponsorship of the leftist student group, Zengakuren (titled “Yuganda seishun” [Twisted Youth]). Kawatani Tadao. Review of Yoshinaga Haruko, Nazo no dokuyaku. Asahi shinbun. Apr. 28, 1996. p. 12.

[8] John Saar. “Japan Accused of WW II Germ Deaths.” Washington Post. Nov. 19, 1976. pp. 1, 19. Reference to “Sixty Minutes” in “Akuma no 731 butai: futatabi rupo hoei.” p. 9.

[9] The new TBS documentary was titled “Soko ga shiritai: Akuma no 731 butai” (This is What I'd Like to Know: The Devil's Unit 731) and introduced an American survivor of the camp. “Akuma no 731 butai: futatabi rupo hoei.” p. 9; “Shishashitsu: Soko ga shiritai, akuma no 731 butai.” Asahi shinbun. June 29, 1982. p. 24. The Hong Kong film, titled “Kuroi taiyo 731 butai” (Black sun, Unit 731), was translated into Japanese and given four public showings a day at Nitchu gakuin in Tokyo on Oct. 7 and 8, 1992. “Kantogun saikinsen butai no jittai egaita eiga kokai.” Asahi shinbun. Oct. 7, 1992. p. 26).

[10] Gunji Yoko. “Shogen:” 731 Ishii butai. Tokyo: Tokuma shoten, 1982.

[11] “Nomonhan jiken ni ‘saikinsen'no shogen.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 24, 1989. p. 3.

[12] Sheldon H. Harris. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover-up. NY: Routledge, 1994. p. 224. The two-part series was produced by Inoue Takashi and aired on two consecutive nights, Apr. 13 and 14, at 10 p.m. “NHK dokyumento ‘731 saikinsen butai.’ ” Asahi shinbun. Apr. 13, 1992. Evening edition. p. 19. Similar to the BBC in Britain, NHK is a publicly owned radio and television broadcasting agency, which means that it is both independent and linked to the government in a way commercial broadcasters are not.

[13] Mori Masataka and Kasukawa Yoshiya. Chugoku shinryaku to 731 butai no saikinsen. Tokyo: Asahi shobo, 1995.

[14] “731 butai kyumei e Nitchu kyodo shinpo.” Asahi shinbun. Sept. 16, 1995. Evening edition. p. 9.

[15] The discovery was even highlighted in the New York Times. David Sanger, “Skulls Found: Japan Doesn't Want to Know Whose.” New York Times. Aug. 13, 1990. pp. 1, 5; “Gun'i gakko ato no jinkotsu Chugoku mo chushi.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 3, 1991. Evening edition. p. 19. Although it was originally reported that the bones came from 35 bodies, that number was eventually revised to over 100. See Tsuneishi Kei-ichi. “Unit 731 and the Human Skulls Discovered in 1989: Physicians Carrying Out Organized Crimes.” In William R. LaFleur, Gernot Böhme, and Susumu Shimazono, eds. Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. pp. 73-84.

[16] Significantly, Japanese historian Hata Ikuhiko, who had earlier aided the Japanese Ministry of Education's legal case against Ienaga Saburo's inclusion of references to Japanese BW experimentation in high school history textbooks, confirmed the authenticity of these documents in 1994. See “731 butai kyokumitsu bunsho: zenkoku 40 kasho de junkaiten.” Asahi shinbun. July 2, 1993. Evening edition. p. 10.

[17] “731 butai no saikinsen: Nihongawa shiryo de urazuke.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 14, 1993. p. 1; “‘Pesuto moi’ to hokoku.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 14, 1993. p. 27.

[18] Kasahara Tokushi, et al., eds. Rekishi no jijitsu o do kakutei shi do oshieru ka. Tokyo: Kyoiku shiryo shuppankai, 1997. p. 16; “Jibun ni muen no hora ja nai.” Asahi shinbun. June 13, 1994. p. 15; “Seitai jikken o mokei de saigen.” Asahi shinbun. July 11, 1993. p. 24.

[19] “Mochi o tabe, zenshin ga aokuroku nari, shinda.” Asahi shinbun. Sept. 6, 1994. p. 30.

[20] Yoshimi Yoshiaki and Iko Toshiya. 731 butai to tenno, rikugun chuo. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995; “731 butai no saikinsen kensho.” Asahi shinbun. Dec. 18, 1995. p. 14.

[21] Nozaki Yoshiko and Inokuchi Hiromitsu. “Japanese Education, Nationalism, and Ienaga's Textbook Lawsuits.” In Hein and Selden. Censoring History. p. 113. Nozaki and Inokuchi note that, from July through September 1980, more than two thousand reports on Japanese textbook screening appeared in the press in nineteen Asian countries.

[22] For sustained analysis of the Ienaga textbook controversy, see Hicks. Japan's War Memories. chp. 7.

[23] Gavan McCormack sees Fujioka as epitomizing a “troubling” current situation in Japan in which “liberalism and rationalism are used to conceal a mode of reasoning that is both antiliberal and antirational.” Gavan McCormack. “The Japanese Movement to ‘Correct’ History.” In Hein and Selden. Censoring History. pp. 70-71.

[24] Harris. Factories of Death. pp. 47, 52.

[25] Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad. Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. NY: Simon and Schuster, 2001. p. 39. It should be noted that the official history of Fort Detrick places the wartime high of employees at the facility at only 2,300. Richard M. Clendenin. Science and Technology at Fort Detrick, 1943-1968. Fort Detrick, Md.: Fort Detrick, Historian, Technical Information Division, 1968. p. 26.

[26] For a summary of those estimates, see Harris. Factories of Death. pp. 66-67. The two most celebrated cases of American experimentation on human subjects during the war are the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932-72) and the Chicago Malaria Study. Neither of these projects, however, was related to the principal U.S. experimentation in BW agents conducted by the United States Army Chemical Warfare Service.

[27] The one notable follow-up to Hersh was the 1988 piece by Stanford University historian Barton Bernstein. Barton J. Bernstein. “America's Biological Warfare Program in the Second World War.” Journal of Strategic Studies 2, no. 3 (1988). pp. 292-317.

[28] See Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagermann. The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Also, G. Cameron Hurst III, “Biological Weapons: The United States and the Korean War.” In LaFleur, et al., eds. Dark Medicine. pp. 105-20.

[29] Namely, chp 17 of the British edition of Williams and Wallace, Unit 731, titled, “Korean War,” pp. 235-85, is missing in the American edition published by the Free Press. Williams and Wallace. Unit 731; Harris. Factories of Death. p. 283, n. 36.

[30] Nozaki and Inokuchi. “Japanese Education, Nationalism, and Ienaga's Textbook Lawsuits.” p. 105.

[31] David McNeill and Mark Selden. “Asia Battles over War History: The Legacy of the Pacific War Looms over Tokyo's Plans for the Future.” Japan Focus. Apr. 13, 2005. Japanfocus.org/257.html.

[32] “Jiki no kyokasho, jiyusha kara shuppan: Tsukurukai ga happyo.” Asahi shinbun. Sept. 18, 2007; “Tsukurukai, Fusosha to kankei danzetsu, betsu no shuppansha o kobo.” Asahi shinbun. June 1, 2007.

[33] For a description of this era as more than a feeble gesture toward liberalism, see Fred Dickinson. “Dai-ichiji sekai taisengo no Nihon no koso.” In Ito Yukio, Kawada Minoru, eds. Niju seiki Nihon to higashi Ajia no keisei. Tokyo: Minerva, 2007. pp. 133-49.

[34] John W. Dower. “Peace and Democracy in Two Systems: External Policy and Internal Conflict.” Andrew Gordon. ed. Postwar Japan as History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. pp. 3-33.

[35] Following soon after the outbreak of the Korea War, the December 1950 issue of Sekai, in which the third Peace Problems Symposium statement was printed, doubled its circulation. Ibid. p. 9.

[36] Roger Swearingen and Paul Langer. Red Flag in Japan: International Communism in Action 1919-1951. NY: Greenwood Press, 1968. pp. 81-82.

[37] Williams and Wallace. Unit 731. pp. 226-27.

[38] See Asahi shinbun. Dec. 25, 27-30, 1949.

[39] By contrast, the full eighteen volumes of raw data used by Soviet prosecutors to make their case have yet to be made available to researchers. Harris, Factories of Death. p. 229.

[40] Swearingen and Langer. Red Flag in Japan. p. 233.

[41] According to the most authoritative account, the U.S.S.R. conducted the tribunal in an effort to justify the large numbers of Japanese POWs yet to be repatriated to Japan from Siberia. Harris, Factories of Death. pp. 226-28.

[42] The December 27, 1949, United Press quoted the American representative to the Allied Council for Japan and Acting U.S. Political Advisor to Douglas MacArthur, William Sebald, describing the Khabarovsk trials as a likely “fiction” designed as a “smoke screen” to deflect attention from the thousands of Japanese POWs in Soviet custody still unaccounted for. See Kasahara, et al., eds. Rekishi no jijitsu o do kakutei shi do oshieru ka. p. 23, n. 14; John W. Powell. Japan's Germ Warfare: The U.S. Cover-up of a War Crime.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. vol. 12, no. 4 (1980). p. 15, n. 1.

[43] New York Times. Dec. 27, 1949. Cited in Williams and Wallace. Unit 731. p. 231. For the effort to shield the emperor, see Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. NY: HarperCollins, 2000. Chp. 15.

[44] Honda wrote a series of articles on Vietnam, “Senso to hito” (War and People), that ran for five months in the Asahi shinbun in the mid-1960s. Published in one volume in 1968, Senba no mura (The Villages of War) became a best seller in Japan, and over 50,000 English-language copies were shipped overseas. See John Lie, ed. The Impoverished Spirit in Contemporary Japan: Selected Essays of Honda Katsuichi. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1993. p. 16.

[45] Field. “War and Apology.” p. 15.

[46] Saburo Ienaga. The Pacific War, 1931-1945: A Critical Perspective on Japan's Role in World War II. NY: Random House, 1978. p. 244.

[47] Lie, ed. The Impoverished Spirit in Contemporary Japan. p. 22.

[48] Although the final ruling rejected Ienaga's most fundamental contention that government textbook screening was unconstitutional, it did accept the legality of his references to Unit 731. Nozaki and Inokuchi. “Japanese Education, Nationalism, and Ienaga's Textbook Lawsuits.” p. 119; “Dai-sanji Ienaga sosho: 4 kasho no iho kakutei.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 30, 1997. p. 1.

[49] For a discussion of this initiative, see Nozaki and Inokuchi. “Japanese Education, Nationalism, and Ienaga's Textbook Lawsuits.” p. 113.

[50] Morimura Seiichi. “Akuma no hoshoku” noto. Tokyo: Banseisha, 1982. pp. 54, 188.

[51] John W. Powell. “Japan's Biological Weapons, 1930-45.” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. vol. 37, no. 8; for a discussion of the publication in Japanese of the article, see Morimura. “Akuma no hoshoku” noto. pp. 188-97.

[52] Morimura. “Akuma no hoshoku” noto. p. 95.

[53] Morimura published with Kobunsha and Kakugawa. Tsuneishi's research appeared with Shinchosha.

[54] Arnold Brackman. The Other Nuremberg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. NY: Quill, 1987. p. 198.

[55] Morimura. “Akuma no hoshoku” noto. p. 235.

[56] The film became the fifth in a series, titled, “Katararenakatta senso—shinryaku” (The War that Could Not be Told—Aggression). “Kyu Nihongun saikinsen butai, eiga ni.” Asahi shinbun. June 28, 1996. p. 3.

[57] Tsuneishi. “Unit 731 and the Human Skulls Discovered in 1989.”

[58] “731 butai no jittai, kami shibai ni.” Asahi shinbun. Sept. 16, 1994. p. 29.

[59] The display was titled “731 butai ten in Kasukabu” (Unit 731 Exhibit in Kasukabu). Yonezawa Nobuyoshi. “Saitama no kokosei, 731 butai shirabeta. Asahi shinbun. Aug. 1, 1996. p. 31.

[60] “Kyu Nihongun no saikinsen, asu jittai kyumei suru kai.” Asahi shinbun. June 28, 1996. p. 26.

[61] “Tekishutsu shita zoki, suketchi shita.” Asahi shinbun. Nov. 20, 1995. p. 14.

[62] “Saikinsen butai o tsuikyu suru Mizutani Naoko san.” Asahi shinbun. July 12, 1996. p. 3.

[63] Later published as Daitoa senso kotei ron (In Affirmation of the Greater East Asia War, Bancho shobo, 1964).

[64] Kasahara, et al., eds. Rekishi no jijitsu o do kakutei shi do oshieru ka. pp. 17-19.

[65] Kobayashi Yoshinori. Sensoron I, II, III. Tokyo: Gentosha, 1998, 2001, 2003.

[66] McNeill and Selden. “Asia Battles over War History.”

[67] This is the title of Gavan McCormack's article on the movement; McCormack. “The Japanese Movement to ‘Correct’ History.”

[68] Morimura. “Akuma no hoshoku” noto. p. 128.

[69] For a detailed study of legal demands surrounding wartime forced Korean labor, see William Underwood. “Names, Bones and Unpaid Wages, 1, 2.” Japan Focus. Sept. 10, 17, 2006. japanfocus.org/products/ details/2219, japanfocus.org/products/details/2225.

[70] Hicks. Japan's War Memories. p. 106.

[71] “731 butai kyokumitsu bunsho” p. 10.

[72] “Dai-sanji Ienaga sosho: 4 kasho no iho kakutei.” p. 1.

[73] See, most recently, H. Tristram Engelhardt and Lisa M. Rasmussen, eds. Bioethics and Moral Content: National Traditions of Health Care Morality: Papers Dedicated in Tribute to Kazumasa Hoshino. Boston: Kluwer, 2002.

[74] For an echo of this argument, see Yamaori Tetsuo. “Strategies for Survival versus Accepting Impermanence: Rationalizing Brain Death and Organ Transplantation Today.” In LaFleur, et al., eds. Dark Medicine. pp. 165-79.

[75] “Gun'i gakko ato no jinkotsu Chugoku mo chushi.” p. 19; “Jinken mushi no noshi ishoku.” Asahi shinbun. Aug. 3, 1991. Evening edition. p. 19.

[76] “Jibun ni muen no hora ja nai.” p. 15.

[77] Gernot Bohme. “Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research: Taking Seriously the Case of Victor von Weizsacker.” In LaFleur, et al., eds. Dark Medicine. pp. 15-29.