[Sponsored by the Nagasaki Peace Museum last July 9, the top Japanese researcher on Japan's wartime biological weapons (BW) program, Tsuneishi Keiichi, gave a public lecture in Nagasaki together with the director of China's Unit 731 War Crimes Museum in Harbin. Tsuneishi's talk, entitled “The Image and Reality of Unit 731,” explained the declassified American intelligence records he discovered in 2005, revealing that U.S. Occupation authorities not only granted immunity from prosecution to Japanese scientists in exchange for their unrivaled BW data, but also made direct cash payments to obtain their experimental results. (“The United States and the Japanese Mengele,” a recent Japan Focus article by Christopher Reed, reproduced the 1947 documents from GHQ's G-2 intelligence unit.)

“We got on the boat in Busan. Don't know where we got off… We came on a fishing boat. A little boat, it was. The waves were that high, and we went right over them. What month would it have been? Can't remember now.

They say you really get to know people when you go on a boat with them, or live with them. It was so dark in that boat, you couldn't even tell who was in there. Everyone jammed together in this little space - so small, we were sitting right on top of one another. When people said their kids were being smothered, they were just ignored. There were dozens of people - thirty or forty in that little boat. That's why we were sitting on top of each other. It was so crowded you couldn't eat rice or anything like that. Two nights we went without eating. Of course in those days it was a people-smuggling boat [yami no fune]. People came on those boats from Jeju or Busan - that was when I was twenty-nine”

The Japanese media is obsessed with the kidnapping of its citizens by North Korea. David McNeill suggests other stories the media might pursue as enthusiastically.

All the pain of the tragedy that has befallen their family is etched in the crumpled faces of Yokota Shigeru and Sakie. Most parents can only imagine the horror of losing a young child, but after years of believing their daughter Megumi was the victim of a random attack in 1977, the Yokotas learned that she had been snatched by North Korean spies. They still don't know if she is alive or dead.