In a different league?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

In a different league?

Japanese journalists do not usually shy away from a murder mystery. But this one is in a different league. The site might be a link to one of the most atrocious sets of crimes Japan committed during the second world war. It involved medics in Unit 731, a covert body in the Japanese imperial army charged with developing techniques of chemical and biological warfare. The medics carried out experiments on humans, including vivisection without anaesthetic. Some later rose to the top of Japan’s post-war medical establishment, abetted by occupying American forces.

The excavations stem from testimony given to the government in 2006 by Toyo Ishii, a former nurse at a nearby army medical school during the war. There she often encountered doctors working on pickled human remains. She said she did not know what they were doing. As the Americans approached in 1945, she and her colleagues were hastily ordered to get rid of the body parts. Human remains, she said, were buried on the site where the diggers are now working. Ms Ishii says she saw a dog run off with a human bone.

It is no secret that the medical school was the Tokyo headquarters of Unit 731. Most of the unit’s activities took place in occupied Manchuria, in north-east China, where the victims of its ghastly experiments were Chinese, Koreans and Russians. They were exposed to plague and cholera. Those who suffered vivisection, including women made pregnant by the doctors, were called “lumber”.