History Will Repeat Itself If Truth is not Told: Japanese TeacherThe tragedies of history will be repeated if no one tells the truth about the past, a Japanese high school history teacher surnamed Morimasa said recently in Harbin, provincial capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.Morimasa, 61, is heading a special Japanese team that is visiting the site of a germ warfare experimental base built by the notorious Unit 731, part of the Japanese Kwantung Army in World War II. The group intends to do further investigations of the germ warfare the Japanese troops launched in China five decades ago. Since 1991 when he first came to China, Morimasa has organized a number of anti-war Japanese to come to China to investigate the germ warfare experiments. The base was used by Japanese troops to conduct germ experiments on people to develop the germ warfare arsenal. The Kwantung Army headquarters burned and buried its records of Unit 731 to get rid of evidence just before Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945. A large amount of the germ experiment data was transferred overseas. Based on the confessions of Japanese war criminals, more than 3,000 people died from the experiments during 1940-1945. But some records suggest a much larger figure, experts said. In Japan, the data concerning the germ warfare has been kept exclusively in the governmental organizations, which Morimasa says denies him access to the facts. He said he has shared his investigation results with his students in the form of articles and video, aiming to reveal the truth of history to the Japanese younger generation. The Japanese Prime Minister's recent visit to the Yasukuni Shrine and the right-wing groups' attempt to publish history textbooks containing factual errors indicate that the Japanese government is trying to whitewash Japan's history of aggression, Morimasa said. |
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