AUGUST 16, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 6

Teaching the Truth About the Past

By HIROKO TASHIRO Nagoya

Noriaki Kamiya, a high school social-studies teacher in Nagoya, had a passion for war history. But he wasn't sure what his own father, Minoru, had done as a soldier. He suspected there might be something dark, something unmentionable in his family's past. He once noticed his father clipping newspaper articles about the notorious Unit 731 that performed medical experiments and germ-warfare research on prisoners in Harbin, in northeast China. Another time, Minoru started to discuss that chapter of Japan's war history. His wife silenced him. Nothing more was said.

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The Kamiya family secrets were left unspoken in much the way Japan as a nation has muted investigation of its war crimes. But finally, when Minoru Kamiya was seriously ill in 1994, he confessed all to his son. He had been deployed to Unit 731 as a cook, and by 1939 he had been assigned to monitor the medical condition of eight Chinese and Russian prisoners being used as human guinea-pigs. At one point, he applied uncapped test tubes of bubonic plague bacteria to the prisoners' arms to see how their bodies would react. In August 1945, with Japan's war machine crumbling and the Russian army advancing, the prisoners were gassed to death.

After his father's revelation, Kamiya began to learn more. His mother's two brothers had also served in Unit 731. His mother lived with her family in Harbin and actually met and married Minoru there. They had a daughter who died in China. Then, while scavenging through the rubble of an uncle's house that was destroyed in the 1995 Kobe earthquake, photographs were unearthed of his family, taken in Harbin. He saw his father in a military uniform for the first time.

Rather than hiding his family history Kamiya talked about it in his classroom and around Japan. At first he referred to his father obliquely, as an "acquaintance." But in 1995, a young Diet member declared that her generation bore no responsibility for wartime atrocities. That alarmed Kamiya. So he began speaking openly. "It's not just a matter of telling the truth," he said. "It's more important how and why a warm-hearted person like my father got involved in a situation where he couldn't say 'No.'"

Kamiya has made it his mission to teach Japanese children to think and act more independently to avoid repeating the mistakes of his father's generation. But he sees worrying signs of a revival of the same kind of nationalistic thinking that motivated men like Minoru. Says Kamiya: "The ghosts of Unit 731 are still alive."

The legacy of that infamous unit still haunts Japan--and the school teacher. In April, one of Kamiya's students thanked him for his lecture about wartime atrocities. The girl said her great-grandmother, who was Chinese, had died at the Unit 731 camp. Before he died in 1997, Minoru told his son he once visited the camp's building where female prisoners were housed. A Chinese woman begged him to spare the life of her young daughter. But Minoru could do nothing. Kamiya thinks that woman was his student's great-grandmother. This month he traveled to China to meet their relatives. Japanese war education, he says, "has emphasized the part of Japanese as victims, such as in Hiroshima. But it hasn't touched the shameful parts. We should teach children history as it happened and leave them to judge."