...The former nurse, Toyo Ishii, now 88, broke 60 years of silence in 2006, saying she and colleagues at an army hospital at the site were ordered to bury numerous corpses, bones and body parts during the weeks following Japan's Aug. 15, 1945, surrender, before American troops arrived in the capital.
Her disclosure led to a face-to-face meeting with the health minister and a government pledge to investigate. The digging had to wait until the scheduled relocation of residents and the demolition of apartments on the site last year.
The site is close to another area where a mass grave of dozens of possible war-experiment victims was uncovered in 1989 during construction of a Health Ministry research institute.
Any remains found at the planned excavation site would have a stronger connection to Unit 731, said Keiichi Tsuneishi, a Kanagawa University history professor and expert on biological warfare.
"The site used to be the research headquarters of Unit 731," Tsuneishi said. "If bones are found there, they are most likely related to Unit 731."
From its wartime base in Japanese-controlled Harbin in northern China, Unit 731 and related units injected war prisoners with typhus, cholera and other diseases to research germ warfare, according to historians and former unit members. Unit 731 also is believed to have performed vivisections and to have frozen prisoners to death in endurance tests.
The 1989 find revealed dozens of fragmented thigh bones and skulls, some with holes drilled in them or sections cut out. Police denied there was any evidence of criminal activity...
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