The Exhibition Hall of Evidences of Crime Committed by Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army released a historic 38-minute video on Thursday, December 11, featuring Tsuruo Nishijima, a former member of Japan's notorious WWII germ-warfare unit. The footage details how the unit conducted frostbite experiments using meteorological data to optimize bacterial dispersal methods.
Recorded in 1997 by Japanese scholar Fuyuko Nishisato and donated to the Harbin-based museum in 2019, the testimony reveals systematic human experimentation at Unit 731's headquarters in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Nishijima describes how researchers exposed subjects to extreme cold to study tissue necrosis patterns, findings later applied to Japan's wartime operations.
The exhibition hall's director emphasized this release coincides with ongoing efforts to preserve firsthand accounts of Unit 731's activities, which killed over 3,000 prisoners between 1936-1945. The facility, built on the unit's original compound, serves as a key educational resource about this dark chapter in Asian history.
