Addressing Japanese Atrocities

After decades of tension over Japan's failure to address atrocities that it perpetrated before and during World War II, the island nation's relations with its regional neighbors, China and South Korea, are improving. Six weeks ago, for the first time in years, representatives of Japan's Upper House resumed exchanges with Chinese parliamentarians. And in December, after the Japanese government long denied its coercive role in the abuse, the country's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, apologized and offered financial compensation for Japan's exploitation of tens of thousands of Korean "comfort women" (a euphemism referring to Japanese military sexual slaves during the country's colonial rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945).

Although these recent developments are welcome, Japan's reconciliation with its neighbors and with its own dark past will remain incomplete and insincere unless and until it acknowledges a lesser known but no less grotesque category of its wartime offenses: human experimentation....

Continue reading: http://blog.oup.com/2016/04/addressing-japanese-atrocities-wwii-human-experimentation/