China to release movie on Japanese biological warfare unit in summer

Japan Today

07-05-2025

A Chinese movie featuring the Imperial Japanese Army's notorious Unit 731 is expected to be released in China this summer, according to local media reports, with the Japanese government worried about a possible negative impact from the film on bilateral ties.
The production of the movie, "731," about the unit, which is thought to have undertaken covert biological and chemical warfare research in China during World War II, was announced in August 2020. It was made with the cooperation of an exhibition hall dedicated to the unit in Harbin in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang.
The film is set to be released in China on July 31 this year, which marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Sino-Japanese conflict, which Beijing calls the 1937-1945 War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression.
Film director Zhao Linshan has told Chinese media that Unit 731 represents "a cruel history that terrified" people in China and abroad and that he hopes to arouse the sympathies of the audience through the movie.
Zhao also said in a Chinese media interview the production is aimed at letting "the light of peace shine on the journey of human civilizations."
A Japanese government source expressed concern over the film's release, saying it could "rekindle rows over history" between the two Asian neighbors and negatively affect bilateral relations.
Set in China's northeastern region, the movie has an antiwar purpose and is designed to "reveal the crimes" of Unit 731 through a focus on ordinary individuals, according to media reports.
The research operation of the unit is believed to have included lethal experimentation and testing on humans. Prisoners of war were secretly experimented upon to develop, among other things, plague and cholera-based biological weapons, according to historians.
The Japanese government maintains the view that it has not confirmed any evidence to indicate the unit's human experiments.
In August last year, Hideo Shimizu, who was a member of Unit 731, returned to its former site in Harbin for the first time in 79 years and mourned the victims of the research operation.
At age 14, Shimizu moved to the puppet state of Manchuria, now northeastern China, and later became a member of the unit's Youth Corps. His visit was widely reported by Chinese media.
In 1997, Japan's Supreme Court, in a ruling concerning state textbook screeners objection to a history textbook's description of the unit's actions in China, said "the view had been established within academic circles to an undeniable extent that Unit 731 had killed many Chinese people through biological experiments."
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