China movie on Japan biological warfare unit to premiere Sept. 18

Kyodo News

4 days ago

BEIJING - A Chinese movie on the Imperial Japanese Army's notorious Unit 731 will be screened from Sept. 18, state-run media said Sunday, after its original release date last week passed without explanation.
The new screening date falls on the 94th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of a railroad track near Shenyang -- an event that marked the start of the Manchurian Incident, leading to Japan's invasion of northeastern China.
The Unit 731 movie, originally scheduled to premiere last Thursday, is one of war-themed works for release this year in China, which commemorates the 80th anniversary of what it calls its victory in the 1937-1945 War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression.
Millions of people online have expressed their interest in the film about the unit, which according to historians conducted biological and chemical warfare research in China during World War II.
Set in China's northeastern region, the movie conveys an anti-war message and reportedly aims to "reveal the crimes" of Unit 731 through a focus on ordinary individuals.
The film, which will be shown after the July 25 release of a Chinese movie themed on a massacre in Nanjing committed by Japanese troops in 1937, is feared to fan anti-Japan sentiment in the country.
Last Thursday, a Japanese woman was assaulted while walking with her child at a subway station in Suzhou, near Shanghai, sustaining a non-life-threatening injury.
Chinese authorities later detained a suspect allegedly involved in the incident but have not provided the details, with Chinese media not reporting on the case.
On Sept. 18 last year, a 10-year-old Japanese boy was stabbed on his way to a Japanese school in Shenzhen, southern China. He died from the stab wounds the following day.
The Unit 731 film was made with the cooperation of an exhibition hall dedicated to the unit in Harbin in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang as well as local publicity departments of the ruling Communist Party.
The unit's research 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 says it has not found any evidence confirming that the unit conducted experiments on human subjects.
In 1997, Japan's Supreme Court, in a ruling concerning state 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."