China is building a museum on the site where the Imperial Japanese Army conducted live biological warfare experiments on prisoners during the war and plans to open part of the facility to the public next June, according to a Japanese activist involved in the project.
The museum is named after the notorious Unit 731, a medical research team set up by the Japanese army that historians say killed more than 3,000 prisoners of war, mostly Chinese and Russians, in experiments aimed at developing biological weapons at its facility in the suburbs of the city of Harbin.
Toru Kurihara, a former member of the Kochi Prefectural Assembly, said he has received a letter from Wang Yiting, the head of the museum, stating that seven of the 23 remaining sites within the facility would be open by next year.
Included in the seven sites will be the holding station where experiments, including vivisections and injection of lethal strains of typhus, cholera and other diseases, were carried out, the ovens where corpses were burned and the freezer rooms where cold-temperature experiments were conducted.
The Chinese plan to ask the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to put the museum on the World Heritage List.
Kurihara, who heads a citizens' group in Tokyo raising funds to support the World Heritage drive, said he was impressed by the speed at which the museum project was being carried out.
"I think it is necessary to appeal for peace by preserving living evidence that war breeds such evils," Kurihara said.