GERM WARFARE Survivors still suffer after 60 years

Many were rejected from society and have never been diagnosed.
TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL
ZHONGZHU, China -- Swarms of flies buzz around Wang Juhua's rotting legs as she slowly shuffles across the yard of her village home.
She carefully removes a cheap tissue from one of the festering wounds, exposing a chunk of raw, decaying flesh. After cleaning it with a crude tea-water solution and disinfectant powder, she covers it with another sheet of toilet paper.
Her twice-daily cleaning ritual is small relief from the constant torment of her swollen and blackened legs. At 71, the elderly peasant has endured the agony of her wounds for more than six decades -- since the day when she fell victim to Japanese germ warfare.
"It's always so itchy and painful, as if some insects or small animals are biting me," she says. "It feels even worse when I'm working in the fields, but I have to work if I want to survive."
World War II tactic
Hundreds of Chinese villagers are still suffering the long-term effects of Japan's horrific tactics during World War II. They were the targets of the world's first use of large-scale biological terrorism.
An estimated 250,000 people were killed when Japan launched its germ-warfare experiments in the early 1940s during its military occupation of eastern and northern China.
The experiments were masterminded by military scientists at the notorious Unit 731, a secret Japanese lab in the city of Harbin in northern China. The laboratory conducted Nazi-style medical experiments on thousands of Chinese prisoners, who were seen as subhuman "logs."
Unit 731 officials organized the most extensive campaign of biological warfare ever attempted in human history. They created lethal packages of fleas, wheat grain, rice, beans and cotton rags -- all infected with deadly pathogens, including anthrax, cholera, typhoid, dysentery, bubonic plague and glanders (a disease primarily of horses and donkeys).
Then they dropped the bags from airplanes over villages, scattering their deadly products over a wide area.
Wang was just 8 years old at the time. "I went out to feed the cattle, and I walked through the grassland," she remembers. "When I came back, I felt my legs itching, and I scratched them. Small red dots appeared on my legs and then became blisters."
All over Zhejiang province in eastern China, peasants began dying of mysterious illnesses, many within 48 hours of falling ill. Hundreds of villages were devastated, becoming ghost villages where the majority of people were dead or sick.
Feeling the pain
Wang's legs continued to rot as she grew older. As an adult, she was bedridden for three years.
She has never received assistance or compensation from the Chinese or Japanese authorities. Too poor to afford proper bandages, she is forced to use toilet paper to dress her wounds.
No one has properly diagnosed her wounds, either. Local experts believe she is suffering from anthrax or glanders -- or a combination of the two.
Just as painful as her wounds was the ostracism she suffered. Because of the horrible appearance of her wounds, she was a social outcast; even some of her relatives were unwilling to live with her, and she still spends most of her time at home.
"I can't visit other people because my wounds and the flies around me would sicken them," she says. "In the past, other people in this village had similar wounds, and we would visit each other, but now there are hardly any of us still alive."
In a neighboring village, one of the few survivors is Wu Chahua, a 72-year-old woman whose face is twisted and distorted by scars that began as small holes and blisters when the germ-warfare attacks began.
One day in 1943, she saw pieces of paper falling from a Japanese airplane. Then she became ill and her skin began to rot. She doesn't know the name of her illness, although doctors believe it is a typhoid fungus.
"All I know is that many people caught the same disease," she says. "My head keeps feeling dizzy, and I can't walk properly and I fall."
Extensive cover-up
Until the 1980s, the victims were baffled by their illnesses. Japan covered up the activities of Unit 731; the scientists were never punished, and the U.S. military helped conceal the lab's activities in exchange for access to the files from its experiments. China was reluctant to investigate the diseases because it was accepting billions of dollars of economic aid from Japan.
Only in the 1980s did human-rights activists finally dig up proof of the germ-warfare campaign. In recent years, the victims have repeatedly sought compensation from Japan.
Finally, in 2002, a Tokyo court acknowledged that Japanese soldiers at Unit 731 had killed many Chinese civilians with "bacteriological weapons." But the court rejected the compensation demands, noting that Beijing had accepted Japanese economic assistance in exchange for giving up its war-reparations claims. The ruling was upheld by a higher court in Tokyo this spring.