The site of Japan's wartime biological warfare troop Unit 731 in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, northeast China. /VCG Photo
A San Francisco non-profit group said Wednesday that two seminars will be held in the U.S. west coast city later this week to discuss Japan's atrocities committed by its troops during World War II (WWII).
The Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War (APTSJW) said the two seminars will be hosted by the Education for Social Justice Foundation (ESJF), a grassroots organization based in San Francisco.
One of the seminars will focus on the topic of the crimes by Japan's chemical and biological warfare troop Unit 731, according to the APTSJW.
The Unit 731 undertook lethal human experimentation on thousands of innocent Chinese people in northeast China during the war. More than 300,000 people in China were killed by Japanese biological weapons.
The other seminar will discuss the topic of tens of thousands of Asian women sexually exploited and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese troops, who were later better known as "comfort women."
A "comfort woman" statue is inaugurated at a ceremony attended by a former Korean comfort woman in San Francisco, the United States, Sept. 22, 2017. /VCG Photo
Unit 731 was one of 26 death factories set up by the Japanese troops in Asia, said Nancy Lee, a member with the ESJF.
"Those troops developed and mutated germs to kill people. And they studied how to spread the germs, how to kill civilizations in the most efficient way," she added.
People are familiar with Nazi's atrocities in Europe, but many of them don't have much information about Japan's cruelty in Asia, Lee said.
The two seminars will be held at the 19th Annual Teaching for Social Justice Conference, and the ESJF will distribute resource books on the Japanese crime to teachers so that they can teach their students about the true history of WWII and let them know the existence of the Asian-version Auschwitz concentration camp decades ago, Lee said.
"Unfortunately, what happened long time ago still matter and still continue. The ESJF provides people with education on past injustices relegated to the sidelines of history, because no one is immune from injustice," said ESJF co-Founder and Executive Director Sung Sohn.
She added that education on the historical facts targeted high school teachers as well as university teachers.
She hoped the teachers would make a connection of what happened in Europe such as Holocaust with what happened in Asia when they teach about WWII.
APTSJW President Barry Chang said the workshop on "comfort women" is important because the current Japanese government is distorting history and refuses to apologize for the crimes committed by the Japanese army.
With this workshop, it would be much more effective for teachers to teach the younger generation in the United States about what happened in the past in Asia, he said.
Chang also announced an extension of the awareness campaign on commemoration of "comfort women" from two weeks, which was launched in August, to an indefinite period of time.