We hear a lot about German atrocities during World War II but in some ways Japan was just as bad. The Nanjing massacre in December 1937 is well-known but the Japanese army's organized use of typhoid, cholera, and plague gets less press. They didn't get as much attention because during the Japanese occupation, China was also fighting a civil war between communists and nationalists.

In 1949, the communists won and the nationalists went to Taiwan. With a communist China and a Japan being rebuilt by the US as a democracy, many of the war crimes faded into the background. But China did not forget Unit 731’s (officially the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department) human experimentation and live dissections of POWs to analyze chemical and biological warfare agents and a new paper reveals the location near the city of Anda in Heilongjiang province.

Japan revealed the names of 3,607 members of Unit 731 in 2018.