JAPAN: Although it happened 60 years ago, almost to the day, one soldier who served in Japan's imperial army in Manchuria clearly remembers what it was like to bury canisters of chemical weapons in the final confused days of the second World War.
Now 84, and speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals from nationalist groups, the former soldier vividly recalls the red and yellow seals on the boxes denoting chemical weapons, such as mustard gas. They were piled up, along with conventional munitions, in a huge dump. But one day the order came to bury them. "We knew exactly what they were. We buried them to hide the evidence," he says, repeating testimony he gave to a Japanese court after he was asked last year to corroborate evidence of the chemicals' disposal.
"We knew it was prohibited to use or even to possess such weapons but we also thought that by burying them it would make them safer. We know now they can leak into the ground causing damage, but we didn't know that then." He is clear the soldiers were not acting alone, but responding to systematic orders handed down the chain of command.
"We were soldiers. We didn't do anything without being ordered to do so," he says.
From his small home on the outskirts of Yokohama, near Tokyo, speaking over the din of cicadas outside, he says he agreed to testify in court out of a sense of obligation, especially towards those who had been harmed by chemical weapons after the war ended.
"I feel a responsibility for those people who have been burnt by chemicals," he says. "Even in Japan, people have been damaged by such weapons and they have been taken care of by our government. I felt that people in other countries deserve the same treatment."
At the end of the war he was taken prisoner by Russian soldiers and sent to Siberia until he was sent back to Japan in 1949. - (Financial Times service)