A Japanese University is admitting to disgusting and evil atrocities against captured American troops during World War II – it’s happening the same week that the Japanese government seems intent on wiping the truth of that history from the nation’s schools.

In the western city of Fukuoka, a museum opened up on the grounds of Kyushu University – which was once known as Kyushu Imperial University.  During the waning days of World War II in 1945, eight crewmembers from a downed B-29 Superfortress were taken to the medical school, where doctors performed horrific experiments. 

The “doctors” injected the soldiers with seawater to see if it could be substituted for saline solution.  Others had part of the livers cut out to learn how long they could survive.  Another experiment involved removing part of the brain to control epilepsy.  None of the eight survived.

For decades following the war, the school had been loath to discuss what had happened, until professors last month agreed to the display.

This coincides with the accomplishment of a long-held goal of Japan’s extreme right wing, the editing of school textbooks to remove references to Imperial Japan’s atrocities.  New schoolbooks approved by the government of nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe deliberately avoid using the word “massacre” when referring to Japan’s mass slaughter of Chinese civilians in Nanjing in 1937, preferring the term “incident”.  The scholarly consensus puts the death toll anywhere from 40,000 to 300,000 lives lost.

Only one publisher out of those supplying Japan’s junior high schools bothered to include the issue of women and girls, particularly from Korea, who were forced to work as “comfort women” in wartime military brothels.

Japanese minority groups didn’t fare much better.  Land disputes with the northern indigenous Ainu are glossed over.

Six out of seven publishers played down the forced suicides of Ryukans by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, saying they were “driven” to suicide.  One claimed that Imperial troops weren’t alone in forcing civilians to jump off the southern cliffs as the US and allies advanced.  In fact, Ryukans were surprised by the comparatively good treatment from the Americans, which contradicted the tales of barbarity and abuse told to them by the Imperial troops.

Replacing this history is more space dedicated to pushing the Japanese view of territorial disputes with South Korea and China.