Spanish
The northeastern Chinese city of Harbin hosted the premiere of the film '731' this Wednesday, which focuses on the crimes committed by Unit 731 of the Japanese Army during World War II, whose main base was located in that city, in a context of friction with Japan on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific.
The launch also occurred on the eve of the 94th anniversary of the so-called 'Mukden Incident', considered the beginning of the Japanese invasion of China on September 18, 1931, a date of special sensitivity in the historical memory of the country.
The Unit 731 was a laboratory that the Japanese maintained between 1935 and 1945 in Harbin, in whose facilities thousands of Chinese civilians were subjected to various experiments.
According to historical accounts, prisoners were inoculated with diseases such as syphilis, cholera, or gonorrhea to find cures that would serve Japanese soldiers, and vivisections were performed to observe the effects of pathogens on still-living bodies.
The film recounts the events from the experience of citizens arrested and confined in the prison unit with the promise of being released if they collaborated in supposed medical and public health investigations, the official Xinhua agency reported today.
The director, Zhao Linshan, quoted by the aforementioned media, explained that the team consulted numerous historical documents for the production of the work, with the intention of conveying through cinema a reflection on the responsibilities arising from those events.
This summer, the film about the Nanjing Massacre 'Dead To Rights' topped the box office in China by addressing photographic evidence of the slaughter perpetrated in 1937 in that eastern city of the country by soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army.
The film generated repercussions on Chinese social media, where numerous users shared images of viewers performing the military salute during the screening and in the credits, and chanting slogans to remember the events.
During World War II, Japan invaded a large part of Chinese territory, where war crimes were recorded, including massacres of civilians, experiments with biological weapons, and the use of Chinese women as sex slaves by officers of the Japanese Army.
Furthermore, the Beijing government has frequently criticized Tokyo for adopting a stance it considers revisionist on the invasion.
