Chinese plaintiff group submitted appeal to the Supreme Court of Japan Wednesday, and the appeal was accepted by the court, said Louxian, a member of the group.

 

The Tokyo High Court ignored Chinese plaintiffs' second appeal concerning germ war Tuesday.

 

"We will persevere our demand for justice and dignity and hold on the lawsuits," said Wang Xuan, the plaintiff group leader.

 

The Chinese plaintiffs have lost all their lawsuits in various levels of Japan's courts from this March to April including the appeals concerning the comfort women, the compensation to Chinese warfare victims and the human experiments of the notorious Unit 731.

 

In 1939, Japan's Unit 731 of the Kwantung Army set up a top-secret, germ-warfare research base in what is today's Pingfang district of Harbin City. The army's medical officers experimented on Chinese civilians, and Soviet, Korean, British and other prisoners.

 

At the experimental base, some people were forced to be frozen or infected with bubonic plague, others were injected with syphilis virus and many were roasted alive in furnaces. It is said more than 200,000 people were killed or injured in the germ warfare launched by Japan.

 

When the Soviet army took back Harbin in 1945, the Japanese blew up the base. The secret could have remained buried forever, but a tenacious Japanese journalist dragged out the truth in the 1980s.

 

(Xinhua News Agency July 21, 2005)