More than 40 plaintiffs in east China's Zhejiang Province seeking compensation for Japanese war atrocities between 1931 and 1945 released a statement on Friday condemning the Japanese Supreme Court, which had earlier overruled and dismissed their appeal.

"The ruling by the Japanese Supreme Court ignores the judicial responsibility of the Japanese government for biological warfare activities carried out in China... (It) had full knowledge of Japanese biological warfare during World War II, one of the most despicable war crimes ever committed," said the statement.

"This decision by the Japanese Supreme Court shows utter disrespect for the victims," said the indignant Chen Zhifa, 77, whose father and elder brother were both killed in 1942 by biological weapons.

"We will carry on the fight until the Japanese government offers an apology and compensation," he said.

The epicenter of Japanese atrocities in China during the war years was Unit 731, a biological warfare unit headed by the infamous Shiro Ishii, based at Pingfan near Harbin in northeast China.

Unit 731 experimented on prisoners -- Chinese, Russians, Americans and others -- referred to as "maruta". Unit 731 pretended to be a lumber mill and "maruta" is the Japanese word for logs.

Not a single human "log" survived Unit 731.

The terrible experiments remained secret for a long time after the war, partly because of American collusion in keeping the incidents quiet.

The plaintiffs' statement was released at a press conference at the Japanese Germ Warfare Museum, located at an ancestral temple in Congshan Village of Yiwu City in southeastern Zhejiang province. Altogether 404 villagers, one third of the village population, were killed by plague in the autumn of 1942.

A separate museum dedicated to Unit 731 is located in Harbin, in northeast China.

The Japanese imperial army's "Unit 731" and "Unit 1644" waged germ warfare in China between 1931 and 1945 in violation of the Geneva Convention. Studies by Chinese and foreign scholars suggest that the number of Chinese victims is around 270,000.

The plaintiffs -- 180 Chinese victims of the Japanese germ warfare and their relatives -- first began a lawsuit against the Japanese government, demanding an apology and compensation, in 1997. In the decade since then, 55 of the plaintiffs have passed away.

First and second trials by a local court in Tokyo and the high court ruled that the current Japanese government was not liable for compensation demands from foreign citizens for wartime actions.

In a decision on May 9, the Japanese Supreme Court upheld the rulings.

Wang Xuan, head of the delegation of plaintiffs, vowed to pursue research on Japanese germ warfare and continue to seek publicity for victims of the warfare.

"We will set up NGOs and appeal to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights," said Wang.

The lawyers' group for the Chinese plaintiffs issued a statement denouncing the Japanese Supreme Court's ruling as an injustice on May 10, a day after the ruling.

Source: Xinhua