Introduction 5 was prevented due to political pressure. It took almost four decades until his- torians actively began to do research related to the issue when the Japan Center for Research on War Responsibility (Nihon sensō sekinin shiryō senta) was established in 1993 and began to publish the quarterly journal Research in War Responsibility (Sensō sekinin kenkyū). In a way, this followed the lead of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, whose members had established a quarterly journal in Studies of the War of Re sis tance against Japan (Kang- Ri zhan- zheng yanjiu) in 1991 that also often addressed the issue of Japanese war crimes. In the years that followed, Chinese Americans and Korean Americans played a vital role in arousing public interest in specific issues related to Japa nese war crimes (e.g., the so-called comfort women issue).33 Japan’s biological warfare program, usually referred to as Unit 731, also caused interest and further research since the early 1990s when the first document collection related to the work of this unit was published in Japanese.34 Works published on Japanese war crimes usually tend to cover four spe- cific areas35: 1. Japanese war crimes in general 2. Violence and torture against POWs and civilian work forces 3. The Japanese biological warfare program known as Unit 731 4. Forced prostitution and the so-called comfort women system Single events, such as the massacre of 100,000 Filipinos during the Battle of Manila in early 1945, have also attracted interest.36 However, the greatest number of English books was probably written on the treatment of Allied POWs, which were stimulated by the first-person eyewitness accounts by many American soldiers and sailors who had survived mistreatment in such prison camps. The issue naturally aroused public interest, especially since 27 percent of American and British POWs died in Japanese captivity, in con- trast to the 4 percent death rate of POWs in German and Italian camps.37 The event most familiar to American readers related to the mistreatment of U.S. POWs is the Bataan Death March, during which up to 2,000 American and up to 16,500 Filipino prisoners lost their lives after the surrender of Bataan on April 10, 1942.38 Another POW-related case is the building of the Burma- Thailand Railway, which entered common memory through cinema and remained alive through the images in David Lean’s film The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Thousands of POWs and Asian people who were forced to work on the railway died in the jungles of Burma and Thailand under the yelling and beating of their Japanese supervisors.39 Many POWs (ca. 30,000) were also transported to Japan, where they were used as workers in mines and factories alike. To reach Japan, they had to cross the ocean on so-called “hell ships,” which were unmarked and very often sunk by submarines under