The Foreign Ministry has announced that an international chemical weapons inspection team will examine wartime poison-gas bombs recovered from Lake Kussharo in Hokkaido in 1996.
In a six-day examination from Thursday, the three-member team from The Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons will check 26 chemical bomb shells retrieved in October 1996 from the lake.
The inspection is designed to verify a Japanese government report on the defusing of the bombs, as required under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which took effect in April 1997 to prohibit and eliminate chemical weapons.
The bombs have been undergoing a detoxification process since Monday in a local plant and 23 of the 26 bombs had been defused by Friday morning, the Prime Minister's Office said. All the bombs will be defused during the inspection period.