Scholars and residents of Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo, submitted a petition Wednesday to the central government to have a superimposing method used to confirm whether human bones dug up there belong to six wartime prisoners who may have been subject to atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army's infamous Unit 731.
Dozens of bones were unearthed in 1989 at a site in the ward where the army operated a medical school and epidemic-prevention institute from the 1920s through 1945.
The Group to Investigate the Bone Issues suspects that remains are of victims of wartime experiments carried out by Unit 731, which specialized in biological warfare. It has been calling on the government to make better efforts to identify the deceased as part of its responsibility for owning up to Japan's wartime misdeeds.