TOKYO (Sept. 16) - The Toyama No. 5 apartment block is quiet at midday - laundry flapping from balconies, old people taking an after-lunch stroll. But the building and its nearby park may be sitting on a gruesome World War II secret.
A wartime nurse has broken more than 60 years of silence to reveal her part in burying dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bodies there as American forces occupied the Japanese capital.
The way experts see it, these were no ordinary casualties of war, but possible victims of Tokyo's shadowy wartime experiments on live prisoners of war - an atrocity that has never been officially recognized by the Japanese government, but is well documented by historians and participants.
The neighborhood on the west side of Tokyo is deeply troubled.
"I feel sorry for remains with such a sad history," said Teppei Kuroda, a college senior who lives there. "I think they should be dug up and mourned properly."
Their first burial was anything but dignified.
Former nurse Toyo Ishii says that during the weeks following Japan's surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, she and colleagues at an army hospital at the site were ordered to bury corpses, bones and body parts - she doesn't know how many - before the Americans arrived.
