China's State Archives Administration has published on Thursday another written confession of a Japanese soldier regarding the use of Chinese prisoners as human experiments in a Japan-run hospital during World War II.

The confession of Takeo Utsugi, a Japanese military police officer who served in the 1930s until early 1940s, detailed how Japan committed war crimes by using prisoners with death sentences as subjects of medical experiments.

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He said in January 1939, a year before the WWII, he ordered the Japanese warrant officer to bring a prisoner to Xinjing No. 2 Army Hospital and give him a military surgeon for a "pathological experiments."

The latest document, written in 1954, supported several other documents of war crimes committed by  Japanese Imperial Forces during the World War period but was concealed after the records have been destroyed.

According to the confession, as reported by official news agency Xinhua, Utsugi served in the military police in "Manchukuo," the Japanese puppet state in China which is now called Northeast China.

It was also in Manchukuo where Unit 731, a Japanese covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit, was located. Unit 731, officially known as Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, is the main facility used by the Japanese in its human experiments during the second Sino-Japanese War, which lasted from 1937 to 1945.

The number of people who died from experimentation in Unit 731 varied between 3,000 and 12,000, most of them Chinese civilians and soldiers, according to reports. The death toll does not include victims of other experiment facilities based in other areas.

In April this year, China released confidential Japanese wartime documents, including the cases of comfort women forced to serve in military brothels during WWII.

Wartime history is still a sensitive issue for both China and Japan due to conflicting records on the number of victims of Japanese atrocities in Chinese territory, and questions about the actual incidents.

The Nanking Massacre, for instance, resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Chinese after the Imperial Japanese Army captured the former Chinese capital. Cases of mass murder and mass rape were recorded, but some Japanese nationalists labeled these as exaggeration for political purposes.

In December 2013, Chinese officials were infuriated after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where both war dead and war criminals are honored. The incident was repeated on April this year after some 150 Japanese lawmakers paid tributes at the Yasukuni, drawing condemnation from China. 

TagsWar Crimes, World War II