WWII Japanese officer's murder, rape, vivisection confession published

China has published Japanese officer Shuichi Kikuchi's written confession that he killed 1,122 Chinese, including 727 civilians, and committed rape, torture and vivisection from 1938 to 1945.

The State Archives Administration (SAA) posted the document on its website on Monday.

Kikuchi was born in Miyagi Prefecture of Japan in 1915 and served in the Japanese army from 1937 to 1945 in northeast and north China. He took refuge among the troops of a Chinese warlord named Yan Xishan in north China's Shanxi Province after Japan's defeat in 1945 and was arrested in April, 1949.

In the document, Kikuchi recalled approving military surgeon Shinji Kawagen to conduct two brutal vivisections on Chinese in September 1941. The officer witnessed the procedures.

"First, [Kawagen] cut the throat apart to stop the captive from making a sound. After the appendectomy, he shot at the gut of the captive with a handgun. He then sutured the gut and laid the captive in the dispensary to see the result," Kikuchi wrote.

On the third day after the first operation, Kawagen performed separation surgery on the joints of the captive and shot him in the head while he was still alive, according to Kikuchi.

He confessed that Kawagen performed a similar surgery on a 16-year-old villager days later.

Kikuchi also wrote about stabbing, beating, torturing and shooting people to death, live burials, and using poison gas and bacteria on his victims.

He also confessed of "personally raping 39 people" and conniving in his inferior officers' rape of another 21.

This is the latest in a series of 45 Japanese war criminal confessions which the SAA plans to publish. It has been issuing one a day since July 3.

The move followed Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and right-wing politicians' stubborn denial of war crimes in China.