22nd Japanese war criminal confession published

The Japanese army massacred and conducted germ warfare experiments on hundreds of Chinese in the 1930s puppet state of Manchukuo, according to the latest in a series of Japanese war criminal confessions published by China's State Archives Administration.

Released on Thursday, the written confession of Okabe Miyake, then chief of police in Rehe Province, details how the authorities of Rehe and Jinzhou Province arrested 7,066 Chinese and killed 150 of them in 1936.

In November 1938, the Ishii Unit used people in Nongan County, which was encircled by the puppet police force, as test subjects for biological weaponry, according to the document.

Miyake also confessed that, from July 1944 to August 1945, he ordered the arrests of 13,180 Chinese and transferred 4,565 of them to the puppet procuratorate. "Fourteen of them were sentenced to death and later slaughtered in prison," he wrote.

This is the 22nd of a total of 45 Japanese war criminal confessions the administration plans to publish. It has been issuing one a day since July 3.

The move follows denials of war crimes by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and right-wing politicians.