Quartermasters can also fight the devils

Under the agreement, the Japanese government pledged to abide by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention and, as a "legacy State Party," pledged to provide all necessary funds, technology, experts, facilities and other resources.

As a "territorial party", China agrees to provide appropriate cooperation. The agreement can take precedence over Section C of Part IV (B) of the Verification Annex to the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The destruction will be carried out within China, provided that the Japanese government guarantees that the destruction process will not cause pollution to China's ecological environment and ensure the safety of personnel.

In 2004, the Japanese Embassy in China published a policy statement on its official website, acknowledging that Japan had discovered buried or stored chemical weapons abandoned by the Japanese army during the war in various parts of China, and that Jilin Province in China was the place where the Japanese army stored the most chemical weapons, with preliminary estimates of hundreds of thousands of chemical shells.

The statement comes as the Japanese government has spent 70 billion yen over the previous seven years cleaning up and destroying its chemical weapons legacy, a cost that is expected to rise.

However, in June 2005, residents of a county town in China's Guangdong Province were harmed by chemical weapons abandoned by Japan, for which the Japanese government's Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly assumed responsibility.

In short, the issue of chemical weapons abandoned by the Japanese army was mainly resolved through a bilateral memorandum much later. At the same time, there were also civil claims lawsuits filed by Chinese citizens in Japanese courts, but these demands were only a very small part of the whole issue.

This brings us to the second remaining issue, which is the issue of individual compensation for Chinese citizens.

Chinese citizens have filed individual claims lawsuits against the Japanese government since 1995, but the results have varied. However, the Chinese claimants received free legal assistance from Japanese lawyers during the litigation process, and these lawyers also conducted fundraising activities among ordinary Japanese.

There are two types of lawsuits filed by Chinese citizens against the Japanese government. The first type is composed of claims for compensation caused by atrocities committed in China during the war, and the second type is filed by laborers who were forcibly taken to Japan or their relatives.

The first type of lawsuits covered a wide variety of subject matter, including the Japanese army's indiscriminate bombing of China's Fujian Province, the Nanjing Massacre, the atrocities of Unit 731, the "comfort women" in Shanxi and Hainan provinces, the Japanese army's massacre of civilians in Liaoning Province in , and the damage caused by the remnants of toxic chemical weapons used or abandoned by the Japanese army during the war.

However, most of the Chinese people's lawsuits against the Japanese government were unsuccessful. The only two cases were a forced labor case in Japan and a case of abandoned chemical weapons leakage in Northeast China, which were ultimately successful.

There are two reasons why most lawsuits filed by Chinese people were dismissed by Japanese courts, which can be simply called the state action theory and the statute of limitations.

Later, as these lawsuits progressed, the Supreme Court of Japan also pointed out in 1998 that the statute of limitations should not apply when it is clearly contrary to the concepts of justice and fairness.

As for the state action theory, Japanese law before 1945 provided that government tortious acts against individuals did not give rise to government liability under Japanese civil law, which deals specifically with matters of private law. However, this theory was actually revised after the new Japanese constitution was enacted in 1946.

Soon, the State Compensation Law, enacted by the Japanese government in 1947, was introduced. The Japanese government drafted this law to implement the new constitution promulgated in November 1946, because in Article 17 of the new constitution, the Japanese government explicitly rejected the state action theory that had previously dominated Japanese law.

In any case, even if the Japanese government invokes domestic law to circumvent international responsibilities that are primarily established by treaties and customary law for conduct prior to 1946, it is highly questionable.

As early as the early 1930s, the principle of prohibiting the invocation of domestic law against international responsibility was recognized. For example, in the case of Polish Nationals in Danzig, the Permanent Court of International Justice stated: "A State may not invoke its own constitution against another State in order to evade its responsibilities imposed by international law or by treaties in force."

At the time of the war between China and Japan, humanitarian principles were already part of the customary law of war and were actually embodied in the "Martens Clauses" of the Hague Convention II of 1899 and the Hague Convention IV of 1907, both of which were also related to the laws and customs of land warfare.

Therefore, no matter what, Japan and China have been parties to the Hague Convention since 1917. Therefore, it is logical that any actions of Japanese civilian or military officers in violation of international treaties during the Japanese invasion of China cannot be excused by the theory of state behavior in Japan at that time.

Moreover, violation of the above treaties may have two consequences. The first is the liability of the defaulting state to the other contracting states, as required by customary law. The second is the liability of the defaulting state for crimes committed by its officials or troops against citizens of the victim state, which is affirmed in Article 3 of the Fourth Hague Convention.

Of course, all this is subject to the Sino-Japanese Joint Declaration of 1972, in which the Chinese government waived its claim for compensation from the Japanese government. However, this declaration does not prevent the aforementioned civil litigation, whether based on Japan's case law in this regard, or on the provisions of Article 3 of the Fourth Hague Convention, or on the international law that has made great progress in the field of human rights since 1945.

It is noteworthy that in at least one case concerning forced labor in wartime Japan, the Tokyo District Court rejected the so-called act of state argument based on notions of fairness and justice, although Japanese case law has not been consistent in this regard.

The question at issue now is whether individual claimants can rely on Article 3 of Hague Convention IV and the rule on the need for compensation for violations of international law.

There is no dispute that Article 3 of the Fourth Hague Convention reflects customary law. If, in the Tokyo trials of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, violations of relevant treaties led to individual responsibility, this means that at the time of the two trials, the relevant treaties applied not only to states, but also directly to individuals and natural persons. It can be inferred that the obligation to make compensation should also be extended to compensation for individual victims of war.

Furthermore, an overall interpretation of Article 3 of Hague Convention IV should also allow for an interpretation that the actions of the armed forces of a belligerent in an armed conflict are attributable to that belligerent and that that belligerent is liable to pay compensation for those actions.