The WaPo sez,
A Japanese district court ruled that Japan conducted germ warfare in World War II, bluntly contradicting the continued insistence by the government that there is no proof of such crimes. But the court rejected claims for compensation by elderly Chinese victims. A Japanese attorney for the Chinese, said the loss was tempered by the unqualified declaration about the biological warfare. "The fact that the court confirmed it is revolutionary," he said. "But the court did not have the courage to admit responsibilities on the part of the Japanese government. I think there will be a time when [the government] will have to admit it. In that sense, this is the first step."

The United States made a secret deal to exempt the biological war crimes from the Tokyo trials held after the war, in exchange for the results of the gruesome experiments. Although the Soviet Union tried 12 members of Japan's notorious Unit 731 (which carried out the biological experimentation in China) in 1949, their gruesome accounts at the trial were dismissed by the United States as Cold War propaganda.