Detailed Instructions: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Problem:Share: 
  
 TOKYO-A group of Japanese scholars is set to reveal the names of the members of a Japanese World War II germ warfare unit that infected and starved Chinese and allied POWs in a series of gruesome experiments. 
  
 Katsuo Nishiyama, professor emeritus of Shiga University of Medical Science in western Japan, has told local media his team is analysing a list of 3,607 members and plans to publish it online to encourage further historical study of the unit. “This is the first time that we see a list of the names of nearly all its members being released in the form of an official document,” the Mainichi Shimbun daily quoted Nishiyama as saying. 
  
 Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army was set up in Manchuria after Japan formed a puppet state in northeastern China in 1931. 
  
 Its members - some of them physicians from Japan’s top medical universities - conducted human experiments, injecting plague and other germs into their victims, testing germ bombs, and artificially causing frostbite to victims while depriving them of sleep and food. 
  
 The Japanese government denied the existence of the unit until 1998, when the Supreme Court indirectly acknowledged it by ruling there was an academic consensus that Unit 731 existed. 
  
 The list, recently released by the National Archives of Japan to Nishiyama’s team, includes the names, ranks and addresses of those who belonged to Unit 731, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. 
  
 “This piece of valuable evidence supports all the testimonies given by those who knew the unit. This is a big step forward for efforts to reveal the hidden truth,” Nishiyama said. 
  
 The list includes 52 surgeons, 49 engineers, 38 nurses and 1,117 combat medics of the unit. 
  
 Nishiyama could not be reached for immediate comment. 
  
 Japan, unlike Germany, has been widely accused of failing fully to face up to its wartime atrocities. 
  
 The subject is not widely taught in schools, and comments by conservative politicians glossing over the issue regularly anger other Asian nations which were the victims of occupation. ||||| Japan has disclosed the names of thousands of members of Unit 731, a notorious branch of the imperial Japanese army that conducted lethal experiments on Chinese civilians in the 1930s and 40s as it sought to develop chemical and biological weapons. 
  
 The country’s national archives passed on the names of 3,607 people in response to a request by Katsuo Nishiyama, a professor at Shiga University of Medical Science, in a move that could reignite the public debate over Japanese atrocities committed in occupied China before and during the second world war. 
  
 “This is the first time that an official document showing the real names of almost all members of Unit 731 has been disclosed,” Nishiyama told the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper. “The list is important evidence that supports testimony by those involved. Its discovery will be a major step toward unveiling concealed facts.” 
  
 The document lists members of the Kwantung army’s Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department – the unit’s official name – and is dated 1 January 1945. It includes the names, ranks and contact details of more than 1,000 army medics, as well as dozens of doctors, surgeons, nurses and engineers. 
  
 Japan reluctantly acknowledged the unit’s existence in the late 1990s, but has refused to discuss its activities. Instead, accounts of the unit’s activities have been built around testimony from former members, photographs and documentary evidence. 
  
 In 2006, Toyo Ishii, a former nurse, said she had helped bury the remains of victims of Japan’s biological warfare programme at a site in Tokyo, as US forces moved into the Japanese capital at the end of the second word war. Ishii said she and her colleagues had been ordered to bury numerous corpses, bones and body parts following Japan’s surrender in August 1945. 
  
 Other accounts indicate that similar experiments took place in other parts of Asia. In 2006, Akira Makino, a former doctor, said he had been ordered to conduct experiments on condemned men while stationed on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. 
  
 Formed in the mid-1930s in Harbin, north-eastern China, Unit 731 conducted lethal experiments on an estimated 3,000 prisoners, who were mostly Chinese and Korean. 
  
  
  
 According to historical accounts, male and female prisoners, named “logs” by their torturers, were subjected to vivisection without anaesthesia after they had been deliberately infected with diseases such as typhus and cholera. Some had limbs amputated or organs removed. 
  
 As Japan headed towards defeat in the summer of 1945, the unit’s leader, Lt Gen Shiro Ishii, forbade researchers from discussing their work and ordered the demolition of the unit’s Harbin headquarters. 
  
  
  
 At the end of the war, US authorities secretly granted unit officials immunity from prosecution in return for access to their research. Several former Unit 731 officials went on to have successful careers in medicine, academia and business. 
  
 Nishiyama reportedly plans to publish the list online to encourage historians to conduct further studies into the unit. 
  
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Solution:
It had the boring and bureaucratic name of the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department. But this secretive unit of the Japanese army during World War II—better known as Unit 731—conducted germ warfare and other lethal experiments on live prisoners of war, explains the Guardian. Now, at the request of scholars, Japan has for the first time released the names of 3,607 of those in the unit, a list that includes 52 surgeons, 49 engineers, 38 nurses, and 1,117 combat medics. The unit, developed in 1936 with the intent of developing biological weapons, conducted its experiments mostly in China on Chinese and Korean prisoners accused of espionage, reports the Japan Times. Its existence remained a secret for decades after the war, in part because the US and its allies did not want the work made public. Among other things, doctors would inject the plague into victims, deliberately cause frostbite, and deprive prisoners of food and water to observe the effects, per the AFP. Surgeons also would perform operations on live prisoners as if they were lab rats. "The list is important evidence that supports testimony by those involved," says Katsuo Nishiyama, a professor at Shiga University of Medical Science. He said he hopes its publication will lead to more information about the unit, which conducted experiments with 20 different kinds of bacteria, including anthrax and smallpox. By one estimate, 3,000 people died at the hands of the unit. One tangible result: Nishiyama will be pushing to have a university degree revoked from at least one medical officer whose dissertation is believed to have been based on the human experiments. (This POW recorded Nazi horrors using ink and urine.)